The Passion According to G.H. Read online

  Until — finally managing to hear myself, finally managing to get myself under control — I lifted my hand high in the air as if my whole body, along with the blow of my arm, would come down against the wardrobe door.

  But that was when I saw the roach’s face.

  It was sticking straight out, at the height of my head and my eyes. For a second I sat there with my hand frozen in the air. Then I gradually lowered it.

  A second earlier I might still have been able not to see the countenance on the cockroach’s face.

  But it happened a fraction of a second too late: I was seeing. My hand, which had lowered when it abandoned its determination to strike, was slowly rising back to stomach-level: though I myself hadn’t moved, my stomach had cringed inside my body. My mouth was terribly dry, I ran an equally dry tongue over my rough lips.

  It was a face without a contour. The antennae stuck out in whiskers on either side of its mouth. Its brown mouth was well-drawn. The long and slender whiskers were moving slow and dry. Its black faceted eyes were looking. It was a cockroach as old as a fossilized fish. It was a cockroach as old as salamanders and chimeras and griffins and leviathans. It was as ancient as a legend. I looked at its mouth: there was the real mouth.

  I had never seen a roach’s mouth. I in fact — I had never actually seen a cockroach. I had just been repulsed by its ancient and ever-present existence — but had never actually come face-to-face with one, not even in thought.

  And so I was discovering that, though compact, a roach is composed of layers and brown layers, fine as onionskin, as if each could be lifted by a fingernail and still there would always be another underneath, and then another. Maybe the scales were its wings, but then it must be made of layers and layers of thin wings pressed together to form that compact body.

  It was reddish-brown. And had cilia all over. Maybe the cilia were its multiple legs. The antennae were now still, dry and dusty strands.

  A cockroach doesn’t have a nose. I looked at it, with that mouth and eyes: it looked like a dying mulatto woman. But its eyes were radiant and black. The eyes of a bride. Each individual eye looked like a cockroach. The fringed, dark, dustless and living eye. And the other eye was the same. Two roaches implanted in the roach, and each eye reproduced the entire cockroach.

  Each eye reproduced the entire cockroach.

  — Pardon me for giving you this, hand holding mine, but I don’t want this for myself! take that roach, I don’t want what I saw.

  There I was open-mouthed and offended and withdrawn — faced with the dusty being looking back at me. Take what I saw: because what I was seeing with an embarrassment so painful and so frightened and so innocent, what I was seeing was life looking back at me.

  How else could I describe that crude and horrible, raw matter and dry plasma, that was there, as I shrank into myself with dry nausea, I falling centuries and centuries inside a mud — it was mud, and not even dried mud but mud still damp and still alive, it was a mud in which the roots of my identity were still shifting with unbearable slowness.

  Take it, take all this for yourself, I don’t want to be a living person! I’m disgusted and amazed by myself, thick mud slowly oozing.

  That’s what it was — so that’s what it was. Because I’d looked at the living roach and was discovering inside it the identity of my deepest life. In a difficult demolition, hard and narrow paths were opening within me.

  I looked at it, at the roach: I hated it so much that I was going over to its side, feeling solidarity with it, since I couldn’t stand being left alone with my aggression.

  And all of a sudden I moaned out loud, this time I heard my moan. Because rising to my surface like pus was my truest matter — and with fright and loathing I was feeling that “I-being” was coming from a source far prior to the human source and, with horror, much greater than the human.

  Opening in me, with the slowness of stone doors, opening in me was the wide life of silence, the same that was in the fixed sun, the same that was in the immobilized roach. And that could be the same as in me! if I had the courage to abandon . . . to abandon my feelings? If I had the courage to abandon hope.

  Hope for what? For the first time I was astonished to feel that I’d based an entire hope on becoming something that I was not. The hope — what other name could I give it? — that for the first time I now was going to abandon, out of courage and mortal curiosity. Had hope, in my prior life, been based upon a truth? With childlike surprise, I was starting to doubt it.

