“As star witness to these violent acts, of my own free Will and in full Possession of my Chitinous Exoskeleton, I bow down before the Overwhelming Display of the One who crossed both Time and Space to show me her Strength. Spawned in the time of the Hordes, I hereby yield my life to the Admonitory Visage of she who has come to possess me. I find her Irresistible. I believe wholly in a Beloved Kingdom which—were I anything more than a small Dying Insect—I would gladly exalt to all the world: the Kingdom that is the Engine of all desires, even those that existed before rage, or cowardice, or War, or Language.”
I would soon return to the initial triad, the origin of my research: a First Person, born amidst predatory hordes, described as part of a metaphysically powerful scene, the ad intra forms of the inner voice. The story of the primate who undergoes the process of becoming human, who is pursued and captured by beasts; a theory toward an anthropology of voluptuousness and war, describing the maniacal system of Interconnected Persons that sends an irresistible charge through the Circuit of Will . . . My theory began to open out, a series of explosive bundles going supernova. I was present in flashes for a strange summary of the history of the world, a grammatical history, where each I is lost in a jungly void—but then something awakens it from its stupor. The I realizes that on the far bank of Being, groups of Them are playing with their peers. The I goes insane: it wants to cross the river, to go to Them, to touch Them. On the Island of Third Persons, there is a carefully maintained set of telescopes that allows Them to see across the river. “Hey, You, the one with your feet in the water.” The heart of Little I rejoices: life exists, and has meaning. From this moment on he will do anything to maintain his status as a You, to cardinally approach that which fascinates him, to lessen the distance that separates his self from theirs. The I of the transmissions is identical to the “point of view” as defined by Leibniz: ubiquitous and individual, interconnected both forward and backward in time with every event throughout the past and future of the universe—that is, with each and every person who violates, suffers, inflicts. Let grammar be a four-dimensional historical model. The material causality that courses through each existence depends upon a Voice, upon a revelation that fills each gap in the human brain. This revelation takes the form of a Third Person who speaks (acts) like the reverse of a voice preparing itself for a mission: the reverse of the voice of Jesus activating his cronies by speaking directly into their minds; of Angela da Foligno, patron saint of those afflicted by sexual temptation, who received divine guidance in the writing of her Book of Visions and Instructions; of Joan of Arc accepting orders to attack the English; of St. Anselm, hearing in a dream his proof of the existence of God. For he who has never heard stories of gods, heroes or saints is unlikely to want or be able to transform himself into a hero or god. This god, stronger than me, who upon his arrival will prevail over me . . . is it him? The tip of my tongue takes a trip below the clitoris of my palate as my lips open and close ever so gently, him-him-him. I had the sensation that beings bereft of light hung nearby amidst the impalpable shadows; that a man was watching me in precisely the way prey watches a predator. Was this the call?
Is this the call? I asked aloud, dropping my muse, the Blatella, into the fishy maw of Yorick’s bowl, watching as Yorick drifted up toward it.
The transcendental manifestations of my thoughts remained opaque, silent. Fear sifted through the air around me once again, and I shouted, Vade retro, you damned one! To clear my head, I turned the television all the way up, and at last my prayers to Kali were answered: I hit upon a James Bond marathon.
The entire career of this spy, fellow countryman of Thomas Hobbes, serves to show that there is no obstacle born of politics or love that can’t be overcome if you can count on the cooperation of whomever designs the plot. Dr. No—purest balm of Bondian adventure—had barely begun when I started to look through my notes. As of fifty-two minutes and five seconds into From Russia with Love, just as James positioned himself to kiss the Russian spy (whose raffish title was nothing less than Corporal of State Security), I had begun polishing 2.1.2, an extremely important subsection. Exhaustion washed over me, and my gaze drifted up to the immense night. I collapsed, overcome, and had a magnificent dream.
It was the first few minutes of From Russia with Love and the white cat fondled by Number 1, the brain of SPECTRE, grew slowly darker in color—darker and darker, until she was suddenly revealed to be Montaigne Michelle herself. The cat continued to allow Number 1 to caress her, with a somewhat perplexed look on her face, as if asking herself, Why would someone fall intentionally into a trap? Because, responds Number 1, a correct reading of the enemy’s mentality shows that they always treat a trap as a challenge. He caresses the cat again. The cat’s eyes fall half closed; the SPECTRE operative brings his wrinkled mouth to her tiny ear, and whispers: A trap is an offer you can’t refuse. The operative continues speaking to the cat while observing a tank where a triad of fish identical to Yorick are swimming. He says:
–Siamese fighting fish. Brave, but on the whole, stupid. With the exception of the one we have here, who lets the other two fight, waiting until the survivor is so exhausted that he cannot defend himself. And then, like SPECTRE, he attacks.
At this point my memories grow hazy—there was something about the SPECTRE character using the Lektor (a code-breaking machine) as bait. I remember with astonishing clarity that I was obscenely aware I was dreaming—and that, when the roles had been handed out, to my sovereign surprise I’d been assigned to play the very Puella Bondinis in question.
No more doubts, no more sleepless nights, I murmured softly to myself in the half dark. This was the call, the dawn that precedes the voluptuous war. And here is the opaline message that I slid under the door of the Augustan office the next morning. An ode to devotion inspired by superior firepower, a sketch of unambiguously carnivorous appetites, I translate from the Latin (ego velut linguam . . .4) the invitation that is my secret, which I enclosed in a manila envelope along with a candied date:
I
like the language
am in his mouth the plaything of a monster.
Morituri te salutamus, Augustus!
* * *
4 . . . coeli.
10 Puella Bondinis
Agent Provocateur
B oth within and beyond the borders of carnivorous Asia, the visage of the tiger is a splendor reserved for the gods of death. In the warrior cult of India, the nuptials of Kali and the tiger form a chapter in the story of the gods’ appetite for the twin attributes of power and animality. The hybrid history of warrior transformation has perpetrated both psychological and graphical outrages, such as the stele raised by Ashurbanipal the Assyrian, which tells of the time following a great flood when lions and tigers roamed the Earth, filling it with their deadly attributes (the tiger is tiger to both man and tiger). Samson dealt death to a lion, and Heracles did the same to that of Nemea; both took home the bones. Jehovah sent tigers and lions against the Assyrians who’d occupied Samaria—but after the slaughter, Jehovah claimed invisibility for the cult that worshipped him and would unify his clan. Kali, in contrast, accepts as offerings the heads of his fellow tigers, and of the thousand soldiers torn apart in battle.
The Deer Woman, escaping from her fellow humans each night to copulate with antelope; in the Mahabharata, Rama calls on the gods to mate with monkeys and bears to produce superhuman warriors with the speed of the wind and the strength of the elephant: these are scenes from a secret threaded through all eras and all men. Thus, congress with savages is part of the core story of the Theory of Egoic Transmissions.
–Who is she that advanceth through the night?
1.
The area in question is an elegant neighborhood in the capital, known most recently by the oxymoronic moniker Palermo Manhattan. A summer night. The slight separation between me and the world consists of a black knee-length skirt, a green satin blouse, and
short, badly scuffed leather boots. I never wear nylons, they discredit my skin. My underwear is of violet lace, and I’m wearing it only for the company—granting access of that type isn’t part of the plan.
Timide à mes heures, all descriptions of my physical charms have thus far been superficial when not inextant. The reader must not allow the radiance described below to blind him or her as regards the matter at hand; instead it must shine a clear light on the importance of the drama to come. That is, I am now obliged to speak of my beauty.
My skeletal structure is flawless and persuasive, often inescapably so, at least according to the occasional desperate snouts of big boys, old men, and the sapphic. I am most elegantly distributed, my flesh unfolds in a soft, glowing imprecise skin tone between olive-gold and the lyrical ivory of Byzantium. My other parts yield commentaries of varied tenor and quantities of saliva pursuant to issues of innate distinction and Buenos Airean loveliness: my black hair begins its plunge into the void, then restrains itself with unction an instant before reaching my hip; my eyes are black and deep, slightly crossed; my mouth is orthodox, red. Seen from the front, the eminent twin towers rise spiritedly below a fine Doric neck, and the jawline of a lady carnivore. From behind, of course, matched anatomical glories, an intersection of feminine aesthetic and military deployment known, per secula seculorum, in the Biblical sense (mark well the customary insolence of the source). Thus the Singer pontificates upon the fascinating farewell of a lady: Return, return, O Shulamite; return, return, that we may look upon thee. What will ye see in the Shulamite? As it were the company of two armies.
The priceless resources at my disposal only acquired strength as they came to know the enemy by taking Communion with him, in an act of atrocious intimacy. Regarding which, Rodolfo Walsh once wrote:
The main characteristic of enemy intelligence is structural analysis. The determinant factor is a knowledge of our own structure’s political and ideological aspects and its spacial, temporal and relational organization, beginning always from the assumption that in knowing the objectives pursued by one’s adversary, the strengths and weaknesses of their forces, their chains of command, the distribution of their barracks, their logistics and their communications, one knows enough to destroy them if one also possesses superior firepower and mobility.5
By this point the reader will have realized that the experiment herein described required making of my body a laboratory, and also a watchtower from which to direct an assault by land.
The building is early 20th century, with walls of stone. Inside, a large wood-paneled vestibule extends along a set of picture windows that give onto an interior garden of smoky greens. The light dims as I advance toward his dwelling at the end of the corridor. The buzzer sounds—the burp of a mockingbird. Across the hallway, the doorman shrinks back behind the counter when his fish-like gaze meets my sidelong glance, his deftly lipid behavior confirming that he knows he has been warned. He changes the channel on his security monitor; the screen now displays an empty swimming pool.
I hear hurried footsteps, comings and goings inside the apartment. I pull back, and find the perfect angle from which to see the face of my prey as he anxiously opens the door.
The physical reality of Collazo takes me by surprise. He is enormous. Much taller and brawnier than I’d imagined. Too, he is fundamentally uglier, is in fact so startlingly hideous that it burns your eyes, leaves you blinking. Did Collazo have a precursor? Naturally he did: this is why I prepared so carefully for this encounter. In order to find Collazo, I had to scrutinize Augustus’s weaknesses; to analyze the encrypted messages, the hidden details, the reverse side of his sentences; to find, in the course of his classes, a few clues that would lead me to decide it was him, Collazo—him and no one else—that I had to seduce, to lasso with a noose made of women’s hair, to bring in chains before the Old Man for him to gloat over—to take hostage.
Collazo says hello with a feigned indifference. He asks if I had any trouble finding the building; I invent a showdown between taxi drivers and picketers to explain my late arrival. I follow him up the hallway without a word. Dark shirt, knotty shoulders; pants tight over the crotch and at the waist, concealing little. He turns, slowly, to face me, and repeats a question I hadn’t answered; up close, lit by the halogen lights, his face opens out, wider and monstrous. He stands before me, enrobed in the strange glamour common to all veterans of the Dirty War. A huge mustache stretches across his face. The nose, deeply etched; bristly eyebrows that seem to poke at whatever he observes, clawing at clothes, scratching at the skin of things. I interrupt my horror briefly in order to answer him.
He examines me lasciviously from top to bottom, focusing mainly on my middle third. My first clear sensation, separate from all else: the odor that lies in wait beneath his cologne, a layered, tuberous scent of semen enclosed in its mandrake coffer, rancid, sharp, writhing beneath his clothes. The left side of his eel-like mustache lifts to show sharpened fangs.
–Whiskey?
–With ice, thanks.
Collazo paws through a variety of liquors without taking his eyes off of me. He pours two glasses; his body is stout as a head stock boy’s, but his arms can’t be too strong at this point—I don’t think you could say they’ve done much over the past fifty-odd years. He holds out my glass of whiskey; stepping closer to receive it, I sense his gently monstrous radiation. Yellow teeth, violent mouth. I hold my breath, take a drink.
–So you’re in Roxler’s class . . . What did you say it was called?
