La casa negra

He knew he was hopelessly lost, exiled from the possible happiness that always, some day, smiles on the palest cheek: he understood that destiny had aborted him into the chaos of that ghastly multitude of sullen men who stain life with their figures, weighed down by every vice and suffering.

He no longer had any hope, and his fear of living grew stronger when he thought that he would never have illusions again, when, his eyes obstinately fixed on a corner of the room, he admitted that it was all the same to him to work as a dishwasher in a cheap eatery or as a servant in a brothel.

What did it matter to him!

These convictions lulled him into gloomy meditations.

Because this anguish came to be so persistent that suddenly he discovered his soul was sad for the fate that, in the city, awaited his body — a body that weighed seventy kilos and that he saw only when he steered it in front of a mirror.

In other times he had surrounded himself, in thought, with every comfort and pleasure — pleasures that, being unlimited by matter, had neither duration nor borders — whereas his present sadness was about his body, a suffering body, one Erdosain at times thought about as if it no longer belonged to him, but with the remorse of never having made it happy.

That sadness, insofar as it concerned his poor body, turned deep — as deep as the grief of a mother who could never satisfy her child's wishes.

Because he had given his flesh, which would live so short a time, neither a decent suit nor a joy to reconcile it with living; he had done nothing for the pleasure of his body, whereas his spirit was denied not even the geography of the countries men have yet to invent machines to reach.

And many times he said to himself:

—What have I done for the happiness of this wretched body of mine?

Because the truth is that at times he felt as foreign to himself as the wine to the barrel that holds it.

Then it would dawn on him that this body was the one that bottled up his broodings and fed them with its weary blood; a wretched, ill-dressed body that no woman deigned to look at and that felt the scorn and the weight of the days — for which only his thoughts were to blame, thoughts that had never craved the pleasures it silently, timidly demanded.

Erdosain felt pity, felt saddened, toward his physical double, of which he was almost a stranger.

Then, like a desperate man who throws himself from a seventh floor, he flung himself into the delicious terror of masturbation, wanting to annihilate his remorse in a world from which no one could expel him, surrounding himself with the delights kept far from his life, with all the most varied and beautiful bodies, to enjoy which an immense sum of lifetimes and money would be needed.

That was a universe of gelatinous ideas, broken into passageways where obscenity dressed itself in the costliest silks and lace and velvets and guipures; a world resplendent in its crepuscular pulp.

And now they were tall maidens, slender and polished, now corrupted schoolgirls — a feminine, varied world from which no one could expel him, him, poor devil, whom the madams of the most ramshackle brothels eyed with suspicion, as if he were going to cheat them of the price of the fornication.

He would close his eyes and enter the burning darkness, oblivious to everything, like the opium smoker who, on entering the filthy den where the Chinese owner reeks of excrement, believes he is regaining heaven.

And for a moment he would slip surreptitiously toward the clandestine pleasure, ashamed, but with the impatience of a young lad entering a brothel for the first time.

Desire buzzed like a horsefly in his ears, but no one could tear him now from the sensual darkness.

This darkness was a familiar house in which he suddenly lost all sense of ordinary living.

There, in the black house, the terrible pleasures were habitual to him — pleasures that, had he suspected them in another man's life, would have separated him from that man forever.

Although this black house was inside Erdosain, he entered it by singular detours, tortuous maneuvers, and once the threshold was crossed he knew it was useless to turn back, because down the corridors of the black house, down one particular corridor forever bundled in shadow, there came toward him, on light feet, the woman who one day on the sidewalk, on a streetcar, or in a house, had stiffened him with desire.

Like someone drawing from his wallet money that is the product of separate efforts, Erdosain drew from the bedchambers of the black house a woman fragmentary and complete, a woman composed of a hundred women torn apart by the hundred ever-identical desires, renewed at the presence of such women.

Because this woman had the knees of a girl whose skirt the wind slanted aside while she waited for the bus, and the thighs he remembered having seen on a pornographic postcard, and the sad, faded smile of a schoolgirl he had met long ago on the streetcar, and the greenish eyes of a little dressmaker with a pale, pimple-ringed mouth who on Sundays went out, at dusk, with a friend, to dance in those recreation halls where shopkeepers shove their swollen flies against the young girls who like men.

This arbitrary woman, kneaded from the flesh of all the women he had not been able to possess, granted him those indulgences that prudent sweethearts grant — sweethearts who have already let their hands stray to their boyfriends' crotches without thereby ceasing to be decent.

Then he would fall into the abysses of the black house.

The black house!