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Chants for Taming the Hedgehog Sow

Excerpt

 

Too tired, too myopic. Even my name, a squashed clam, slowly sinks through my skin deep within me, past soft tissues, past organs pulsating like terrified suns, deep down to where none of the things on the outside can force their way in any more.

***

Keep me away from this autumn, keep me away from the people, away from the fields bristling with stubble… Take me in your arms and keep me away from myself, lest I get lost among all these hideous heads of old women popping up in the light of the evening.

***

Oh the glamour of being the visceral type, the unaffordable luxury of it all! Viscera aren’t meant for display in a showcase. That’s where ordure builds up – the meanness, the hatred, the fear. That’s where Grandmother’s meat grinder is, the proverbial box – Pandora an’ all. That’s where Mom falls asleep alongside a host of her friends – neurotic women with diabetes, prematurely ailing, hands crisscrossed by jar scars. Everything’s complicated down there and extremely mixed up. That’s where crucibles crackle, that’s where death comes ingloriously. There, oh, there no one lies. Down there in the damp cold we all huddle together, faces caved in on themselves like gloves turned inside out.

***

Heart in hand I’ve been walking all over the city, treading the first snow of the year under my feet. And my heart, sprinkled with wine and with vinegar, went on rotting away to the beat of my years – all thirty and seven of them – while the magpies assembled on the drummer-boy’s shoulder. Bones alone couldn’t save me. Nor could your name, Argentina, you, Land of Promise. Only a big yellow dog took pity on me – humbly walked up to me and ate up my heart, taking his time. Then he left, moving away towards the horizon like an enormous sun flower.

***

Backbiting mouths, metallic grey and greased, snapping open and shut under the summer sky. If you want to grow up you’ll just need to be picking your way through the lot, Mika-Lé upped and said from behind the derelict wall. But who wants to be grown up? Save the creeps or the losers, perhaps, who believe that’s the only way out. Not I, though, not I…

***

Of late happiness statistics have become all the rage. You can thus figure out whatever you want to. No more doubts from now on. These statistics could beat metal detectors big time… Precise and efficient they are. Yet what’s the coefficient of your happiness at midnight, when the hedgehog sow comes, creeps into your bed and nestles on your belly? What modern statistics could ever quantify the resonant nibbling and convert it to a percentage?

***

There be some you’ve just got to put up with the way you put up with urban landscapes full of cigarette stubs, tampons and empty plastic bottles. Put up with them the way you put up with the neighbours’ blaring music or with tooth aches. Put up with them so you won’t end up like them.

 

***

Not even myself can I say that I like. I dab Gentian violet al over myself in order to alter my skin – or give it some colour at least, to obscure somehow all these poisonous mushrooms that keep sprouting out of my arms, to obscure my cracks and my stitches and, most important of all, to obscure at long last all the corpses I’ve been dragging along since my childhood. From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am smearing myself with Gentian violet in the hope that its curative properties, which everyone swears by, might help me somehow.

***

My skin is fibreglass, my tongue is fibreglass, even my eyes are fibreglass. And no more touch is possible at all.

***

When the heart shrivels up, shrinks to a raisin like grapes left to dry in the attic, when flesh ebbs away, when the body refuses to allow the world in any more, what’s the use of still trying, what’s the use of still smiling?

***

Leaves afloat in a jug. No old man is waiting.

***

Late at night – when advertising signs glow at their loudest and the world seems preserved in a vatful of lard. At night – when chests rasp at their loudest, muffling God’s regular breath, the hedgehog sow comes prowling again. She nestles on my pillow and starts sniffing at me.

***

Mika-Lé is traipsing along down the baking-hot pavement wreaking havoc among the heavyset men whom the sun rendered torpid. Mika-Lé susurrates in their ears the story of her barmy gadfly life and then severs their tendons with one single hair strand.

***

Where do I squeeze, where do I squat within this body? Where am I to be found inside this withered flesh that’s not even mine any more? Where is my place inside this alien body no longer to be travelled by your hands? And where do they end up – all the bodies of women unloved? Their bodies displaced, with their rugged elephant skin, those earthen-brown bodies not even the wind will caress. Where, I wonder, do all their tenderness dreams end up, their tiramisu-flavoured tenderness dreams?

