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In the Forbidden City

University of Chicago Press

Chapter One

this typed letter will never be signed. Therefore, you will
futilely search for me. You will futilely imagine that you know who I
am, but who I am is unimportant.

It is enough for you to know that I saw you by chance the other
day. You passed right in front of me and didn't even look at me, but I
... I understood everything. You don't know it, but I have known you for
some time, yes, before ever meeting you I knew of your existence. There
are certainties in life that cannot be erased, however much one wants
to. At the very most, one can suffer a lapse of faith-did I really, in
fact, meet you? did I ever see you on that day? But then there you were,
pushing a supermarket cart and wearing a sea-green pullover. At that
moment, I didn't immediately recognize you, but then you turned and I
understood.

I can't say exactly how long it is that I have been waiting for
you-years, moments, forever really.

You have never seen me, and therefore you don't know that I have
been following you. Now I know where you live, what your name is in this
life; of the other life, where we were surely passionate lovers, I don't
have anymemories, but it must have been somewhere, in some corner of
the universe that was in that moment sublime. I've always known it, have
you?

Marco,

i heard from your doorkeeper that you tried to find out who it is
that has been asking about you. Don't do it, it's pointless. I haven't
been the one asking questions about you, but another person on my
behalf; therefore, you will never in any way be able to find me out. Why
have I done this? I have my reasons. And they are reasons such that I
will never allow anyone else to discover them.

Yesterday, I saw you at the window. You were laughing and talking
to someone else in the room, but for a second you turned as if you knew
that I was watching you. Was it perhaps for this reason that you left
the window open? There was a woman with you, I know, I understood that,
perhaps even a young and beautiful one. I wasn't able to catch a glimpse
of her except in profile, and a profile doesn't reveal very much. The
two of you went into the other room, and I followed you-there, too, you
left the window open.

Then you began to undress. It's strange, I didn't feel any
jealousy, even though I knew the two of you would make love almost
immediately. What mattered to me was seeing you naked. I saw you, in
fact, from behind. I recognize the blond hair on your lower back and
that scar on your right buttock and, when you turned sideways, I saw
your member erect and throbbing. Yes, I recognized your member by its
slight curved form, which facilitates penetration. But you too, you too,
must also have felt something-but what? a memory? a gaze from outside
following your every movement? But then you shook your head as people do
when absurd thoughts enter their minds, and you returned to her, to that
woman.

This time I didn't have the courage to continue to watch the two of
you, and yet you left the window open again and if I had wanted to I
could have heard your moans. Did I moan too in that other life? did I
also groan like a wounded beast whom your member sought to satiate?

Marco,

i know that you are distraught. I read it in your eyes the other
day, when I saw the doorkeeper give you my last letter-I, too, was
there, but as usual you did not notice me. I know that these days you
are having difficulty with work. That is why I am putting some money in
with this letter. I don't want you take any from the others; I don't
want you to be humiliated by other women, even if they say to you, "It
is a loan, dear, I don't think of it in any other way."

Your lover is, as it turns out, a rich woman-I know even this, as
you see-and her money comes from her husband, a vulgar man, I found out,
as she herself is vulgar, notwithstanding the Fendi furs and the
sophisticated lingerie made of Spanish lace. She is a vulgar woman, I
tell you, a common woman. She has been the lover of other younger
men-I've investigated thoroughly, you will note-only for the thrill of
feeling like a free and promiscuous woman.

But that is not even it. She is merely an egotistical women who
uses sex with the same recklessness as a bitch running to find a tree to
urinate on.

Soon even you will understand this-I beg you in the meantime not to
let yourself be swallowed up in her desires, not to let yourself be
humiliated by her bitch's lust.

You are sensitive, and sensitivity is a gift, not a punishment or
an affliction. Were you also like that then? in that other life?

Marco,

i saw you yesterday at the window with your absent gaze
interrogating the emptiness-or was it me that you were searching for? me
only? Now that you know that I can see you at all times this
bewilderment comes upon you.

Unless you want only this: for me to see you, for me to follow you
throughout the day, because this all excites you now.
Yesterday, for example, after she had left, you sat down on the
couch in the corner, the one underneath the Klimt drawing. You put
something on the turntable-something vaguely sacred, so it seemed to me,
maybe Bach-and you slowly undressed.

