Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (24 page)

'"I haven't any experience of all this."

'"I haven't any experience of all this."

' "I'm not asking you about your overlays of memories, like the overlays of culture in Europe, culminating in a decayed seaside hotel whose walls peel away from themselves into the literature they think is supporting them. I'm asking you what you know. What do you know, what do you perceive?"

'"I'm not asking you about your overlays of memories, like the overlays of culture in Europe, culminating in a decayed seaside hotel whose walls peel away from themselves into the literature they think is supporting them. I'm asking you what you know. What do you know, what do you perceive?"

'"I'm too scared to talk to you because I'm too scared to talk to anyone, especially older people: I'm scared because I have or know no self. There's no
one
who can talk. My physical sensations scare me because they confront me with a self when I have no self: sexual touching makes these physical sensations so fierce. I'm forced to find a self when I've been trained to be nothing. Therefore, I perceive that physical pain, if it doesn't scare me because it's happening without my expectation and consent, helps out and enlarges sexual excitation."

'Delbène said, "What do
you
perceive?
You
must speak. Here, all of us who're women, who no longer have men around us, in the death of Europe this crypt, must now speak."

'When Flavie a young girl said "One speaks with the body," the teacher reproved her, "You're not speaking yet."

'The teacher herself spoke: "Fuck me! One of you! I'm so desperate to be fucked! My cunt is swollen because it's crying out in its own way to be fucked! I'll abandon my belief that I'm worth something in order to fuck!

'"I'll be your slave. I would have you place leather bonds around my wrists. I would have you place whatever you wanted of yourself on whatever part of my body you want.

'"I would have you, Laure, because I'm in love with you, so I want only you. Put some part of your body in front of my overexcited face. I won't even notice whatever the other girls do to me as long as I can do something to you.

'"Do something, something. Please I have to have one orgasm. I need to orgasm or love so much. I can't orgasm. Will anybody help me?

"I'll kill Laure. I'll kill one of you. Hit me. Flay me. Oh shit. Oh, oh yes. Oh shit. Yes.

'"I'm so irritated, my flesh's diseased. I don't care. Hit me. There . . . I'm going. Oh. Thank you.

'"As for marriage, I, for one, don't know men. So much for marriage.

'"There're no males here, in this place, for there can be no men around when we're speaking. Therefore marriage has nothing to do with us."

'My teacher's words now mean nothing to me. I who've been without speech speak. "I love a young woman. She's sitting on a stool. I love her because, or else I love her and, she is the most beautiful kindest and in the future intelligent person right now. (Don't be real.) Only her thin tight but-tocks're hitting the cold wood. I can't think about her in this way. There's no possibility she could want me. I know she's in love with me. I have her. I can touch her right now as if lust's allowed, as if she's my object. She's sitting in front of me. Her ass which's touching the stool in some way detrimental to her

identity/self-determination/separation-from-me is now mine to touch whenever I want to/it.

' "She can't stop whatever I do to her because being in love with me has forced her helpless in my face. Cords fastened to the wood stools fixed to the floor spread her legs open, as far as is comfortable for her. Since she through her love's open to me, inside her I'll be softer than her, less of an identity. As I'll make her come, I'll fade. This isn't possible, though I know she loves me. Her arms are as fixed as her legs.
Fixed
means
abandoned.
Held up and out in the real cross which is the girls' cross, the cross of taking me in her arms.

'"Who am I to have her? I'm about to graduate, while she's the youngest student in our school. She's the most beautiful student in the school. And she's female.

'"My speech is this:"

'I say: "Laure," I said, "come here." She couldn't come cause she was chained to the stool. "Laure, come. Bring your vicious little cunt over here. Even though I know you love me, you're inscrutable so I'm, since I'm a cunt, vicious:

'"Are you thrusting your cunt out at me, twat? Tart-face. Fish-teats. Vomit-bag. They've taught us that, above all, our bodies, especially that part of our body, should be hidden. Secreted. Shoved anywhere, any which way. To them nuclear bomb leakage's less dangerous than ours. Even our tongues shouldn't leak: above all, we must be polite or nondescript or non-existent. These're my words: Cunt, you are an asocial cunt. I'm going to have to whip you badly, cunt."

