Agua Viva Read online

  This is the word of someone who cannot.

  I direct nothing. Not even my own words. But it’s not sad: it’s happy humility. I, who live sideways, am to your left as you come in. And the world trembles within me.

  Is this word to you promiscuous? I would like it not to be, I am not promiscuous. But I am kaleidoscopic: I’m fascinated by my sparkling mutations that I here kaleidoscopically record.

  Now I am going to stop for a while to deepen myself more. Then I’ll be back.

  I’m back. I was existing. I received a letter from São Paulo from a person I don’t know. A final suicide note. I called São Paulo. No one answered, it rang and rang and echoed as if in a silent apartment. Did he die or not die. This morning I called again: still no answer. He died, yes. I’ll never forget.

  I’m no longer frightened. Let me talk, all right? I was born like this: drawing from my mother’s uterus the life that was always eternal. Wait for me—all right? When I paint or write I’m anonymous. My profound anonymity which no one ever touched.

  I have an important thing to tell you. Because I’m not joking: it is the pure element. Material of the instant of time. I am not objectivizing anything: I am having the real birth of it. I feel faint like someone about to be born.

  To be born: I’ve watched a cat give birth. The kitten emerges wrapped in a sack of fluid and all huddled inside. The mother licks the sack of fluid so many times that it finally breaks and there a kitten almost free, only attached by its umbilical cord. Then the mother-creator-cat breaks that cord with her teeth and another fact appears in the world. That process is it. I am not joking. I am earnest. Because I am free. I am so simple.

  I am giving freedom to you. First I rip the sack of fluid. Then I cut the umbilical cord. And you are alive on your own account.

  And when I am born, I become free. That is the foundation of my tragedy.

  No. It’s not easy. But it “is.” I ate my own placenta so as not to have to eat for four days. To have milk to give you. Milk is a “this.” And no one is I. No one is you. That is what solitude is.

  I’m waiting for the next phrase. It’s a matter of seconds. Speaking of seconds I ask if you can stand for time to be today and now and right away. I can stand it because I ate my own placenta.

  At half past three in the morning I woke up. And immediately elastic I jumped out of bed. I came to write you. I mean: be. Now it’s half past five. I want nothing: I am pure. I don’t wish this solitude on you. But I myself am in the creating fog. Lucid darkness, luminous stupidity.

  There is much I cannot tell you. I am not going to be autobiographical. I want to be “bio.”

  I write with the flow of the words.

  Before the appearance of the mirror, the person didn’t know his own face except reflected in the waters of a lake. After a certain point everyone is responsible for the face he has. I’ll now look at mine. It is a naked face. And when I think that no other like it exists in the world, I get a happy shock. Nor will there ever be. Never is the impossible. I like never. I also like ever. What is there between never and ever that links them so indirectly and intimately?

  At the bottom of everything there is the hallelujah.

  This instant is. You who read me are.

  I find it hard to believe that I shall die. Because I’m bubbling in cold freshness. My life will be very long because each instant is. I get the feeling I’m about to be born and can’t.

  I am a heart beating in the world.

  You who are reading me please help me to be born.

  Wait: it’s getting dark. Darker.

  And darker.

  The instant is of total darkness.

  It goes on.

  Wait: I begin to glimpse a thing. A luminescent shape. A milky belly with a navel? Wait—because I shall emerge from this darkness where I am afraid, darkness and ecstasy. I am the heart of the shadow.

  The problem is that the curtain over the window of my room is defective. It is stuck and so it doesn’t close. So the whole full moon enters and phosphoresces the room with silences: it’s horrible.

  Now the shadows are retreating.

  I was born.

  Pause.

  Marvelous scandal: I am born.

  My eyes are shut. I am pure unconsciousness. They already cut the umbilical cord: I am unattached in the universe. I don’t think but feel the it. With my eyes I blindly seek the breast: I want thick milk. No one taught me to want. But I already want. I’m lying with my eyes open looking at the ceiling. Inside is the darkness. An I that pulses already forms. There are sunflowers. There is tall wheat. I is.

  I hear the hollow boom of time. It’s the world deafly forming. If I can hear that is because I exist before the formation of time. “I am” is the world. World without time. My consciousness now is light and it is air. Air has neither place nor time. Air is the non-place where everything will exist. What I am writing is the music of the air. The formation of the world. Slowly what will be approaches. What will be already is. The future is ahead and behind and to either side. The future is what always existed and always will exist. Even if Time is abolished? What I’m writing to you is not for reading— it’s for being. The trumpets of the angel-beings echo in the without time. The first flower is born in the air. The ground that is earth forms. The rest is air and the rest is slow fire in perpetual mutation. Does the word “perpetual” not exist because time does not exist? But the boom exists. And this existence of mine starts to exist. Is that time starting?

  It suddenly occurred to me that you don’t need order to live. There is no pattern to follow and the pattern itself doesn’t even exist: I am born.

