Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (17 page)

Don Quixote: Wait a second. (She cuts a cross into the other wrist and one into her chest.) OK. Let's go. Another Dog: I'll be with you forever.

Don Quixote: I love you. I'm scared of loving you, but that doesn't matter.

Another Dog: I'm happy.

And so a nameless dog and Don Quixote went away, one with the other. They saw blood wherever they went, bloody abortions screaming with pain that anaesthetics only drive under the surface of consciousness, blood hidden under the clean white male weaponry. They clutched at their memories which were now skeletons moldering on the desert of blood. These memories of America decayed. They no longer knew what they had left. Loneliness-being-lost and lack of liberalism threw themselves upon the Night and her companion like pleasure, like the bliss of a throbbing red cunt dawn.

HETEROSEXUALITY

Don Quixote, along with some dog, descended somewhere. She had no more home. She had left the only land she had ever known - Spain - and there was no land to which she wanted to go, or to which she knew how to go, except wherever she happened to be. As a result, she wasn't quite sure where she was.

Being landless, like a sailor wafting upon always unknown waves, who goes hither and thither and isn't really able to go anywhere, certainly not anywhere he or she wants to, as if he or she wanted to go anywhere, but only going wherever those unknowable forces the waves took him or her either of their own volition or not of their own volition. Don Quixote had no friends except for strangers and passerbys, the flotsam and jetsam of the world. The garbage. For she had neither family nor any possibility of family, that is, a lover: During Christmas-tide, when the family gathers around the hearth, and feels the warmth of a central heater or some tiny electric heaters or the Christmas tree that's happily caught fire and so provides a bit of warmth, and discusses, that is the family, divorces sexual inadequacies job losses insane children, or tries not to discuss anything; the sailor wanders through almost black, now deserted streets. Windows show hints hopes of Christmas trees

decorated by silver and light. A TV is on and the family is gathered around it.

Don Quixote, walking down some narrow dark street somewhere, turned around to the dog, She wasn't even sure it was the dog.

The dog woofed.

'Can't you actually bark?' Don Quixote asked the dog. 'It's Christmas. Can't you, just for once, give me something?' She wasn't contented with her lot.

The dog, being doggish, that is guilty or Catholic, decided it couldn't give Don Quixote anything because Don Quixote wanted. Nevertheless, the doggish unknown dog was all Don Quixote had.

'Since I love you, dog,' Don Quixote said over and over to the dog, for she loved the dog, 'my world is only dog, for love, by its nature, is total. Being my life and death, though if you went away from me - which, it being your nature, you must - I wouldn't give a shit, you are my being. My very self.

'What, then,' Don Quixote asked nobody in particular, being of a philosophical bent, 'is this doggish being?'

'Since I love you, and that's all I can do because I love you,' she answered herself, 'doggish being, like all being being itself, must be love. What is this, you or my sexuality?'

The dog answered Don Quixote's question by telling her the story of her doggish life:

'Having been treated badly, and even worse, by men, and even worse, caring that I had been treated badly by men about whom I didn't care, I lost my pride,' the dog began. 'Being proud, I couldn't abide losing my pride, so I resolved to have nothing further to do with men. From then on, I would make love only with women.

'My decision to be with women only didn't heal the initial sickness: why I had let myself be treated so badly. Rather: what was it - raving and raging in me - that allowed me to change or descend into what I wasn't? Sleeping with women,' the dog said in a feminine voice, 'didn't solve anything.

'Since I didn't want to sleep with women, sleeping with women couldn't endanger me, didn't touch the ranting, raving unknown. A woman, rather than being the unknown, is my

mirror. For the lips of my mouth are the replicas of the lips between her legs. Our desires, repeating each other to infinity, or to the impossibility of infinity like the mirrors in Renaissance paintings, want to keep evolving, rather than die in one orgasm.

'A mother'll never abandon her child whoever the child is; likewise, female lovers're faithful to each other. Whereas a man always rejects: his orgasm is death.