'"Oh yes," Laure answered, "whip me badly."

"'I'll whip you by breaking you down by breaking through your virginity or identity. As soon as you're no longer a virgin, you're going to leak. You'll keep on leaking so you won't be able to retain any more of their teachings."

'"Oh, whip me badly."

'"I have to warn you. As soon as you start leaking, you're going to need desperately. You won't be secure ever again."

' "What could I need?"

'"You'll need me to stop up your leaks. That's why I'm going to take away your virginity. Let me tell you every detail, Laure, of how I'm going to do it:

"This's a rod."

"That's a finger," the evil girl said.

'"This finger is a rod." I corrected her. "Of the proper size. Four inches long and less than an inch in diameter. There's a myth that women experience pleasure only when their cunts're being bruised. Women know better. A small rod is the correct size of a rod. Since such a rod, unlike larger rods, whose material're similar to this one, can bend and swivel, such a rod stops up your leaks while causing leakages of pleasure.

'"Now, Laure. As soon as I've stuck this rod up you, cunt, you're going to bleed all over it. Probably a lot.

'"Let's examine. What is this blood? It's you, cunt, leaking or identity. You might even die. This is love, when death's involved. By sticking this rod up you and making you bleed, love, I'm making you love me.

'"As soon as you've had so much new experience for the first time, O my love, you'll lose the consciousness you've had. You'll leak again: you'll lose consciousness.

' "When you awake to an unknown - our reality - , you'll be leaking forever so much you'll lose your childhood selfishness. In this way my penetration'll teach you."

'"This's the true state of female human knowledge." Laure replied to me. "I'm going to die."

'Unfortunately I didn't know how to fuck Laure. Desperately I strapped a dildo around my waist. I was aghast: wearing a dildo is like wearing plastic. Is wearing plastic. I was no longer natural.

'I learned that our fierce emotions make us do what we'd never otherwise do. Just as a skinny woman lifts up the part of a bus that's run over her young child, I strapped the dildo on to my waist: but the dildo, unlike the bus, went this way and that way. The straps kept slipping off. It was ambiguous.

'The dildo slipped so much, it slipped in, and out of Laure. Even when I managed to slip the slippery thing in for a whole moment, not only couldn't it slip past that fleshy obstruction in her cunt, that obstruction made it slip out. I became scared.

'Since I was scared, nothing mattered, so I had the courage of one who knows no fear. I knew nothing. I placed my right hand around the dildo's bottom and shoved with my thighs

then right hand. How could I know the degree of the pain Laure was feeling? I alone was responsible for the pain Laure was feeling. I was responsible or another whom I couldn't know. By my administration and neglect of unknown pain, the dildo slipped into the now blood-filled cunt and didn't slip out. I made Laure wail.

'Between wails she exclaimed. "I'm fainting."

'I was more terrified by what I was doing now than I had been by my strapping on the dildo. How could I be doing this to one whom I loved? I wailed as loudly as the child.

'Delbène: "Shut the fuck up. What are you: women? Do women always wail? Are women weak? Do women never take responsibility: do they do a thing and then, whatever the thing is, immediately regret it; do their emotions keep shifting and all they pay attention to are these drifting emotions; are women stupid? Do women take no responsibility for their own actions and therefore have no speech of their own, no real or meaningful speech?"

'"No," I managed to reply. "I'm coming." Those were my words.'

With these words, the dog ended her story.

'They certainly taught you how to speak in that school,' Don Quixote agreed with the dog, 'for you obviously haven't shut up since then.'