  To find out what I really could hope for, would I first have to pass through my truth? To what extent had I invented a destiny now, while subterraneously living from another?

  I closed my eyes, waiting for the astonishment to pass, waiting for my panting to calm to the point that it was no longer that awful moan that I’d heard as if coming from the bottom of a dry, deep cistern, as the cockroach was a creature of a dry cistern. I was still feeling, at an incalculable distance within me, that moan that was no longer reaching my throat.

  This is madness, I thought with my eyes closed. But it was so undeniable feeling that birth from inside the dust — that all I could do was follow something I was well aware wasn’t madness, it was, my God, the worse truth, the horrible one. But why horrible? Because without words it contradicted everything I used to think also without words.

  I waited for the astonishment to pass, for health to return. But I was realizing, in an immemorial effort of memory, that I had felt this astonishment before: it was the same one I had experienced when I saw my own blood outside of me, and I had marveled at it. Since the blood I was seeing outside of me, that blood I was drawn to with such wonder: it was mine.

  I didn’t want to open my eyes, I didn’t want to keep on seeing. It was important not to forget the rules and the laws, to remember that without the rules and laws there would be no order, I had to not forget them and defend them in order to defend myself.

  But it was already too late for me to hold myself back.

  The first bind had already involuntarily burst, and I was breaking loose from the law, though I intuited that I was going to enter the hell of living matter — what kind of hell awaited me? but I had to go. I had to sink into my soul’s damnation, curiosity was consuming me.

  So I opened my eyes all at once, and saw the full endless vastness of the room, that room that was vibrating in silence, laboratory of hell.

  The room, the unknown room. My entrance into it was finally complete.

  The entrance to this room had a single passageway, and a narrow one: through the cockroach. The cockroach that was filling the room with finally open vibration, the vibrations of its rattlesnake tails in the desert. Through a painstaking route, I had reached the deep incision in the wall that was that room — and the crevice created a vast, natural hollow hall as in a cave.

  Naked, as if prepared for the entrance of a single person. And whoever entered would be transformed into a “she” or “he.” I was the one the room called “she.” An I had gone in which the room had given a dimension of she. As if I too were the other side of the cube, the side that goes unseen when looked at straight on.

  And in my great dilation, I was in the desert. How can I explain it to you? in the desert as I’d never been before. It was a desert that was calling me as a monotonous and remote canticle calls. I was being seduced. And I was going toward that promising madness. But my fear wasn’t that of someone going toward madness, but toward a truth — my fear was of having a truth that I’d come not to want, an infamizing truth that would make me crawl along and be on the roach’s level. My first contact with truths always defamed me.

  — Hold my hand, because I feel that I’m going. I’m going once again toward the most divine primary life, I’m going toward a hell of raw life. Don’t let me see because I’m close to seeing the nucleus of life — and, through the cockroach that even now I’m seeing again, through this specimen of calm living horror, I’m afraid that in this nucleus I’ll no longer k
now what hope is.

  The cockroach is pure seduction. Cilia, blinking cilia that keep calling.

  I too, who was slowly reducing myself to whatever in me was irreducible, I too had thousands of blinking cilia, and with my cilia I move forward, I protozoan, pure protein. Hold my hand, I reached the irreducible with the inevitability of a death-knell — I sense that all this is ancient and vast, I sense in the hieroglyph of the slow roach the writing of the Far East. And in this desert of great seductions, the creatures: I and the living roach. Life, my love, is a great seduction in which all that exists seduces. That room that was deserted and for that reason primally alive. I had reached the nothing, and the nothing was living and moist.

  I had reached the nothing, and the nothing was living and moist.

  It was then — it was then that as if from a tube the matter began slowly oozing out of the roach that had been crushed.

  The roach’s matter, which was its insides, the thick, whitish and slow matter, was coming out as from a tube of toothpaste.

