The Kindly Ones

Encontre desir fait voleir.

When he does what he does not desire to do

Because he can’t have what he wants

He turns his will against desire.

And once again it was as if her long ghostlike hand had come and slipped under my arm, all the way from her Helvetian exile or else right behind me, to place a finger gently in front of my eyes under these words, this irrevocable sentence that I couldn’t accept, that I rejected with all the miserable determination I could still muster.

And thus I fell into a long, endless stretto, where every response came before the question was over, but in retrograde, like a cancrizans. Of the last days spent in that house, only scraps of images, disconnected and senseless, remain, confused but animated too by the implacable logic of dream, the very speech or rather the clumsy croaking of desire. I slept every night now in her odorless bed, stretching myself out on my stomach with all my limbs extended, or else curling into a ball on my side, my head empty of all thought. Nothing remained in this bed that recalled her, not even a strand of hair, I had taken off the sheets to examine the mattress, hoping to find at least a bloodstain, but the mattress was as clean as the sheets. So I set about soiling it myself, squatting with my legs wide apart, the ghostly body of my sister open beneath me, her head turned slightly aside and her hair pulled back to reveal her small, delicate, round ear that I loved so, then I collapsed in my slime and abruptly fell asleep, my belly still sticky. I wanted to possess this bed, but it was the bed that possessed me, no longer let me go. All kinds of phantoms came to coil up in my sleep, I tried to chase them away, for I wanted only my sister there, but they were stubborn, they returned by the ways I least expected them, like the shameless little feral girls in Stalingrad, I opened my eyes and one of them had slid right up against me, she was turning her back to me and pushing her buttocks against my belly, my penis entered her from that end and she stayed like that, moving very slowly, and then afterward she kept me in her ass, we fell asleep that way, embedded in each other. And when we woke up she slipped her hand between her thighs and raked my scrotum, almost painfully, and again I became hard inside her, one hand on the bone of her taut hip, and I turned her over onto her stomach and began again, as she clenched her little fists in the sheets and moved without a sound. She never left me free. But then another, unexpected feeling came over me, a gentle and forlorn feeling. Yes, that’s exactly it, it’s coming back to me now, she was blond, gentle and forlorn. I don’t know how far things went between us. The other image, the one of the girl sleeping with her lover’s cock in her ass, doesn’t involve her. It wasn’t Helene, that’s certain, for I have a confused idea that her father was a policeman, a high official who didn’t approve of his daughter’s choice and regarded me with hostility, and then also with Helene my hand had never gone farther than her knee, which here was perhaps not the case. This blond girl too took up room in the big bed, room that wasn’t hers. All this caused me a great deal of concern. But finally I succeeded in driving them all away, by brute force, at least up against the torsaded posts of the canopy, and in leading my sister back by the hand and laying her down in the middle of the bed, I spread out on top of her with all my weight, my belly naked right against the scar slicing across hers, I thrust against her, vainly and with increasing rage, and finally there was a great opening, as if my body in turn were split open by the surgeon’s blade, my bowels poured onto her, the children’s door opened on its own beneath me and everything flowed in that way, I was lying on her as one lies in the snow, but I was still clothed, I took off my skin, abandoned my naked bones to the embrace of this cold white snow that was her body, and it closed in over me.