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| | Stage I, Bessie - Bath of Nigra - Now-Pregnant
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| | Although it's only dawn. After curds, seeds and prayers, I have slept harder than cast iron, under lightning's eternal name.
Apes have disappeared, replaced by large beasts which glide in walking, something between a camel and ostrich, neck in the clouds.
We have invaded rocks vertically, there are trees, every so often, like pines.
Red earth, or sand.
In the distance mountains, below, the plain lulled asleep with mist, horse rider dust in the distance.
Silence of buffalo who would have drank.
Who do you love in my place? (How many people at this moment on earth ask themselves this damn question, Bessie?)
This landscape, I carry it always like I've carried you before time began.
With alternatives, something is erased, something grows, it's more than water, much more and indescribable. How to be still, still, still closer to your celestial, jasmined morning skin? It's you, eyes closed, it's you groping, searching in the market, between beribboned animal legs, to meet me!
Water weeps in the basin, water stirred by a woman washing herself. (…)
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| | Stage II, Night before the Mountain - Bessie forever
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| | From here, lying down at the bottom of the world. The stone is hard under my skull, so impressive the distance between the stone, the skull and this star, there.
Pages written with this small tip, pages torn off, pages thrown away. And tomorrow the Mountain! They will end up at the top because it is as inexplicable as the mountains, says Chango.
Night everywhere.
I have the stone inside me,
the stone that kills and enchants.
I leave you my life in this form,
that you may find it or not, that I may return from there or not. I pull with my teeth (I break the needle's point), blood beads, then the passage in review, before sleep, moments wanting to live, hunting for the impossible.
In the shade which disfigures
Visit which devastates on two knees
Naked visit
I loved you I loved you song. But
there is always the extreme weakness of legs, loss, flesh, all fodder for the historian.
Behind the cloth, it's Nigra who washes, Nigra who sings. The basin's zinc is cold, the water steams. She is up, and sings, me, the soap I melt in the basin, I melt in your hands, Bessie, damn it all I finish there. I think of these paintings you love so,
I am there,
Man-soap,
Man-napkin,
Man-comb.
Man against zinc on his knees.
Who waits. Hard rocks, I say to them, am I the host for whom the cloth flap will open, with whom one will feast under the tent,
sifting the rain of legs and arms? Will I be?
My poverty, Bessie.
Scent of the bath, scent of
water, vapor of scented water
of the bath, steam of skin, skin of
grass violently trampled by warriors soon.
That died out.
Bessie you leave me outside the night! No one knows yet, only me, now. (…)
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| | Stage III, Five in the afternoon before the Mountain - Childhood memory.
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| | I remembered the way I would make my eyes see the tips of stars: shake your eyebrows hard, your fingers helping hold them, to better see the fire.
Confusion of warriors sweeping off by force. Prayer of falcons. The women exist alone far from the wash-house! Write and comb at the bottom of their beds what will only be revealed much much later, they very dead and replaced by young girls or young women their age, light crosses the bedroom, warm body that had found everything under the sheets.
We left one morning the rich country of France, this beautiful country, and what did we forget, what had we forgotten, why did we leave? All these questions the heart answers but no one understands it. Often, with all these questions, the heart takes the shape of a boat then of an insect with propellers, then hooves sinking through reeds, inconstant and willful at once!
Will we meet the infamous Master of Reeds in front of the Mountain? He makes his rounds here, appearing on stilts.
With eyes of love, each person folded their small handkerchief eight times.
That morning, he slipped out of the wallet and other cherished images made of grass and poppy petals.
Bessie, eyes-of-my love, I will tear up everything, throw out every-thing, damn damn Bessie, until I no longer care! And then good-bye, I'll focus only on the mountain.
Chango says: "Women with long necks" await us under the snow.
(…)
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| | Stage IV, Final night on the Mountain - Bessie, I give you the cave
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| | Round moon, and mist, piercing night, at the edge, I bend, you feel skin. "Coyote child, in moonlight all skin feels like night!" So grandmother, I am getting old.
And I await what?
At the edge I bend, she is lower than day (you are lower than day), you look at what?
Sure that it's me you would have had, Bessie.
Did you see this cloud I saw, Bessie, yesterday, this trumpet player of a cloud arched for the finale? Did you see a little of it?
Nigra passes by, loaded with narrow linen to close the eyes of animals, Daughter, I would like your strips to lock up the heart, no one knows the heart, moreover that it is red, it suffocates or explodes but lights from its own twisting fire. In the cave, I squeeze the torch in my left hand. It was him, with the right hand I loved and I painted, as I write you for days and days here on the surface, often abyss often desert.
Then I blow out the flame, then I take it and throw it outside, why
reread when it's naked flesh, when there is no more space no escape between skin and everything else human? I left all, when you will come?
Nigra passes, on the way back, more remote than the farthest distance and more alone than the loneliest, I would love you Nigra, would you love me? She makes a sign at me, passes by, Bessie you are planted forever, I put myself on the wall of the cave with you planted in me. One iota of what you're thinking, I am clueless, I invent, and it's me you think of, Bessie, and you look for me unceasingly you seek me in forests and on seas, and everywhere, in store rooms and trucks, restaurants, clubs, brushwood, dead arms, how will we find each other, too late, never, the real melodrama dammit Bessie! And who does not need one? Still there are those who mock need and build strongholds.
Bessie.
Tomorrow we leave the mountain and its way of suspending the usual suffering, replacing it with another, more honest, less ungrateful.
We go back down toward the plain, toward what?
Will you find the wall where we are, and in how many years? The wall painted red, full of torsos with heads, swimming in fire, when you will come? Will I be able to remove myself again removing myself to forget that you live, to forget that you are dead because maybe you died since, I can't even imagine, peaks ice silence, worked into a knife! I erase everything, I return, I place on your forehead the bandage soaked with mint and sage, you are asleep, only to exist again as softness and youth, night becomes good then.
Bessie. Bessie. Bessie. I am getting old and losing my looks. (…)
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| | Stage V, Frozen night on the Sand - Bessie, the Most Loved.
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| | The ground is close-shaven, sky close-shaven, I lie awake between the two, with the Sand we're four, so much is flat, it's up to me, I'm on watch, I walk a little, sit on a bowl, relieve myself, pass between the legs of the highest and warmest beasts who startle at me, all ice and fire, beasts, have pity!
The world we speak of is behind us, or doesn't exist anymore. Or else we have walked so much on the earth that we are suddenly going to pass to the other side, fall into the sky or what? There is no return possible here where we are now. Some are afraid, I see it. Me, I live only in myself or the entire universe, I am as always, limitless.
My torch will die out, the day will be here soon, that which we count on still, my torch soaked with sky and too small.
Absolute black. Am I far away enough Bessie, but I keep the lance from the tournament, and I exert myself in the dark like the others, but once again I have this hole which hollows my chest, I don't want you to run to your room, Bessie, damn room where you lock yourself, I trample these sheets, Bessie, I plant across you the Cypress-Being that only proved useful as a model, I forget, I do not forget anything, because I will not see you anymore anymore or once before dying, as happens in short stories, picture books, I would love so much to die quickly and be done with it, leave it for others who know better!
I am not yet far away enough, will I ever be far away enough! I leave below, least visible, this love, remember mine is hidden in the cave, buried under days, buried under my tongue, under the skin I tear off, small butterflies for the wind, hidden, and mixed with entrails, light from flies on sand. Nothing will remain, save below, it's necessary to look. Below I dug for you, for others who desire to live. Like me loving you before the world began or something equally impossible to imagine! Words more and more often cross one another, overlap or change into goats, eels, Jesus! I leave everything.
More an animal, not a noise, absolute black and silence, you move in me as never before, small bells and small bells rise again from the abyss, they toll and save the painted being, the shadow. Head raised, I await the dawn and the disappearance of this star, there, of this light cloud which has no home, what is reality my Bessie, it's your head which rises with the sun.
The horn blower comes to open his tent, looks at the sky, he will blow he blows. Once again night becomes day.
©Flammarion, 1999:
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Hélène Sanguinetti:
Translated by Ann Cefola
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