could not take place. Sometimes, Eugene would go out leaving Clara almost undressed in the cabin: I thought that this might hasten events, but I was wrong. Clara would accept no other beginning than that in the shop. I would have to wait pointlessly for her to dress and go into the shop in order to open the book of the afternoon at the first page, behind the window.
I would sit on a stool in front of her and begin to talk to her, to beg her, to implore her for a long time. I knew it was useless; Clara would accept only rarely and even then she would make use of a ruse, in order not to grant me perfect liberty:
“I’m going into the cabin to take a powder, I have a terrible headache, please don’t come after me”.
I would swear not to and then follow in an instant. In the cabin, a veritable battle would begin, in which, obviously, Clara’s forces were inclined to surrender. Then she would tumble all in one piece onto the couch, as though she had tripped up. She would put her hands under her head and close her eyes as though she were asleep. It was impossible to budge her from that position so much as an inch; just as she was, lying on her side, I would have to tear the dress from under her thighs and press myself to her. Clara put up no resistance to my gestures, but nor did she give me any assistance. She was as inert and as indifferent as a block of wood, and only her intimate and secret warmth revealed to me that she was mindful, that she “knew”.
*
It was during this period that the physician who prescribed me quinine was consulted. Confirmation of my impression that there was something mousy about him came in the cabin, and, as I have said, in a manner wholly absurd and surprising.
One day, as I was sitting pressed up against Clara and tearing off her dress with feverish hands, I felt something odd moving in the cabin and – more with the obscure but finely honed instinct of the extreme pleasure I was nearing, which admitted no alien presence, than with my real senses – I guessed that a living creature was watching us.
Frightened, I turned my head and on the chest, behind the box of powder, I glimpsed a mouse. It stopped right by the mirror at the edge of the chest and fixed me with its beady black eyes, in which the light of the lamp placed two gleaming golden pips, which pierced me deeply. For a few seconds, it looked into my eyes with such acuity that I felt the gaze of those two glassy points boring into the depths of my brain. It seemed as though it were meditating on a harsh rebuke to me or merely a reproach. But all of a sudden the fascination was shattered and the mouse fled, vanishing behind the chest. I was certain that the doctor had come to spy on me.
The same evening, when I took the quinine, my supposition was bolstered by a perfectly illogical albeit, for me, valid reasoning: the quinine was bitter; on the other hand, in the cabin the doctor had seen the pleasure Clara suddenly offered me; in consequence, and for the establishment of a just balance, he had prescribed me the most unpleasant medicament that could exist. I could hear him nibbling the judgement in his mind: “The grrreater the pleasurrre, the morrre bitterrr the pill!”
A few months after the consultation, the doctor was found dead on the floor of his house; he had fired a bullet into his brow.
My first question on hearing the sinister news was:
“Were there mice on that floor?”
I needed that certainty.
For the doctor truly to be dead, a pack of mice would necessarily have had to swarm over the body, to bore into it and extract the mousy matter lent to the physician during his life in order to exercise their illegitimate “human” existence.
Point of Balance, Oil on Canvas, 2008
The Feather
I must have been twelve years old when I met Clara. However far back I rummage through my memories, in the depths of childhood I find them connected to sexual knowledge. She appears to me as nostalgic and pure as the adventure of night, of fear, of first friends. She is in no way distinct from other melancholies and other times of waiting, for example the tedious waiting to become an “adult”, which I could physically gauge whenever I shook hands with an older person, trying to delimit the difference of weight and size in my small hand, lost between the knobbly fingers, in the enormous palm of the one who was gripping it.
At no time in my childhood did I ignore the difference between men and women. Perhaps there was a time when for me all living beings were jumbled up in a single limpidity of movement and inertia; I have no exact recollection of this. The sexual secret was always apparent. It was a matter of a “secret” in the same way as it might have been a matter of an object: a table or a chair.
When I examine my most distant memories more carefully, however, their lack of actuality is revealed to me in my fallacious understanding of the sexual act. I used to imagine the female organs in erroneous forms and the act in itself as much more grandiose and strange than as I knew it with Clara. In all these interpretations, however – fallacious, and then increasingly just – there ineffably floated an air of mystery and bitterness, which slowly acquired consistency like a painting by an artist who has set out from amorphous sketches.
*
I see myself as I was when very little, in a nightshirt down to my heels, crying desperately on the threshold of a door, in a yard filled with sunlight, whose gate opens onto a deserted market, a market in the afternoon, warm and sad, with dogs sleeping on their bellies and people lying in the shade of the vegetable stalls.
In the air there is an acrid scent of rotting vegetables, a few large violet flies are buzzing loudly around me, imbibing the teardrops that have fallen onto my arms and making frenetic swoops in the dense and broiling light of the yard. I stand up and carefully urinate in the dust. The earth greedily sucks up the liquid and in that spot there remains a dark patch, as if the urine of an object that does not exist. I wipe my face with my nightshirt and lick away the tears at the corners of my lips, savouring their salty taste. I sit down once more on the threshold and feel very unhappy. I have been beaten.
Just now my father smacked my bare buttocks. I do not very well know why. I am thinking. I was lying in bed next to a little girl the same age as me; we were put there to sleep, while our parents went out for a walk. I did not sense them when they returned and I do not know exactly what it was I was doing to the little girl under the quilt. All I know is that in the moment when my father suddenly lifted the sheet, the little girl had begun to yield. My father turned crimson, he was enraged, and he beat me. That is all.
And so I am sitting on the threshold, I have wept and I have dried my eyes, I am drawing circles and lines in the dust with my finger, I shift my position more toward the shade, I am sitting cross-legged on a stone and I am feeling better. A girl has come to fetch water in the yard and she is turning the rusty wheel of the pump. I listen carefully to the creaking of the old iron, I watch how the water, like the haughty, swishing tail of a silver horse, gushes into the pail, I look at the girl’s large, dirty legs, I yawn because I have not slept at all and from time to time I try to catch a fly. It is the simple life that recommences after tears. Into the yard the sun forever pours its overwhelming, torrid heat. It is my first sexual adventure and my oldest memory of childhood.
Henceforward obscure instincts will burgeon, wax, distort and settle within their natural bounds. What should have been both an amplified and ever growing fascination was for me a string of renunciations and cruel reductions to banality; the evolution from childhood to adolescence meant a continuous diminution of the world and, as things started to structure themselves around me, their ineffable look disappeared, just like a gleaming surface clouding over with condensation.
