The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso

Author:José Donoso [Donoso, José]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: A.A. Knopf
Published: 1973-12-14T13:00:00+00:00

18

EVERYTHING, FROM THE very beginning, from the time his glove grazed my arm in the street, everything’s been carefully laid out, step by step, with infinite care, making me a prisoner of his confidence when I entered his service, making me a witness of his love in order to hold me prisoner, Inés the bait to get me to swallow the hook, supremacy in the world of monsters where my mean body would take the place of his and be the father of his son, the final temptation, the most powerful hook. I bit, the hook pierced me, and I can’t shake free, tied down as I am to a bed that burns suddenly and freezes just as suddenly, injection after injection, bottle after bottle of blood to keep me from dying, not turn me into an imbunche, that’s what the kindly old witches I live with want me for, and that would be complete peace, with all of me sewed up instead of opened with the precise cuts of Dr. Azula’s knife, as I listen to their halting footsteps outside, no, they’ve come to sew me because they’re good, I see them through the window, idling in the street while waiting for me at the corner service station. Why don’t they let them come in to see me? They want nothing of me, they’re patient. They wait patiently because the old women’s time is interminable, they replace one another and live on forever, no, we’re in no hurry, we can wait till the bottle empties into poor Mudito’s vein.

It’s cold outside. There’s a cold wind blowing I know I’ll never feel again, just as I’ll never feel water in my mouth again because they refuse to give me any. They’ll keep me here forever in this overheated incubator. I close my eyes to drive away this hopeless longing for the street, for cold air. And suddenly, behind my eyelids, the answer’s flashed across a kind of screen: They want to keep you alive here without ever letting you get out, in order to rob you of all your organs, you see, they’re taking out eighty percent . . . Of course! They started by interchanging my blood: with my own eyes I saw Dr. Azula take syringe after syringe of blood from my stomach and turn it over to the screaming multitude. They’re getting ready to go on with the rest. Last night I felt the saw cutting off my feet, the way they traced a red circle around my right ankle and then around the left. And this morning I woke up with enormous feet, with yellow membranes between my toes: webbed feet. I suspect they did the same with my hands. I don’t want to look at them. That’s why I hide them under the sheet, in order not to see the repulsive membranes that join my fingers, that are enmeshed in thick cobwebs of monster’s flesh. There must be a list of priorities controlled by Emperatriz.

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