The Malady of Death Read online

  You want to see all of a woman, as much as possible. You don't see that for you it's impossible.

  You look at the closed shape.

  First you see slight tremors showing on the skin, just like those of suffering. And then you see the eyelids flicker as if the eyes wanted to see. And then you see the mouth open as if it wanted to say something. And then you notice that under your caresses the lips of her sex are swelling up, and that from their smoothness comes a hot sticky liquid, as it might be blood.

  Then you stroke more quickly.

  And you see that her thighs are opening to give your hand more room, so that you can stroke better than before.

  And suddenly, in a moan, you see pleasure come upon her, take possession of her, make her arch up from the bed. You look intently at what you have just done to her body. Then you see it fall back inert on the white of the bed. It breathes fast, in gasps that get further and further apart. And then the eyes shut tighter than before, sink deeper into the face. Then they open, and then they shut again. They shut.

  You've looked at everything. At last you too shut your eyes. You stay like that a long time, with your eyes shut, like her.

  You think of outside your room, of the streets in the town, the lonely little squares over by the station. Of those winter Saturdays all alike.

  And then you listen to the approaching sound. To the sea.

  *

  You listen to the sea. It's very close to the walls of the room. Through the windows that colorless light still, the slowness of the day to spread over the sky, the black sea still, the sleeping body, the stranger in the room.

  And then you do it. I couldn't say why. I see you do it without knowing why. You could go out of the room and leave the body, the sleeping form. But no, you do it, apparently as another would, but with the complete difference that separates you from her. You do it, you go back towards the body.

  You cover it completely with your own, you draw it towards you so as not to crush it with your strength, so as not to kill it, and then you do it, you return to the nightly dwelling, you are engulfed.

  You stay on in that abode. You go on weeping. You think you know you know not what, you can't go through with that knowledge, you think you alone are the image of the world's woe, of a special fate. You think you're the master of the event now taking place, you think it exists.

  She sleeps, a smile on her lips, fit to be killed.

  You stay on in the abode of her body.

  She is full of you as she sleeps. The faintly voiced tremors that go through the body become more and more marked. She's in a dream of happiness at being full of a man, of you, or of someone else, or of someone else again.

  You weep.

  The tears wake her. She looks at you. She looks at the room. And again at you. She strokes your hand. Asks: Why are you crying? You say it's for her to say, she's the one who ought to know.

  She answers softly, gently: Because you don't love. You say that's it.

  She asks you to say it clearly. You say: I don't love.

  She says: Never?

  You say: Never.

  She says: The wish to be about to kill a lover, to keep him for yourself, yourself alone, to take him, steal him in defiance of every law, every moral authority—you don't know what that is, you've never experienced it?

  You say: Never.

  She looks at you, repeats: A dead man's a strange thing.

  *

  She asks if you've seen the sea, asks if it's day, if it's light.

  You say the sun's rising, but that at this time of year it takes a long time to light up the whole sky.

  She asks you what color the sea is.

  You say: Black.

  She says the sea's never black. You must be mistaken.

  You ask if she thinks anyone could love you.

  She says no, not possibly. You ask: Because of the death? She says: Yes, because your feelings are so dull and sluggish, because you lied and said the sea is black.

  And then she is silent.

  You're afraid she'll go to sleep again, you rouse her and say: Go on talking. She says: Ask questions then, I can't do it on my own. Again you ask if anyone could love you. Again she says: No.

  She says that a moment ago you wanted to kill her, when you came in off the terrace and into the room for the second time. That she knew this in her sleep, from the way you looked at her. She asks you to say why.

  You say you can't know why, that you don't understand the malady you suffer from.

  She smiles, says this is the first time, that until she met you she didn't know death could be lived.

  She looks at you through the filtered green of her eyes. She says; You herald the reign of death. Death can't be loved if it's imposed from outside. You think you weep because you can't love. You weep because you can't impose death.

  She's already almost asleep. She says almost inaudibly: You're going to die of death. Your death has already begun.

  You weep. She says: Don't cry, it's pointless, give up the habit of weeping for yourself, it's pointless.

  Imperceptibly the room is filled with the still dark light of the sun.

  She opens her eyes, shuts them again. She says: Two more paid nights and it will be over. She smiles and strokes your eyes. She smiles ironically in her sleep.

  You go on talking, all alone in the world, just as you wish. You say love has always struck you as out of place, you've never understood, you've always avoided loving, always wanted to be free not to. You say you're lost. But that you don't know what you're lost to. Or in.

  She's not listening, she's asleep.

  You tell a story about a child. The light has reached the windows.

  She opens her eyes, says: Stop lying. She says she hopes she'll never know anything, anything in the world, the way you do. She says: I don't want to know anything the way you do, with that death-derived certainty, that hopeless monotony, the same every day of your life, every night, and that deadly routine of lovelessness.

