Winter of artifice; three novelettes (16 page)

They were talking about Mischa. He told her that she was an obsession in Mischa's life. That he saw her as the mother, the sister, the most unattainable of women, and for this he wanted to conquer her, to free his manhood. Then she confessed how at first she had loved Alischa, but when she had felt his smallness, his way of hiding within women, she had felt protection but no desire. She had wanted to give him an illusion but feared not to be able to sustain it to the very end. She begged the Voice not to tell him the truth, which would wound him, but to tell Alischa she was a little mad. This would explain the change in her, put all the blame on herself, and Mischa might enjoy discovering there were other abnormal people in the world. The Voice agreed with her. He asked her if she did not mind other people thinking she was not normal. She hesitated and then:

"No, I don't mind. I like them to think me puzzling, mystifying and unpredictable. I feel that I keep my real self a mys-ter\\"

The \^oicc laughed a little at this.

"I see you don't need any help at all, you are quite content, quite strong, quite able to manage your own life."

At these words Lilith began to tremble, and then she felt her attitude crumble, the facade crumbling all around her. 141

She became intensely aware of her weakness, her need of another. She said nothing but the Voice understood and continued: "You have acted beautifully towards Mischa. As few women will act. In general women consider men as enemies, and they are glad when they can humiliate or demolish them."

"I could not hurt Mischa. Whenever I see him I remember the story he told me about his first sensual curiosity. His mother had discovered him weighing his sex in his hand, reflectively, had beaten him with a whip and left him locked up in the room. He wept hysterically, then quieted down and dipping a finger in the tears, he had written on the wall: evil boy. He waited for the words to vanish, but they seemed to remain like stains on the wall, and he grew hysterically afraid the words would never dry and that the whole city would know about his doings."

Lilith liked the way the Voice's questions crackled at her from all directions. He was behind her and she was not ashamed to speak of anything. At the same time she felt that she could not deceive him even by a shade of falsity, for he was so attentive to every hesitation, every inflection of the voice, every gesture she made, and especially the silences. Every silence put him on a new scent. He was really the hunter of secret thoughts. They would reach a blank wall. She would repeat: "I don't know. I don't remember. I don't think so." But the truth was apparent from what she felt at his words. Whenever something had hurt her, and he touched upon it, she felt a churning of feelings, a warning: Here is the place. He uncovered her wars against herself: "I see myself always too small or too large. I awake one day feeling small, and another day bursting with a power which makes me believe I can rule the whole world."

When he talked it was hke a stirring of quicksands. She 112

felt the whole sandy bottom of her life, a complete insecurity, rootlessness. He said perhaps she was a woman who was not the enemy of man, but she remembered da\'s of great hatred for man. lie talked about the unyieldingness and the fear. Fear of being hurt, he said. Why? She did not know. How could man hurt her? I le had hurt her already.

"iMy first feeling was that my father was not tied to anything. He was not tied to my mother, he was not tied to us, he was not tied to the women he made love to. He was tied to nothing. He was always leaving, forgetting, throwing out, betraying."

When she made this very simple statement Lilith felt the most intense anguish. She turned her head to look at the Voice and said: "I can't go on."

"You must go on."

"The first thing I saw was a father escaping from the mother. Running away from us, from the house. From everything. I saw my mother left maimed, like someone who had lost an arm. I saw our house sold and disrupted. It was like a deluge. Everything was carried away. The strange, mysterious atmosphere we lived in as children, our games which were like an enchantment from which we never freed ourselves: nothing was ever the same. I saw the furniture out in the garden being sold at auction. I saw my father leaving and sending postcards from all over the world. The world was immense, it seemed to me, and he was in all of it except the corner where he left us. He not only took himself away, but our faith in the marvelous too. The world of our childhood closed with his departure."

"All these departures, these upheavals, gave you a hatred of change. You, in your anger and pain, stood in the center and refused to move, decided to make a fixed core within you. 143

You accepted outer change, but fought against it by creating an inner static groove. You would not move. Everything else around you could move, change, but you, because of your mistrust of pain and loss, refused to move. You would be the island, the fixed center. For fear of a second loss, a second abandon, a second wound. That is why you never again gave yourself, that is why you are cold. You are afraid of giving yourself wholly."

Lilith felt a deep anguish as he talked. She could not tell if the Voice was right or wrong, but she could feel with his words the invasion of a most painful secret. Exactly as if this set, tense, granite core of herself were being touched and found not to be granite. Found to have nerves, sensibilities and memories. She remembered at this moment that when she heard that stones had a heartbeat, a kind of faint pulse which had never before been registered, she had cried out angrily: "how terrible, everything in the world feels. Exactly what I feared. That is why I am always so tender with everything. To think that even a stone can feel!"

And now the Voice was entering into this secret pain, exposing the vulnerability and the fear in her, and the anguish was immense.

Lilith said: "Now I hate you. You took away the little protection I had, the little cover I kept over things. I feel humiliated to have exposed myself. I who so rarely confess!"

"And why don't you confess?"

"It is always I who receive the confidences. People confess their doubts and fears to me. I am afraid of showing my weakness. Why? I think I will be less loved."

"Do you love those who expose their weakness?"

"Yes, even more. I feel them very near to me. I feel human and I love them."

"Then don't you think they might feel the same way towards you?"

"I feel I have been given another role, a non-human one. I don't know why."

"Because the father failed you. .. .You cannot depend on others. You prefer to be depended on."

Lilith went out in the street. She felt the day much softer on her skin. The snow was melting. It seemed to her that she let the day get nearer to her, permitted it to touch her. That before she had looked at the day like a stranger. Now she felt the day all over her body, the sensual touch of it. She was now like Djuna who felt everything with her skin, her finger tips, her hair, the souls of her feet. Djuna was like a plant. Every time Lilith saw Djuna she felt this strange, continuous, vibrating life of plants and water. There was a nobility, a constant motion and reverberation.

