A Breath of Life (17 page)

I’m an insistent question but I don’t hear an answer. No one’s ever answered me. I try in vain to find the answer in Angela. I keep my ears open to hear it. As if my shouted question would give me more than the echo of the question. I know that all of life is always nearly a symbol. But my heart wouldn’t understand. So shall I always miss that thing? Can you live without that thing? I hardly answer.

I feel an almost insufferable and indescribable beauty. Like a starry air, like the shapeless shape, like the not-being existing, like the splendid breathing of an animal. As long as I live I shall sometimes have the almost-not-a-sensation of what cannot be named. Between hidden and almost revealed. It’s also a shimmering desperation and the pain gets confused with beauty and mixed with an apocalyptic joy.

I’d like to live exclusively from my foolish and fertile meditations in the contemplation of death and God. I’d like to dedicate myself to kissing children. Deliver me I beg you all, I no longer want to be myself, I know that I am no longer myself. I am you. I feel the need to risk my life. Only then is it worth living.

— Angela, my love, I fumbled in the darkness of words in order to find yours. And my hand returned with a word that dazzled me: scentillating. I don’t know what it means or if what I discovered exists. Now in the early morning there’s a clear and delicate silence and the small shadowy garden seems like that of a cloister. There’s a light inaudible trepidation in the trees: this trepidation can be heard with the skin of the body. Angela, as I create you I taste blood in my mouth.

ANGELA: We die.

AUTHOR: Deep down she doesn’t believe that we die.

ANGELA: When I’m really happy I suddenly think that we die.

AUTHOR: But she’s more frightened of life than of death.

ANGELA: Why do I exist? and the answer is: hunger justifies me.

Ah, that’s it, isn’t it? Well, if that’s how it is then I’ll take revenge and live my life with brutality, without pity.

AUTHOR: Why do I exist? and the answer is: hunger justifies me.

I get happy when I feel hunger, as long as there’s something to eat, of course. Just to have an immediate goal. When I feel hunger, I have a reason to live. Or I want my life to be justified by the intense desire to live. What sustains me is necessity. Necessity makes me create a future. Because desire is something primitive, serious and something that impels.

ANGELA: I taste like tears.

I’m accompanied by organ and also by a recorder. A spiral flute. And I am very tango too.

I’m out of tune, what can I do? I was born crooked.

And hungry.

I get the feeling that someone is living my life, that what happens has nothing to do with me, there’s a mechanical spring in some part of me.

What I want is simply this: the impossible. To see God. I hear the noise of the wind in the leaves and answer: yes!

There are so many movements around me that I thought of them: death awaits me.

My purest movement is that of death.

AUTHOR: Angela already learned to accept her crises of fear: when they come she immobilizes herself with her eyes closed and tries to forget herself to the point of becoming an unfeeling nothing.

I never achieve total immersion. Ah the day I can completely let myself go — that’s what I’m waiting for. Meanwhile, there’s Angela impenetrable rock of granite that she is. Or an aerial fluid I can’t manage to breathe. She’s always tasting a new fruit with pleasure and without fear of its taste. But she’s clever: she knows that the only things that are poisonous are what the birds won’t eat. The new fruit is an apple hidden and transfigured so as not to frighten and not to leave paradise. That’s how she tricks her God. In order not to die, Angela prefers not to exist. I’m creating something that can only die by being forgotten.

ANGELA: To be happy is a great responsibility. Few have the nerve. I have the nerve but with a bit of fear. A happy person is one who has accepted death. When I’m too happy, I feel a gagging anguish: I get scared.

I get scared easily. I’m afraid to be alive because whoever has life shall one day die. And the world violates me. The demanding instincts, the cruel soul, the crudeness of those who have no decency, the laws to obey, murder — it all makes me dizzy just as there are people who faint at the sight of blood: the medical student with a pale face and white lips about to dissect his first cadaver. It scares me when in a glance I see the bowels of other people’s spirit. Or when unintentionally I fall deep into myself and see the interminable abyss of eternity, abyss through which I phantasmagoric communicate with God. I fear the natural law that we call God. The fear. Suicides often kill themselves because they are afraid of death. They can’t stand the mounting tension of life and the wait for the worst to happen — and they kill themselves to be free of the threat.

