serial killer of the millennium. Hunger. Hunger and once again hunger. Insatiable hunger. Hunger that is there for one’s whole life. Hunger for the body. Evening. Vacations after passing the matura. The short, violent, northern summer. The stuffy room in the wooden attic. The pain of sunburn. The rumble of the river. Hunger. All the women in the world. All of them from the beginning of history. All who died before us. Their buried skeletons and bodies, now eaten by the clay, which once were covered by skin created for our touch. All of them. Invented. Fantastic. To the end of your life you will regret that you didn’t touch the woman created by Saul Bellow who was named Renata; that the mistress of the Frenchman was not your mistress; that you didn’t take Kitty away from Levin; that you didn’t undress Singer’s sensuous Jewesses; Kundera’s eccentric Czech women; Solzhenitsyn’s labor camp prisoners, gaunt like models; Márquez’s golden-skinned mulattoes; Bunin’s impoverished gentrywomen; Kafka’s pencil-pushers dressed in white blouses. Personally — I must confess — I even feel affection for the most frequently used of all the literary asses: Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Clavdia Chauchat. I regret that I didn’t unbutton the first one’s corset; that I didn’t treat the second with all the brutality she deserves; that the third didn’t come to my room on New Year’s Eve. OK, I’ll say it frankly and bluntly, although at the same time thoroughly metaphorically: I regret that Isolde didn’t blow me, that I didn’t have anal sex with Shakespeare’s Julia. And I even regret that it wasn’t me, but Leverkühn, whom the mythic whore infected with syphilis. We have the same curse and dreadful fate: that, at the sight of bared shoulders in a summer dress, a daring décolletage in an evening gown, dark hair pulled back from the forehead, and a thousand other scenes and views, we will always lose consciousness. We will suffocate on account of the lack, we will be ready to strip off our own skin in order to be able to touch. Without that touch — death in agonies. The desire to kill is deeply justified in this context. When one feels like screwing ideal beings, it’s no wonder that one feels like killing beings made of flesh and blood. But wait! Wait! Wait! There hasn’t been anyone for a long time. I didn’t enter the name of the student of archeology, and my charts, at which I am just now glancing with curiosity, show clearly that the last babe I wanted to kill, and had noted in the register, was Viola Caracas. What do you know! The number of cows that a person feels like clubbing to death is diminishing at a terrifying rate. Apparently we are getting old. The acquaintance with Viola Caracas began in the manner typical for our times — through the Internet. She sent frequent emails, not badly written, although exceptionally vague. Almost no details about herself. This agreed, however, with her key confession, repeated in various versions, that, you know what, I don’t feel too well in this world, because I generally spend my time in the sphere of ideal beings. I underestimated the danger of this admission, and I even, rashly, found it appealing. In addition to this, granted, there were almost no details about herself, but one essential detail finally came out: namely, the year of her birth. It was recent. Even — I would say — shockingly recent. I made a date with her. Seemingly interesting: a dainty little doll with the face of a Venezuelan whore. Hence the nickname — of little sophistication in its simplicity — Caracas. Well-groomed, tidy, scrubbed, coiffed, dressed inordinately perfectly. For such a young age — an excessive perfection, smelling of premature spinsterhood. There was no question, for example, that she would ever drop in on me right after classes. After classes, she always returned first to the student dorm on Piastowska Street, where she tarted herself up for at least two hours, and finally, in a New Year’s Eve blouse, sizzling-hot make-up, and a fantastic hair-do, she would make her way to my place. It goes without saying: ideal beings. What she thought about during preparations was equally important to her as the actual next installments. The actual next installments with Viola Caracas were, as a matter of fact, not bad — really not bad. She had splendid — writers of old would write — alabaster skin and a truly Latin temperament. Unfortunately, she also had a certain insurmountable vice. She didn’t speak up at all. There is no reason to laugh here. We know perfectly well that the silent woman is the ideal. But it depends on the quality of the silence. There is favorable silence, and there is hostile silence. To formulate the matter more precisely: Women who don’t speak up are divided into those who don’t speak up favorably and those who don’t speak up hostilely. Viola didn’t speak up — let’s put it this way — in order to