So slowly it was to die for. Then, naked, you turned toward the
wall, and you wanted your shadow to stand out sharply against the
background, and I saw ... well, you know what. At the end you were
heaving as if you were really with me, inside of me. And now I know that
you finally desire me, you want me, for yourself. And this having and
not having me let the beast slowly come out of you, the one that is in
us all. And the beast is not so much sex, but the indulging with another
being in the very same beastliness that pursues us all, that waits in
that hidden place in the depths, from which we fear our whole lives that
it will arise, and yet we want it to so much.

Suddenly, the ring of the telephone interrupted that moment. Or
maybe not? You in fact did not even pick up the receiver. Instead, you
remained standing in front of the window staring outside, into the
darkness, searching for me.

Marco,

i don't know what's happened to you these days. I haven't been
home, and I went to a place that I don't intend to reveal to you-a very
sad place unquestionably, but one not worth speaking further about.

One night, however, while I was there, I dreamed of you. The
evening before, I had read Borges's story about the Minotaur. And in my
dream you were the Minotaur. I saw you unhappily lowing at the moon, to
whose divinity you appealed, to the goddess Luna toward whom you raised
your big bull's head and bellowed your unhappy man-beast's song.

I was near you, wearing a peplos like an ancient priestess or a
virgin consecrated to holy sacrifice. Yes, maybe that is it. Maybe I was
one of the virgins to be sacrificed to you, but not so much to you as to
the lunar goddess. You wanted me to kneel before her power, but then I
realized that I was kneeling before your power.

And your heart, commingled with that of the beast you were, made
you different from other men. You were the man-beast that every woman
desires to know; perhaps for this reason women cloak themselves to such
an extent in their oft-proclaimed modesty, otherwise they might have to
reveal their own unfathomable bestialities, those which men generally
disavow (are we not more than any other being made of earthy substance?
maybe this accounts for why we give birth and have humors and intuitions
that strike fear into you men?).

While you, my dear beast, howled at the moon, or asked its
blessings, your member rose in the darkness, becoming larger and more
incommensurable, until the night itself became entirely made of your
bellowings and your immense member. There was nothing else beside that,
except for your furious bestial need manifesting its grandiose virility.
Singular. Regal.

At that moment, I was prepared to be sacrificed-now I can
understand the myth of Pasiphae. I bowed down like a beast before you,
so you could take me and kill me without pity (no, it was not pity that
I wanted, as much as your satiating me and my being satiated).

Marco,

a week after my last letter I saw you slowly climbing the stairs,
as if you were sleepwalking. You were carrying a package, and for the
first time when you came in you went right to the window and, addressing
me, you showed me the package. Then you left-you did it on purpose,
didn't you?

I waited a long time for you, and you returned very late-from what
infamous places, from what unfathomable abysses did you come that night?
Don't ever tell me, I don't want to know. Certainly there had to be a
reason for your having been away so long. Then, I understood. The
package on the table contained some drug. I followed your every
preparation, which I could never have imagined to be so complicated. I
saw you lie there at length awaiting the effect. Finally you put
Bellini's ballad "Casta Diva" on the turntable. It was then I understood
what the package contained.

Where you found that mask I do not know, perhaps in some shop in
the old quarter of town, with a leering shopkeeper with sweaty hands
inside who, watching you, beautiful as an archangel, felt the need for
you to like him and smiled at you with the ruined smile of an old
pederast. And perhaps he brazenly asked you, "What do you need it for?"
And you just looked at him with empty eyes.

But ultimately it doesn't matter. What matters is that you found
it, the head of the Minotaur. I felt a shiver of pleasure: all this was
for me, for me.

Marco,

this is the way it should be. Now you finally understand.

Because it is just. I discovered you, I revealed you to yourself.
And now you are mine.

Not in vulgar men's sense of possession, but that kind of
reciprocal belonging to a world of desires that all of us contain in
ourselves and of which we live in virtual horror.

