had disappeared.
O became scared. If her father had killed her mother, he could slaughter her. Perhaps that’s what her life had been about.
During this period of time, O lived and stayed alive by dreaming. One of the reveries concerned the most evil man in the world.
It was at a fancy resort that was located in the country, far from the city: O stood on one of the stony platforms or giant records that jutted out of a huge cliff. Shrubbery was growing out of parts of the rock. Each record lay directly over and under another record, except for the top and the bottom. The one on which O perched thrust farther than the others into a sky that was empty, for this record was a stage.
In the first act of this play, O learned that evil had entered the land. That the father, who was equivalent to evil, was successfully stealing or appropriating his son’s possessions. Both of them were standing behind O. Then, the father began to torture his son. He inflicted pain physically. O actually saw this older man point three different machine guns at her. Each of them was different. O understood that he wanted to scare, rather than shoot, her.
He laughed. And then disappeared.
O hated him more than it was possible to hate anyone.
Either the next day or some days later, the young woman began to search for the older man. She and his son were partners, co-mercenaries, in this venture; in fact, it was the son who taught O that to be a successful detective, one has to get rid of fear.
For some reason unknown to O, she was always frightened of people.
The father left one clue to his whereabouts. DN.
Nobody seemed to know whether DN was the initials of someone, of something, whether the letters were part of a language no human could understand. O and the son believed that DN was the name of a coffee joint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . They entered a deserted western town. The coffee joint they found in the loneliness, whose name was a street, within all the yellow, didn’t have a name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . They traveled to a ranch. The main building, which at first they didn’t notice because it wasn’t noticeable, was one-story, white peeling paint. In its right side, a cafe-in-the-wall.
A girl was feeding her dog-horse, ‘cause it was as large as a large horse, a plate of raw hamburger. She used to be married to the son; now she was living on this ranch and happy.
This is the second clue.
One didn’t need to find any more because the man for whom she had been looking walked right up to her. In all that openness, there was no one but those two. O realized that all that had happened to her had happened only because she was attracted to this man. To this father. And she hated him because he was violent.
It was at this point that O began to teach him how to change violence into pleasure.
Now O decided that she wanted to go where she had never been before:
O Speaks:
The revolution had yet to begin in China. At that time, the word revolution meant nothing to us because the same governments owned everything. There seemed nowhere left to go. All of my friends, including me, before we reached old age, were dying and, until we died, living in ways that were unbearable because that’s what living was. Unbearable.
I had no interest in politics.
I had come to China as I usually came: I had been following a guy.
I had believed we were in love.
It didn’t matter, the name of this unknown city to which I came. All the unknown cities, in China, held slums that looked exactly like each other: each one a labyrinth, a dream, in which streets wound into streets which disappeared in more streets and every street went nowhere. For every sign had disappeared.
The poor ate whatever they could put their hands on.
Right before the revolution, the Chinese government told its people that the recession was over. This lie made the poor unable to distinguish between economic viability and disability. Some of them walked around with needles sticking out of their bodies.
Many of the women were whoring for money.
W, my boyfriend, said that if I loved him, I would whore for him. I knew that W got off on women who were prostitutes. I didn’t know whether or not he had deep feelings for me and, if so, what those feelings were. I used to wonder, again and again, why I ran after men who didn’t care for me.
It was my mother, not my father, who dominated my waking life. When she was alive, my mother didn’t notice or, if she had to, hated me. She wanted me to be nothing, or something worse, because my appearance in her womb, not yet in the world, caused her husband to leave her. So my mother, who was ravishingly beautiful, charming, and a liar, had told me. While she was alive.
Absence isn’t the name of the father only.
Every whorehouse is childhood.
The one in which W placed me was named Ange.
Outside the whorehouse, men fear women who are beautiful and run away from them; a ravishing woman who’s with a man must bear a scar that isn’t physical. My mother was weak in this way; her weakness turned into my fate.
Inside the brothel, the women, however they actually look, are always beautiful to men. Because they fulfill their fantasies. In this way, what was known as the male regime, in the territory named women’s bodies, separated its reason from its fantasy.
Since I was the only white girl in this brothel, the others there, including the Madam, who had once been a male, hated me. They sneered at my characteristics, such as my politeness. What they really detested was that economic necessity hadn’t driven me into prostitution. To them, the word love had no meaning. But I didn’t become a whore because I loved W so much I’d do anything for him. Anything to convince him to love me. A love I was beginning to know I would never receive. I entered the brothel of my own free will, so that I could become nothing, because, I believed, only when I was nothing would I begin to see.
I had no idea what I was doing.
When I entered the house, Madam took away all of my possessions, even my tiny black reading glasses. It was as if she was a prison matron. She said that, because I was white, I thought that I deserved to possess commodities. Such as happiness. That I was too pale, too delicate to be able to bear living in this place.
The other girls thought that I could leave the cathouse whenever I wanted.
But I couldn’t walk away, because inside the whorehouse I was nobody. There was nobody to walk away.
I was now a child: if I ridded myself of childhood, there would be nothing left of me.
Later on, the girls would accept me as a whore. Then I would start to wish that I loved a man who loved me.
There were many prescients in the slum. The whores, in their spare hours, visited these fortune-tellers. Though I soon started accompanying my friends, I was too scared to say anything to these women, most of whom had once been in the business. I would stand in the shadows and rarely ask anything, for I didn’t
