Broad forehead, short, brushed hair, protruding cheekbones. His abundant mustache fallen, the odd cut of his face. His musical voice; his slow speech; his prudent and meditative walk. His intent eyes betrayed the painful work of his thinking. They were, at the same time, the eyes of a fanatic, a keen observer, and a posthumous.
As she was cooking dinner, she meditated that she envisioned a living writing she could take for an encounter. Meditating, she justified her own desire for solitude
solitude is nothing more than the safeguard of writing when the desire arises.
Solitude is the defense of the text.
Sitting solitarily in front of Nietzsche, she observed him, at night: “It is night, the hour when all the welling springs speak more loudly.
It is night: the hour when all the songs of those who love awaken.
But being surrounded by the light is my solitude.
But I live in my own light, I drink the flames that escape from me.”
Place 22 —
Looking at the windowpane, she saw herself portrayed in it. Through an optical illusion, the two of them were outside the house; on the opposite side of the river, where there is a large knot of ancient, multicolored trees.
The one in the center stood out, red — amidst them all lay the red; then, sunken in a filigree of green foliage, a white shrub; and farther away, always among the multitonal green, pink and yellow shrubs.
— If you have come to die, come die in my room. — Entering into ecstasy the delicious mornings serenaded by the equilibrium of the mornings
it is a young woman’s bed
with room for
a single body;
it is the time of darkness:
all day the sun remains
beyond the horizon;
during that time,
the temperature falls
slowly,
without stopping.
If my sons come,
if I hear the beating of oars,
I will go down to the garden
and tell them:
someone is dying,
and doesn’t want to see anyone.
He had the habit, on his walks, of burning in a fragment of time. Stroking the tender shrubs — those that haven’t yet grown; when the wind blew and it was autumn, the leaves moved quickly, evoking the sound of footsteps, or an eagle. The cold in his hands always astonished him and he stopped to write a few aphorisms, as if he washed them; that morning (just before noon) he would take an unknown path. The sun, that sun, known, went away and came back. Shortsightedly, he was almost out of ink and he had to select and condense his thoughts. He stretched out on the ground, and a shaft of sun scorched him with its subdued brightness. The tops of the trees, always different, filtered the sharpness of the return.
Ana de Peñalosa had not stopped smiling — The Eternal Return — he heard her say without speaking.
But, at midmorning, there was a perfidious animal, with claws; it devoured the insects and the words, which it set down further away, unrecognizable and transformed; its language simulated a page covered with mysterious hieroglyphs constantly shifting sign and meaning. In its shadow, Nietzsche had been invaded by the terror of being another animal and he couldn’t get up from the ground, his spine immobilized — by the weight of the rings and the multiplicity of legs that he did not, logically, know how to use. A thick terror closed his eyes and his hand could not even find the remnants of the writing on the surface. The earth and the light decomposed, chewed by steely teeth lacking a face with a name.
— Is that Nietzsche? — The beast lay its head on her chest; their eyes were extremely close.
(Later, Ana de Peñalosa had completely forgotten what she thought she had seen in that gaze and not even the meditative silence of Saint John of the Cross had made her remember it. Vivid and imperceptible letters.)
— What keeps my sons on their islands? It is night. It is night. It is night.
Friedrich Nietzsche lying on my chest frightens me. The wind blows, the moon shines, O my distant, distant sons, why are you not here?
But today, loving Nietzsche so much, there is an obstacle to this evocation. The silence announces immobility and night, it does not obscure; I drift on a rhythm of texts,
my bare arm lying on the page,
dark and full,
still unaged.
Still unwritten is our future; in my arms, Nietzsche pierces our future with his blind eyes; he sees what is.
The fear that I would be unable to be alone, which threaded through all my Easter days and perverted their potential happiness, has disappeared. I feel as if I splinter melodiously in search of my multiple pleasures (the greatest one — that of the body’s sensitivity). It always begins in my eyes, which distribute subjects for meditation to the other senses.
As Friedrich Nietzsche dies, Suso the fish winds through my aquarium, the aquarium was uninhabited; half full of water; our thinking blew across the surface
my dear, distant sons, do not return while Friedrich Nietzsche does not die
Your mother, who also writes,
Ana de Peñalosa
I disappear from this place. My desires lead me to the new territory, to the house whose entrances have no doors, and the windows not even a pane of glass. A distinct brightness suffuses the entire space — in the most distant corner, shadow is still light.
I am merely a body disrobed. I turn to the aquarium where Suso the fish is
and where water, earth, fire, air cannot be distinguished.
(At the beginning of the fourteenth century a famous Dominican by the name of Suso lived in Suabia. He had a subtle intelligence like his Meister Eckhart of Cologne.)
I lower my eyes over Nietzsche’s mouth, which is still lying on my chest
it is the fish’s grave,
the fish will die at the bottom of the aquarium but the water and fire, dividing themselves, allowed me to see a space full of trees where his fins circulate through beds of leaves, dry branches, deeply marked stones.
He lives with his spirit and his solitude, of which he has not tired for ten years:
always walking, they stumbled upon a deep pit, a kind of amphitheater where young men and women were sitting. Among those who were naked there was a silken body, with gently sloping breasts that reminded him of a harp in full repose. The night, not yet fully ended, was reflected in the
