It was beginning to grow cold again, it snowed a little, the terrace, the courtyard, the garden were dusted with snow. There wasn’t much left to eat, I had finished the bread, I tried to make some myself with Käthe’s flour, I didn’t really know how to go about it, but I found a recipe in a cookbook and made several loaves, from which I tore pieces that I swallowed hot as soon as they came out of the oven, crunching at the same time on raw onions that gave me an awful breath. There were no more eggs or ham, but in the basement I found some crates of little green apples from the previous summer, a little mealy but sweet, which I ate throughout the day, drinking sips of brandy. The wine cellar, however, was inexhaustible. There were also some pâtés, so I dined on pâté, on bacon grilled on the stove with onions, and on the greatest wines of France. At night, it snowed again, in heavy gusts; the wind, coming from the north, struck the house mournfully, banging the poorly fastened shutters as the snow beat against the windows. But there was no lack of wood, the stove in the bedroom roared, it was pleasant in this bedroom, where I stretched out naked in a darkness illumined by snow, as if the storm were whipping my skin. The next day it was still snowing, the wind had fallen and the snow was coming down, thick and heavy, covering the trees and the ground. A shape in the garden made me think of the bodies lying in the snow at Stalingrad, I could see them clearly, their blue lips, their bronze-colored skin pricked with stubble, surprised, stunned, dumbstruck in death but calm, almost peaceful, the very opposite of Moreau’s body bathing in its blood on the carpet, of my mother’s body with its twisted neck, spread out on the bed, atrocious, unbearable images, I couldn’t stay with them despite all my efforts, and to chase them away I climbed in my mind the steps leading to the attic of Moreau’s house, I took refuge there and huddled in a corner, to wait for my sister to come find me and console me, her doleful knight with the broken head.

That night, I took a long, hot bath. I placed one foot and then the other on the ledge and, rinsing the razor in the bathwater, I shaved both my legs, carefully. Then I shaved my armpits. The blade slid over the thick hair, coated with shaving cream, which fell in curly bundles into the soapy bathwater. I got up, changed the blade, placed one foot on the edge of the bathtub and shaved my sex. I proceeded attentively, especially for the hard-to-reach parts between the legs and the buttocks, but I slipped and cut myself just behind the scrotum, where the skin is most sensitive. Three drops of blood fell one after the other into the white foam of the bath. I patted some eau de Cologne on, it burned a little but also soothed my skin. Everywhere hair and shaving cream floated on the water, I took a bucket of cold water to rinse myself off, my skin was bristling, my scrotum shriveled. Leaving the bath, I looked at myself in the mirror, and this frighteningly naked body seemed foreign to me, it looked more like the body of the green Apollo in Paris than my own. I leaned against the mirror with my whole body, I closed my eyes and imagined myself shaving my sister’s sex, slowly, delicately, pulling the folds of flesh between two fingers so as not to wound her, then turning her over and making her lean forward so I could shave the curly hairs around her anus. Afterward, she came to rub her cheek against my skin, naked and withered by the cold, she tickled my little boy’s shrunken testicles and licked the tip of my circumcised penis, with short, exciting tongue strokes: “I almost liked it better when it was as big as that,” she said laughing, holding her thumb and forefinger a few centimeters apart, and I stood her up and looked at her naked sex protruding from her legs, prominent, the long scar I always imagined there not quite reaching it but stretching toward it, it was the sex of my little twin sister and I burst into tears in front of it.