  Before my nauseated and seduced eyes, the shape of the roach began slowly modifying as it swelled outward. The white matter slowly spilled atop its back like a burden. Immobilized, it was bearing atop its dusty flanks the weight of its own body.

  “Scream,” I calmly ordered myself. “Scream,” I repeated uselessly with a sigh of deep quietude.

  The white thickness had halted atop its scales. I looked at the ceiling, briefly resting the eyes that I felt had become deep and large.

  But if I screamed even once, I might never again be able to stop. If I screamed nobody could ever help me again; whereas, if I never revealed my neediness, I wouldn’t scare anybody and they would help me unawares; but only if I didn’t scare anybody by venturing outside the rules. But if they find out, they’ll be scared, we who keep the scream as an inviolable secret. If I raised the alarm at being alive, voiceless and hard they would drag me away since they drag away those who depart the possible world, the exceptional being is dragged away, the screaming being.

  I looked at the ceiling with heavy eyes. Everything could be fiercely summed up in never emitting a first scream — a first scream unleashes all the others, the first scream at birth unleashes a life, if I screamed I would awaken thousands of screaming beings who would loose upon the rooftops a chorus of screams and horror. If I screamed I would unleash the existence — the existence of what? the existence of the world. With reverence I feared the existence of the world for me.

  — Because, hand that sustains me, because I, in a trial I never want again, in a trial for which I ask pardon for myself, I was exiting my world and entering the world.

  Because I was no longer seeing myself, I was simply seeing. A whole civilization that had sprung up, with the guarantee that what one sees be mixed immediately with what one feels, an entire civilization whose foundation is salvation — so I was in its ruins. The only ones who could depart this civilization were those whose special role is to depart it: a scientist is given leave, a priest is given permission. But not a woman who doesn’t even have the guarantees of a title. And I was fleeing, uneasily I was fleeing.

  If you knew the solitude of those first steps of mine. It wasn’t like the solitude of a person. It was as if I’d already died and was taking the first steps alone into another life. And it was as if that solitude was called glory, and I too knew it was a glory, and was shivering all over in that divine primal glory that I not only didn’t understand, but deeply didn’t want.

  — Because, you see, I knew I was entering the crude and raw glory of nature. Seduced, I was still fighting as best I could against the quicksand that was swallowing me: and each movement I was making toward “no, no!”, each movement pushed me inevitably on; not having the strength to fight was my only forgiveness.

  I looked around the room where I’d imprisoned myself, and sought an exit, desperately trying to escape, and inside me I had already shrunk so much that my soul was against the wall — not even able to stop, no longer wanting to stop, fascinated by the certainty of the magnet that was drawing me, I shrank into myself up to the wall where I was implanted in the drawing of the woman. I had shrunk into the marrow of my bones, my last refuge. Where, on the wall, I was so naked that I had no shadow.

  And the measurements, the measurements were still the same, I could feel they were, I knew I’d never been more than that woman on the wall, I was she. And I was well preserved, a long and fruitful path.

  My tension suddenly snapped like a noise interrupted.

  And the first true silence began to whisper. Whatever I’d seen that was so calm and vast and foreign in my dark and smiling photographs — whatever that was was outside for the first time and entirely within my reach, incomprehensible but within my reach.

  Which was giving me relief as a thirst is relieved, it was relieving me as if my whole life I’d been waiting for a water as necessary for my bristling body as cocaine is for a body that demands it. Finally the body, soaked with silence, was calming down. The relief came from my fitting into the mute drawing in the cave.

  Until that moment I hadn’t wholly perceived my struggle, that’s how buried I was in it. But now, from the silence into which I had finally fallen, I knew I’d struggled, that I had succumbed and surrendered.

  And that, now, I really was in the room.

  As inside it as a drawing that has been in a cave for three hundred thousand years. And that’s how I fit inside myself, that’s how I inside myself was engraved upon the wall.

