An Avid One in Extremis
-
by Hilda Hilst -
for Lygia and Paulo Emilio
(Translated by Dawn
Jordan)
Spit in your face, a slap, a punch, anything better than the word, KleinKu,
I call you that, name with the sonority of the language of poets and
beasts, the act always better and not like me myself the thought-leap
to explain myself through minimal you. I'm not dying KleinKu. I tried
to explain the same thing to another one, stupid like you, named Koyo
and built stockades looking for my nail, stockades around nothing, because
for all that you raise up, never, closed like I am in this braided mat,
neither Koyo nor KleinKu would have the visor, the perforating eye for
the smallest of me. I'm not dying. Perfection is death, one of you AH
discovered and said Perfection is death, wouldn't this be the greatest
proof of immortality? Koyo and KleinKu locked you up, insane asylum,
in this AH up against the wall can't give speeches in the congresses,
senates, it would be the same, madmen in the inside, on the outside,
all KleinKus repeating that I am dead when this would be the inexpressible
but the most significant of all my acts. I want to die, a single marble
slab over the I whole, I'd rather the mat, that which never within your
reach, not even with eyes closed, KleinKu understand, I'm in agony but
I'm not going to die, deteriorated, shapeless, from here on pus and
dust accumulating, I should live in silence, but the one of me in silence
runs to you, expresses itself in acts, and what acts those of yours,
savagery and arrogance in all of them, I must ask that you hurry, finish,
you have the means, more powerful than Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and there's
a hunger in you too marvelous for your name, and isn't it that all your
hungers fit in your despicable hole? I don't know how one dies, and
I didn't know that thinking me would expel concept and dunghill, I look
at you in a sobbing separating of distances, I look at me and in the
body I search for the tiniest point from where I can extract an all
new, death, if I could remake myself in death, I kneel twisted down
before myself, that the divine I find the road to Nothingness and on
the way not try again to give form to appearances, the I full of emotion
wanted to translate itself into works, thought Man to inhabit the Earth
and it was as if one had thought sordidness fossilized feces, that Nothingness
should meet me once again, thought me Nothingness, because for an instant
it intended to give form to the Nothingness-Not Being, ah KleinKu, I
say it again, I'd rather the spit the punch the slap, anything would
be better that the word, and if I had cornets I could use them like
this one of me, fortunate Mahler, if I had cornets, the ones post-riders
use, oh if I only had them, I would extract the most painful sound for
your impaired hearing, if I had words like those of me Jeshua had them
some mine incendiary, but for KleinKu it was as if I had never committed
them, if the many in me could hammer your substance, once again molded,
a new metaplasm, two hearts-head for the man, acting in complete communion,
KleinKu added on in some easts, torn from the south, it would have been
better to have consumed the idea-man as soon as it was expelled, act
the way I was taught by mine own, monks-cartridges volatilizing the
word at its source, KleinKu thinking yes but incandescent in the same
moment returning to its root. Now black elbows braced in my softnesses,
I look at the absurd: you. Dear little mother, I GrosseKu, also baptized
by men with esoteric names, Pneuma, the All-One, the No Name, dear little
mother I want your hand in mine, and Gide in an endless to my ear: "I
want to die in desperation." Maybe that way I'll be able, maybe
that way I learn to die.
Translated by Dawn Jordan
Originally published in LANDSCAPES OF A NEW LAND: SHORT FICTION BY LATIN
AMERICAN WOMEN
Edited by Marjorie Agosin
Fredonia, New York: White Pine Press
1992 Second Edition
