II
“A woman awakened to her desires will in all probability brand herself as a monstrosity”
—Hélène Cixous
—Hélène Cixous
On the way back, passing through the old piazza, my neck hairs bristled and I knew.
I WANT A NEW PAST, she said as soon as she slipped out of the swamp onto the pavement as a gothic mermaid. Her tail was a myriad of coloured scales from bright red to dark purple, and that radiance almost took my breath away once and for all, it was something that contrasted with the grey as not even Murano crystal can, it was the reflection of the sky at orangey twilight and at the same time the blackened blue of night, scintillating darkness. She had only one breast, on the other side was a scar, and on her face there was an even bigger scar near her mouth, a smile cut with scissors, a discarded sketch. She was a blue-eyed brunette and had a flower affixed behind her ear, a dahlia, as well as a hard and emaciated sadness on her face. My mind was confused, I had the impression she was speaking English. Her gaze was supplicating, but with the authority of one who has grown tired of suffering.
I WANT TO BE THE NEW ARIEL, she said, balancing her tail on the edge of the swamp like someone spending an afternoon by the pool. A WOMAN WHO WOULD RATHER BE A MERMAID.
I removed my boots, sat down beside her and wet my feet—there was now no point in fleeing. I had the impression the mud was a little warmer, perhaps due to the swaying of her tail, which moved the soft sand from side to side. Her face was pale and appeared frozen, but the scales on her tail emanated heat. It was as if the two parts of her body weren’t communicating with each other, as if there were a surgical division at the base of her chest.
She immediately saw, in the fear freezing my throat, that I had understood. It was an irrefutable request, a splash of muddy water propelled into my face by a decisive tail. An order from a mermaid, and one does not argue with mermaids. My terror would have been greater but for the colours from her tail reflecting into my eyes like the clouds on the lagoon, dancing from side to side like windscreen wipers, that movement which says, deep down, that everything is going to be alright, even if it isn’t. YOU’RE GOING TO WRITE MY STORY ANEW, I WANT ANOTHER PAST, A DIFFERENT PAST.
Right when I had felt myself so well hidden, so ensconced inside the caffè, why me? WHY? and before I knew it, she said like skin, JUST BECAUSE.
At her house, hanging from the staircase banister, were my new winter clothes, on coat hangers and covered in plastic. On the front, they boasted frilly collars, very tidy. On the back, they were torn and had some kind of strapping. She was in the living room and gave the impression she could hardly wait. I had classes, I couldn’t stay any longer, I had to go. Very calmly, she told me she was aware of that. I asked her why she wasn’t ready for her class. I noticed she hadn’t even taken a shower, her hair looked dirty. In the end you didn’t even take a shower . . . I know, she replied. I gave her a hug, what a lovely hug, she said, and then I noticed something almost hard on her back, a kind of square tip on her lower back, it might be metal or wood, who knows with the edges of a coffin.
They invented a mother for me, she said. Her name is MOM: Motive, Opportunity and Means. These are the elements required to solve a murder, obviously. “Thoughtprints”, the psychology of acts, the science of detectives. Sorry if I speak in English sometimes, but that’s my mother tongue. Well, I’m the woman from the most famous murder of the twentieth century. The dahlia is a flower that is planted to be ornamental and its petals are normally segmented, cut or toothed.
This is how she started talking, and from inside her eyes came waves of smothered desperation, the old spume of pain. Between one bubble and the next I could see her more or less living eyes, half here and half there, intimate with turbid mud. They were always searching for my hands, those eyelids too distrustful to meet one’s gaze and request a hug. It had been a police reporter who closed them, and then all other eyes in the world, wide open, were looking at her, but she couldn’t look back and ask for a little discretion, please, because the crime scene was left open to the press, even if the photos they took made use of techniques that supposedly softened the human cruelty. The real photos were only released forty years later, after the case had gone cold, because time is a murderer’s best accomplice. But this is how thousands of men began looking at her, and, after an exhausting century, she had decided to keep only the top half of her body, leaving the lower part in the vacant lot where it had been discovered, in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, ten minutes from Hollywood. This hadn’t really been the kind of fame she’d hoped for, and in that way, with only a tail, she would never have to worry about what they might stick between her legs without her consent. That’s why her tail was so shiny, colourful and vigorous. She was an aspiring actress proofed against men.
She didn’t wish to provide many names from the story apart from her own. And she wasn’t BD, but Elizabeth, or Beth. She wasn’t the missing girl who bit her nails, but the one who liked to write letters. Not exactly because she was a romantic, but because her father had walked out on his family and she’d acquired the persistent habit of waiting for news. It was as inevitable as biting her nails.
She’d believed that getting married would resolve everything, that like a magic trick she would finally be happy, but the major she’d said yes to decided to go and die in a plane crash in India, in spite of the twenty-seven letters she’d written in eleven days, because copying fairytales was still the only thing she knew how to do. After that, she’d travelled from East to West and vice versa more times than she can remember.