play to a draw. Not hostilely, but also not favorably. She kept silent and stared intensely and greedily, and her pitch-black eyes burned like the windows of the Miraflores Palace during a New Year’s Eve ball. On more or less the third date, I understood that she was a victim of her own imagination. Her mind spent its time, indeed, in spheres so ideal that she was not capable of stammering out even one concrete sentence. In time — not even one concrete word. The acquaintance — you could say — melted into mists devoid of absolutely anything concrete. To put the matter precisely, one thing remained concrete: her name on the list. OK, I’ll say it. I’ll say it, although at first I didn’t admit it. It was about something else. We entered Viola Caracas on the list, but our first impulse was to hide the genuine reason. Actually, it concerned contact lenses. This seemed petty to us. What nobility! What self-restraint! But such is the truth: ever since babes began, on a mass scale, to take out their contact lenses before going to bed, the enthusiasm has diminished. Immeasurably diminished. Sure, not all wear them, and thus not all of them remove contact lenses before they go to bed, but there are so many of them, and the ritual has become so distinctive, that its shadow is cast upon all the rest. I lie on the sheets, and even if I know for a certainty that the miss for whom I am waiting doesn’t wear contact lenses, I have the traumatic sense that I will immediately hear the rattle of lenses coming from the bathroom. And Viola Caracas was probably the seventh babe in a row to wear contact lenses. Seventh! The seventh in a row! Three out of six of her predecessors were allowed to spend the night, and they rattled their contact lenses in the bathroom! She herself didn’t stay for the night and didn’t rattle, but she had them, she wore them, and that was enough. The trauma — God forbid — is not a matter of an aversion to nearsighted girls. Not at all! Quite the opposite! We love four-eyed girls! We have a thing for four-eyed girls! Our pathetic fetishism was born and shaped in the pediatric ophthalmalogy sanatorium in Witkowice. It couldn’t be avoided, since there were no babes there other than those who wore glasses. To put it precisely, there weren’t any other babes there than those who had just had their crossed-eye operations. That had its good sides. The oldest — the half-blind fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds (there was even a sixteen-year-old, but she was flat as a board), eyes plastered after the operation, pupils dilated from atropine — were in no position to notice that we were ogling them, and they changed clothes in the gigantic multi-bed rooms with exquisite slowness, practically feeling their way in and out of them; they bathed under showers in bathrooms as huge as factory floors; on scorching days, they lay down in the Austro-Hungarian garden, overgrown with Asiatic grasses, and, as if in a dream, not seeing and not knowing that all bounds had long ago been crossed, they rolled up their skirts and opened their blouses. It goes without saying that we, too, wore glasses; we, too, had just had operations to cure our crossed eyes; we, too, had gummed-up eyes and vision blurry from drops and creams. We were completely unfit for the role of voyeurs. All the more fervently, then, did we turn our countenances toward the light shining through our dressings. The foremost angels of our childhood were nearsighted. They all wore glasses. The first girls I saw undress in my life took off everything but their glasses. In any case — the glasses came at the end. After the panties. The indomitable subconsciousness that glasses are a natural element of the female anatomy stems from those times in Witkowice. To recapitulate: we are dealing here with fundamental matters, two fundamental doubts. First: contact lenses lead to the extermination of glasses-wearing women. After all, you almost don’t see any women, especially young women, in glasses any more! Nowadays, a super babe in glasses is a deviant, brothel request! I’m serious. Nowadays, if you want to have a super babe in glasses, you have to set off for a super brothel, in which super secret desires are realized. And even there, if you say that you want a four-eyes, the personnel, well versed in excess, will look at you scandalized by the knowledge that such deviants still walk the earth. A four-eyes removes her glasses and most charmingly squints her nearsighted eyes! Oh, how irrevocably has such an enchanting sight vanished! Thousands of other scenes have vanished! The four-eyes have died off! The perversely narrowed eyelids buried in clay! When I think that I could have had glasses seven times in a row, and yet I had contact lenses seven times in a row, it makes my blood boil! That’s it! That’s absolutely it! I enter all the pieces of tail wearing contact lenses on the list