“The matron approached the nubile girl, took her hand with an unexpected delicacy and grace, and led her toward the mechanism on the edge of emptiness. She spread her across the narrow chassis and secured her wrists and ankles in cuffs. Crucified on an aluminum St. Andrew’s cross, Cecilia revealed her sex to our eyes like a black flower with crinkled petals, a feline sex, a sphinx’s vulva, unsuited for ordinary copulation. Slowly, with a sharp gesture of Melanie’s fingers, the hydraulic cylinders began to move, and the metal frame rose to vertical. Disturbingly beautiful, Cecilia smiled with the bright smile of African women, but also with something of a girl’s perversion, pleased to show everyone her secret flower. She leaned her head on one shoulder, and her eyes covered with a thin fog. Curled in its aquarium, the fetus suddenly opened its yellow eyes, and its barely sketched mouth began to speak unheard words, as it gaped like an exotic fish. The Albino, whose uniform had evaporated like gas into the air, slowly approached the operating table. His sex was erect and semitransparent. His testicles of filigreed ivory were visible through his scrotum like soft glass. We all imagined we were about to witness the ritual rape of a virgin by the horrifying cleric. We did not imagine, however, the unimaginable. And I cannot describe the indescribable. For hour after hour, the young woman’s body of flesh, blood, and nerves experienced the entire scope of human suffering and beyond. Happy were those pagan warriors fallen into the hands of their enemies, held in oubliettes for dozens of years and tortured daily under the senior’s eyes. Happy those who were burned at the stake, flayed alive, or devoured by cancer. But the girl’s screams somehow seemed to be screams of unbearable pleasure, and on her face her clenched lips and eyes revealed a devastating ecstasy. The only deed that words can describe, although itself appalling, seemed, in comparison with what had come before, to be a gesture of tenderness: with an expert flash of the blade, The Albino sliced open Cecilia’s stomach, without spilling a drop of blood, and removed her uterus, as clean as an anatomical specimen, watched over by the two ovaries like two spread wings at the ends of their tubes, between the fringes of soft skin, like two rhinestone mititei. Only then, as though the delicate organ held all her vitality, did her dark body die, soft and ashen, and rot beneath our eyes, until the bones scattered, yellow, over the floor. Only the radius of her left hand remained held in the metal cuff. Then those bones changed to dust, and the dust was absorbed into the glassy floor.
“Monsieur Monsú held the butterfly uterus in the open palm of his right hand. Its skin fibers gently pulsed. In the end, it took flight, not through the mechanical beating of lepidoptera, but by undulations within the gelatinous medium, the way transparent beings on the bottom of the ocean proceed dreamlike through the abyss. Fluttering over the emptiness, the little life form turned toward the diamond cell in the center of lights. It touched it after eons of hypnotic travel. It curled up there, in the flashing box, took root in its crystal earth and unrolled a peritoneum crown. Its center continuously developed an ovum, filigreed, pearly, with constantly changing designs and mirific protuberances extended into the ionosphere. In the end, the uterus itself, with its tubes and contractions, was only an almost-unobserved detail of the great bead, of the egg with a quartz shell.
“The egg appeared to be tattooed with a labyrinth of dully colored lines, which crossed each other and shifted, so that, at the beginning, nothing could be deciphered, aside from some illusory outlines, more guesses than anything, like looking in the filigreed dregs of coffee. As its volume increased and its surface widened, the strangest, most heteroclite designs began to spout from the tissue of lines. There was the face of a young man, with features in charcoal, his hair black vines curling along his ascetic cheeks. His severe, visionary eyes were slightly asymmetrical, the right inspired by a spark of spirit, while the left, tragic and matte like a covered mirror, had violet circles beneath. Below the fibrous threads of his moustache, his mouth could have been a woman’s, if its sensuality were not negated, dissolved, denatured, and reconverted by bitter folds at the corners. Every feature of this portrait was, if you looked closer, formed by other drawings, on a smaller scale, and those by others, all brilliantly clear, just when your eye touched them, so that you could dive endlessly into the spectacle of the world, deepening the visions within a single hair of an eyebrow, and you could explore skies with other stars, heavens, and gods within a pixel in the immensity of the cheek. It was All, and all ran in the heart of all, and the real hand and the possible drew each other, exchanging densities and destinies a billion times a second. It was the Mandylion, the Vera Icon, the image of the human face, acheiropoieta, the one we search for always, which we see in all the compositions of the world, because the world itself — for us, and gods, and Divinity — has a human face. From this, sunk in tragedy and the stench of the sulfur from Gomorrah, cultivating tens of thousands of horrible diseases in the furrows of our body, never being sure of tomorrow and writhing to breathe another moment, we yet smile, just as a two-month-old child will smile even at two eyes drawn on a white piece of paper …
“Fra Armando’s brain, slithering with its spinal tail, shooting beams like a spacecraft, migrated over the billion heads of the crowd toward the great sphere that encompassed almost all the space in the middle of the disk where we stood. The egg rotated heavily around its vertical axis, constantly displaying other canals, dry seas, and continents, throwing off other garlands of fire and reabsorbing them in its paunch of albumen and yolk. The brain approached the sun like a lonely navigator, seeming to slide along a subliminal pleat, on a guide tube hidden in another dimension. There was a whisper, unheard but possible to feel with the entire body, denser than the organ that perceived it — that whisper from the middle of the night, to which you can only respond, suddenly awake and afraid, ‘Here I am, Lord.’ The solitary sperm slid along the beacon, along the whisper of billions of decibels. The golden male fluttered along the guide tube of the shock wave of billions of gigatones. The entire hall, and everyone inside, quaked in trepidation. The ovum whispered, it whispered a name. Quiet, monotonous, unhurried, powerful as a seraph, the face in the egg whispered a whisper, whispered a name. Its own name. ‘Here I am, Lord,’ responded the brain and the sperm, and the response — happy in terror, frightened in ecstasy — was not a sound, but the advance itself.
“The tadpole, with its curved brow like a glass shell, finally stopped only a hand width from the enormous filigreed stomach. The hard membranes mirrored each other. Colored whirls appeared in the front-most points and encompassed, in ever larger circles, the trembling spheres. A dialogue was improvised, the channels and frequencies aligned, passwords exchanged, thousands of keys went into thousands of locks of air and void. They turned, raised pinions and cams, and released chemical barriers. And suddenly not the skin, but the space itself between them opened like a gate, suddenly there was no space between the membranes, and the sperm and the ovum were one, the brain and the sex were one, space and time were one.