Emilie comes to me in a dream
Emilie is fading from my days, my evenings and my dreams. Even her white dress has darkened in my memory. I no longer blush as I recall the mysterious marks of teeth I glimpsed one night below her little belly. The last traces of dissimulation impeding the emotion I was ready to feel have disappeared. That troupe of girls is lost forever, smiling uncertainly and with indifference as they remember how their hearts were torn by passion and by half-treacherous humility. Even her face has been exorcised at last, the face I modeled in snow as a child, the face of a woman whose compliant cunt had consumed her utterly.
I think of Emilie as a bronze statue. Marble bodies, too, are not bothered by fleas. Her heart-shaped upper lip recalls an old world coronation; the lower lip demanding to be sucked arouses visions of harlotry. I was moving slowly beneath her, my head in the hem of her skirt. I had a close-up view of the hairs on her calves, flattened in all directions under her lace stockings, and I tried to imagine what kind of a comb would be needed to smooth them back into place. I fell in love with the fragrance of her crotch, a wash-house smell mingled with that of a nest of mice, a pine needle lying forgotten in a bed of lilies of the valley.
I began to suffer from optical illusions. When I looked at Clara her body merged into the outline of Emilie’s with the tiny heel. When Emilie felt like sinning, her cunt gave off the aroma of spice in a hayrick. Clara’s fragrance was herbal. My hands are wandering under her skirt, touching the top of a stocking, garter knobs, her inner thigh—hot, damp and beguiling. Emilie brings me a cup of tea wearing blue mules. I can never again be completely happy, tormented as I am by women’s sighs, by their eyes rolling in the convulsions of orgasm.
Emilie never tried to penetrate the world of my poetry. She looked at my garden from over the fence, so that everyday fruit and ordinary berries seemed the awesome apples of some prehistoric paradise. I moved foolishly along the paths, like a half-wit, like a useless dog with its nose in the grass tracking down death and fleeing its own destiny. I was crazy, seeking to find again that moment when shadows fell across a paved square somewhere in the south. Leaning on the fence, Emilie sped on through life. I can see her so clearly: getting up in the morning with her long hair loose, going to the lavatory to piss, sometimes to shit, and then washing with tar soap. Her crotch made fragrant, she hurried to mingle with the living, to rid herself of the feeling that she was at a fork in the road. Emilie’s smile was a wonderful thing to watch! Her mouth seemed a dried-out hollow, but as you drew near to this upper lode of pleasure, you could hear something trembling down inside her. As she parted her lips for you, a knob of red flesh burst from between her teeth. Age fondles time lovingly. Morality is only safe at home in the arms of abandonment. Her eyes—which never closed at the height of her pleasure—would take on a gleam of heavenly delight and looked ashamed of what her lips were doing.
In the corners where I seek my lost youth, I come upon golden curls carefully laid away. Life is one long waste of time. Every day death nibbles away at what we call life and life constantly consumes our longing for trivialities. The idea of the kiss dies before ever the lips meet and every portrait pales before we can look at it. In the end, worms will eat through this woman’s heart too and grin in her entrails. Who could swear then that you had ever existed? I saw you with a lovely naked girl of astonishing whiteness. She lifted her hands and the palms were black with soot. She pressed one hand between your breasts and placed the other over my eyes so that I was looking at you as through torn lace. You were naked under an unbuttoned coat. That single moment revealed your life to me in its entirety: you were a plant, swelling and budding. Two stems rising from the ground grew together and from that juncture you began to wilt. But your body was already taking shape, with a belly, two breasts and a head where two entrancing pink weals swell up. At that moment though, the lower part of your body began to wither and collapsed. And I groveled before you, grunting with love such as I had never known. I do not know whose shadow it was. I called it Emilie. We are bound together forever, irrevocably, but we are back to back.
This woman is my coffin and, as she walks, I am hidden in her image. And, so as I curse her, I damn myself and yet love her, falling asleep with a cast of her hand on my cock.
On the first of May, you’ll go to the cemetery and, there in Section Ten, you’ll find a woman sitting on a gravestone. She will be waiting for you to tell your fortune from the cards. You will leave her and look for explanations on the walls of boardinghouses for young ladies. But the girls’ faces in the windows will turn into budding buttocks and tulip arses and will quiver as a lorry drives past. You will be crazed with fear that they’re going to fall down into the street—fear that is close to the pleasure you felt at your first boyish erection and close to the terror you felt when your sister taught you to masturbate with a hand of alabaster.
