THREE

Sensual pleasure is the embrace of a dead body by two living beings. The “corpse” in this case is time murdered for a time and made consubstantial to the sense of touch.

Malcolm de Chazal

He was still talking and cursing, but I dropped his lighter: we were groping in the dark now, stumbling up the wooden staircase, of course the old man hadn’t come back and so there was no duck, that was to be expected probably he was sleeping off his gin, there was still something like a faint gleam of light in the room the kind that lingers on after the twilight we could see the reflection in the wood of the bed I bumped into the chair and knocked it over it made a terrible noise in the empty house we stood still listening for a minute as if someone could have heard it from the road then I groped again in the darkness to pick it up put down my rifle sat down then I saw that he had lain down on the bed I said Shit the least you could do is take off your spurs, then there was nothing else, that is remembering nothing, I think I must have fallen asleep there maybe even before I was finished talking, maybe I hadn’t even got to the spurs perhaps I had simply thought of it the nothingness the black sleep falling over me like a bell burying me while I was sitting on the chair leaning forward my hand groping trying to unbuckle the strap of my, thinking what a crazy idea it had been to put them back on since we had left the horses in the stable what good, their rowels were clogged with caked blood from having dug into their flanks on Sunday when we had covered those fifteen kilometres at a gallop almost the whole time to get over the bridge before it was blown up, once he told us that one of those old men in striped trousers grey stovepipe walrus moustache and rosette in his buttonhole had paid him to ride him (Ride him? I said, Yes ride him What like a horse Do I have to draw you a picture?—looking at me out of his huge astonished eyes as if I were an idiot or just about), Iglésia putting a string in his mouth, his crop in his hand, wearing his jockey silk and boots and he had had to put on the spurs, the man stark naked on all fours on the carpet of his bedroom he had to whip him saw at his mouth and scratch his belly with the spurs, telling this in his usual perpetually morose and naturally scandalized voice so that it was impossible to tell if he was really shocked: at most he might have merely found the thing a little incomprehensible but not so much as that after all, disgusting too, but not so much either, accustomed as he was to the eccentricities of the rich, according them that preoccupied indulgence (more astonished than outraged, and slightly but not very contemptuous) of the poor—whores, pimps or flunkies; that sleep fell over me as if someone had suddenly thrown a blanket over my head, imprisoning me, suddenly everything went completely black, maybe I was dead maybe that sentry had fired first and faster, perhaps I was still lying back there in the fragrant grass of the ditch in that furrow of the earth breathing smelling its black and bitter humus lapping her pink but not pink nothing but the darkness in the deep shadows licking my face but in any case my hands my tongue able to touch her know her assure myself my blind hands reassured touching her everywhere running over her her back her belly with the sound of silk then encountering that shaggy tuft growing like an alien parasite on her smooth nakedness, I kept running over her crawling under her exploring in the darkness discovering her enormous and shadowy body as though under a milk-giving goat, the goat foot (he said they did it with their goats as well as with their wives or their sisters) sucking the perfume of her bronze breasts finally reaching that warm tuft lapping intoxicating myself clinging to the silky hollow of her thighs I could see her buttocks above me gleaming faintly phosphorescent bluish in the darkness while I drank endlessly feeling that stem growing out of me that tree growing its roots branching inside my belly my loins enveloping me like ivy creeping down my back wrapping round my neck, I seemed to be shrinking in proportion as it grew feeding on me becoming me or rather me becoming it and then there was nothing left of my body but a shrunken wizened foetus lying between the lips of a ditch as if I could melt into it disappear there engulf myself there clinging like those baby monkeys beneath the belly of their mother to her belly to her many breasts burying myself in that tawny clamminess I said Don’t put on the light I grabbed her arm as it was reaching she tasted salty like shellfish I didn’t want to know admit anything else, only to go on lapping her