The Malady of Death Read Free

there it strokes. You look at the opening and what surrounds it, the whole body. You don't see anything.
     
     
    You want to see all of a woman, as much as possible. You don't see that for you it's impossible.
    You look at the closed shape.
    First you see slight tremors showing on the skin, just like those of suffering. And then you see the eyelids flicker as if the eyes wanted to see. And then you see the mouth open as if it wanted to say something. And then you notice that under your caresses the lips of her sex are swelling up, and that from their smoothness comes a hot sticky liquid, as it might be blood.
    Then you stroke more quickly.
    And you see that her thighs are opening to give your hand more room, so that you can stroke better than before.
    And suddenly, in a moan, you see pleasure come upon her, take possession of her, make her arch up from the bed. You look intently at what you have just done to her body. Then you see it fall back inert on the white of the bed. It breathes fast, in gasps that get further and further apart. And then the eyes shut tighter than before, sink deeper into the face. Then they open, and then they shut again. They shut.
    You've looked at everything. At last you too shut your eyes. You stay like that a long time, with your eyes shut, like her.
     
     
    You think of outside your room, of the streets in the town, the lonely little squares over by the station. Of those winter Saturdays all alike.
    And then you listen to the approaching sound. To the sea.
     
    *
     
    You listen to the sea. It's very close to the walls of the room. Through the windows that colorless light still, the slowness of the day to spread over the sky, the black sea still, the sleeping body, the stranger in the room.
    And then you do it. I couldn't say why. I see you do it without knowing why. You could go out of the room and leave the body, the sleeping form. But no, you do it, apparently as another would, but with the complete difference that separates you from her. You do it, you go back towards the body.
    You cover it completely with your own, you draw it towards you so as not to crush it with your strength, so as not to kill it, and then you do it, you return to the nightly dwelling, you are engulfed.
    You stay on in that abode. You go on weeping. You think you know you know not what, you can't go through with that knowledge, you think you alone are the image of the world's woe, of a special fate. You think you're the master of the event now taking place, you think it exists.
    She sleeps, a smile on her lips, fit to be killed.
    You stay on in the abode of her body.
    She is full of you as she sleeps. The faintly voiced tremors that go through the body become more and more marked. She's in a dream of happiness at being full of a man, of you, or of someone else, or of someone else again.
    You weep.
     
     
    The tears wake her. She looks at you. She looks at the room. And again at you. She strokes your hand. Asks: Why are you crying? You say it's for her to say, she's the one who ought to know.
    She answers softly, gently: Because you don't love. You say that's it.
    She asks you to say it clearly. You say: I don't love.
    She says: Never?
    You say: Never.
    She says: The wish to be about to kill a lover, to keep him for yourself, yourself alone, to take him, steal him in defiance of every law, every moral authority—you don't know what that is, you've never experienced it?
    You say: Never.
    She looks at you, repeats: A dead man's a strange thing.
     
    *
     
    She asks if you've seen the sea, asks if it's day, if it's light.
    You say the sun's rising, but that at this time of year it takes a long time to light up the whole sky.
    She asks you what color the sea is.
    You say: Black.
    She says the sea's never black. You must be mistaken.
     
     
    You ask if she thinks anyone could love you.
    She says no, not possibly. You ask: Because of the death? She says: Yes, because your feelings are so dull and sluggish, because you