I lay down on the bed, I touched my child’s parts, so strange under my fingers, I turned over onto my stomach, caressed my buttocks, gently touched my anus. I put all my effort into imagining that these buttocks were my sister’s, I kneaded them, slapped them. She laughed. I kept spanking her, with the flat of my hand, the elastic behind rang beneath my palms, and she, her breasts, her face lying like mine on the sheet, was overcome with uncontrollable laughter. When I stopped, the buttocks were red, I don’t know if mine actually were, for in this posture I couldn’t hit hard, but on the sort of invisible stage in my head they were, I could see the shaved vulva overflowing between them, still white and pink, and I turned her body around, buttocks toward the great full-length mirror and I said to her: “Look,” and she, still laughing, turned her head to see, and what she saw cut off her laughter and her breath, just as it cut off my own. Held by my thought, floating in this dark and empty space inhabited only by our bodies, I slowly reached my hand out toward her, with my forefinger out, and I ran my finger in the slit that parted like a poorly healed wound. Then I slipped behind her and, rather than remaining on my knees, I squatted so that I could see between my legs and she could see too. Leaning with one hand on her bared neck—her head was resting on the bed and she was looking between her legs—I took my penis in my other hand and pushed it between the lips of her sex; in the mirror, when I turned my head, I could clearly see my penis enter her childlike vulva, and, beneath, her upended face, flushed with blood and hideous. “Stop, stop,” she moaned, “that’s not how it should be done,” and then I pushed her forward so her body was again flat on the bed, crushed by my own, and I took her that way, both hands on her long neck, she panted as I came, my breath rattling. Then I tore myself from her and rolled on the bed, as she cried like a little girl: “That’s not how it should be done,” then I too began crying and touched her cheek: “How should it be done?” and she slid onto me, kissed my face, my eyes, my hair, “Don’t cry, don’t cry, I’ll show you,” she was calming down, I too was calming down, she was sitting astride me, her belly and smooth vulva rubbing against my stomach, she straightened up, crouched down so as to be sitting on my hips, her knees up and her sex swollen, like a strange, decorative thing attached to her body, placed on my abdomen, she began rubbing it and it opened up, sperm mixed with her own secretions flowed from it which she smeared on my belly, facing me, kissing my belly with her vulva as if it were a mouth, I drew up, took her by the neck and, leaning against her, kissed her in the mouth, her buttocks were pushing now against my hardening penis, she pushed me back down and, one hand leaning on my chest, still crouching, she guided my penis with her other hand and impaled herself on it. “Like that,” she repeated, “like that.” She rocked back and forth, starting and stopping, her eyes closed, and I, I looked at her body, I sought out her little flat body from before beneath the breasts and curves of her hips, dazed, almost stunned. The dry and nervous orgasm, almost spermless, tore me open as a fish knife would, she kept plunging on me, her vulva like an open shell, prolonged by the long straight scar that cut across her belly, and all that now formed one long slit, which my sex opened up to the navel.

It was snowing in the night, but I continued wandering in this limitless space where my thought reigned sovereign, making and unmaking forms with an absolute freedom that nevertheless kept running into the limits of bodies, mine real, material, and hers imagined and thus inexhaustible, in an erratic to-and-fro that left me each time emptier, more febrile, more desperate. Sitting naked on the bed, drained, I drank brandy and smoked and my gaze went from the outside, from my reddened knees, my long veined hands, my sex shriveled up at the bottom of my slightly bulging belly, to the inside, where it traveled over her sleeping body, sprawled out on her stomach, her head turned toward me, her legs stretched out, like a little girl. I gently parted her hair and bared her neck, her beautiful, powerful neck, and then my thoughts returned, as in the afternoon, to the strangled neck of our mother, she who had borne us together in her womb, I caressed my sister’s neck and tried seriously and attentively to imagine myself twisting my mother’s neck, but it was impossible, the image didn’t come, there was no trace of such an image inside me, it stubbornly refused to form in the mirror that I contemplated within myself, this mirror reflected nothing, remained empty, even when I placed both my hands under my sister’s hair and said to myself: Oh my hands on my sister’s nape. Oh my hands on my mother’s neck. No, nothing, there was nothing. Suddenly shivering, I curled up in a fetal ball at the end of the bed. After a long while I opened my eyes. She lay fully stretched out, one hand on her belly, her legs apart. Her vulva was opposite my face. The small lips protruded slightly from the pale, domed flesh. This sex was watching at me, spying on me, like a Gorgon’s head, like a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks. Little by little this silent gaze penetrated me to the marrow. My breath sped up and I stretched out my hand to hide it: I no longer saw it, but it still saw me and stripped me bare (whereas I was already naked). If only I could still get hard, I thought, I could use my prick like a stake hardened in the fire, and blind this Polyphemus who made me Nobody. But my cock remained inert, I seemed turned to stone. I stretched out my arm and buried my middle finger into this boundless eye. The hips moved slightly, but that was all. Far from piercing it, I had on the contrary opened it wide, freeing the gaze of the eye still hiding behind it. Then I had an idea: I took out my finger and, dragging myself forward on my forearms, I pushed my forehead against this vulva, pressing my scar against the hole. Now I was the one looking inside, searching the depths of this body with my radiant third eye, as her own single eye irradiated me and we blinded each other mutually: without moving, I came in an immense splash of white light, as she cried out: “What are you doing, what are you doing?” and I laughed out loud, sperm still gushing in huge spurts from my penis, jubilant, I bit deep into her vulva to swallow it whole, and my eyes finally opened, cleared, and saw everything.