'For these reasons alone, men and women aren't similar. What did I care about?

'Being with another woman was like being with no one, for there was no rejection or death. Therefore, I didn't care. I didn't think I felt anything for my girlfriends.

'But is thinking one doesn't feel something the same thing as not feeling anything?'

'I don't know.'

Nevertheless, the dog continued. 'If a woman is my image, when I make love with a woman, all I experience is myself. I'm very muscular, though I'm not large.'

'My God!' Don Quixote exclaimed. 'You're not the sexual gender I thought you were! And I love you.'

'Though I'm not large, being flexible and able to do what I want physically,' the dog couldn't be bothered to pay attention to her girlfriend, 'when I make love to a woman or to myself, I'm controlling the body. Loving a woman is controlling. Whereas, when I make love with a man, I'm the opposite: I'm so physically and mentally open or sensitive, I simultaneously can't bear being touched and come continuously. Whereas I can't come with women, which is why, for safety's sake, I was making love with them.

'Since women when they make love to each other're both controlling, there's no question of control or power between them.

'I was staying, squatting, in London. Being shy, I was too scared to to talk to anybody. I spent all my time working. There was a theatrical studio near my room. When I became too tired to work, I'd walk down to this theatre where I didn't know anybody. A man whom I didn't know caught my eye. He didn't look anything like me:

'Although his body, like mine, was muscular, his from early

soccer playing, he looked like a girl. He was so aware of his femininity or what he thought of as his failings, he could scarcely raise his eyes from the ground. So passerbys could observe, even more clearly, the white hair floating around his head. When he was so enamoured or respectful of or interested in the person that he forgot his self-hatred and raised his head upwards, two set-far-apart so-black-as-to-be-Russian eyes appeared. Then his hair was the fur hat, camouflaged by snow, of a Slav princess. There was no way this man could be male.

'Then he was animated, forgetful of who he was, talking so rapidly about his work that the person to whom he was talking and whom he had been so interested in might as well not have existed. Nothing was direct in this man. He despised himself so deeply, he didn't even know he was.'

The dog explained her myth of rejection: 'I'm almost never attracted to men, physically. About once a year, I see a man whom I actually want and then . . . the usual happens: Either he walks away or, after a day or two, he walks away. For me, sexuality is rejection. When men don't reject me, when they make the moves on me, they scare me so much I run away. Either way, since it doesn't work out between me and men, I distrusted my immediate desire for this man. I resolved to have nothing to do with him.

'He indirectly looked at me, for that was his nature, and I kept staring at and following him, though I was having nothing to do with him, and both of us did this for a very long time. Fifty-four days. I don't know whether we got to know each other or not. I didn't even know his name. Each day, though I was in a strange country in England, was a pleasure to me because I could look forward to seeing
him.
I hadn't looked forward to seeing someone for a long time.

'One day, I don't remember when, he spoke to me. The first thing he said was that he admired people who wrote because he was unable to speak. Had he always been tongue-tied? Yes. He said something, made some indication that he needed to be punished in order to reach out to another human being. He was as he had been trained to be by his public school. I immediately hinted that, for that reason, we might be able to get along. He became tongue-tied.

'Since he made no indication he sexually wanted me, I decided he didn't want anything to do with me sexually, though he never indicated anything. We were friends.

'I didn't understand the sexuality of English males. A lot of them, except for my friend whom I sexually wanted, at that time, seemed to want me. They wanted me cause they thought I was a boy; not being a boy, I couldn't want them. In England, girls couldn't be wanted because they were the relatives to the Virgin Mary. Their constant flirtation meant that, if they were touched, they'd reject the toucher. Since I was used to men rejecting me, I had no part in this English world.

