... In blood are we born. I came into the world a second time the day when,
while washing, I saw a red stain on my sheet. It was in Cabourg,
the night before Easter. ...
Perhaps I had already stepped to the other side of the
looking glass, since inside I no longer recognized the
appaerance of things. Who was this scrawny girl in the
white nightgown, in the middle of her open thighs a trickle
of red liquor the color of church wine? And those eyes.
Were those eyes mine, barbwired with lashes vibrating like
a paramecium's, those eyes as opaque as hard stones, those
agate eyes that had just pierced the fog and had begun
to see? Were those pointy shoulders mine, the clavicles
as straight as two ivory rulers pushing to the surface
of the skin, that barest hint of breasts, that belly of
a kid who suffers from air in the stomach and eats too
much cake? And down there, the unknown. Two furrows, two
small streams of blood that were blue, forked, branching,
hidden in the hollow of the crotch, in the place where
the skin is white, creamy, and sickly due to its softness,
and farther down, genitals - a nail scratch, which hadn't
much to do with the whole business. It was most especially at stomach
level that the upheaval was located. A scratched stomach and guts thanked
me for their wet heavy wound, the Devil's claw, fire and flood, a prickling
burn and a reflection floating with splattered moons. And what if I
was dreaming? What if I had cut myself on some glass? If somebody had
slashed my pussy with shards in order to punish me? For what? Well,
you've always done something wrong, ever since that little number with
the apple. I touched the slit and drew away my vermilion-colored finger.
No, no bits of glass. It's funny, I am as hollow as a tree trunk, I
thought. Hollow as those round billboad columns in the streets. And
I felt my legs go wobbly as if I had just been plopped in front of
the Holy Grail; I felt like splattering myself with fresh blood, filling
up the bidet with it and sticking in my feet, doing a lipstick drawning
on the mirrors of enormous scarlet genitals, open, pulpy, and moistened
like lips and elongated like squash; from my belly came rushing down
all the rivers of the earth, the waters of the Ganges had its source
at the roots of my life and flowed from my mystical wound; all around
me I felt the phosphorescence and the wet shimmer of Salammbô's
zaïmph, all around my head floated a little of the diffuse bluish
glow stolen from the moon's corona, queen of moisture, the ever-changing
sticky uterine cavern of night. In my belly, an earthquakened crust,
sea trenches opened up, Atlantic ridges, wounds of gleaming coral,
a whole Labrador which flowed toward the barely open estuary of my
sex where palpitated lichens and starry foam caressed by the primordial
tide, the tide that eats away at chalk cliffs, the wine-colored tide
that had also made me crumble away, had invaded me, infested me, flooded
me, gobbled me up by the root and picked me clean down to the level
of a peneplain only to leave me there, crucified, stretched out on
the ground with open thighs licked by a luminous ruby-colored foam. ...
