4
Reiko says:
I did not invent the art; the art invented itself through me. In due course we became aware that certain wounds, as they healed, imprinted on the flesh sinuosities that resembled writing. Because I had a finer hand, Misaka wanted me to tattoo characters on our skin with a knife blade, but I said that would be too easy, too obvious, and I didn’t want their symbols on her skin or mine. I said that, in any case, what made these marks interesting was not the script, nor even the movement it sometimes suggested, but the thickness, the texture. I knew our path was not to draw, whether it be with a razor, on the skin itself, but to shape the flesh. I began by experimenting on myself, finding a way to open up the tissues and have them hold in the desired position, preventing the wounds from closing over and the skin from drying out, blending in alcohol, tincture of iodine, and wood varnish. Soon the forms became too complex for me to produce them on my own body, and I began to carve into Misaka’s flesh. The art gradually became a blend of engraving, sculpture, and fabric design. I dug furrows and cut strips of skin with dressmaking shears, gouges, and burrs; I kneaded the oozing flesh with my hands and shored it up with cross-stitching and satin stitching; I inserted rivets, splints, and pins between the strips when my configurations required open skin and erect parings.
The problem was that I was both more skilled than Misaka, and had greater endurance. The art was very hard on her. She sweated, vomited, and fainted. We had to experiment with drugs, but often the pain became too severe to be dulled even by powerful opiates.
Curiously, it was the men who found the solution when they sent us one of their spouses to renew the contact between us. The renegades brought us Azumi in the middle of the afternoon, on a Thursday. She had made herself lovely in her summer dress, and had arrived with gifts. We talked to her about art. We showed her the results, on Misaka’s body. We saw the curiosity that lent a gleam to her large black pupils. Misaka bared her shoulder, we had her drink a soothing infusion, and I placed myself beside her with my instruments. She was breathing deeply. I sought Misaka’s eyes and saw that she’d already understood. We’d been missing one ingredient. You needed to be three to practise the art. Misaka went down on all fours and only a few seconds after I’d set to work, thrust her face between the legs of Azumi, already dazed by the drug and the pain. Azumi didn’t protest, she even unfastened her dress a bit more and in a sudden spasm, offered her cleft to Misaka’s mouth.
I bested her in suffering, but with her tongue she was superior to me.
We let Azumi leave for home later, dazed, dishevelled, and covered in her own blood. Misaka well knew that we’d gone too far. Immediately afterwards, she said to the renegades:
“Get ready. The villagers will be on their way.”
But there was no attack that night. Instead, Azumi returned the next day with a young wife even prettier than herself, who pointed with her finger to the motif, much resembling a gillyflower, which I’d carved into her friend’s soft shoulder, and said:
“I want one, too.”
I called forth a wood spider, with her right breast as the abdomen, and drew its fine sparassid legs from her bosom’s thin flesh. Meanwhile Misaka thrust her face between her legs, and Azumi, without anyone having to say anything, went down on her knees behind Misaka and dipped two fingers, soon dripping wet, into her cleft.
In no time at all, women were arriving from the village and the entire peninsula, to be sculpted. This beauty Misaka and I had invented was now walking the streets, given prominence by the spouses’ strategically perforated dresses, and the dismayed ugliness of the husbands.
Oh, you have every right to turn the page and declare that it’s all a bad dream in which Misaka and I drift about like shadows behind curtains. But I have the right to defy you, to tell you to lift the bedclothes in the dawn hours, to accustom your eyes to the half-light without waking your loved one, and to swear to me that you know the meaning of every tattoo on her body, and the origin of every burn.
The men say:
We made an enormous mistake by sending Mabuto’s wife to the Inoué domain, and the horror that ensued was immeasurable. The repugnant mutilations that Misaka and Reiko inflicted on flesh became a fashion, an uncontainable compulsion, an enchantment, and there was no way to break the spell, not in reasoning with the wives, or in crying after them, or in trying to shake them out of their torpor, or by beating them. We were at least able to make them talk, but their accounts were all the more shocking in that we knew each one was keeping many details to herself.
They said that Misaka and Reiko were lovers. That they embraced by touching their foreheads together, merging their lidless gazes, and licking, each in turn, the other’s gums and teeth. They said that Misaka ate glass. That she crushed electric light bulbs, which she had brought from the mainland, in her hands, and swallowed them one by one, like candies, the splinters stained with blood. She mixed them with flower petals and shari rice. Later, there flowed from between her legs a rose-coloured liquid she offered to the women like a serving for a meal, one they said was as delicate as the raw flesh of a fish. They also said that withered and solitary women come from nowhere asked for their bodies to be entirely sculpted, and that the renegades had buried their martyred remains behind the property, below the hills.
We would have wanted to treat these stories as simple tales, and we would doubtless have succeeded in doing so, if these mutilated wives, sometimes amputated and blinded, had not strolled through the village streets in greater and greater numbers to display their wounds like brand new silk kimonos.
Misaka says:
According to the renegades, the men complained that from beyond the palisade there reached their ears cries of desolation and death. Say what they liked, the men indeed heard guttural sounds of an alien nature, rollicking belly to belly with the cries of pain that issued from the villa. Something was cavorting in company with the pain, mating with it inside the shared cries, something that, being so intimate with pain, showed itself to be even more shocking. The men knew perfectly well what it was, but they had no name for it, and even if they’d had one, they would under no circumstances have pronounced it.
They did have one, however, to designate the demons of Christian lands, and they set themselves to covering the Inoué property’s walls with red paint:
悪魔
When the renegades told me about it and asked me what they should do, I told them to leave the ideograms where they were on the palisade, and to call me from now on by my chosen name, Akuma.
5
Once, once only, Misaka says:
Long before this day, the last day, I took Reiko in my arms, as in the beginning, when she was only a child. I embraced her, and afterwards I said:
“My love, the flesh that grows over what is cut is new flesh. Perhaps for this reason, precisely, something awaits us at the end of art that is not death. Perhaps our work is a work of life, perhaps when our bodies will be nothing but open wounds we will be reborn anew, like two twin sisters. Perhaps in the end a million scars will leave our skin as smooth as that of a newborn.”
Reiko looked at me with sadness, and replied:
“You’re wrong, Misaka. You’re as wrong as you can be. None of us is born without scars. We are created by the meeting of flesh and flesh, we are the fruit of one only, but we remain coiled like a voracious tumour in her belly, until we are torn from her breast and the thread is cut that binds us to her. There will be no return to the beginning, beautiful sensei. We are brought into this world by the steel of a blade, Misaka, and you and I are born each day a bit more.”