The Secret Crypt by Salvador Elizondo

Author:Salvador Elizondo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

“IT IS AN APPARITION that occurs only at the very end of a desperate solitude. The figure is eternalized in a sort of defiant pose. A painter. We demand a less ambiguous description. Someone who is infinitely secret, but also infinitely precise. Someone who is formless yet tangible. We demand to know what she’s like. We’ll have to send for the Master. We want a conventional portrait. We want to know what La Perra was like. What was she like, then? What was La Perra like, X? ‘Ambiguous in her unquestionable precision. So tangible as to be formless; I already told you that. We demand an explanation regarding La Perra. We have to send for the Master. We want a conventional portrait. Sometimes I amuse myself by thinking that she, too, in her insomniac nights, like October thirteenth, imagines the possibility that I’m a secret agent, even though I’m just a painter.’

‘Excuse me. It’s late. Yes, we know. It’s late … This recording was prepared fifty thousand years ago in order to be transmitted right now. Please … Don’t hang up…’

She interrogates me with her eyes. ‘Who is this?’ Fields of grass fill her eyes. ‘Who is this?’ She asks me through half-open lips. There is a definite quiver in that half-uttered question.

‘Only the devil knows…’

‘Ah!’ she exclaimed. ‘Now I remember. A few months ago, when you started to write The Secret Crypt, you wanted me to read a book because you had imagined our mirror image. The image of our love, which you wanted to coincide completely with images from a book where our love was described in terms of bloody surgery…’

The only evidence that the book exists is in her knowledge of the city of Polt’s topography. But she’s here, sitting by my side. Her eyes, the absolute swell of her forehead, indicate ignorance, indifference, or total disappointment regarding the nature of the mystery that has by now manifested itself to us.

‘You’ll be subjected to an exhaustive interrogation about every aspect of your persona that remains unclear. You mustn’t attempt any of those arguments that criminals employ to make excuses for certain events, such as that you suffer from partial amnesia, invariably spanning periods of your life when it would be logical to assume that you were subjected to certain disciplines that would have been able to provide access to … No, you were wearing white and walking the hedge-lined path, wandering randomly, completely unaware that you were going into the last stronghold at the absolute center of a huge labyrinth, that center from which you always return with a dizzy knowledge—as complex as the labyrinth that contains it—of the construction and growth of ideal cities. Or do you deny having known, at some point in your life, the author of those confusing ideas concerning the structure that made it possible to deduce the module governing the growth of the secret, hidden cities contained within ideal cities? Did you hold him in your arms? If so, by seducing

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