Open Sesame

   Today's a day for walking; you get it dear reader? Where? By a pyramid of
beautiful asparagus. What for? To wait for our next victim to appear. We wish to
give taste to our work, like this very corncob, delicate morsel of azure and
mauve, these delicious fay comestibles as we may call them, that we are wont to
sacrifice in the course of our cruel feasting. 

   Françoise appeared, bringing the wicker chairs inside (fearing a rain shower
might ruin them) in the sixty-seventh sentence of the novel, being thirty away
from Madame de Saint-Loup. I had not failed with this one and was able to
expunge all signs of her presence from the text, Françoise appeared to be found
with the wicker chairs in the sixty-seventh sentence, the rain having fallen
already, the asparagus too having grown already. 

   We position ourselves there, leaning against the wall, trying to melt
ourselves into its dullness and stay hidden from the roving eye, at a slight
angle, treading upon the sublime flesh of our vegetables, their bunches pointing
in accusation. In the crowd which presses, pushes, and flows, channeled between
storefronts and food stalls, to the street in a fluid stream, then more
viscously, gluey and stagnant, we find the bodies that it carries and which it
aligns in sight of the iridescent asparagus, which assimilate themselves to our
mental calculation.

   Now the calls of farmers, the food haphazard in all their glory, all the
sentimental picturesque of our juvenile compositions and your favourite books,
swoons. All comes flooding back before your eyes, through your ears, into your
nostrils, then recedes as though upon a deserted beach, a body, an individual,
"Françoise." The passers-by that you bump into, press against, push aside in an
effort to rejoin them no longer retain their individuality, as rocks, walls,
floating tree trunks, putrefying peaches, bunched-up lettuce, piled potatoes,
unripe fruit, earthy vegetables. In this, our murderous and amorous desire are
indistinguishable: it depopulates the world. The image of that lone body which
we pursue is itself entailed through our pupil, and with our gaze alone kills
itself, sends our senses a-riot. 

   "Françoise;" you can only see her back. She is our Orpheus, the agonizing
wheel of time stopped turning and the rock of Pure Matter withdrew from its
Sisyphean fall, you forget your hunger. You follow her across the shadow realm,
across the indifferent crowd, fearing only one thing, that she will turn around
and with her gaze the enchantment will break and that you will swoon back into
the hazy stream. But no, she walks, holding in her hand a wicker basket, and all
the stalls serialize to you as stations of the cross, each more painful than the
last. 

   Finally, she diverges from the current which sweeps the crowd onward, this
magma which seems to hold you back, to suck you up and against which you must
make an effort to disengage. Follow the footsteps along tranquil little streets,
but not deserted enough for your taste, dear reader. You're not that audacious. 

   To catch her without causing alarm, you follow her up to the stairs across
from those to which she was heading. 

   She has suddenly pushed the door of a building. A car passes at that
precisely moment in the street, you are prevented from crossing, you were late.
You just had enough time to see her collect the mail from a box at the top of
the stairs. When, finally, you penetrate the cool penumbra of the building's
entrance, its interior door will already have reclosed upon your prey.  

   At this point, I think dear reader, you abandon, spitefully, staggering to
your feet, all hope of seeing upon the page any sacrificial victim you had
lured. But you want dreamlike murder, the throat-cutting of movies...  I must
now intentionally point a finger, in the ranks of letterboxes aligned to the top
of your hollowed-out chest, at the only empty compartment that carries the
distinction of being named, apocryphally for sure (you know how to read as well
as I do, though the script is rather old-fashioned: Madame Pauline Fem), beneath
which is hidden François. 

   I leave you to your spite, standing before the tenant list, the little column
of labels which hangs by each button on the interphone, and make a tour of the
block while you consider the means of arriving at my ends... However, you might
be noticed, dear reader o' mine, standing over there, crazed, in the entrance of
a building where it is well marked by a yellowing, dog-eared sign that
soliciting is forbidden and trespassers will be prosecuted. You risk a fine.
Better yet, a tenant leaving to walk his dog would be sure to notice you -- when
the very same animal, hurrying, shoots forward, pulls at its leash -- casting
you a suspicious look while passing by; he would take note of your look
(sinister), your facial angle (obtuse), the form of your chin (coward, coward),
your dress (discrete, period), and your mugshot would end up pasted on the wall
of every police station in the city in the worst-case scenario.

