A gleam of light from the setting sun passed under the clouds and struck the wall of the bedroom, the secretary, the side of the wardrobe, the foot of the bed. I got up and went to piss, then went downstairs to the kitchen. Everything was quiet. I cut some slices of good coarse peasant bread, buttered them, put some thick slices of ham on top. I also found some pickles, a terrine of pâté, some hard-boiled eggs, and put it all onto a tray with silverware, two glasses, and a bottle of good Burgundy, a Vosne-Romanée, I think it was. I returned to the bedroom and placed the tray on the bed. I sat down cross-legged and contemplated the empty sheets before me, across the tray. Slowly my sister took shape there, with a surprising solidity. She was sleeping on her side, folded in on herself; gravity drew down her breasts and even, a little, her belly, her skin was stretched over her raised, angular hip. It wasn’t her body that was sleeping but she who, sated, was sleeping nestled inside her body. A little bright red blood was seeping between her legs, without staining the bed, and all this heavy humanity was like a stake driven into my eyes; it didn’t blind me, though, but on the contrary opened up my third eye, the pineal eye grafted into my head by a Russian sniper. I uncorked the bottle, breathed in the heady odor deeply, then poured two glasses. I drank and began to eat. I was immensely hungry, I devoured everything that was there and emptied the bottle of wine. Outside, the day was drawing to a close, the room was growing dark. I cleared the tray, lit some candles, and brought over some cigarettes that I smoked lying on my back, the ashtray on my stomach. Above me, I could hear a frantic buzzing. I looked around, without moving, and saw a fly on the ceiling. A spider was leaving it and slipping into a crack in the molding. The fly was trapped in the spiderweb, struggling with this buzzing to free itself, in vain. At that instant a breath passed over my penis, a phantom finger, the tip of a tongue; immediately it began to swell up, to unfold. I put the ashtray aside and imagined her body slipping over me, rearing up to bury me inside her while her breasts sat heavy in my hands, her thick black hair forming a curtain round my head, framing a face lit up by an immense, radiant smile, which said to me: “You have been placed in this world for one single thing, to fuck me.” The fly kept buzzing, but ever less frequently, it would start suddenly and then stop. I felt the base of her spine beneath my hands, the small of her back, her mouth, above me, murmured: “Oh, God, oh, God.” Afterward, I looked at the fly again. It was silent and still, the poison had finally overcome it. I waited for the spider to reemerge. Then I must have fallen asleep. A furious outbreak of buzzing woke me up, I opened my eyes and watched. The spider was hovering near the struggling fly. The spider hesitated, came forward and withdrew, returned finally to its crack. Again the fly stopped moving. I tried to imagine its silent terror, its fear fractured in its faceted eyes. From time to time the spider reemerged, tested its prey with a leg, added a few spins to the cocoon, returned; and I observed this interminable agony, until the moment the spider, hours later, finally dragged the dead or overcome fly into the molding to consume it in peace.

When day came, still naked, I put on some shoes so as not to get my feet dirty and went to explore this large, cold, dark house. It unfurled around my charged body, my skin white and bristling from the cold, as sensitive over its entire surface as my stiff penis or my tingling anus. It was an invitation to the worst excesses, to the most insane, transgressive games, and since the tender, warm body I desired was denied to me, I used her house as I would have used her, I made love to her house. I went everywhere, lay down in the beds, stretched out on the tables or the carpets, rubbed my backside against the corners of furniture, jerked off in armchairs or closed wardrobes, in the midst of clothes smelling of dust and mothballs. I even thus entered von Üxküll’s apartments, with a feeling of childlike triumph at first, then of humiliation. And humiliation in one form or another never let go of me, a sense of the mad vanity of my gestures, but this humiliation and this vanity too placed themselves at my service, and I profited from them with an evil, limitless joy.

These disjointed thoughts, this frantic exhaustion of all possibilities, had replaced my sense of time. Sunrises, sunsets, only marked out the rhythm, like hunger or thirst or natural needs, like sleep that rose up at any time to engulf me, restore my strength, and return me to the wretchedness of my body. Sometimes I put on some clothes and went out walking. It was almost hot out, the abandoned fields beyond the Drage had become heavy, slippery, their crumbling soil stuck to my feet and forced me to walk around them. During these walks I saw no one. In the forest, a breath of wind was enough to drive me into a frenzy, I lowered my pants and pulled up my shirt and lay down on the hard, cold ground covered with pine needles that pricked my rear end. In the dense woods beyond the bridge over the Drage, I stripped completely naked, except for my shoes, which I kept on, and began running, as when I was a kid, through branches that scratched my skin. Finally I stopped against a tree and turned around, both hands behind me clutching the trunk, to rub my anus slowly against the bark. But that didn’t satisfy me. One day I found a tree lying down, overturned by a storm, with a broken branch on the top of the trunk, and with a pocket knife I shortened this branch some more, removed its bark and smoothed the wood, carefully rounding out the tip. Then, soaking it copiously in saliva, I straddled the trunk and, leaning on my hands, slowly buried this branch inside me, all the way. It gave me an immense pleasure, and all this time, my eyes closed, my penis forgotten, I imagined my sister doing the same thing, making love in front of me like a lustful dryad with the trees of her forest, using her vagina as well as her anus to take an infinitely more terrifying pleasure than my own. I came in huge disordered spasms, tearing myself away from the stained branch, falling to the side and backward onto a dead branch that made a deep gash in my back, a raw, adorable pain on which I remained for several minutes leaning with the weight of my almost fainting body. Finally I rolled over onto my side, blood flowing freely from my wound, dead leaves and needles sticking to my fingers; I got up, my legs trembling with pleasure, and began running between the trees. Farther on, the woods grew wet, a fine mud dampened the earth, patches of moss covered the driest places, I slipped in the mud and fell onto my side, panting. The cry of a buzzard echoed through the undergrowth. I got up and went down to the Drage, took off my shoes and dove into icy water that shocked my lungs, to wash off the mud and the still-flowing blood, mixed, when I got out, with the cold water streaming down my back. Once dry, I felt revived, the air on my skin was warm and gentle. I would have liked to cut down some branches, build a hut that I’d have carpeted with moss, and spend the night there, naked; but it was still too cold out, and also there was no Iseult to share it with me, no King Mark either to chase us from the castle. Instead I tried to lose myself in the woods, first with a childlike joy, then almost with despair, for it was impossible, I always stumbled onto a path or else a field, all ways led me to known landmarks, whatever direction I chose.