We leave an Alpha for an Omega and destroy ourselves and work and play and . . . For what? We walk toward a vortex —
irremediably
.

Doing nothing might yet be the solution.

They’d confuse that with suicide but it’s mere coincidence. Does it make sense to run so much after happiness, could it be enough to be happy? Could it be that being happy is a state of tolerance?

AUTHOR: I want for my body good clothes, the finest French food, money to travel, a lover to love freely, a wife to take care of me. But all that while preserving my monkish soul. I know that it’s possible. It’s like knowing how to be alone in the middle of a crowd. It’s like distinguishing your own voice that would almost get lost in a chorus unison of many voices: feeling the song in your throat and hearing yourself. I-must-must hear myself: because I have yet to tell myself certain things that are mysterious and sacred but with the taste of blood in my mouth. Things that are difficult to be fully lived for where is the true center of the pulp of the fruit for me to bite into? To finally shoot the arrow. But if I don’t hit the target precisely I shall perish. Because of this fear I don’t dare. My question is a matter of life and death. To die because of a word? If that word is filled completely with itself and a source of dreams — then it’s worth dying for. But everything I do is out of fear of that word. It’s out of fear that I’m split by a woman, the one I invented. At the same time I need nothing — plurified by naked simplicity. Now I’ll let Angela go on talking about whatever she wants — so that meanwhile I can retire to my silence. Happy silence. I am a happy man because I was born. And because I know how to hold my tongue. To hold your tongue is to be born again.

ANGELA: I no longer know how things understand each other. Everything seems crazy. Today I took a taxi and my Christ-like mien made the driver of another taxi look back at me terrified four times. Oh human face that should be mine and is yours. I’m still alive though close to death.

AUTHOR: Note: I want to see if I won’t forget to give Angela a face.

ANGELA: Sometimes I put myself in a situation of seeing just before really seeing. I foresee the next instant and musically my breathing accompanies the rhythm of time. I who feel before feeling. Harmony is sensing the next phrase, the next sound, the next vision.

AUTHOR: Death is beyond human measure. That’s why I find it strange. I have no knowledge of its mute language. Or does it have a language possible for me to understand? It sometimes seems to me that death is not a fact it’s a sensation that must already be with me. But I still haven’t reached it.

ANGELA: After I’ve lived will I know I lived. When it’s happening living escapes me. I am a memory of myself. Only after “dying” do I see that I lived. I flee from myself. Sometimes I hurry to finish some intimate episode of life, in order to capture it in memories, and, more than having lived, to live. A living that already was. Swallowed by me and now part of my blood.

AUTHOR: I’m filled with recollections and everything that is already the past has a touch of aching melancholy.

What do I do with so many memories — but die at last.

ANGELA: My aunt Sinhá died a happy death. She laughed at the moment she died. You might say she died from laughing. She simply dribbled around death: she didn’t die at all. She just passed on to something else forever. She was lucid: like a lit chandelier, like organ music.

I feel that at this exact moment someone is dying. It disturbs me, that final breath, and in Ireland a strong redheaded boy is born. It’s as though they were notifying me. To that robust child I say good morning.

AUTHOR: When we write or paint or sing we break a law. I don’t know if it’s the law of the silence that must be kept before sacrosanct and diabolical things. I don’t know if that’s the law that is broken.

But if I speak it’s because I no longer have the strength to remain silent about what we know and what we should keep secret. But when that silent and magical thing swells too much we disrespect the law and shout. It’s not a sad cry it’s not a cry of hallelujah either. I’ve already said this in my book calling that cry “
it
.” Could it be that I already died and didn’t notice? Could it be that I already no longer exist?

I feel there’s a finger pointing at me and making me live on the edge of death. Whose finger?

ANGELA: Yes. A bloody finger points at me. I shiver. Could it be the finger of death? I who survive myself, I queen of Pharaoh. But what I really like is a soccer tournament. Will I be alive during the next world cup? I hope not, my God, death calls out to me, so attractive and lovely. Oh death why don’t you answer? I call you every day. I was made to die.

The ecstasy of cold champagne. The scientific ecstasy.

As for me, I’m just not up to the present: it’s a bit beyond me. One could say of me: “she doesn’t know how to take advantage.” God said to me: come. And I went frozen all over. The ecstasy of the apocalypse.

But I might never die. I might be eternal and you too, my love. Will I be eternal after my death? Or am I only instantaneous?

I am essentially a contradiction.

The serene abstract graphic mark.

Banality as a theme.

Oh how I aspired to a languid life.

Twisted tree: witchcraft.

I feel an absolute anguish as if my arms were opened wide to the heavens in a receiving gesture and my lips half-open the better to inhale — as if I longed for the beyond. Beyond me. I surpass my boundaries and enter the air: the air is my space. Chaos had happened before and from that chaos emerged the spectacle.

I deserve a medal for living each day and each night three hundred and sixty-five days tortured by time. Only death settles it.

My God, give me the courage to live three hundred and sixty-five days and nights, all devoid of Thy presence. Give me the courage to consider that void an abundance. Make me Thy humble lover, entwined with Thee in ecstasy. Let me speak to this trembling void and receive in reply the maternal love that nourishes and cradles. Give me courage to love Thee, without hating Thy offenses to my soul and to my body. Let my solitude not destroy me. Let my solitude keep me company. Give me the courage to face myself. Let me know how to be left with the nothing and feel nonetheless as if I were filled with everything. Receive in thy arms my sin of thinking.

I live breathing my last.

Oh get out while you can because at all times the time has come. Every moment is get-out-while-you-can.

No one rests in the dentist’s chair.

AUTHOR: What mischievous spirits are interfering with Angela’s mental telephone line? because mentioning the dentist is something trivial that only a woman could come up with. Angela is capricious.

ANGELA: It’s all rotten. I feel it in the air and in the people frightened and starving huddled in a crowd. But I believe that in the depths of rottenness there exists — green sparkling redeeming and promised-land — in the depths of the dark rottenness there shines clear and captivating the Great Emerald. The Great Pleasure. But why this desire and hunger for pleasure? Because pleasure is the height of the truthfulness of a being. It’s the only struggle against death.

As for me, I discovered Death.

But how?! to die without having understood?? But that’s terrifying! It’s unworthy of the human being not to be able to understand anything of life. Yes. But mysteriously we go through the rituals of life. I give my life in homage to whom or what. I want to dedicate it, like when you dedicate a book. God doesn’t kill anyone. It’s the person who dies.

Even if someone. Defend my goal, God. I’m imprisoned for fifteen minutes. What delicious madness to write 13 as a number and not in words. I’ll wait for you in the other world. First, though, I kiss my father and my mother. I shall be an infant rolling in space. Whose satellite? What a chill I suddenly felt when I said I was no one’s satellite.

I’m serious as hunger. I’m terrified. It’s dawning. I’m dawning. I’m the chord of a harp. Goal.

I’m serious as hunger. I’m terrified. My heart is in mourning. But it’s dawning. Our seeds sprout. I’m dawning. I’m not a judge, no sir. I’m a sweet viola. Better than Carl Orff is silence. Goal.

What separates me from the world is my future death. Death will be my greatest individual achievement: a person undresses herself of herself to die alone of herself. Death is a biblical demeanor. And it has no discursive history: it is an instant. To die once and for all. The stopping of the heart takes no time. It’s the tiniest fraction of a second.