Here, I am finally at home: nestling in my murderer’s den like a fetus in its swollen womb, lovingly depicted by Professor Leblanc’s freckled hand: a ghastly little creature cozily curled up for the somersault of life from the mouth of the womb into the crouched burial position of Stone Age people, woeful little legs drawn up to its blistered forehead, webbed little fists furiously clenched against its blind pug face . . .

In general, there’s a lot of homey secrecy here, in Leblanc’s terms: the brutal iron coat hook on the door (clinical white enamel) is waiting for cattle to slaughter, as if a halved woman were hanging from it, meticulously prepared by the professor’s artistic, carrot-haired hand:

Gaia’s splendidly fleshy, exotic leg (slightly bent at the knee, the foot in the high-heeled shoe of society whores), testifying to the humanity of the fallow anatomy above it:

over the massive thigh (in the evening-shadow tones of the shiny mulatto skin, pouring, as if smoked, from the tender, mucus-glistening constriction of the silk stocking), the elegant arc of the abdominal-wall cross section curves into the intensely downy parabola summit of the vagina, tipping inwardly into the blossom pistil of the uterus—

“Et je vous assure, mon cher ami: c’est pareil chez les noires comme chez les blanches—d’ailleurs, ne me dites pas que vous avez senti la moindre différence”—

over it, the concave red-white-red stripes of the rib cage—

“Et voyez-vous: l’intérieur du thorax est tout à fait—mais tout à fait égal chez les unes comme chez les autres: bien entendu à l’extérieur il y a quand même des variantes . . .”

and from the throat, as if blown by the pipe of an art-glass blower: a wolf-toothed grin, forcing its way like cigarette smoke through the labyrinth of the frontal sinus and nasal cavity.

“C’est ça, mon cher: ce que vous avez aimé!”

•

I sit here like a maggot in the heart of night.

The glow of the lamp on the dresser where I write (I’ve covered the mirror) peels a slanting hollow cone of yellow light from the darkness:

in it, I huddle over my papers (caught in my own web).

The light gathers around my feet in an elliptical puddle; in it, I suck in my shadow.

Here I dwell in the core of nocturnal stillness. The telephone at the switchboard (two floors below me) futilely bores into the stillness with its dull buzzing. It is doomed to be ignored. The handsome Pole is asleep, or reads, with world-remote ardor, one of his detective stories. (Or is he with some woman somewhere in one of these rooms stacked like boxes one atop the other? It doesn’t concern me anymore.) The silence is too thick for this buzzing thread to penetrate. The sound merely sews it thicker, a small-stitch quivering of desperate patience, pausing only to resume, like the stickily entangled murmur of a fly on sized paper: