Prayer to the Dark One #3
And now, to the important things: the moment you fall into a triad that stirs horrors and drives you to write extraordinary books. I’m of course talking about Sylvie/Adrienne/Aurélia, an intricate Bermuda Triangle where even the bravest drown.
Sylvie appears in an idyllic, foggy landscape, tender and delicate Sylvie, small nymph of the forest from childhood, innocent first love, a memory from when you were so small you played on the ground with crystals, shells, and little stones.
Sylvie brings you nostalgia from happy days, there in Valois, that remote, rural place with its flowered celebrations, its ancient ruins, its bewitched wild places.
Sylvie, the childhood girlfriend, excitement from another time.
In your daydreams, you climb the stairs of your home with her and together you open the closet, take out old wedding clothes, dress up in them, hold each other’s hands, and play at a ceremony, chaste and sacred, a game of mutual surrender.
Sylvie, or possible happiness. But no, that’s not it, everything possible scares and disillusions you.
Where is Sylvie, could she have left? You can’t see her anymore: You’re blind, or she’s invisible.
Sylvie is no longer the childhood bride, she no longer sews rolls of lace nor wears wildflower crowns in her hair, so you forget her.
You abandon her, dazzled now by Aurélia, the dead beloved who stirs in you the same worship you felt for Jenny the opera singer, and for Pleyel the pianist, and for the enigmatic woman in Naples, and for the sheep-woman, et cetera, et cetera.
This Aurélia really complicates things. She presents herself to you in the form of the Queen of Sheba, the Virgin Mary, and the ancient goddess Venus.
I’m the same as your mother, she says. As if that weren’t enough, it turns out she’s now your mother too, Marie Antoinette.
I’m the same one whom you’ve loved in all those forms—she assures you—in each trial I’ve dropped one of the masks that hide my face—she confesses—and now I want you to see me the way I am.
Aurélia, or the final reveal! At last, her true face.
What else could you ask for? But it’s not so simple, because as I’ve already said, Aurélia is dead.
Among them all, she’s the most ghostly and elusive.
The most dangerous. She roams as La Llorona through the dim corners of your sick psyche, howling and dying, forever suffering, and you exhaust yourself prowling the beyond to find her.
Better to look elsewhere, let Aurélia rest in peace, let the dead bury the dead.
Don’t get embroiled with her, Gérard, that woman-corpse seriously triggers your mental issues.
Aurélia, the untouchable, the incandescent pit of pain.
Aurélia is the black hole where your reason breaks.
All the others are innocuous compared to Aurélia, who tempts you by offering the vision of her face.
Don’t do it, Gérard, don’t look at her directly, she’s a Gorgon, she is the void and vertigo.
To me, Aurélia captures the quintessence of your schizophrenia; every time she appears, you fall into a terrifying depression and start to hallucinate. To love Aurélia is to desire death.
That’s what you’re going through—or was it earlier?
—when Adrienne arrives, religious, blond, and noble, sexually unavailable, provocatively cloistered in a convent.
Her pure perfection lights a fire of passion in you that, this time, could be called carnal and profane.
What could be as appealing as scaling the stone walls that shelter Adrienne?
But that would be a vile desecration, you’d never forgive yourself for such a disgrace, how you’d whip yourself! , better to forget the nun and move on.
Let’s clear things up a bit, come on, Gérard, you’re making me dizzy, your many loves seem like Russian dolls, each time you open one, another comes out.
During your trip to the East, drunk on incense and legends, you let your lust entangle you in a chain of wild events.
Starting with Zeynab, the Nubian slave you buy in the markets of Cairo, which ends up being a disaster, she oils her hair in a way you dislike and according to you she’s loud, irreverent, gluttonous.
You see her as having too many defects, and return her to the Zeynab merchant who sold her to you.
In Beirut you fall for a young woman who may have been called Salerna, whom you forget about in Syria when you get the notion to marry Attaké Siti-Salema, daughter of a Druze sheik, or was that Salerna from Beirut the same woman as Salema of Syria?
I’m not sure, their names are so close. The dowry amount has been agreed to, everything is arranged, and your nuptials with the sheik’s daughter are close at hand when the memory of Jenny strikes with fresh intensity.
Your heart, though not scarred, bleeds red tears again, and verses flow from your pen with blood as their ink. You end up marrying no one.
Too much falling in and out of love, driven by obsessive pathos.
Inevitably, the day of the gray coat, olive-green trousers, and top hat arrives and you set out for the filthy alley, Rue de la Vieille Lanterne, that’s what it’s called, or what it was called then, because the city has since devoured it.
I wonder whether you’re feeling defeated by the gallows or, rather, as Kristeva claims, imbued with the placidness, serenity, and that kind of happiness that veils a number of suicidal people, once they have made the fatal decision.
4 The voluptuousness of suicide, according to Dostoyevsky.
There’s ongoing debate about the type of rope you used to hang yourself.
Some say it was the cord from a butcher’s apron, a sadly obvious hypothesis, an alley of butcher shops, ergo, a butcher’s cord; it’s too on the nose.
Others assure me it was a corset’s cord, a bold absurdity made up by some consumer of cheap porn.
Thank goodness we have the ingenuity of your friend Gautier, who pulls the boldest version out of his sleeve: He says you hung yourself with the wool-and-silver woven cord the Queen of Sheba ties around her tunic. It must be true.
You declared that the night would be white and black: a space of epiphanies, black sun whose light allows visions of other worlds, before which we’d go blind.
But I belong to an era without rituals or sigils, what Giordano Bruno called sigils, meaning keys to the occult, doors or thresholds for crossing over.
I’ve got to do something if I want to see your sacrifice.
Should I find the saint and sign, perhaps pouring out a bit of red wine on a white tablecloth?
While wearing a black tie. I’ll cut my wrist with a Gillette, or carve a sign of the cross onto my chest. I’ll enter your black mass by flashing MS-13 gang signs, I’ll paint a grisly scene on the wall, I’ll offer up a century of silence in your honor.
The alley of the old lantern is holy ground: I’ll remove my shoes before I step there.
As with all timid killers, you killed yourself. At the last moment, you seemed grateful; death would finally look your way. That’s what Pavese would have said.