On the day she returned to the city of her dreams, she found her body in that vacant lot, surrounded by reporters. It was they, and not the detectives, who took the photos of the crime scene that had seriously impeded her projects. It wasn’t enough that she now had two halves of a body that were no use separately, but she was also missing her uterus, removed post mortem—doctors and monsters really can have a lot in common.
Getting married and having children no longer seemed like a viable option after this, so she stopped writing letters, and then it’s also true that it’s difficult to write letters underwater. With that, a lot of things were left untold, despite many on the surface having decided to write about who she was—it appeared to be a hobby of theirs, this habit of talking about the way people were based purely on one’s own ideas. They were all in need of a good bath, it seemed.
When the newspapers and police finally grew sick after thirty-one consecutive days of covering her murder, they invited writers to consider who the murderer might be. This must have been fun for them, this brainstorming undertaken on the basis of a tortured and lifeless brain. One of them, a thriller writer, suggested that the murderer was impotent. If this writer had taken the trouble to research the murderer’s criminal record, he would have known that the man had also been tried for incest and released after posting bail of five thousand dollars.
The next day, a competing newspaper also featured a best-selling writer—he’d been adapted by Warner Brothers and everything—who had decided that the killer and victim must have met at a bar and discussed something erotic, which unzipped the trousers of the man’s unconscious, quickly driving him mad. A very calculated madness, judging by the manner in which he’d planned everything out. Spells of madness, she would come to understand, can be very convenient.
*
Day after day, she became a soap opera, a series watched by all in North America. Her afterlife, in fact, had given rise to a TV series, but she preferred not to talk about this because it caused her pain at the line of her equator.
“It is when she is asleep that she really belongs to me,” I recalled, it was from Soluble Fish, a novel that portrays women as torsos, devoid of head and limbs. To see freedom in madness is simply an adolescent interpretation of Freud, a mark of Breton’s narcissistic megalomania. I looked at her again, I’d become distracted for a few seconds, but she hadn’t noticed. She was used to not being listened to.
The newspapers ended up inventing a murderer as bait to get the real one to appear, stung by vanity, which only encouraged him to kill several more women and leave, on their bodies, messages for the police written in lipstick. It was an irresistible pastime, as he also made clear in the postcards he sent to the newspapers. In two weeks, thirteen messages were sent to the police. Let us not doubt the pedagogy of Jack the Ripper, another who loved leaving little notes.
But what the newspapers didn’t know, she said as if this were not enough, is that she’d turned into what some gentlemen called a work of art. Even more: she was a secret homage paid to each other by a group of friends, a select and singular little men’s club.
Everything began to flood inside my head, the tide returning like a tsunami. Behind the ringing in my ears there was a hissing, and behind the hissing a wave, “Isn’t what matters that we be the masters of ourselves, the masters of women?” Paris, the city of lights, 20th century. Breton, the self-proclaimed Oracle of Delphi, seeking a fairytale for pampered men, and written inside my notebook were the words psychic automatism, but I read botulism, psychic botulism, mental diarrhoea.
*
One of their games, at this little boys’ club, was to pretend that they were mad, in a kind of conscious madness, a pure flow of egocentricity, because those madmen could have everything the way they wanted, always. Like children who intimidate their parents with tantrums, she said, which made me think she’d make a very good babysitter.
Some call this Surrealism, I said, and it’s a name that’s very well respected on the surface, where the men live who keep women underground, “we rap on the bottom with the shoe of our horse every time we want to signal to one or other of them that we would be very happy to take her back to the surface.” They levelled harsh criticisms at dualism, this method of dividing everything into opposites, yet in the meantime they continued dividing women in half. If a woman had a body, then she couldn’t have a head and vice versa, the “maidservants of frailty, maidservants of happiness”. They claimed they were capable of producing “rarefied gases”, and as I recalled this I wondered, for the first time, if it might have anything to do with the psychic botulism. In the grip of a fine white powder, they would also attack the bourgeoisie while at the same time frequenting the most fashionable parties in Paris and fighting to decide who would appear in the official photo for each exhibition.
Yes, that’s right, she agreed, and she seemed relieved to establish that I knew all I needed to know in that moment, in one of those rare coincidences in life. They were all disciples of Sade, “the sacred martyr of freedom,” according to Eluard—or the one who believed himself a classy son of a bitch. As she talked, she barely stopped to take a breath, but she apologised immediately for using foul language. She was a “sweetie,” she didn’t tend to smudge her lipstick with coarse expressions, sorry, and she continued.
There was a photographer, a fan of Sade to the point of taking photographs of the original manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom: he was very famous, and he loved being famous, because it meant he could go on believing, as a card-carrying surrealist, that women exist to give pleasure to men. Even more: that this pleasure is only achieved by inflicting humiliation, degradation and pain on women, just as Uncle Sade had taught them.