Of the outside world I no longer had the slightest idea, I didn’t know what was happening in it. There was no radio, no one came. Abstractedly, I understood that to the south, while I was losing myself here in the mad bitterness of my impotence, many human lives were coming to an end, as so many other lives already had, but it all was the same to me. I couldn’t have said if the Russians were twenty kilometers away or a hundred, and I couldn’t have cared less, worse, I didn’t even think about it, for me all that was occuring in a time—not to mention a space—completely different from my own, and if that time came to meet my time, well, then, we’d see which one would give way. But despite my abandon, a naked anguish welled up from my body, trickled out of it, the way droplets of melted snow fall from a branch to strike the branches and needles below it. This anguish was mutely corroding me. Like an animal digging through its fur to find the source of a pain, like a child, obstinate and furious at his fractious toys, I sought to put a name on my sorrow. I drank, I emptied several bottles of wine or else glasses of brandy and then I abandoned my body to the bed, thrown open to the winds. A cold, wet breeze circulated through it. I looked at myself sadly in the mirror, contemplating my red, tired sex hanging in the middle of the pubic hair, I said to myself it had changed quite a bit, and that even if she had been there it would no longer be as it was before. When we were eleven or twelve our sexes were minuscule, it was almost our skeletons that collided with each other in the twilight; now, there was all this thickness of flesh, and also the terrible wounds it had undergone, a slit belly no doubt for her, and for me the long hole through my skull, a scar wrapped around itself, a tunnel of dead flesh. A vagina, a rectum, is also a hole in the body, but inside the flesh is alive, it forms a surface, for it, there is no hole. What is a hole, a void, then? It’s what is inside the head when thought dares to try to flee from itself, to separate itself from the body, to act as if the body didn’t exist, as if you could think without a body, as if the most abstract thought, the thought of the starry sky above and the moral law within, for example, were not wedded to the rhythm of the breath, the pulsing of blood in the veins, the grating of cartilage. And it’s true, when I played with Una when we were children, and later on, when I learned to use for my own purposes the bodies of the boys who desired me, I was young, I hadn’t yet understood the specific weight of bodies, and what the commerce of love involves, destines and condemns us to. Age meant nothing to me, even in Zurich. Now, I had begun the preliminary work, I sensed what living in a body could signify, and even in a woman’s body, with its heavy breasts, a body forced to sit on the toilet or crouch down to urinate, whose belly has to be cut open with a knife to take the children out. I would have loved to set that body down in front of me, on the sofa, its thighs open like the pages of a book, a narrow band of white lace hiding the bulge of the sex, the beginnings of the thick scar above it and, to the sides, the ridges of the tendons, hollows where I longed to set my lips, and to stare at it as two fingers slowly came to push the fabric aside: “Look, look how white it is. Think, think how black it is beneath.” I desired madly to see this sex lying between those two coombs of white flesh, swollen, as if offered on the serving tray of its thighs, and to slip my tongue through the almost dry cleft, from bottom to top, delicately, just once. I also wanted to watch this beautiful body pissing, leaning forward on the toilet seat, elbows resting on the knees, and to hear the urine gushing into the water; and I then wanted her mouth to lean forward as she finished, take my still-limp penis in her lips, I wanted her nose to sniff at my pubic hair, the hollow between my scrotum and my thigh, the line of my hips, to grow intoxicated with my rough, sour smell, that male smell I know so well. I was burning to lay this body down on the bed and spread its legs, to bury my nose in that moist vulva like a sow nuzzling for a nest of black truffles, then to turn the body over on its stomach, spread its buttocks with both hands to contemplate the purplish rosette of the anus blinking gently like an eye, put my nose to it, and breathe in. And I dreamed of pushing my face as I slept into the curly hair of her armpit and of letting her breast weigh on my cheek, my two legs wrapped around one of hers, my hand resting lightly on her shoulder. And when, upon waking, this body beneath me had completely absorbed me, she would have looked at me with a floating smile, would have spread her legs once again and rocked me inside her to the slow, subterranean rhythm of one of Josquin’s old Masses, and we would have slowly moved away from the shore, carried by our bodies as by a warm, becalmed sea rich in salt, and her voice would have come whispering next to my ear, clearly and distinctly: “The gods created me for love.”