The Malady of Death (2 page)

She sleeps.

You switch the lights off.

It's almost light.

It's still almost dawn. These hours are as vast as stretches of sky. It's too much, time can't find a way through. Time has stopped passing. You tell yourself it would be best for her to die. You tell yourself that if now, at this hour of the night, she died, it would be easier. For you, you probably mean, but you don't finish the sentence.

You listen to the sound of the tide starting to rise. The stranger is there on the bed, in the white expanse of white sheets. The whiteness makes her shape look darker, more present than an animal presence suddenly deserted by life, more present than the presence of death.

You look at this shape, and as you do so you realize its infernal power, its abominable frailty, its weakness, the unconquerable strength of its incomparable weakness.

You go out of the room, go out again onto the terrace facing the sea, away from her smell.

A fine drizzle is falling, the sea is still black under a sky bleached of light. You can hear it. The black water goes on rising, gets nearer, moving, always moving. Long white rollers run across it, a long swell that crashes in a turmoil of white.

The black sea is a heavy one. There's a storm in the offing, as there often is at night. You stand for a long while, watching.

It occurs to you that the black sea is moving in the stead of something else, of you and of the dark shape on the bed.

You finish your sentence. You tell yourself that if now, at this hour of the night, she died, it would be easier for you to make her disappear off the face of the earth, to throw her into the black water, it would only take a few minutes to throw a body as light as that into the rising tide, and free the bed of the stench of heliotrope and citron.

*

Back into the room you go again. She is there, sleeping, abandoned in her own darkness, her magnificence.

You realize she's so made that it's as if at any moment, at her own whim, her body could cease to live, could just thin out around her and disappear from sight, and that it's in this threat that she sleeps, exposes herself to your view. That it's in the risk she runs, with the sea so close and empty and black still, that she sleeps.

*

Around the body, the room. Probably your room. But it's inhabited by her, a woman. You can't recognize it anymore. It's emptied of life, without either you or your like. Occupied only by the long, lithe streak of the alien form on the bed.

She stirs, her eyes half open. She asks: How many paid nights left? You say: Three.

She asks: Haven't you ever loved a woman? You say no, never.

She asks: Haven't you ever desired a woman? You say no, never.

She asks: Not once, not for a single moment? You say no, never.

She says: Never? Ever? You repeat: Never.

She smiles, says: A dead man's a strange thing.

She goes on: What about looking, haven't you ever looked at a woman? You say no, never. She asks: What do you look at? You say: Everything else.

She stretches, is silent. Smiles. Goes back to sleep.

You come back into the room. She hasn't moved in the white expanse of the sheets. You look at her whom you've never approached, ever, either through others like her or through herself.

You look at the shape suspected through the ages. You give up.

You stop looking. Stop looking at anything. You shut your eyes so as to get back into your difference, your death.

When you open your eyes she's still there. Still there.

You go back towards the alien body. It's sleeping.

You look at the malady of your life, the malady of death. It's on her, on her sleeping body, that you look at it. You look at the different places on the body, at the face, the breasts, the mingled site of the sex.

You look at where the heart is. The beat seems different, more distant. The word occurs to you: more alien. It's regular, it seems as if it would never stop. You bring your body close to the object that is her body. It's warm, moist. She's still alive. While she lives she invites murder. You wonder how to kill her and who will. You don't love anything or anyone, you don't even love the difference you think you embody. All you know is the grace of the bodies of the dead, the grace of those like yourself. Suddenly you see the difference between the grace of the bodies of the dead and this grace here, this royalty, made of utmost weakness, which could be crushed by the merest gesture.

You realize it's here, in her, that the malady of death is fomenting, that it's this shape stretched out before you that decrees the malady of death.

*

Out of the half-open mouth comes a breath that returns, withdraws, returns again. The fleshly machine is marvelously precise. Leaning over her, motionless, you look at her. You know you can dispose of her in whatever way you wish, even the most dangerous. But you don't. Instead you stroke her body as gently as if it ran the risk of happiness. Your hand is over the sex, between the open lips, it's there it strokes. You look at the opening and what surrounds it, the whole body. You don't see anything.

You want to see all of a woman, as much as possible. You don't see that for you it's impossible.

You look at the closed shape.

First you see slight tremors showing on the skin, just like those of suffering. And then you see the eyelids flicker as if the eyes wanted to see. And then you see the mouth open as if it wanted to say something. And then you notice that under your caresses the lips of her sex are swelling up, and that from their smoothness comes a hot sticky liquid, as it might be blood.

Then you stroke more quickly.

And you see that her thighs are opening to give your hand more room, so that you can stroke better than before.

And suddenly, in a moan, you see pleasure come upon her, take possession of her, make her arch up from the bed. You look intently at what you have just done to her body. Then you see it fall back inert on the white of the bed. It breathes fast, in gasps that get further and further apart. And then the eyes shut tighter than before, sink deeper into the face. Then they open, and then they shut again. They shut.

You've looked at everything. At last you too shut your eyes. You stay like that a long time, with your eyes shut, like her.

You think of outside your room, of the streets in the town, the lonely little squares over by the station. Of those winter Saturdays all alike.

And then you listen to the approaching sound. To the sea.

*

You listen to the sea. It's very close to the walls of the room. Through the windows that colorless light still, the slowness of the day to spread over the sky, the black sea still, the sleeping body, the stranger in the room.