  She says: It's day, everything is about to begin, except you, you never begin.

  She goes back to sleep. You ask her why she sleeps, what weariness she has to rest from, what monumental weariness. She lifts her hand and strokes your face again, the mouth perhaps. She smiles ironically again in her sleep. She says: The fact that you ask the question proves you can't understand. She says it's a way of resting from you too. From death.

  You go on with the story about the child, cry it out aloud. You say you don't know the whole of the story about him, about you. You say you've been told it. She smiles, says she's heard and read it too, often, everywhere, in a number of books. You ask how loving can happen—the emotion of loving.

  She answers: Perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe. She says: Through a mistake, for instance. She says: Never through an act of will. You ask: Could the emotion of loving come from other things too? You beg her to say. She says: It can come from anything, from the flight of a night bird, from a sleep, from a dream of sleep, from the approach of death, from a word, from a crime, of itself, from oneself, often without knowing how. She says: Look. She parts her legs, and in the hollow between you see the dark night at last. You say: It was there, the dark night. It's there.

  She says: Come. You do. Having entered her, you go on weeping. She says: Don't cry anymore. She says: Take me, so it may have been done.

  You do so, you take her.

  It is done.

  She goes back to sleep.

  One day she isn't there anymore. You wake and she isn't there. She has gone during the night. The mark of her body is still there on the sheets. Cold.

  It's dawn today. The sun's not yet up, but the edges of the sky are already light, while from its center a thick darkness still falls on the earth.

  There's nothing left in the room but you. Her body has vanished. The difference between her and you is confirmed by her sudden absence.

  Far away, on the beaches, gulls would be crying in the
last of the dark, already starting to feed on the lugworms, to scour the sand abandoned by the receding tide. In the dark, the crazy din of the ravenous gulls— it's suddenly as if you'd never heard it before.

  *

  She'd never come back.

  The evening after she goes, you tell the story of the affair in a bar. At first you tell it as if it were possible to do so, then you give up. Then you tell it laughing, as if it were impossible for it to have happened or possible for you to have invented it.

  The next day, suddenly, perhaps you'd notice her absence in the room. The next day, you'd perhaps feel a desire to see her there again, in the strangeness of your solitude, as a stranger herself.

  Perhaps you'd look for her outside your room, on the beaches, outside cafés, in the streets. But you wouldn't be able to find her, because in the light of day you can't recognize anyone. You wouldn't recognize her. All you know of her is her sleeping body beneath her shut or half-shut eyes. The penetration of one body by another—that you can't recognize, ever. You couldn't ever.

  When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.

  *

  All you remember of the whole affair are certain words she said in her sleep, the ones that tell you what's wrong with you: the malady of death. Soon you give up, don't look for her anymore, either in the town or at night or in the daytime.

  Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.

  The Malady of Death could be staged in the theatre.

  The young woman of the paid nights should be lying on some white sheets in the middle of the stage. She might be naked. A man would walk back and forth around her, telling the story.

  Only the woman would speak her lines from memory. The man never would. He would read the text, either standing still or walking about around the young woman.

  The man the story is about would never appear. Even when he speaks to the young woman he does so only through the man who reads his story.

  Acting is replaced here by reading. I always think nothing can replace the reading of a text, that no acting can ever equal the effect of a text not memorised.

  So the two actors should speak as if they were reading the text in separate rooms, isolated from one another.

  The text would be completely nullified if it were spoken theatrically.

  The man's voice should be rather high-pitched, the woman's deep and almost off-hand.

  The man's pacings to and fro around the young woman's body should be long-drawn-out. He ought to disappear from view, to be lost in the theatre just as he is lost in time, and then to return into the light, to us.

  The stage should be low, almost at floor level, so that the young woman's body is completely visible to the audience.

  There should be great stretches of silence between the different paid nights, silences in which nothing happens except the passage of time.

  The man reading the text should seem to be suffering from a fundamental and fatal weakness—the same as that of the other, the man we don't see.

  The young woman should be beautiful, distinctive.

  A big dark opening admits the sound of the sea—always the same black rectangle, never any lighter. But the sound of the sea does vary in volume.

  The young woman's departure isn't seen. There should be a blackout when she disappears, and when the light comes up again there is nothing left but the white sheets in the middle of the stage and the sound of the sea surging in through the black door.

  No music.

  If I ever filmed this text I'd want the weeping by the sea to be shot in such a way that the white turmoil of the waves is seen almost simultaneously with the man's face. There should be a correlation between the white of the sheets and the white of the sea. The sheets should be a prior image of the sea.

  All this by way of general suggestion.

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  The Malady of Death