I recalled what I’d read about a picture of his exhibited in Los Angeles, in the 1940s, entitled Imaginary Portrait of the Marquis de Sade. The art critic H. Miller had written, in Art Digest, that it was a subject for crime and torture magazines.
Being a surrealist was practical, because it allowed him to take photos of naked teenage girls without troubling his conscience—after all, his conscience was unconscious and didn’t really know what it was doing. It was convenient for them to claim that there was no separation between reality and dreams, this way they wouldn’t be required to take responsibility for the women’s living nightmares. When he ran the risk of being accused of rape, the photographer was able to get a doctor to provide him with a letter stating he was impotent. Perhaps this is where the writer hired by the newspaper to devise a character for the murderer got his idea of an impotent man from.
For those surrealist gentlemen, reality simply got in the way. Nothing that was real or living could come between them and their sacred wishes, “where their whim is the luminous road”, or where “the whims of the imagination alone cause real things”. Fuck them, she said, and then blushed. It was the first time I saw some life-like colour in her face.
This thing about whims was a phrase from one of the surrealist manifestoes. I immediately identified it because I’d underlined it in my research, retrieved from the Caffè Florian. In some ways, Beth and I found ourselves in the same boat, and no one would be submitting us to a “progressive depersonalisation”, no movement would introduce us into their “secret society” of death, as if it, death, were not the most universal thing in the world. Our death was united, watery and fast approaching. There would be no more dying in life.
My writing was never automatic, only traumatic, actually, psychosomatic too, she continued. So many things to clear up before an epistolary exchange in which, in reality, two senders exist, but all this she would only learn later.
Those gentlemen called themselves mad principally when they had problems with the police. When accused of the sexual abuse of minors and interrogated by a policeman, her murderer had claimed his acts were as nebulous as a dream, and that he never knew when he was hypnotising someone or being hypnotised himself. Being mad, for him, meant getting everything his own way, always, a pampered and dangerous madness.
Those gentlemen claimed to be irremediably detached from reality, transporters of another world, like someone forced to drive a new car, with that noisy machine invading their garages just as they themselves invade our bodies. By adopting the excuse that, when it comes to imagination, the watchfulness of reason is absent, they could rid themselves of any and all moral concern.
Do you already know how rage is written?
I responded that I didn’t, but she continued all the same.
It wasn’t the photographer who brought me here, she said, looking at the tepid mud. It was him, she explained, as if she could still see him, and she still could. But I won’t say his name, because that’s what he would want, and that is everything I refuse to give him. They say I died at twenty-two, but it happened long before, without anyone publishing it in the newspaper or even noticing. I died the day he stuck my picture in a secret hard-cover photo album, small and square. Before that, I used to write to my mother every week, and perhaps that’s why the reporters decided to phone her and, before telling her I’d been raped tortured murdered cut in half, they were able to secure an exclusive interview.
I was always very polite and well-behaved, a “darling”, because that’s what they claim to want, but I was afraid of walking alone on the streets of Los Angeles, because they weren’t “gentlemen” and they didn’t behave well at all. My asthma was always seeking warmer parts, but the gusts of icy wind continued to buffet my face, no matter what I did.
It’s always cold in here, an icy, slippery surface, she said. Her purplish lips trembled and I could hear her teeth knocking together, like someone knocking insistently at a door. I’d already put the question off for far too long, and it was an obligatory invitation. Would you like to come back with me to the caffè?
III
Why Venice, I asked as soon as we arrived. Because this is where we’re going to meet with Leonora, she said, and in that moment the voices of my skin began to make sense. We had a meeting set in scars, the three of us.
Aside from that, just like me, Venice is accustomed to sinking, because the whole world looks at it, but no one sees, she said. And furthermore, I thought without saying anything, it was a body that gave Venice its importance, the body of Saint Mark, transported from Alexandria. Perhaps we had arrived at the time and place for a woman’s body to carry this same importance. Mermaids don’t shed tears and yet they suffer far more than we do. Talk some more about that club, I asked, I’m going to fill the bathtub and make coffee. It was only then that I fully appreciated the size of her tail, so big it filled almost the entire Chinese Room. However, she moved it so dexterously that she didn’t knock any of the furniture out of place, not even those tables with movable tops designed to allow the passage of the enormous skirts that had been created to prevent women from moving until the end of the eighteenth century.
Mermaids live longer, up to three hundred years, but when they die, they turn into foam, and she prefers this to having her immortal soul transferred by a man (“‘I’m ready,’ declared the little mermaid, PALE AS A CORPSE.”) She had so little time and yet the days kept going by without anyone noticing. I needed to assure her that she would be alright, and yet it isn’t at all easy to look after a mermaid.
