1
Outside Necker Hospital, I watched him taking the stairs two at a time, bolting through rooms of deformed babies. When he whispered in my ear, in a deafening Paris bar, that he was expecting a baby with some other woman, but that it had been an accident, we weren’t an “us” yet, I hadn’t even laid a finger on him, I was living a bourgeois, almost monogamous life. After the delivery, I went to see him at his place and he was grilling sausages on a barbecue out on a terracotta terrace, and his baby hadn’t been diagnosed yet but was already wailing and gasping for air. I stared at his walk-in closet, his coats, their ski boots dumped in a pile by the door, and the papers welding their names together, taxes, documents. He had no history of killing a dog, as he would later do, his clothes were immaculate; the necklaces, brushes, and suitcases shared with his wife. He hadn’t smashed any windows, hadn’t crashed a car yet, no massacre on my hands, no shredded clothes, no bloody ass. In the hospital we paced through the hanging gardens, hands not yet locked together, tongues still untasted, eyes still set right in their sockets. Recalling this now is like dragging turtles out of the water by the scruff. The babies wailed in turmoil, unable to slurp, like helpless pups. In every pitch-black room, one of them. In every box, one: a macabre surprise. I tracked on the calendar the time that had passed since that day to see exactly when the fever broke out. And how passion always surges up from the pitch-dark, just like sea monsters.
2
Death can be in a bottle tossed onto the subway tracks, in an umbrella stand, on a Roman bridge over a swollen river. Ours was a passion like Anna Akhmatova’s, exactly seventeen months without moving a single centimeter from the line at the Moscow prisons to see her beloved prisoner, Stalin never gave him back, she hanged herself right there, was cut down and swept away by a clerk. Stories of passion must be told even if through the words of another, words always belong to someone else, we speak and we die without ever having said a thing.
3
The first time we kissed was the first night we saw each other under an extinguished sky, we’d dined in some bar on rue Oberkampf, passing Arabs telling him to ask for my hand. We’re already married, we explained. But I can love two men at the same time / but I can love two women at once, we said. First we hammered each other with glasses of alcohol. There was already the precedent of having seen each other at a wedding, of having danced, so tall we were, so dazzling we were in the window crystals, in a wandering at the edge of a lake like a portrait, in the skylights. And the first kiss arrived without witnesses, in that cellar, but places do not exist, lights do not exist and upon stepping out, his wife’s demands on the phone, the first insults, the defeated and hallucinatory rhetoric of jealousy, me sprawled on the pavement and his wife saying that we were exchanging inflamed words and him explaining that no, where did she get that from, that he was working in the ambulance dispatch, denying me right to my face while looking at me wild with delirium. The Parisian tow truck had taken his car. To take a taxi that September night—now lost who knows where—a taxi to make us fly to the city’s impound lot. To make us fly through the air to perdition. At the traffic office he paid for the car behind some bars. I want you, he screamed, I want you, clutching the bars like a monkey. I want you I want you but he wasn’t crazy yet. And then he drove back at top speed. Seething. Without identity. Without stopping at a single traffic light, without respecting a single sign, and that was when he killed a black dog limping on the road, but he kept right on going, with no other horizon than the sky tearing itself away in his path.
4
Avenue Hoche. Royal Monceau. He hadn’t seen me, though we had both arrived. An unbearable first step in the lobby. The elevator was assaulted by two obnoxiously loud Americans and my emotion was infected. I headed for the grand staircase. The elderly watching me. They know what they lost, the old ones behind lustful doors smelling the heat of the other guests. Chambre 1311. In four hours this place will no longer exist. It will be scalded. One last rapid look at the crystal chandeliers and the paintings. My eyes dangling from his eyes. It was compulsive. Reaching for his heart above my head. It was mine. Several thousand kilometers of travel to own that heart. The sludge of lava in an active volcano. Like the screams of children in night terrors after a bus crash.
5
Handprints branded on the wallpaper. That’s how we spent the hours, lighting and burning out lamps. This is passion, I said, inside a German bathtub, like a chant in another language, like a motorcycle trip down savage roads. Yesterday my wife heard your name in my sleep, but I spoke in your tongue, Spanish, and she didn’t understand a damn thing. She put on her boots to go outside and burn bushes that were not meant to be liquidated, and she nearly burned down the house, the cat, the dog, her daughter in her chair, and his wife. And all those hours shifting room bed body. That immense ghost, the Alhambra by night. A grave under stalks and dirt like a homicidal passion. We had been born lipless and we grew them when we kissed. Madrid, London, Berlin, Prague, Bruges, Valencia, Granada, Giverny, Crozon, Le Mont St Michel, Honfleur, Deauville, Tréauville, and Madrid again. I wondered what would happen if, sprawled here now mid-resuscitation, he found out. That was the scene. Him finding out about my death, about the four hours of attempted resuscitation. So I would leave without knowing what he had said, what he would do the hour after the news, the next night, that summer, the first Christmas, and I would die insane.
6
Jealousy is a child destined for experiments, prostrate and naked, his eyes injected with typhus. Jealousy is white cows and a retard trying to graze them. Shedding desire to gain time. Like a mystic who flings himself onto the tiles to cool down and levitate, but he is erect and cannot. Desire is always there like the edge of a ravine, men have always sucked each other everywhere, on the hills and the pyramids, in the Roman circus, they gnawed on the cerebellum in mouthfuls. Where are you that you don’t answer? I bequeath you my dirtiest thoughts and my most sacred declamations. Call me. Right now in this waiting I am a dead woman after death.
7
I am the soul of Caesar in a woman’s body, I smash myself against the fence but I don’t see my blood. You stopped answering, you vanished. How many times the door stood ajar and I didn’t see it. How many times the sky of the free shone outside to be seized, to plunge into the highway verges and become a drifter or a beggar. Desire is pathetic, right now I can’t even look myself in the eye, turned into a fanatic, into a laughingstock. And you still won’t show up? I see your shadow in the house and I hunt it through every room, I float, clutching your shadow, I rape it. He was with a killer and he didn’t realize it. I didn’t realize it either, what a joke. Now I’m going out to hunt you down. You’ll be a pig with its brains blown out.
Translated by Miaad Banki
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