Avec un mélange d’horreur et de curiosité, j’ai observé la putain ivre se jeter dans la Seine. Sa échine redoutable, une bouche pour des façons d’untold de la mort, et coeur de consommation ne sont pas plus.
With a mixture of horror and curiosity, I watched the drunken whore hurl herself into the Seine. Her dreadful loins, a maw for untold manners of death, and consumptive heart are no more
L’attrait de la sirène me laisse avec rien mais l’amertume.
(The lure of the siren leaves me with nothing but bitterness.)
l’âme de chaque homme est une prison, la terre, un régal de la corruption et de la dégradation.
Every man’s soul is a prison. The earth, a feast of corruption and degradation.
Le grand-père Luc était un banquier et un industriel. Il était un homme serré, un compteur d’haricot avec un poing de fer et une faiblesse pour le baccara.
(Grandfather Luc was a banker and industrialist. He was a tight man, a bean counter with an iron fist and a weakness for baccarat.)
Inhalez à la tasse de la putréfaction de la mortalité. La vapeur mephitic de votre chair de fléchissement me rappelle que je vis.
(Inhale at the the cup of the rot of mortality. The mephitic vapor of your sagging, here leathern flesh reminds me I live!)
My chalet in the mountains:
I fled out of the country on a breeze of cow dung. I shall miss the country dances, advice full of loose, sickness large breasted women and their coarse menfolk, cialis thick as donkeys. By evensong I was passing back over the mountains and took a suite in an overlook hotel at 1000 meters. At twilight a brass band paraded boisterously below the terrace. I fled before I could be subject to any sort of folk dance or horrific ululations. Winding the steep mountain road, I noted that the sites where witches had been burned were marked by cruel and hideous clawed figures, their faces distorted with malice.
I found a bar of ill-repute, where lowly characters of many stripes were playing darts. It would be more accurate to say they were pouring liquor down their throats and hurling knives into a board. I settled in a corner to watch their game and obliterate my consciousness. I was served by an aged slattern with absurdly dyed red hair and a black eye of interesting palette. Her sharp address and the sour odor of her yellowed flesh bespoke her beating well deserved.
The grim and fiendish mountain town is disappearing behind me. A mob will assemble with torches this evening for the burning of effigies. I saw the figure of a woman lashed to a post suspended over a pyre as I roared out of town. What madness runs loose in these mountains after dark!
Tomorrow I set upon the road homewards. My last stop was a castle high in the hills. I scaled the ruined tower through a narrow, find crumbling staircase, malady nearly missing a second staircase tucked in an alcove. This led to a great pit adorned by rusted chains, filthy straw, and a beheading block, innumerably scarred. How many rank and decrepit churls met their louse ridden end here? As I meditated such a woeful condition, a mayfly circled. I impulsively lashed out with my fist and caught it midair. I felt it crawling weakly across my palm. There is no mercy for the body, and none in such a place as this. I crushed the fly out of existence.
It is the last days of my country sojourn. I strolled a chestnut lined lane with my ivory tipped cane. There I encountered a gentleman poet and his smiling wife. They invited me to supper, and soon pasta in a rich, bacony sauce was before me. We talked of weather and of the wasp’s sting, of travelling and staying at home. I was tucked deeply into a glass of spirits when the talk turned to theater. “Cruelty! Plague!” I cried, springing upon the table and miming a violent death. The gentleman and his gentle wife did not share my enthusiasm for Artaud, looking on horrified as I writhed in agony, seizing and shattering their crockery. I abruptly resumed my seat and it was my turn to be horrified, as the poet referred to Roland Barthes. Signs! Deconstruction! Abstract piddle puddle, I’ll have none of it. We should have come to blows, but the poet’s mild wife took to fainting in a corner. I took up my hat and strode out, bristling with indignation. Barthes indeed!
I was trapped in a torrent of wind and rain. It would not do. I had to return to the widow. She was all grateful pleasure at my appearance- the kind of joy that only the poor can experience. She was preparing supper, and asked me to collect a plant the locals call “Brenn-essel”. It is called that, I know, because all the fires of Beelzebub are contained within its leaves and stems. My scholar’s hands are stung and nettled into a fierce white hot swollen mass. How I long for silk sheets and a slice of foie-gras in my favorite chair!
Loneliness has followed me my whole life- in cars and in bars. It haunts me like the headwind on this road. Tonight I drink, and drink deeply. “Get drunk!”, said the great poet. Get Drunk!
…
Celestine! I try not to read your name in curls of smoke from the poppy. Apolline! I try not to see our lustry embrace in interwoven grass that I trample underfoot.
Lo! La vallée: I spent the last two days in the valley, helping a young widow move the stones from her garden. It was her loneliness that first drew me to partake of the thick brown stew that she ladled into stone bowls with a heavy, wooden spoon. How humble and happy her spirit after a day’s work! I can know no such simple peace. I do not belong in the widow’s garden soiling my calfskin boots. I do not belong at her table with my poison heart, bloated corpse eye and my mind a teeming wasp’s nest. The herd in the meadow watched with open, bovine curiosity when we parted at her gate. In my haste to be gone I ran over the snarling tomcat that she called Chester in the yard.