It was at the Arsenale that we found the perfect pool for her. It had been created by Robert Grosvenor, appearing courtesy of the artist at the Venice Biennale. Crafted from concrete blocks, it seemed to have been fashioned for a mermaid with an enormous tail that was already beginning to ache from so much squeezing into my bathtub, a borrowed bathtub that I filled with bucketfuls of water, because the Florian has no shower. Some might ask why I choose to live this way, so deprived of comforts, sleeping on a sofa in the main hall of the caffè, looking out onto the piazza, with no curtain, using a miniscule kitchen with no stove. Maybe it’s because, in Venice, it is you who must adapt to the city, not the other way around. Travelling on foot come rain or shine, buying fruit while pulling along a little shopping trolley, respecting the tide, the timetables for transportation and the blind alleyways, all of this brings with it a humility that the internet has shattered, because on the internet everyone can do everything, including, and principally, acting like a moron.
Beth, however, is still ignorant of the internet and has never really been accustomed to comforts, so she was very happy with the pool. There she can take refuge during the day and, once the Biennale is over, she can even come out for a while and explore her surroundings without anyone seeing. It’s true that some soldier might spot her and, not hearing a bewitching song, take fright, which would simply be a historical reparation. To cause fear, for a change, instead of always going around frightened.
Settled in, more at ease and with a little more colour in her face, she began telling me everything. They were three men from the little boys’ club: the murderous doctor, that famous photographer, and an artist. The doctor, himself an amateur photographer, didn’t just admire the famous photographer but, deep down, he also genuinely wanted to be an artist, and we all know how that usually ends. He believed that being a surrealist meant operating on reality however he pleased, even with a scalpel, and he was profoundly influenced by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Sade, the canon of Wickedness Directed Specifically Toward Women, Doctors in Sexual Objectification, all still very well respected in the academies to this day.
I recalled Frida Kahlo rejecting the surrealist label and calling Breton a son of a bitch. In Paris, she had ended up staying at his house, but left for a hotel claiming that he was filthy and ate horrible things. After the exhibition, she paid little attention to the compliments of Duchamp, the artist from the little club who’d helped the photographer cosy up to the Dadaists in Paris. Of what Breton, that “old cockroach,” wrote about her, exoticizing her work as if it could only exist in Mexico, she had also disregarded every comma.
Yes, she said, and then they would somehow come across each other again in Philadelphia, where the photographer was born and where the artist may have ordered for my breast to be hidden. For a long time, I was also Duchamp’s secret album, this time in notebooks filled with instructions for the reproduction of my crime scene, secret recommendations that should only be carried out upon his death.
For twenty years, in New York, while claiming to be merely a chess player and to have left his artistic career behind him, he had worked on that installation in secret, but this doesn’t seem to impress any of the authorities on his work, just as they view as perfectly natural the idea of an installation that exposes the naked and bloated body of a woman, seemingly raped and left in a clearing, as I was. Until that point, none of Duchamp’s installations had represented reality so brutally. The installation, created by hand, even went as far as covering the body with fine leather, to give the skin as real an appearance as possible, as close to the reality that he and the photographer both likely knew all too well and yet had decided to do nothing about for decades on end, letting the murderer go unpunished. Instead, they decided to violate me again and again, for the greatest number of voyeurs around the world. For some, cowardice only ends when their lives are over.
She said all this without looking at me. Her eyes were tired, tired of being nothing more than death as fetish. It had been the famous photographer who photographed Proust on his deathbed, death as art, but it turns out that both prey and predators exist, and she’d grown tired of always being prey. After studying all of his erotic literature, it was to Sade that the photographer had dedicated, in the 1930s, almost a dozen paintings and sculptures. What he admired in Sade was his capacity to ignore conventions and morality, which meant, principally, ignoring that women can think for themselves and feel pain. Among those gentlemen, there was even a cult of harm against all “moralising dilettantism”, because their radical concept of freedom was in opposition to human freedom, it meant doing what they wanted with others without any concern for the suffering they caused. Whenever this occurred to me, I would feel cubes of ice hurled at the back of my neck, which caused me to have an obsession with scarves.
She continued to avoid really looking at me, yet gradually she was weaving a narrative, a structure in scales that seemed to calm her tail, which no longer moved back and forth so energetically.
But I knew none of this at the time, she said. She’d been too busy with her work as an actress, trying to earn a living in Hollywood while sharing hotel rooms with friends or acquaintances. Most of the time, the only affinity between these women was their empty purses. She often lacked funds even to afford the daily rate.
The person who had told her all this, down below, was—who would imagine it?—André Breton’s daughter, Aube Elléouët. Accustomed to taking people from the interior of France for their first experience of the sea, the mountains and the ecstasy of life, she thought it would be a good idea to also lead excursions to the swamp, and this is how they met.
