Read With My Dog Eyes: A Novel Online
Authors: Hilda Hilst
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Literary, #United States, #Hispanic, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers, #Psychological Thrillers, #Contemporary Fiction, #Literary Fiction, #Psychological, #Hispanic American
With My Dog Eyes: A Novel (7 page)
Blind I will walk over hot coals
Mangled and demented for all
But a trilling troubadour
Of the black paradise of your face
Or if you like, fold me.
Your hand on the back of my head
Will curve my body down to the waist
In the barrels of the question. I must know the pit
Of never understanding. As they have been until now
Over me, these sandy winds of your breath
Or quiet me. My heart joined to the moss of the stone
Exempted from this search.
I do a few somersaults. Mirror and boots. I’m a castaway from myself and a gardener. I’m in the depths but I plant as though I were outside. I’m an executioner in a classroom. If they ask me I don’t respond. This is who I am. Somersault, cuddle, fish, silken tail, water, grindstone clouds in this aquarium. The eyes eye me. The faces lean their noses into my space. Mutely I roam through the room. There is a circle of glass between us. There are a bunch of people in the entryway: is that the professor? Begonia. I revisit the window in its yellows. We are questions in an extensive and inconclusive ball of twine.
I lie down on the thread, the twine nestles me, it goes concave, gets longer, makes a hammock, I sleep hearing groans and complaints. The ones who can see me are very annoyed. A man crosses the room, sits down, farts on my black chair. I ask: did you say your name, sir? There are laughs from the desks in the back. Someone gives me a jasmine. I am mutely bored. The questions grow and form cubes in the air. They collide. I stretch out on the smoothness of the mats. A cube wounds my worn-out elbow. Another bangs
against my forehead, testing my bone brown with shackles. Women invade the room. They stomp on me with their high heels. Sado-slippery I’m sweating and laughing. Grotesquely I’m dispersing. There’s blood spattering the walls of the circle. An avalanche of cubes blankets my tissues of flesh. I’m empty of anything good. Full of the absurd.
Lift me, Shining One
To the opulence of your shoulder.
With my dog-eyes I stop before the sea. Tremulous and sick. Bent, thin, I smell fish in the driftwood. Fishbone. Tail. I gaze at the sea but don’t know its name. I remain standing there, askance, and what I feel is also nameless. I feel my dog body. I don’t know the world, nor the sea in front of me. I lie down because my dog body orders it. There’s a bark in my throat, a gentle howl. I try to expel it but man-dog I know that I’m dying and I will never be heard. Now I’m a spirit. I’m free and fly over my miserable being, my abandonment, the nothing that contains me and that made me on Earth. I am rising, wet like fog.
The snares: As if a dead man
Believed the sunflower of life
To grow upon his chest.
Amós Kéres, 48 years old, mathematician, was nowhere to be seen. In the arbor, the she-dog looked to the sky, sniffing. His mother found a phrase on paper: God? a Surface of Ice Anchored to Laughter. And below it:
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Ernest Becker (1927–1974) was a Jewish American cultural anthropologist and author of
Denial of Death
(1973), one of Hilst’s favorite books. She dedicated several of her books to him. José Antônio de Almeida Prado (1943–2010) was a composer and pianist. Mário Schenberg (1914–1990) was a theoretical physicist. Newton Bernardes (1931–2007) was a physicist. Ubiratàn d’Ambrosio (b. 1932) is a mathematician.
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This translation of Copernicus appears in Arthur Koestler’s
The Sleepwalkers
, a book Hilst had in her library in Portuguese translation. Koestler is probably responsible for the translation from German to English, which is used here; in
The Sleepwalkers
, he was citing the book
Entstehung und Ausbreitung der Copernicanischen Lehre
(Erlangen, 1943).
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Georges Bataille,
Inner Experience
, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 13.
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Amós’s reply is in fact the next sentence of the work cited by the dean, Russell’s
Mysticism and Logic
.
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Guaraná is a popular Brazilian soft drink.
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The name Osmo is a reference to a character from another of Hilst’s fictions. His name, like many others in her work, mimics the unfamiliarity of certain Hebrew biblical names.
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This is another reference to Bertrand Russell. Hilst read Russell in Spanish translation; his original English terms are used here.
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From the words “Is this, my friend, this silly thing” to “Mathematician, right?,” this text is in English in the original.
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From the words “The little boy” to “How dog, daddy,” this text is in English in the original.
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“… rodents dragged by the wind”: The Portuguese word for a cavy, a species of large rodent native to South America, is used in the original.