I go to speak but just then a piece of ice gets caught in my throat. I cough briefly. He seems amused. He asks how old I am. I blurt out a lie—twenty-eight, doing my PhD. Collazo hands me a napkin and a glass of water. The thought occurs that he’s given me the napkin so I’ll have somewhere to spit out the ice cube, and I stop coughing. He looks at my hands around the whiskey glass, and I realize it can’t be hidden: I’m trembling.
–It’s a little cold, isn’t it. I’ll turn up the heat.
Collazo disappears down the hallway and I slip into the bathroom. I lock the door. This bathroom in the center of the house is the lair par excellence, the den of dens. Like a mist swirling up from a lake in which monsters sleep, Collazo’s odor is born herein, his aura, a red stain as seen through a thermal scope. Here he dwells, leaving behind flakes of skin each time he bathes, scabs stuck to the shower walls, spatterings of semen that a woman, someone’s grandma, will be paid to come clean up. There are no thong panties hung like flags, and their absence speaks to a state of desperation, a certain degree of vulnerability that is essential to the success of my mission. I look through the medicine cabinet. A shaving brush, rusty nail clippers, bits of fur here and there (the beast chews at its own hair and spits), and a few colognes from twenty years ago, the bottles almost empty—an ascetic, leftist intimacy. The cracked wall tiles bear traces of recent damp, of rising steam, saliva in larval form. I close the cabinet door.
And there they are, my eyes, guileless, looking back at me from the filthy mirror. The long, long eyelashes, the arched eyebrows shining with determination, and lower, out of view, the labyrinthine organ for which he is willing to lose himself irretrievably. I don’t mean to overemphasize the beauty of these features, but the mirror doesn’t lie, does nothing but show what it sees: in these features, in the moral contrast they offer to the vile and contemptible brutality of Collazo, resides the key to what will bring him to a boil. There is no escape.
I walk quickly out of the bathroom. He’s not in the kitchen; I cross the hallway, look for him in the living room, there’s a small zebra-striped rug, I step onto it but it’s a trap, I slip and fall to the floor. Collazo watches me fall. He comes slowly across the room, as if hoping to get a peek at my panties or something. I hold out one arm, let him lift me to my feet. His fingers leave marks; I show him the red prints of his huge hands pulsing at the surface of my skin. He says: “Very delicate, yes.”
> He takes my glass and sets it on a shelf. He smooths his mustache, as if enjoying a brief interlude before consuming me. He takes me by the waist. I try to maintain the distance between us, but it’s futile: everything is saturated with his hideous radiation. I close my eyes, but even so his monstrous features hang before me haloed in blue. His rancid breath, the cologne mixed with sweat, the unconditional mustache, the echo of his eyes, malicious, wallowing about beneath my clothes, that nose pricked by Triassic insects, nostrils like holes in stone. Enough. I must not allow anything to stop me. I disentangle myself from his arms, let myself fall onto the sofa.
Seated now, my legs uncrossed, the heat begins to worm its way up past my knees, reshapes me, tightens, pulls at my mouth—leaves it hanging open as I stare at him. I must be bright red. I cover my face with my hair, peek out to spy on him, and a sensation rises from my stomach. Then I realize that I’ve landed on a cushion whose triangular corner is poking deeply, vilely, in between my buttocks.
Standing there like a shadow stretched over a victim, Collazo examines me in silence. The halogen lights zero in on his bald head like well-trained snipers; the mustache widens to both sides as he smiles. He’s certain that the battle has tilted in his favor, and he ponders, all but obscenely, his theoretical control of the disputed terrain.
–Let’s take a little walk through the woods, he says. The park’s just right over there.
He comes forward, the dark fabric of his shirt filling the lens, a classic cinematographic fade to black.
1.1
Oh, Augustus! The first time you spoke to me under the words, I failed to understand. But you immediately noted my unease, and moved your head impossibly slowly, as if nodding in agreement. You think me excessively prideful, but I assure you that all this time I have suffered a great deal—and I have missed you even more. That is why, before launching my attack, I need to know your state of mind. Don’t let obsessive thoughts bewitch you. Because what I want to say to you (what I howl so that you might hear) has more to do with protecting the courtly synthesis of your legacy than with my negligible, insubstantial, egoic role in the events themselves.
Savage Theories Page 9
