The Malady of Death Read Free Page A

lied and said the sea is black.
    And then she is silent.
    You're afraid she'll go to sleep again, you rouse her and say: Go on talking. She says: Ask questions then, I can't do it on my own. Again you ask if anyone could love you. Again she says: No.
    She says that a moment ago you wanted to kill her, when you came in off the terrace and into the room for the second time. That she knew this in her sleep, from the way you looked at her. She asks you to say why.
    You say you can't know why, that you don't understand the malady you suffer from.
    She smiles, says this is the first time, that until she met you she didn't know death could be lived.
     
     
    She looks at you through the filtered green of her eyes. She says; You herald the reign of death. Death can't be loved if it's imposed from outside. You think you weep because you can't love. You weep because you can't impose death.
    She's already almost asleep. She says almost inaudibly: You're going to die of death. Your death has already begun.
    You weep. She says: Don't cry, it's pointless, give up the habit of weeping for yourself, it's pointless.
     
    Imperceptibly the room is filled with the still dark light of the sun.
    She opens her eyes, shuts them again. She says: Two more paid nights and it will be over. She smiles and strokes your eyes. She smiles ironically in her sleep.
    You go on talking, all alone in the world, just as you wish. You say love has always struck you as out of place, you've never understood, you've always avoided loving, always wanted to be free not to. You say you're lost. But that you don't know what you're lost to. Or in.
    She's not listening, she's asleep.
    You tell a story about a child. The light has reached the windows.
    She opens her eyes, says: Stop lying. She says she hopes she'll never know anything, anything in the world, the way you do. She says: I don't want to know anything the way you do, with that death-derived certainty, that hopeless monotony, the same every day of your life, every night, and that deadly routine of lovelessness.
    She says: It's day, everything is about to begin, except you, you never begin.
    She goes back to sleep. You ask her why she sleeps, what weariness she has to rest from, what monumental weariness. She lifts her hand and strokes your face again, the mouth perhaps. She smiles ironically again in her sleep. She says: The fact that you ask the question proves you can't understand. She says it's a way of resting from you too. From death.
    You go on with the story about the child, cry it out aloud. You say you don't know the whole of the story about him, about you. You say you've been told it. She smiles, says she's heard and read it too, often, everywhere, in a number of books. You ask how loving can happen—the emotion of loving.
     She answers: Perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe. She says: Through a mistake, for instance. She says: Never through an act of will. You ask: Could the emotion of loving come from other things too? You beg her to say. She says: It can come from anything, from the flight of a night bird, from a sleep, from a dream of sleep, from the approach of death, from a word, from a crime, of itself, from oneself, often without knowing how. She says: Look. She parts her legs, and in the hollow between you see the dark night at last. You say: It was there, the dark night. It's there.
    She says: Come. You do. Having entered her, you go on weeping. She says: Don't cry anymore. She says: Take me, so it may have been done.
    You do so, you take her.
    It is done.
    She goes back to sleep.
    One day she isn't there anymore. You wake and she isn't there. She has gone during the night. The mark of her body is still there on the sheets. Cold.
    It's dawn today. The sun's not yet up, but the edges of the sky are already light, while from its center a thick darkness still falls on the earth.
    There's nothing left in the room but you. Her body has vanished. The difference between her and you is