  I’m still not ready to talk about “he” or “she.” I demonstrate “that.” That is universal law. Birth and death. Birth. Death. Birth and—like a breathing of the world.

  I am pure it that was pulsing rhythmically. But I can feel that soon I shall be ready to talk about he or she. I’m not promising you a story here. But there’s it. Bearable? It is soft and is oyster and is placenta. I am not joking because I am not a synonym—I am the name itself. There is a thread of steel going through all that I am writing you. There’s the future. Which is today.

  My vast night goes by in the primary of a latency. The hand touches the earth and listens hotly to a heart pulsing. I see the great white slug with a woman’s breasts: is that a human entity? I burn it in an inquisitorial bonfire. I have the mysticism of the darkness of a remote past. And I emerge from these victims’ tortures with the indescribable mark that symbolizes life. Elemental creatures, dwarves, gnomes, goblins and sprites surround me. I sacrifice animals to collect the blood I need for my witching ceremonies. In my fury I offer up my soul in its own blackness. The mass frightens me—me who carries it out. And the clouded mind dominates matter. The beast bares its teeth and in the distance of the air gallop the horses of the carnival floats.

  In my night I idolise the secret meaning of the world. Mouth and tongue. And a horse free with loosed strength. I keep its hoof in amorous fetishism. In my deep night a mad wind blows that brings me scraps of screams.

  I am feeling the martyrdom of an untimely sensuality. In the early hours I awake full of fruit. Who will come to gather the fruit of my life? If not you and I myself? Why is it that things an instant before they happen already seem to have happened? It’s because of the simultaneity of time. And so I ask you questions and these will be many. Because I am a question.

  And in my night I feel the evil that rules me. What is called a beautiful landscape causes me nothing but fatigue. What I like are landscapes of dry and ba
ked earth, with contorted trees and mountains made of rock and with a whitish and suspended light. There, yes, a hidden beauty lies. I know that you don’t like art either. I was born hard, heroic, alone, and standing. And I found my counterpoint in the landscape without picturesqueness and without beauty. Ugliness is my banner of war. I love the ugly with the love of equals. And I defy death. I—I am my own death. And no one goes further. The barbarian within me seeks the cruel barbarian outside me. I see in light and dark I the faces of people flickering in the flames of the bonfire. I am a tree that burns with hard pleasure. A single sweetness possesses me: complicity with the world. I love my cross, which I painfully carry. It’s the least I can make of my life: accept commiserably the sacrifice of the night.

  The strangeness takes me: so I open the black umbrella and throw myself into a feast of dancing where stars sparkle. The furious nerve inside me and that contorts. Until the early hours come and find me bloodless. The early hours are great and eat me. The gale calls me. I follow it and tear myself to pieces. If I don’t enter the game that unfolds in life I shall lose my own life in a suicide of my species. I protect with fire the game of my life. When the existence of me and of the world can no longer be borne by reason— then I loose myself and follow a latent truth. Would I recognise the truth if it were proven?

  I am making myself. I make myself until I reach the pit.

  About me in the world I want to tell you about the strength that guides me and brings me the world itself, about the vital sensuality of clear structures, and about the curves that are organically connected to other curved shapes. My handwriting and my circumvolutions are potent and the freedom that blows in summer has fatality in itself. The eroticism that belongs to whatever is living is scattered in the air, in the sea, in the plants, in us, scattered in the vehemence of my voice, I write you with my voice. And there is a vigor of the robust trunk, of roots buried in the living earth that reacts giving great sustenance. I breathe the energy by night. And all this in the realm of the fantastic. Fantastic: the world for an instant is exactly what my heart asks. I am about to die and construct new compositions. I’m expressing myself very badly and the right words escape me. My internal form has been carefully purified and yet my bond with the world has the naked crudity of free dreams and of great realities. I do not know prohibition. And my own strength frees me, that full life that overflows me. And I plan nothing in my intuitive work of living: I work with the indirect, the informal and the unforeseen.

  Now in the early hours I am pale and gasping for breath and have a dry mouth dry in the face of what I achieve. Nature in choral canticle and I dying. What does nature sing? the last word itself that is never again I. The centuries will fall upon me. But for now a fierceness of body and soul that shows itself in the rich scalding of heavy words that trample one another—and something wild, primary and enervated rises from my swamps, the accursed plant that is about to surrender to God. The more accursed, the nearer toward the God. I deepened myself in myself and found that I want bloody life, and the occult meaning has an intensity that has light. It is the secret light of a knowledge of fatality: the cornerstone of the earth. It is more an omen of life than actual life. I exorcise it excluding the profane. In my world little freedom of action is granted me. I am free only to carry out the fatal gestures. My anarchy obeys subterraneously a law in which I deal occultly with astronomy, mathematics and mechanics. The liturgy of the dissonant swarms of the insects that emerge from the foggy and pestilential swamps. Insects, frogs, lice, flies, fleas and bedbugs—all born of the corrupted diseased germination of larvae. And my hunger is fed by these putrefying beings in decomposition. My rite is a purifier of forces. But malignancy exists in the jungle. I swallow a mouthful of blood that fills me entirely. I hear cymbals and trumpets and tambourines that fill the air with noise and uproar drowning out the silence of the disc of the sun and its marvel. I want a cloak woven from threads of solar gold. The sun is the magical tension of the silence. On my journey to the mysteries I hear the carnivorous plant that laments times immemorial: and I have obscene nightmares beneath the sick winds. I am enchanted, seduced, transfixed by furtive voices. The almost unintelligible cuneiform inscriptions speak of how to conceive and give formulae about how to feed from the force of darkness. They speak of naked and crawling females. And the solar eclipse causes secret terror that nonetheless announces a splendor of heart. I place upon my hair the bronze diadem.

