The Kindly Ones

A gleam of light from the setting sun passed under the clouds and struck the wall of the bedroom, the secretary, the side of the wardrobe, the foot of the bed. I got up and went to piss, then went downstairs to the kitchen. Everything was quiet. I cut some slices of good coarse peasant bread, buttered them, put some thick slices of ham on top. I also found some pickles, a terrine of pâté, some hard-boiled eggs, and put it all onto a tray with silverware, two glasses, and a bottle of good Burgundy, a Vosne-Romanée, I think it was. I returned to the bedroom and placed the tray on the bed. I sat down cross-legged and contemplated the empty sheets before me, across the tray. Slowly my sister took shape there, with a surprising solidity. She was sleeping on her side, folded in on herself; gravity drew down her breasts and even, a little, her belly, her skin was stretched over her raised, angular hip. It wasn’t her body that was sleeping but she who, sated, was sleeping nestled inside her body. A little bright red blood was seeping between her legs, without staining the bed, and all this heavy humanity was like a stake driven into my eyes; it didn’t blind me, though, but on the contrary opened up my third eye, the pineal eye grafted into my head by a Russian sniper. I uncorked the bottle, breathed in the heady odor deeply, then poured two glasses. I drank and began to eat. I was immensely hungry, I devoured everything that was there and emptied the bottle of wine. Outside, the day was drawing to a close, the room was growing dark. I cleared the tray, lit some candles, and brought over some cigarettes that I smoked lying on my back, the ashtray on my stomach. Above me, I could hear a frantic buzzing. I looked around, without moving, and saw a fly on the ceiling. A spider was leaving it and slipping into a crack in the molding. The fly was trapped in the spiderweb, struggling with this buzzing to free itself, in vain. At that instant a breath passed over my penis, a phantom finger, the tip of a tongue; immediately it began to swell up, to unfold. I put the ashtray aside and imagined her body slipping over me, rearing up to bury me inside her while her breasts sat heavy in my hands, her thick black hair forming a curtain round my head, framing a face lit up by an immense, radiant smile, which said to me: “You have been placed in this world for one single thing, to fuck me.” The fly kept buzzing, but ever less frequently, it would start suddenly and then stop. I felt the base of her spine beneath my hands, the small of her back, her mouth, above me, murmured: “Oh, God, oh, God.” Afterward, I looked at the fly again. It was silent and still, the poison had finally overcome it. I waited for the spider to reemerge. Then I must have fallen asleep. A furious outbreak of buzzing woke me up, I opened my eyes and watched. The spider was hovering near the struggling fly. The spider hesitated, came forward and withdrew, returned finally to its crack. Again the fly stopped moving. I tried to imagine its silent terror, its fear fractured in its faceted eyes. From time to time the spider reemerged, tested its prey with a leg, added a few spins to the cocoon, returned; and I observed this interminable agony, until the moment the spider, hours later, finally dragged the dead or overcome fly into the molding to consume it in peace.

When day came, still naked, I put on some shoes so as not to get my feet dirty and went to explore this large, cold, dark house. It unfurled around my charged body, my skin white and bristling from the cold, as sensitive over its entire surface as my stiff penis or my tingling anus. It was an invitation to the worst excesses, to the most insane, transgressive games, and since the tender, warm body I desired was denied to me, I used her house as I would have used her, I made love to her house. I went everywhere, lay down in the beds, stretched out on the tables or the carpets, rubbed my backside against the corners of furniture, jerked off in armchairs or closed wardrobes, in the midst of clothes smelling of dust and mothballs. I even thus entered von Üxküll’s apartments, with a feeling of childlike triumph at first, then of humiliation. And humiliation in one form or another never let go of me, a sense of the mad vanity of my gestures, but this humiliation and this vanity too placed themselves at my service, and I profited from them with an evil, limitless joy.