  The narrow route passed through the difficult cockroach, and I’d squeezed with disgust through that body of scales and mud. And I’d ended up, I too completely filthy, emerging through the cockroach into my past that was my continuous present and my continuous future — and that today and always is on the wall, and my fifteen million daughters, from then up to myself, were there too. My life was as continuous as death. Life is so continuous that we divide it into stages, and we call one of them death. I had always been in life, and it matters little that it wasn’t I properly speaking, not what I’d usually call I. I was always in life.

  I, neutral cockroach body, I with a life that at last doesn’t escape me because I finally see it outside of myself — I am the roach, I am my leg, I am my hair, I am the section of whitest light on the plaster of the wall — I am every hellish piece of me — life in me is so demanding that if they hacked me up, like a lizard, the pieces would keep trembling and squirming. I am the silence engraved on a wall, and the oldest butterfly flutters and finds me: the same as always. From birth to death is when I call myself human, and shall never actually die.

  But that isn’t eternity, it’s damnation.

  How luxurious this silence is. It’s built up of centuries. It’s a silence of a roach that’s looking. The world looks at itself in me. Everything looks at everything, everything lives the other; in this desert things know things. Things know things so much that that’s . . . that’s what I’ll call forgiveness, if I want to save myself in the human world. It’s forgiveness itself. Forgiveness is an attribute of living matter.

  Forgiveness is an attribute of living matter.

  —You see, my love, see how out of fear I’m already organizing, see how I still can’t deal with these primary laboratory elements without immediately wanting to organize hope. Because for now the metamorphosis of me into myself makes no sense. It’s a metamorphosis in which I lose everything I had, and what I had was me — I only have what I am. And what am I now? I am: standing in front of a fright. I am: what I saw. I don’t understand and I am afraid to understand, the matter of the world frightens me, with its planets and roaches.

  I, who used to live on words of charity or pride or anything. But what an abyss between the word and what it was trying to do, what an abyss between the word love and the love that doesn’t even have a human meaning — because — because love is living matter. Is love living matter?

  What was it that happened to me yesterday? and now? I’m confused,
I crossed deserts and deserts, but did I get stuck by some detail? trapped as beneath a rock.

  No, wait, wait: with relief I must remember that I left that room yesterday, I left it, I’m free! and still have a chance to recover. If I want to.

  But do I?

  What I saw is not organizable. But if I really want to, right now, I could still translate what I found out into terms closer to ours, to human terms, and could still let those hours yesterday pass unnoticed. If I still want to I could, within our language, wonder some other way what happened to me.

  And, if I put it that way, I can still find an answer that would let me recover. Recovery would be knowing that: G. H. was a woman who lived well, lived well, lived well, lived on the uppermost layer of the sands of the world, and the sands had never caved in beneath her feet: the coordination was such that, as the sands moved, her feet moved along with them, and so everything stayed firm and compact. G. H. lived on the top floor of a superstructure, and, though built in the air, it was a solid building, she herself in the air, as bees weave life in the air. And that had been happening for centuries, with the necessary or occasional changes, and it worked. It worked — at least nothing spoke and nobody spoke, nobody said no; so it worked.

  But, precisely this slow accumulation of centuries automatically piling atop each other was what, without anybody noticing, was making the construction in the air very heavy: it was getting saturated with itself: getting more compact, instead of getting more fragile. The accumulation of living in a superstructure was getting increasingly heavy to stay up in the air.

  Like a building in which everyone sleeps calmly at night, unaware that the foundations are sagging and that, in an instant unsuggested by the peacefulness, the beams will give way because their cohesive strength is slowly pulling them apart one millimeter per century. And then, when it’s least expected — in an instant as repetitively common as lifting a drink to a smiling mouth during a dance — then, yesterday, on a day as full of sunlight as the days at the height of summer, with men working and kitchens giving off smoke and a jackhammer shattering stones and children laughing and a priest trying to stop, but stop what? yesterday, without warning, there was the loud sound of something solid that suddenly crumbles.