I asked as if there were no such thing. I felt safe knowing only the details of daily life, johns and defecations, all that was a dream.
As if dreams couldn’t be real.
Fortune-tellers wandered around the streets outside Ange.
The one fortune, mine, which I remember, was based on the card of the Hanged Man:
The woman who was reading the cards still took tricks.
“Does that mean that I’m going to suicide?” I asked.
“Oh, no, O. This card says that you’re a dead person who’s alive. You’re a zombie.”
But I knew better. I knew that the Hanged Man, or Gérard de Nerval, was my father and every man I fucked was him.
My father was the owner of Death, of the cathouse. Sitting in his realm of absence, he surveyed all that wasn’t.
The cards showed me clearly that I hated him. When a message travels from the invisible to the visible world, that messenger is emotion. My anger, a messenger, would lead to revolution. Revolutions are dangerous to everyone.
But the cards said worse. They told us, the whores, that the revolution, which was just about to happen, had to fail, due to its own nature or origin. As soon as it failed, as soon as sovereignty, be it reigning or revolutionary, disappeared, as soon as sovereignty ate its own head as if it were a snake, when the streets turned to poverty and decay, but a different poverty and decay, all my dreams, which were me, would be shattered.
“And then,” the fortune-teller said, “you’ll find yourself on a pirate ship.”
The cards that I remember told me that my future is freedom.
“But what’ll I do when there’s no one in the world who loves me? When all existence is only freedom?”
The cards proceeded to show images of stress, illness, disease . . .
1 had been in the cathouse for a month. W hadn’t once visited me, for he had never cared about me.
I was a whore because I was alone.
The fortune-teller had told me that I would be free after I journeyed into the land of the dead.
I was trying to get rid of loneliness and nothing would ever rid me of loneliness until I got rid of myself.
Artaud Speaks:
O said, “I want to go where I’ve never been before.”
I was living in a room that was in the slum. I was still sane.
I was just a boy. All I saw was the poverty of those slums. In order to counteract the poverty that was without and within me, I ran to poetry. Especially to the poetry of Gérard de Nerval, who wanted to stop his own suffering, to transform himself, but instead hanged himself from a rusty picture nail.
I had no life. I only loved those poets who were criminals. I began to write letters to people I didn’t know, to those poets, not in order to communicate with them. To do something else.
Dear Georges, I wrote.
I have just read, in Fontane magazine, two articles by you on Gérard de Nerval which made a strange impression on me.
I am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed. For this reason I am kin to Gérard de Nerval who hanged himself in a street alley during the hours of a night.
Suicide is only a protest against control.
Artaud
The alleyways were lying all around me. They ran every which way, so haphazardly that they stopped. There was the brothel.
I would watch man after man walk through its doors. Men went to this brothel, not in order to have the sexual intercourse they could have on the outside, but to enact elaborate and tortuous fantasies which, one day, I’ll be able to describe to you.
I’ll be able when there’s human pleasure in this world.
Day after day I would look through one of my windows into one of theirs. There I first saw O, who was naked. My eye would follow her, as much as it could, trying to clear away for her everything that was before and behind her.
I would die for her. Whenever a man hangs himself, his cock becomes so immense that for the first time he knows that he has a cock.
One day O came out of the brothel. I saw her stand on the edge of its doorway and look away. Obviously she was terrified. Finally, one of her feet peeped over the door-frame’s bottom. I had no idea what was mirrored in those eyes. Three times her feet darted back and forth across that doorstep.
As soon as she was fully outside, she began to turn in the same ways the winds do through the sky. Perhaps she was meeting the outside, the sky, for the first time. Perhaps, in the staleness of the brothel, O had been a she and now she was another she who wasn’t distinct from air. I watched this girl begin to breathe. I watched her encounter poverty for the first time, the streets that my body was daily touching. The streets whose inhabitants ate whatever they could and, when they no longer could eat, died.
These streets reminded O of her childhood. For when she was a child she had always been alone. Even though she’d a half-sister, who was now married to a European armaments millionaire. Every summer O’s mother, so she would never have to see her, sent O to a posh summer camp. A camp of girls.
There the girls passed through the latest dances in each other’s arms in the hour before they were ordered in to dinner while O watched them. She knew that she couldn’t dance. For the first time in her life, in the whorehouse, O was safe because, here, there were no humans.
In the whorehouse she had become naked.
Now that O felt safe, she had the strength to return to her childhood. To poverty. I watched O walk down street after street, searching for who she would be. I knew that when she had found what she had to find she would belong to me.
O Speaks:
The first time W and I slept together I knew that he didn’t love me. But I didn’t know why. The nausea and confusion that resulted left me shreds of belief to which I could cling: I clung to belief that in the future W might start to love me.
Like a child who’s not able to believe that her mother doesn’t care about her.
I remained in that brothel. One day W came back to tell me that he wanted me to meet the woman he adored even more than his own life. To meet her, he was going to take me out of the brothel for the day.
They had been together many years before he met me. He said. That she had left him. It had been his fault: he wasn’t good to her. She returned to him in China, and now he wanted to be as good to her as it was possible for a human to be.
Though she had come back to him, she still wasn’t sure whether she wanted to be with him, and this made him love her more.
I didn’t know who I was to W, why he was telling me about the woman he worshiped.
I could
