meters lucid, transforming the measurements of the world into lucidity. I look around and am able to understand because I brought the right Sentence with me. Sometimes, it is this.
To make at least a few square meters of reality lucid. Like someone carrying a small first-aid kit, carrying sentences from Llansol to the outside world, to the place and moment where you are alive.
6.
This edition of the Geography of Rebels trilogy, which includes The Book of Communities, The Remaining Life, and The House of July and August, and has been published by Deep Vellum thanks to the Espaço Llansol and Audrey Young, is a major event. A great writer like Llansol deserves such an edition in English. May readers enjoy this strangeness, which will, in time, I am certain, win them over.
—GONÇALO M. TAVARES
To my mother
(Elvira)
This is how I read this book:
there are three things that strike fear: the first, the second, and the third.
The first is called the provoked emptiness, the second is called the continued emptiness, and the third is likewise called the glimpsed emptiness.
Now we know that Emptiness does not depend on Nothingness.
There are, then, three things that strike fear.
The first is mutation. No one knows what a human is. The limits of the human species are consequently unknown. They can, however, be felt. The mutant is extra-ordinary, bearing with it a new ordinary. This book is a process of mutants, physically perfect. It is a terrible process. It is advisable to fear this book.
There are, as I have said, three things that strike fear.
The second is Tradition, according to the spirit that moves where it breathes.
We all believe we know what Time is, but we suspect, with reason, that only Power knows what Time is: Tradition according to the Weft of Existence. This book is the history of Tradition, according to the spirit of the Remaining Life. Yet another reason for us not to take it seriously.
There are, I say for the last time, three things that strike fear.
The third is a bodywriting. Only those who pass through there understand what it is. And that it is of interest to no one.
Speaking and negotiating, producing and exploring, construct, in effect, the happenings of Power. Writing accompanies the density of the Remaining Life, of the Body’s Other Form, which, I tell you here is: Landscape.
Writing glimpses, it cannot be used to confine. Writing, as in this book, fatally brings Power to the loss of memory.
And who knows what a Body With A Hundred Absent Memories of Landscape is.
Who can bear Emptiness?
Perhaps No One, not even a Book.
A. Borges
Jodoigne, January 4, 1977
Place 1 —
in that place there was a woman who did not want to have children from her womb. She asked the men to bring her their wives’ children so she could educate them in a large house with only one room and only one window; she wore a black shawl close to her face; she had a distant way of making love: with her eyes and with her speech. Also with time, for since the days of her great-grandmother, going back to any era was always possible. Moving, she sometimes looked intently at a place the most beautiful in her house the whole house
because the whole house was beautiful and in that look began either the time of children, or the time of men. Women, there was no other, aside from her, never passed beyond the entrance, which led to the land, land with a garden where they could walk. The men were content because every time she said it isn’t you I care about, it’s the next. So they convinced themselves that, in the moment before, they had been the next. She sat in her room (everywhere) and picked up words on a lightly curved forefinger, as if she served herself an aperitif or a fish. She never thought that perhaps she was situated in the fragment of a cooled star or that she could, with a powerful plant, poison
but, there being no other woman in the house, there were many voices which, from different corners, all seemed to turn toward her
body and did not quiet when she spoke
there was a curtain in the window
which served as a place of spiritual retreat for the children who, at times, wished to leave for the woman, in turn, to receive new lovers there they copied the Ascent of Mount Carmel, by Saint John of the Cross, they laughed, they listened to the voice that slowly read what they had written and, in the end, even imitated their laughter you must know that a soul laughter must generally pass first through two nights that the mystics call purgations laughter or purifications of the soul and that we here will call nights laughter
because the soul walks as if at night, and in darkness; you must know that for these children this laughter did not signify derision; out of pure and extreme ignorance, other children invented that there was a chair in this room with torn stuffing where the sea could be heard, as soon as we put our ear there; now, the springs are damaged the housecat came in you live in the alternative of being a real cat or a royal object and the papers slipped to the ground without her caring: papers, children, lovers, there would always be Saint John of the Cross: when she stood up because a child called her to the locutory in the garden behind one of the house’s walls, she already knew the girl wanted to speak to her; she listened so raptly to what she revealed that, after two hours, she felt an ache in the nape of her neck and also in her skull; it seemed to her, as always when she spoke for a long time, that the words fell into her eyes, dilated and sunk them; the girl wanted an answer and she remembered that no precedents existed; despite this, she was going to think on it, to be with a few children and the papers, and perhaps Saint John of the Cross, whom she would find in any place.
Covered by the table and always ready to write, she dreamed about a group of men and Saint John of the Cross, discalced carmelite, sitting in front of an oven, roasting mutton; his forehead began to darken, red, between waves of scent; she understood, by the fixity of his expression, that he had entered the dark night and that either his book, or his hands, or his feet were now lying on the rack and they traversed flames and circumstances with unforeseeable results. And that he did not write: he had gathered his right fist inside his sleeve and because of the cloth’s transparency only the image
of those who asked for the prisoner to be received could be recognized; sleepreading in the chair, tobacco smoke rose between his fingers, while the woman twisted her bracelet on her wrist:
never again bring me a message that doesn’t know how to tell me what I want. The door closed with a soft
disturbance of air
which agitated the scarf