Since the dog shut up by licking the knight's face, the knight decided she preferred the fictional dog school to the ratty girls' school she had had to attend when she was a girl.

THE LAST ADVENTURE: UNTIL THIS BOOK WILL BEGIN AGAIN

'That's very nice - what you just told me - ' Don Quixote said to the bitch, 'but it all took place in the past. It's all past and gone.

The Present

'Sister dog or bitch,' Don Quixote, 'we have to decide about

the present. You and I. I mean: what we're going to do now:

'Now, bitch. If I were capable of action, as any man is, if I wasn't so shy that I had to stay cooped up in this Spanish peasant's hut all the time and through time, as I now do; at this very moment I would be delivering Laure from that convent, where, beyond doubt, the evil Sisters are keeping her against her will. Despite whoever's now opposing me, despite whoever thinks I'm a male pornographer, I would deliver her. But I'm only a woman, and frail.

'Then, sister dog, I would place Laure in your paws, and would say, "Oh sister dog. Deal with this woman as you will, for, dog, I trust you and know that every woman knows that no woman, being a bitch, will deal with any woman against her own pleasure. The body cannot lie."'

'But what if I'm not a bitch?' the dog asked.

'To me,' Don Quixote said, 'these conditions, these
shoulds
and
woulds,
are the same as the past. Either they are past and gone or they don't occur. They don't concern me.

'What concerns me,' Don Quixote added, 'is me.'

'Oi yoi yoi,' the dog said. 'Only a bitch can reason the way you do.'

'I'm concerned with what is,' Don Quixote announced, 'not with what isn't or may be. In the beginning of me, I am. Therefore I am.'

'What about me?' the dog barked. 'If I am to me, am I to you?'

'Your question is really the question of the self. Dog, am I you? Are our politics human, doggish, or both?'

At that moment a bugle rang through all the spheres of Don Quixote's and the bitch's ears and outside.

'Belief in sorcerers,' said the dog, 'is common to black people throughout Africa.
Sorcerers
are people who eat peoples' souls. A
sorcerer
is born a sorcerer; once a sorcerer, does sorcery or magic in private. I'm talking about the power of the self in the world. As soon as a sorcerer's known, as soon as evil's realized, it's no longer evil or powerful.

'The only people who can recognize evil are women. Because you have to be in a trance in order to recognize evil and it's usually women who're in trances.

'Women,' said the bitch, 'understand who's evil in this world, who the evil sorcerers are . . .'

'The evil sorcerers!' Don Quixote repeated, all excited. 'The ones who've stopped me from being loved! Who are they?'

Not hearing anything, the bitch continued, 'These women and their trances or dances' name is Wolof as m'Deup.

'This is what a woman does when she dances: She rolls on the ground and eats dirt.'

'You've taken leave of your senses.'

'Then she recognizes the evil in front of her.'

'Who're the evil sorcerers who've stopped me from being loved?' the night asked again. 'Who haven't loved me?'

At that moment, there was a bugle blast. At that moment, the night, hearing the blast of the bugle, knew that the first spirit, Papa Eleggua, was calling her.

She rose up. She saw a number of men wearing psychedelic garb - filthy white cloths over whatever parts of their bodies they managed to cover. These men are now standing up in numbers because they think they have the power of God. Don Quixote couldn't figure out why these filthy punks were acting like this: she just knew that they were. She thought that these poverty-stricken cultists were stranger than the Born-Agains who were murdering women who tried to get abortions in the United States.

'I find white men so strange. I'm not sure I want to be alive,' Don Quixote explained to the gangs of wild dogs who were now flocking around her. Probably because they smelt she was about to get her period.

'My whole life's involved with these white men,' Don Quixote continued in her mad way.

'You're mad,' said a dog.

'I'm not lesbian,' said Don Quixote. 'Whereas those psychedelic humans are male, white, and they hate women.'

'How d'you know they hate women?' asked the bitch. 'Are you a feminist?'