Who do you think can console you now? Emilie is fragmented, torn scraps of her likeness have been borne away by the wind to places beyond your knowledge, and that is why you cannot call on her to be the medium of your calming. And anyway you have long ago learned not to mourn moments of farewell.
The sky slumbers and somewhere behind the bushes a woman molded of raw flesh is waiting for you. Will you feed her on ice?
Clara always sat on the couch, wearing little and expecting to be undressed. One day she took my revolver from a drawer, took aim, and fired at a picture. The cardinal’s hand went to his chest and he fell to the ground. I felt sorry for him and later on, whenever I visited brothels on the outskirts of the city and paid the whores for their skills, I was always aware that I was purchasing a moment of eternity. Any man who once tasted the salt of Cecilia’s cunt would sell his rings, his friends, his morals and all the rest just to feed the insatiable monster hidden beneath her pink skirt. Oh, why do we never distinguish the first moments when women treat us as playthings from the time when we drive them to despair? I woke up one night in the early hours, at the time flowers drop their petals and birds begin to sing. Martha was lying by my side, a treasure house of all ways of making love, a hyena of Corinth, lying with her cunt spread open to the dawn. She caught the disgust in my eyes and surely wanted nothing better that to see me nauseated by the filth of her. I watched her sex swelling and pouring out of her cunt, over the bed and on to the floor, filling the room like a stream of lava. I got out of bed and fled madly from the house, not stopping until I reached the middle of the deserted town square. As I looked back, I saw Martha’s sex squeezing out of the window like a monstrous tear of unnatural color. A bird flew down to peck at my seed and I threw a stone to drive it away. “You will be lucky, you will repeat yourself over and over again,” a passer-by spoke to me and added, “your wife is just giving birth to a son.”
Two little sparrows kept rendezvous every noon behind the pale blue corsage of Our Lady of Lourdes. I was innocent when I entered the catacombs. The row of square boxes naturally aroused my curiosity. There were a few boys hanging by their bound feet from the tops of the olive trees, flames roasting their curly young heads. In the next room, I found a bunch of lovely naked girls entwined in a single monstrous living creature like something from the Apocalypse. Their cunts were opening and closing mechanically, some empty, some swallowing their own slime. One in particular caught my eye, the lips moving as though trying to speak, or like a man whose tongue has turned to stone trying to crow like a cock. Another was a smiling rosebud that I’d recognize to this day among a hundred specimens. It was my dead Clara’s cunt, dead and buried, with nobody to wash her body with the mint-scented lotion she loved. Sadly, I brought out my cock and stuck it aimlessly into the writhing mass, uncaring and indifferent, telling myself death always brings debauchery and misfortune together.
Then I put an aquarium on my window sill. I had a golden-haired vulva in it and a magnificent specimen of a penis with a blue eye and delicate veins on its temples. As time went on, I threw everything I had ever loved into it: broken cups, hairpins, Barbara’s slippers, burnt-out bulbs, shadows, cigarette butts, sardine tins, all my letters and used condoms. Many strange creatures were born in that world. I felt myself to be a Creator and I had every right to think so. When I had the aquarium sealed up, I gazed contentedly at my moldering dreams until there was no seeing through the mildew on the glass. Yet I was sure that everything I loved in the world was there inside.
I still need fodder for my eyes. They gulp down all they get, greedily and roughly. At night, asleep, they digest it. Emilie scattered her shocked scorn generously, arousing desire in all she met, provoking visions of that hairy maw.
I still remember something that happened when I was a boy. I’d just been expelled from high school and nobody would have anything to do with me. Except my sister. I would go to her secretly in the night. Lying in each other’s arms, legs entwined, we slowly dreamed ourselves into the dulled state of all those who lie on the knife-edge of shame. One night we heard soft footsteps and my sister nudged me to hide behind the armchair. Our father came into the room, shutting the door quietly behind him, and climbed into her bed without a word. That was when, at last, I saw how one makes love. Emilie’s beauty was not meant to fade, but to rot.
Jindřich Štyrský
1933
Translation: Iris Irwin