Lilith had never imagined this until today. She was breathing with the day, moving with the wind, in accord with it, with the sky, undulating like water, flowing and stirring to the life about her, opening like the night. What had happened? Only the \^oice saving to her: Don't you love those who confess to you? Don't you love their blindness, their blunders, their weakness? When they talk to you about their crimes, don't you dissolve with a human passion, with a desire to carry them, share everything that happens to them? Yes, yes, cried Lilith. Then you ... Why do vou ... But then if I, Lihth, if I leaned, the others would find nothing there to rest on. If I became human, then where will the others go? They would go to the Voice, more of them. If I show anything but this strength, what will happen to them? He asks me what will happen to me; I don't think I care much what happens to me. I have a feeling that I am responsible for them. How restless

he got, the Voice, when I asked him if he thought certain people had a destiny which forbade them to be human. I must have touched something which affected him. I will make him talk. I will question him.

But the Voice did not answer her questions. The Voice pried and prodded into her marriage.

The man Lilith had married was very simple. He had not found the way to woo her, to break down her resistance. Every night it had been the same flight, the same locked door against him, a hatred of his desire. She showed all her claws, her wild hair, her hatred of sex. Finally, one day they discussed it coolly. She asked him: "What is it like? Tell me." He did not know what to say, so he made a drawing. The drawing revolted her and frightened her all the more. She wouldn't even let him kiss her after the drawing. Finally he persuaded her to have it done by a doctor. She preferred the idea of a knife. It was a knife which first cut into her being.

"I tried to feel as a woman afterwards. It was a terrible thing, it was as if the knife had made me close forever rather than open, as if it had made me cold forever. There were times when I felt strong excitement in me, warmth, desire. I yielded without feeling to adventures. They all remained strangers to me. I never wanted to see them again. Do you think they killed the feeling in me that time? I can't bear this any more. I have a constant feeling that I'm hving on the edge of something about to happen, and that I can never reach. My nerves are set for a climax of some kind. I feel tense and expectant. It is so agonizing that I begin to wish for a catastrophe which would relieve the expectancy. I wish for all the calamities, all the tragedies to happen at once. I want scenes, quarrels, tears, I want to be devoured, I want to strike at people. I feel restless. I can't stay very long anywhere. I can't sit and I can't sleep. 146

I always have this feehng that I must seek a rcHef from this waiting, a shattering moment before I can rest, sleep. As if death were waiting, death were pursuing me, watching me. The whole world arouses me, I feel love for people in the streets, music stirs me at all times like a caress; I desire violently, and I wait. I feel the storm coming, I feel the anguish, but everything continues the same, sluggish, without break, without lightning. Something in me wants to break, to explode. Instead, I have to take pleasure in breaking the lives of others. I am constantly seducing others, enchanting them, capturing them, while wishing they could do it to me. I want so much to be captured. Everyone obeys me, but they don't find the key to me. I like to feel their hearts beating faster, I like to see their eyes waver, their lips tremble, to feel the emotion in them. It is like food. I am fa.scinated by their feelings. I am like a huntress who does not want to kill, but I want to feel the wound. What do I expect? To be caught in the desire of the other and bathe in it. To burn. But I am always disappointed. No one can take possession of me. It is as if they were all blind, circling around me. I warm myself and then I become aware that the current is not passing through me. It is as if I were an idol of some kind. I always dream of this: I see myself standing very rigid, and I am covered with jewelry and luxuriant robes. I wear a crown. Do you think I will ever turn into a woman? I want to be shattered into bits. Yet at the same time I know I do everything to create my own inaccessibility. I wear strange clothes which estrange people. And then I hate them for failing to reach me. I know I create the legend. It is hard to explain, but I do have the feeling that I come from very far. While I sleep I know that many things have happened. I do not remember them all but I don't wake near everything. That is why sometimes when I come into a 147

room I do not look at the people as if they were of my own race. It is true I feel they look at me and see this distant personage. I talk to them and I choose the most remote subject, the most remote from daily life. I feel compelled to do this, while at the same time I want warmth and simplicity. I feel alone. Sometimes they are taken with a furious madness to do violence to me, to clutch at me. But it's like a desire for a tabooed object, for a secret temple, for some forbidden person. For what is untouchable. And I, the woman inside of all this, I feel this. I feel I have created this personage and that I sit outside of her, lamenting because they are worshipping a sort of image, and they don't reach with simple, warm hands and touch me. It's as if I were outside this very costume, desiring and calling for simplicity, and at the same time a kind of fear compels me to continue acting. You are the only one I feel near to, you and Djuna, the only ones who don't make love to my shadow."

"But it is your own making. We are simply the ones who can't be mystified and entangled in your appearance. We are simply the ones who did not get lost in the labyrinth you create. You hide yourself and then you weep because people get lost in all this external form of your life. It's only locking doors against those who wish to come near, the same door that you locked against your husband."

Such simple words he said, yet Lilith left him feeling a great warmth towards him, something that resembled love. She was falling in love with the Voice. She felt that he was the subtle detective who made all these discoveries in her, who made her state the very nature of what hurt her. He liked the game of tracking down her most difficult thoughts. It was only after many detours that she could make these long revelations. It was as if he possessed her, somehow, in a way she 148

could not explain to herself. There was a silent, subtle force in him. It was not in the words he said. It was something he exhaled. He confronted one with one's own self, naked, one's true self as it was at the beginning. He destroyed the deformations, one by one, the acquired disguises of the personality. It was like a return to the original self, a return to the beginning where everything was pure.

He took her back, with his questions and his probings, back to the beginning. She told him all she could remember about her father, ending with: "the need of a father is over."