I have to reveal to you that I come from a strange land, where
there is something savage in the air, always; even our sun is a
blasphemy. That is why the Church, when it finally achieved dominance
over us, taught with still greater force little else but sackcloth and
prayers. Had the Benedictines and Franciscans not yet seen the stone
phalli at the entrances to our farms? had they been present at the
dances of the peasants of the Girgenti? or at the magic circles of the
sorceresses who live near Pantalica? had they never seen Segesta?

And were our devoutly pious matrons so devout after all? Do not our
gorgeous female saints, with their carved breasts or their vacant eyes,
arouse one more than others do? And our churches, our palaces of that
funereal baroque that smells of death, what abysses of wormlike life do
they contain? And our triduums, our novenas, our Good Fridays with a
half-naked, beautiful Christ who wanders the streets followed by weeping
women, what do they represent?

And now I understand that wherever we go we carry the flavor and
the odor of that land upon us. For this we are so ... so different.
Oh, not in the physical sense, this no, but in the soul, we are murky,
dissipated, imbued with a desperate, sickly sensuality (but is it not
that way, is not the real sensuality always like that?).

Marco,

don't do it again. Trying to rebel is futile. It is futile to
refuse the pimping hand of the doorkeeper when she hands you one of my
letters. You did finally take it. Finally, after leaving it on the table
for three days without opening it, you could no longer resist.

And now you are reading it, and every now and then you lift your
astounded gaze to see if I'm watching you. I am watching you, my dear,
and I am infuriated with you for not having opened it immediately.

I'm enraged because you are my slave, the slave of my and your
desires, and like every slave you gnaw at your chains. But he who is the
slave of himself will never be free, and I instead want to free you from
the ancient enslavement to the desires.

I know everything about you, don't forget it. I know that you are
an orphan and grew up in the care of a devout aunt who wanted to make a
priest out of you-even piety has its egotisms. I know that you spent two
years in seminary and that you then fled. I also know why: the prefect
fell in love with you and tried in every way to entice you. Forgive him,
Marco, love is blind, always, even when it destroys.
I know that to master his fevered desire he had the whole
fellowship perform miracle plays and that during one of them he had you
dressed as Lucifer, the angel of damnation. And I know that the
following evening he called you to his room and, handing you the
gleaming vestments, said: "Do it for me, become again Samaele the
accursed one." And when he once again beheld your sinister beauty, he
broke into tears and fell to his knees at your feet, begging you to love
him.

Yes, my beautiful demon. I know that you have kept those articles
of clothing-your abyss, Marco; do you not also see what abysses your
heart contains? And now I tell you: dress yourself again as you were
then, wear again the robes of the angel of temptation and gaze upon me
as you then had to gaze upon your ancient prefect: with malice and fear,
but also with the sense of power that comes to you most perfect ones
when someone loves you with a love resembling adoration.
And then with those gigantic wings of an angelic demon, come to me
in the night and burn with me every lustful desire of yours.

Marco,

i don't want it. I don't want you so anxiously to try to spot
behind which window, among all of the windows directly opposite yours, I
hide myself and watch you. It's fruitless, for us it could even be
fatal. And then, those windows correspond to so many apartments that it
is almost impossible to orient oneself, as it is also in your apartment
block.

But you just the same wanted to violate the rules of our game-they
were my rules, actually, but you were constrained to accept them. So
yesterday I even heard your voice in my hallway.

You probably saw Silvia, the prostitute who in her heart still
nurtures the dream of love; you probably saw Colonel Arriva, who was
with Rommel in the African campaign, but you probably did not grant him
time enough to tell you his story. You were searching for me, me alone.
You probably saw Signora Rossi Durante, who was in her day a great opera
singer, and even now at times I can hear the muted sound of her records
playing-old artists are such pathetic creatures.

And you might even have seen me, but this you will never know for
certain.

I could be the divorced blonde on the third floor with the
cigarette hanging from her lip and the decadent face-that's how you
imagine me, isn't it? Or Marika, the daughter of Lula the masseuse.
Despite her mother, Marika is an extremely good girl, too bad she was
born blind.

Therefore, my dear, don't come looking for me.

Continues...

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Excerpted from In the Forbidden City

Copyright © 2003
by University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission.
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