My parents’ arrival, one day before we left the hospital, in a milky morning that already foretold the change of seasons, in those days when I could not talk or play with anyone, was the only real event. They abruptly appeared in the room, in windbreakers and arm in arm, young and dark-haired, almost as tall as the ceiling, and they fell upon me in a frightening display of love. In a few moments, I was surrounded by new toys with a strong smell of paint — a set of cardboard boxes with fairy-tale pictures, each smaller and smaller, fitting one in the next, other wooden blocks that made square pictures: turkey, pig, cow, and ones you could make castles with, and especially a white rag horse with glass eyes and a red lacquer saddle. This toy was so dear to me that even at fourteen I still had it, somewhere in the buffet, shaped like a kind of deformed worm, almost totally brown from dirt, marked all over with pen, with its eyes missing and cuts that revealed the fragile roughness of its harness. My parents did not stay long. After they promised to take me home the next day, “to a new house, bigger, you’ll see,” they left just as strange, just as altered. I realized then that their departure made no difference to me: I could have stayed in the hospital my entire life, watching the walls darken and brighten in the sun, melding into the stereoscopic field of my irises, or listening distractedly to the demented inflections of mineymoezish. And always whenever I would later abandon myself to the will of punctual, spherical worlds, the pearl-worlds that I strung, like vertebrae, upon the cord of my spinal marrow, I would stay there, metamorphosed, adapted to the texture of the air there, the flashes of the clouds there, until something from the outside world hurried my abortion through those successive abdomens, with other placental constellations, amniotic waters, dawns and gods … Once my parents were gone, I was left sitting on my bottom, on the carpet, building block towers and pyramids for the horse. A bit later, however, coming back from the potty, I found the tower I had worked so hard to balance until it was as tall as I was toppled and scattered, and the purple lacquer saddle torn from my horse’s body. Only then did I begin to cry, in despair, the way I should have cried when my parents were leaving. When the nurse came, the pious little girls were in their beds, playing dolls.
The next day, my clothes were brought back, and my pajamas, balled up, sour-smelling, stayed on the floor, like an anatomical specimen on a slide. The nurse took me by the hand, under the hostile gazes of Carla and Bambina, who did not want to say good-bye as the large blond woman asked, and we walked again, together, through the sinuous corridors and the frozen stairways, until we reached the waiting room with the plaster model of the skinned man. My parents again went into the next room, to talk to an unseen doctor, so I was alone in the olive air, listening to the sound of my footsteps on the square floor tiles. I approached, as I had the week before, the armless and legless statue, half a person with painted yellow skin, hair like a black hat and one coin-like brown nipple, and half a nightmarish monster, made of blood-red muscular fibers, knotted blue veins, and the tips of ivory bones. Through a hole in his cranial cavity, above the skeleton of his face, you could see his brain. No martyr had ever suffered so much, or been so savagely and scientifically tortured. On each detachable organ, held by nails to the next, there were small numbers written in an ancient hand, seconded by a table on the wall with knowledgeable explanations, which for me were nothing but thorny decorations. I stood still in front of the tragic sculpture, its gaze lost in its spherical eye, held up by orbital muscles like hands raising an offering. The blue, porcelain eye had a brown glass iris, where a fragment of light flashed. Leaning my head far back, since I was only waist-high to the man skinned alive, I contemplated the sinister foreshortening, the same way I had stared at the field of ink-colored flowers, until in my self-hypnosis, self-forgetting, the statue’s trepidacious extermination of being became suddenly pregnant and luminous, its contours irradiated by hesitant stripes of gold. And then, only then, I realized the man was screaming — hoarse, unending, in wild glissandi, coughing out pieces of larynx and bloody strands of tracheal mucous. He screamed like a hyena, like a stray dog being beaten to death, like someone being boiled in oil, like a woman giving birth to a bat. His body was gripped by unbelievable convulsions. Bloody stumps reached toward the ceiling, stained by squirting arteries. I started to howl in terror along with him. We howled together, we writhed together, and in my little brain with soft bones the scream turned a blinding yellow, apocalyptic, pulsating, unbearable. I screamed with my hands on my ears and my entire body, through the narrow tunnel of my throat and my buccal cavities, became a howl, it dressed my howling body in a howling anatomy, so that I didn’t howl, but the howl howled me, I was the one that ran through the vocal cords of my howl, wounded by my glottis and epiglottis, flowing down my tongue, narrowing myself to pass through my howling lips.
This is how my parents found me, balled up on the square tiles, at the feet of a plaster model, screaming as hard as I could. I kept screaming, my nose running and tears wetting my face and neck, until we left the hospital door, through the yellow leaves and cobwebs. We waited a long time for the tram in a lonely station. I kept sighing, and my cheeks did not dry until I saw the red tram coming, rocking on its rails, like a tired beetle.
21
MAYBE, in the heart of this book, there is nothing other than howling, yellow, blinding, apocalyptic howling … Last night, with all of my strength sucked dry, I fell asleep between my flaccid sheets and lay like a corpse frozen on a field, in an utter lack of existence that made death seem like a pointless agitation, until I reacquired, for the first time in three or four years, my state of nocturnal “revelation” (in fact, I’ve never found the right name for it, and the one I use here seems to serve only inasmuch as it is weak and unmarked, because, in addition, in the limitless insanity of my “essential” dream — and here, more than ever, the word “my” should be in quotation marks — it doesn’t “reveal” anything to me, except, perhaps, revelation itself: it reveals to me the fact that in this opaque, dense world, murderous as a pillow that someone holds over your face, kneeling mercilessly on your chest to stop your writhing, revelation is possible. Like a porous flaw in the hard ivory that surrounds your interior cistern of living light, a pore gnawed out by a swarm of termites, a tunnel can suddenly open for your vision, illuminated from within by an undying fire, while you rotate unquiet, in dreams and visions, around and around the Enigma. But what can you understand if, sliding through the tunnel at a terrible speed, you feel your eyes burnt to a crisp and your ears torn by flames, your tongue liquefied and bubbling, your skin scorched like the rinds of trees, your nasal mucous digested by incineration? In the spooling sheets of ash, in the carbonic rose, what of you remains after you meet the living you, what can have a revelation, what can follow the melting? It is the center of the rose of our death, because there in the center of our carbonized body, among the petals of char that were our liver and brain and lungs, held together, like an abominable blossom, there among the scrubbed granules of our molars, between the matchsticks of our bones burnt white, there is still something, and that something is everything. When the tunnel turns straight and the flames from the oven’s mouth lick it, melting the glassy walls, when you speed fantastically fast directly toward the blindness beyond blindness, toward the deafness that makes deafness seem like the wailing of a slaughterhouse, when the protuberances of fire that burn fire like kindling lap against the black rose, its petals (kidneys and vertebrae, theorems and desires, theories and gods) lift off and ignite again, tumbling back down, and in the middle of the middle of the middle of the cup of the rose, an indestructible quartz sphere appears, that can penetrate the architecture of the tongues of flame, in the hierarchies of wasteland. In the center of the cistern of fire, reflecting the fire, it becomes itself the generator of living power, and so it was at the beginning, since you can never experience an enigma if you weren’t the one who made it.