   And it happened, this worst-case scenario, it happened. I leave "François"
the time to dress the bacon (following the grain of the meat) and the beef too,
to truss them up (giving them all possible good graces), to blanche the calf's
trotters, to slice and dice her carrots, and I arrive, I arrive, so much earlier
than the other guests in honour of which I suspect she was making such a
magnificent meal. 

   
   Here I am, I've arrived. I press the button on "François's" interphone and
immediately hear the static crackling of a nasty speaker, the hissing of
malevolent gods who hasten the copper wires, the electric harpies who snatch the
words from our lips and tarnish them in transit through the darkness; I announce
myself in a colourless voice, nonchalantly as possible, all uttered to the magic
surface: "It's me."

   Great! Open sesame! Yes, it's me. I'm not lying. Me! It's definitely me.
Prodigious pronoun! Magic word, like a cast die which makes, from something,
from anything, a distinct individual, which makes particular from universal. And
conversely, in which someone only recognizes within someone else another who
conforms to their own thought, their own expectations. My name is nobody and I
am me. But for you, for her, for them all, I am another, the other.

   Divine word, of all the words the most hypocritical, ghost with a stolen body
which we invade without breaking it, without leaving a trace under cover of
infernal night populated with the cunning illusionists who are charged by
trickster gods, Lares or Larsen, with communicating and giving rise to
disembodied voices, the doors of the lair, of the other, kept closed.

   All that remains is to take the stairs up to the top floor, and on the way,
alight each landing after the other in the depths of the stairwell, looking out
for the door left ajar in expectation of "me," or the sweet smell of a meal
prepared in "my" honour. 

   The door was ajar and, politely (since polite I am, beyond all measure, oh
rude reader who never even wipes their feet on the doormat), I knocked with my
left hand since my right held a knife, one used to decapitate chickens, the
strong, sharp, cool blade aligned behind the length of my forearm and, for her,
hidden. I heard myself announce (you will be my witness) into the apartment:
"Just coming in." I (and you as well) did not forget to do that, then next, like
a hunting dog on the scent, woken by an intense odor, managed to reach the
kitchen. 

   And there I found her (I know, I know, I'm blocking your view, I'm blocking
your view... don't crowd me so much) motionless, standing in the doorway like a
statue of a saint in its niche, as though petrified by the sight of me, none
other than the other, "François."

   So, like one drawing a curtain over an open window, with this same movement
of an arm tightly squeezed into too many sleeves and seeking to reveal the face
of a wrist watch with which to tell the time to some unknown individual who has
asked, I drew my knife across the throat of François, just under the chin, from
one ear to the other. 

   You didn't get out of the way, naïve and imprudent reader (this mania for
always needing front row seats), of the jet of blood which spurted, pulsating,
from the sectioned carotid of our victim. It shot out onto you, of course. Your
beautiful clothes all splashed. Let's go out to the street stained like that...
dear reader, I don't get you sometimes... They'll tell you in all honesty that
you've come out of a slaughterhouse. 

   Reader, my dearest reader, if you don't watch out, you'll end up in the dock,
and don't say I didn't tell you. If you still want to accompany me on these
excursions, pay more attention to your clothes than to your readings. In black,
again and again I remind you, always in black. In black, everything dies,
everything mixes and is extinguished. 

   Before our flight, dear reader, take a look in the kitchen. Not to
contemplate the head of the Saint which the slice's violence has detached from
its body, and the spasmodic muteness of its mouth, or again at the floor, the
almost drunk asparagus, scattered about like a Mikado game exuding their savage
odour, among the blood of the martyr they imbibe. No, take a look on the kitchen
table. Notice, among the peelings, a book. Since you're already sullied head to
toe, why are you afraid of walking over the dead and reddening the soles of your
shoes, Regency style? Go over and look at the page, arrayed around the edge of
an elliptical plate, those same blocks of gelatin like transparent crystals of
quartz moulded into a cathedral, a temple, an obelisk, or a boulder at the heart
of which a morsel of meat is encased. Note, here and there in the glassy matter,
the fragments of carrot included like hieroglyphs, like figures in a
stained-glass window. These sacred monuments destined to be devoured, choir,
apse, transept, votive columns in all, and which you would love to devastate
with greedy jaws, to feel them melt in your mouth, to penetrate themselves
deeper into you throat, to digest them plastering your gut...

   Salivate, my reader, salivate to your very soul. And don't forget to leave
out the back door.