***

As I lie on my bed, my body sinks ever so slowly, going down through the mattress, past the floorboards and into the moist earth favoured by grubs. There I run into the crumbling bodies of so many women and merge into their thick paste. And then you come by and you smile. Your smile extracts from down there and lays me back on my bed.

***

I used to write about loneliness, poems about loneliness. Yet I did not know it in truth way back then. The loneliness scissoring at your entrails and banging you against walls, the loneliness of a Bucharest ghetto with Gypsies that call out of containers telling you to back off. The loneliness with its stale rancid smell, with its brutish indifference. The loneliness ridding your body of all of its organs till only a carcass is left roaming the streets late at night. And here comes loneliness now, drooling just like a bulldog, writing its poems, its very own poems, straight onto my body.

***

Never before has autumn been as beautiful as this. La luz de tu cuerpo. La luz de tu cuerpo. The promise of an evening without her. No. This evening the hedgehog sow is not going to come. She’s going to stay put in the drawer with nail varnish and socks. Getting smaller and smaller, claws tangled in lace trims. La luz de tu cuerpo. La luz de tu cuerpo. And sleep will be running its course through my veins.

***

To embrace suffering, go bathing in it like in water, clean water. Yet I’m neither a saint, nor am I Dostoyevsky. Not that I need to be, really, because suffering dwells within me like a dog, poisoned and helpless.

***

Your beauty, Mother, has descended by degrees into your tobacco-stained bronchia, into your frost-bitten heart, into the rubbery realms of your helplessness, into the numbness of your pink-coloured pills. But still, Mother, do keep your fate to yourself, do not bequeath it to me as you leave. Hold on to your damp fate, I’ve had enough of all the things we have in common.

***

Humans are also animals, of sorts, only more civilised, Mika-Lé, such an expert on life, whispers to me. But even that is just another lie. In fact they’ve only managed to discover the more exquisite torture devices. They can skin you alive with only one word. Just like this, she goes on as she slashes my skin with her asp tongue. Next she snatches it off me and then hangs me up on display like a skinned rabbit carcass, veins neatly exposed. See how right I was, dear, Mika-Lé adds, proud to have demonstrated her point, and she brings me a mirror as large as herself.

***

November was mild, even hot. A tree with crows on each and every alley. Dummies left behind under benches, in cemeteries. Brightly lit little boxes where people torture each other, chop up each other while waiting for Christmas to come. But I am just waiting for you.

***

And all that is left is this waiting, chewing the world with its black gums, already gangrened. And this waiting is called by no name.

***

It may well be I’m no different than the seagulls along the embankment – a whitewashed crow, just like Mika-Lé used to say. Hey, you can’t possibly think they are seagulls for real… What on earth should them seagulls be doing in the middle of Bucharest?, Mika-Lé taunted me through her razor-sharp lips. I could hear, all the same, their ravenous cries and could see their lot prowling, along with needy fishermen, for the same paltry prey soiled past redemption with infested waters. I could see them rummaging through the garbage along with the homeless. And in my turn I started asking myself what on earth was I doing on the embankment, what was I doing in that raving mad city? The earthworms after the rain were wriggling their way to my feet. Slowly but surely. And all I could do was just stand there, all on my own, like some potted plant, roots gone all mouldy.

***

Week after week after week I can feel myself crumble away in the trains taking me farther and farther from you. Long-distance trains, fast trains, express trains, high-speed trains – it’s all the same: they all decompose me, particle by particle, mixing me with the dust and the stale air in the carriages. So please, watch your step and tread softly. And inhale not too deeply – that’s me, all around, and my ripe love, my overripe love.

***

A grating voice above an ashtray full of stubs and a face I can hardly recognize as my own –

and that only because no one beside me is there – in the cheap hotel room that just waits for an earthquake.

***

Time was, I used to be a cup brimming with cream, a Christmas music box. Time was, sleep was gentle to me.