'I buried my longing, my anguish - all that is loneliness - for I couldn't want my friend unless he was female. De Franville, the unknown man's name, clearly didn't want me. Since clearly he didn't want me, he couldn't be male. But De Franville had never wanted to be male. His father had repeatedly told him that he wasn't acting like and capable of being a man. Since his father was a good man, De Franville couldn't deny him.

'His mother, by worshipping him, also proved to the young boy that he must be obedient. Being good and beautiful, De Franville early in his life learnt and knew, meant he was shit.

'His mother adored him. Since she adored shit, was she shit? A mother has to be good. De Franville saw no escape from this mess, this mess that had to be him, except by erasing it or him. He had to be more than androgynous: he had to erase loving, sexuality, and identity.

'Both men and women adored this creature who, by his/her sexual void, like a magnet, attracted most those whose sexual desires were the fiercest. He/She seemed to be magnificently sexual. For De Franville, wanting a self he/she could love, needed with a desperation that seemed sexual. Whoever wanted him/her, he/she grabbed at, for they might be mirrors of himself/herself, while he/she, being nothing, was incapable of anything including sexuality.

'Without knowing this and without any desire to be involved in any mess, I stepped into this mess.'

The dog continued talking, now in the third person, because she wanted to tell what De Franville felt about her: 'De Franville was immediately drawn to Villebranche, that's my

name, because he thought she was his mirror. She didn't look or act like a woman because, she had been so rejected as a woman, she had flagellated herself into being someone she wasn't. Like De Franville, her sexual existence was precarious. This appeared from her appearance:

'Her body normally appeared in male clothing and her muscles had been trained into a tough muscularity. Her mind had been trained by western philosophy and chess. In a country in which women appear to be related to the Virgin Mary because the men want them to appear that spectrally, Villebranche was an apparition. Even though she had to be a boy because there was nothing else she could be, she wasn't a boy. De Franville felt that this identity was the masculine or feminine counterpart to his own. He kept all of this silent, in himself.

'"How," thought De Franville, "can either of us be capable of sexual love? Therefore we're made for each other. In order to fuck you have to appear, and neither of us can appear in this society which demands appearances based on lies and hypocrisies: We are too honest to exist."

T have always thought,' the dog explained, 'that the world of society or this city is the world of appearances.

'Being rejected was my worst nightmare. Is that related to being female? If I could control my own life, I could make sure I wouldn't be rejected. In order to control my own life, rather than make up an image or be hypocritical as most social people do, I learned to control my own mind and body. Thus, to whatever extent possible, my fate.'

'God,' the mad knight asked, 'how were you able to do that?'

'First of all, by renouncing all I was taught to live by, such as goodness and proper opinions. Then, by renouncing that renunciation, by actually suffering.'

'I've suffered,' said the knight. 'Why don't I control anyone?'

'The trouble is: you're not a Nazi. You've good intentions or thoughts: you suffer because these intentions or thoughts're ineffectual. Your suffering isn't pure. Since Hitler didn't have good intentions or thoughts, his suffering took effect.'

'Hitler was bad,' the knight instructed.

'Since that's a proper opinion, you must be suffering.'

'I am.'

'Let's get rid of the proper opinion, or the suffering, by asking "Who was Hitler?'" Or: "Am I Hitler?"

'In order to answer this question, or, get rid of suffering, I decided to be Hitler. That night, there was a fancy party at Area, a disgusting club in London. So I could dress up as Hitler.

'As I said before, as far as I can remember, which isn't anywhere, but time as such doesn't exist anymore, or is it distance? I wasn't interested in men because I was trying to destroy my own suffering. I wasn't interested in fucking De Franville who clearly wasn't interested in fucking me. This commonality allowed me to let slip, barely peep out, for everything's allowed between people who aren't passionately in love with each other, that I was going to the Area ball dressed as a Nazi captain. Since I could no longer have a man, I would become one. We have such strange ways of fucking these days. Of course, my transformation had nothing to do with De Franville's sexual rejection of me, for I'm too proud, being male, to allow rejection.