The Kindly Ones

It was snowing in the night, but I continued wandering in this limitless space where my thought reigned sovereign, making and unmaking forms with an absolute freedom that nevertheless kept running into the limits of bodies, mine real, material, and hers imagined and thus inexhaustible, in an erratic to-and-fro that left me each time emptier, more febrile, more desperate. Sitting naked on the bed, drained, I drank brandy and smoked and my gaze went from the outside, from my reddened knees, my long veined hands, my sex shriveled up at the bottom of my slightly bulging belly, to the inside, where it traveled over her sleeping body, sprawled out on her stomach, her head turned toward me, her legs stretched out, like a little girl. I gently parted her hair and bared her neck, her beautiful, powerful neck, and then my thoughts returned, as in the afternoon, to the strangled neck of our mother, she who had borne us together in her womb, I caressed my sister’s neck and tried seriously and attentively to imagine myself twisting my mother’s neck, but it was impossible, the image didn’t come, there was no trace of such an image inside me, it stubbornly refused to form in the mirror that I contemplated within myself, this mirror reflected nothing, remained empty, even when I placed both my hands under my sister’s hair and said to myself: Oh my hands on my sister’s nape. Oh my hands on my mother’s neck. No, nothing, there was nothing. Suddenly shivering, I curled up in a fetal ball at the end of the bed. After a long while I opened my eyes. She lay fully stretched out, one hand on her belly, her legs apart. Her vulva was opposite my face. The small lips protruded slightly from the pale, domed flesh. This sex was watching at me, spying on me, like a Gorgon’s head, like a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks. Little by little this silent gaze penetrated me to the marrow. My breath sped up and I stretched out my hand to hide it: I no longer saw it, but it still saw me and stripped me bare (whereas I was already naked). If only I could still get hard, I thought, I could use my prick like a stake hardened in the fire, and blind this Polyphemus who made me Nobody. But my cock remained inert, I seemed turned to stone. I stretched out my arm and buried my middle finger into this boundless eye. The hips moved slightly, but that was all. Far from piercing it, I had on the contrary opened it wide, freeing the gaze of the eye still hiding behind it. Then I had an idea: I took out my finger and, dragging myself forward on my forearms, I pushed my forehead against this vulva, pressing my scar against the hole. Now I was the one looking inside, searching the depths of this body with my radiant third eye, as her own single eye irradiated me and we blinded each other mutually: without moving, I came in an immense splash of white light, as she cried out: “What are you doing, what are you doing?” and I laughed out loud, sperm still gushing in huge spurts from my penis, jubilant, I bit deep into her vulva to swallow it whole, and my eyes finally opened, cleared, and saw everything.