And then you do it. I couldn't say why. I see you do it without knowing why. You could go out of the room and leave the body, the sleeping form. But no, you do it, apparently as another would, but with the complete difference that separates you from her. You do it, you go back towards the body.

You cover it completely with your own, you draw it towards you so as not to crush it with your strength, so as not to kill it, and then you do it, you return to the nightly dwelling, you are engulfed.

You stay on in that abode. You go on weeping. You think you know you know not what, you can't go through with that knowledge, you think you alone are the image of the world's woe, of a special fate. You think you're the master of the event now taking place, you think it exists.

She sleeps, a smile on her lips, fit to be killed.

You stay on in the abode of her body.

She is full of you as she sleeps. The faintly voiced tremors that go through the body become more and more marked. She's in a dream of happiness at being full of a man, of you, or of someone else, or of someone else again.

You weep.

The tears wake her. She looks at you. She looks at the room. And again at you. She strokes your hand. Asks: Why are you crying? You say it's for her to say, she's the one who ought to know.

She answers softly, gently: Because you don't love. You say that's it.

She asks you to say it clearly. You say: I don't love.

She says: Never?

You say: Never.

She says: The wish to be about to kill a lover, to keep him for yourself, yourself alone, to take him, steal him in defiance of every law, every moral authority—you don't know what that is, you've never experienced it?

You say: Never.

She looks at you, repeats: A dead man's a strange thing.

*

She asks if you've seen the sea, asks if it's day, if it's light.

You say the sun's rising, but that at this time of year it takes a long time to light up the whole sky.

She asks you what color the sea is.

You say: Black.

She says the sea's never black. You must be mistaken.

You ask if she thinks anyone could love you.

She says no, not possibly. You ask: Because of the death? She says: Yes, because your feelings are so dull and sluggish, because you lied and said the sea is black.

And then she is silent.

You're afraid she'll go to sleep again, you rouse her and say: Go on talking. She says: Ask questions then, I can't do it on my own. Again you ask if anyone could love you. Again she says: No.

She says that a moment ago you wanted to kill her, when you came in off the terrace and into the room for the second time. That she knew this in her sleep, from the way you looked at her. She asks you to say why.

You say you can't know why, that you don't understand the malady you suffer from.

She smiles, says this is the first time, that until she met you she didn't know death could be lived.

She looks at you through the filtered green of her eyes. She says; You herald the reign of death. Death can't be loved if it's imposed from outside. You think you weep because you can't love. You weep because you can't impose death.

She's already almost asleep. She says almost inaudibly: You're going to die of death. Your death has already begun.

You weep. She says: Don't cry, it's pointless, give up the habit of weeping for yourself, it's pointless.

Imperceptibly the room is filled with the still dark light of the sun.

She opens her eyes, shuts them again. She says: Two more paid nights and it will be over. She smiles and strokes your eyes. She smiles ironically in her sleep.

You go on talking, all alone in the world, just as you wish. You say love has always struck you as out of place, you've never understood, you've always avoided loving, always wanted to be free not to. You say you're lost. But that you don't know what you're lost to. Or in.

She's not listening, she's asleep.

You tell a story about a child. The light has reached the windows.

She opens her eyes, says: Stop lying. She says she hopes she'll never know anything, anything in the world, the way you do. She says: I don't want to know anything the way you do, with that death-derived certainty, that hopeless monotony, the same every day of your life, every night, and that deadly routine of lovelessness.

She says: It's day, everything is about to begin, except you, you never begin.

She goes back to sleep. You ask her why she sleeps, what weariness she has to rest from, what monumental weariness. She lifts her hand and strokes your face again, the mouth perhaps. She smiles ironically again in her sleep. She says: The fact that you ask the question proves you can't understand. She says it's a way of resting from you too. From death.

You go on with the story about the child, cry it out aloud. You say you don't know the whole of the story about him, about you. You say you've been told it. She smiles, says she's heard and read it too, often, everywhere, in a number of books. You ask how loving can happen—the emotion of loving.

 She answers: Perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe. She says: Through a mistake, for instance. She says: Never through an act of will. You ask: Could the emotion of loving come from other things too? You beg her to say. She says: It can come from anything, from the flight of a night bird, from a sleep, from a dream of sleep, from the approach of death, from a word, from a crime, of itself, from oneself, often without knowing how. She says: Look. She parts her legs, and in the hollow between you see the dark night at last. You say: It was there, the dark night. It's there.

She says: Come. You do. Having entered her, you go on weeping. She says: Don't cry anymore. She says: Take me, so it may have been done.

You do so, you take her.

It is done.

She goes back to sleep.

One day she isn't there anymore. You wake and she isn't there. She has gone during the night. The mark of her body is still there on the sheets. Cold.

It's dawn today. The sun's not yet up, but the edges of the sky are already light, while from its center a thick darkness still falls on the earth.

There's nothing left in the room but you. Her body has vanished. The difference between her and you is confirmed by her sudden absence.

Far away, on the beaches, gulls would be crying in the last of the dark, already starting to feed on the lugworms, to scour the sand abandoned by the receding tide. In the dark, the crazy din of the ravenous gulls— it's suddenly as if you'd never heard it before.

*

She'd never come back.

The evening after she goes, you tell the story of the affair in a bar. At first you tell it as if it were possible to do so, then you give up. Then you tell it laughing, as if it were impossible for it to have happened or possible for you to have invented it.

The next day, suddenly, perhaps you'd notice her absence in the room. The next day, you'd perhaps feel a desire to see her there again, in the strangeness of your solitude, as a stranger herself.