House of Incest Read Free

hear the tearing, the anger and love,
passion and pity. When the act of dislocation suddenly ceases—or when I cease
to be aware of the sound—then the silence is more terrible because there is
nothing but insanity around me, the insanity of things pulling, pulling within
oneself, the roots tearing at each other to grow separately, the strain made to
achieve unity.
    It requires only a bar of music to still the
dislocation for a moment; but there comes the smile again, and I know that the
two of us have leaped beyond cohesion.
    Greyness is no ordinary greyness, but a vast
lead roof which covers the world like the lid of a soup pan. The breath of
human beings is like the steam of a laundry house. The smoke of cigarettes is
like a rain of ashes from Vesuvius. The lights taste of sulphur, and each face
stares at you with the immensity of its defects. The smallness of a room is
like that of an iron cage in which one can neither sit nor lie down. The
largeness of other rooms is like a mortal danger always suspended above you,
awaiting the moment of your joy to fall. Laughter and tears are not separate
experiences, with intervals of rest: they rush out together and it is like walk
with a sword between your legs. Rain does not wet your hair but drips in the
cells of the brain with the obstinacy of a leak. Snow does not freeze the
hands, but like ether distends the lungs until they burst. All the ships are
sinking with fire in their bowels, and there are fires hissing in the cellars
of every house. The loved one’s whitest flesh is what the broken glass will cut
and the wheel crush. The long howls in the night are howls of death. Night is
the collaborator of torturers. Day is the light on harrowing discoveries. If a
dog barks it is the man who loves wide gashes leaping in through the window.
Laughter precedes hysteria. I am waiting for the heavy fall and the foam at the
mouth.
    A room with a ceiling threatening me like a
pair of open scissors. Attic windows lie on a bed like gravel. All connections
are breaking. Slowly I part from each being I love, slowly, carefully,
completely. I tell them what I owe them and what they owe me. I cull their last
glances and the last orgasm. My house is empty, sun-glazed, reflectively alive,
its stillness gathering implications, secret images which some day will madden
me when I stand before blank walls, hearing far too much and seeing more than
is humanly bearable. I part from them all. I die in a small scissor-arched
room, dispossessed of my loves and my belongings, not even registered in the
hotel book. At the same time I know that if I stayed in this room a few days an
entirely new life could begin—like the soldering of human flesh after an operation.
It is the terror of this new life, more than the terror of dying, which arouses
me. I jump out of bed and run out of this room growing around me like a
poisoned web, seizing my imagination, gnawing into my memory so that in seven
moments I will forget who I am and whom I have loved.
    It was room number 35 in which I might have
awakened next morning mad or a whore.
    Desire which had stretched the nerve broke, and
each nerve seemed to break separately, continuously, making incisions, and acid ran instead of blood. I writhed within my own life,
seeking a free avenue to carry the molten cries, to melt the pain into a
cauldron of words for everyone to dip into, everyone who sought words for their
own pain. What an enormous cauldron I stir now; enormous mouthfuls of acid I
feed the others now, words bitter enough to burn all bitterness.
    Disrupt the brown crust of the earth and all
the sea will rise; the sea-anemones will float over my bed, and the dead ships
will end their voyages in my garden. Exorcise the demons who ring the hours
over my head at night when all counting should be suspended; they ring because
they know that in my dreams I am cheating them of centuries. It must be counted
like an hour against me.
    I heard the lutes which were brought