  Beyond thought—even further beyond it—is the ceiling I looked at when I was an infant. Suddenly I was crying. It was already love. Or I wasn’t even crying. I was on the lookout. Scrutinizing the ceiling. The instant is the vast egg of lukewarm entrails.

  Now it’s early morning again.

  But at dawn I think that we are the contemporaries of the following day. May the God help me: I am lost. I need you terribly. We must be two. So that the wheat can grow tall. I am so earnest that I’m going to stop.

  I was born a few instants ago and I am dimmed.

  The crystals clink and sparkle. The wheat is ripe: the bread is shared out. But with sweetness? It’s important to know. I don’t think just as the diamond doesn’t think. I shine wholly limpid. I have neither hunger nor thirst: I am. I have two eyes that are open. Toward the nothing. Toward the ceiling.

  I’m going to make an adagio. Read slowly and with peace. It’s a wide fresco.

  Being born is like this:

  The sunflowers slowly turn their corollas toward the sun. The wheat is ripe. The bread is eaten with sweetness. My impulse connects to that of the roots of the trees.

  Birth: the poor have a prayer in Sanskrit. They ask for nothing: they are poor in spirit. Birth: the Africans have black and dark skin. Many are the sons of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. The Africans to put me to sleep, I newly born, intone a primary rigmarole where they sing monotonously that the mother-in-law, as soon as they go out, comes and takes a bunch of bananas.

  There’s a love song of theirs that also says monotonously the lament I make my own: why do I love you if you don’t return my love? I send messengers in vain; when I greet you you hide your face from me; why do I love you if you don’t even notice me? There is also a lullaby for elephants who go bathe in the river. I am African: a thread of a sad and wide and sylvan lament runs through my voice that sings to you. The whites whipped the blacks. But as the swan secretes an oil that makes its skin impermeable—in that way the blacks’ pain cannot enter and does not hurt. You can transform pain into pleasure—a “click” is enough. Black swan?

  But there are those who starve to death and all I can do is be born. My rigmarole is: what can I do for them? My answer is: paint a fresco in adagio. I could suffer the hunger of others in silence but a contralto voice makes me sing—I sing dull and black. It’s my message of a person alone. A person eats another from hunger. But I fed myself with my own placenta. And I’m not going to bite my nails because this is a tranquil adagio.

  I stopped to drink cool water: the glass at this instant-now is of thick faceted crystal and with thousands of glints of instants. Are objects halted time?

  The moon is still full. Clocks stopped and the sound of a hoarse carillon runs down the wall. I want to be buried with the watch on my wrist so that in the earth something can pulse time.

  I am so broad. I am coherent—my canticle is profound. Slow. But rising. Rising still. If it rises much more it will become full moon and silence, and phantasmagoric lunar soil. On the lookout for the time that stops. What I write you is serious. It will become a hard imp
erishable object. What is coming is unexpected. To be uselessly sincere I must say that now it is six fifteen in the morning.

  The risk—I’m daring to discover new lands. Where never human steps trod. First I must pass through the perfumed vegetable matter. I was given a night jessamine that is on my terrace. I’m going to start making my own perfume: I buy the right alcohol and the essence of whatever is already crushed and especially the fixer which must be of purely animal origin. Heavy musk. This is the final low chord of the adagio. My number is 9. It’s 7. It’s 8. All beyond thought. If all this exists, then I am. But why this unease? It’s because I’m not living in the only way that exists for everyone to live and I don’t even know which one it is. Uncomfortable. I don’t feel well. I don’t know what it is. But something is wrong and making me uneasy. Yet I am being frank and playing fair. I show my cards. I just don’t tell the facts of my life: I’m secretive by nature. So what’s wrong? I just know that I don’t want cheating. I refuse. I deepened myself but I don’t believe in myself because my thought is invented.

  I can already prepare for the “he” or “she.” The adagio reached its end. So I start. I don’t lie. My truth sparkles like a pendant on a crystal chandelier.

  But it is hidden. I can stand it because I’m strong: I ate my own placenta.

  Though everything is so fragile. I feel so lost. I live off a secret that glows in luminous rays that would darken me if I didn’t cover them with a heavy cloak of false certainties. May the God help me: I am without a guide and it is dark once again.