PARTISAN REVIEW
399
replaces her fingers and drives them slowly upward, through the walls
of the fortress, into the thick of its devastation. There is no life any
more, only an aftermath, only the taint of plague everywhere. A sol–
dier. She recalls no soldiers. And yet how many invading annies have
rampaged in these town walls, taken into the sanctuary indiscrimin–
ately? Her recollection is poor. But now the streets are flowing in a
sewage of green mucus, left by some faceless minister of infection.
And, too, the hallowed halls at her depths are charred and scourged,
the insides of her humanity shredded and running green. This is a
woman's disaster, she muses, and, in some curious woman's despair
and anguish, she has willed it.
Perfidia sits up as best she can and the blood rushes into her
belly, out of her brain, the empty chasm where her troll-lover waits
to take his place. She experiences the failure of her body.
It
has
dredged up its wastes and stored them in her awkward corners, forc–
ing her to walk or stand
in
perpetual muscular discomfort and con–
fusion. Before her she conjures up her specter of achievement, of action
in the provocative mirrors of the world. She knows now, in a brief
moment of suspended clarity lighting up the broken hours of her days,
that she lacks the grace she needs to set these fires under her.
All this is a clamor in her ears. A tide of years is surging in her
threatening a flood of regret over the dam she has built
again~t
her–
self. She must collect and face the time.
But in this composure-seeking a public man has approached and
stands over her. He smiles casually, but she has been trained to rec–
ognize a certain disciplinary eye. He would like a few words with
her and, in his labored politeness, he has carelessly identified him–
self with strategies of law. He explains again the routine of detaining
patients suffering from this ailment. Perfidia further wakes to a situa–
tion of extreme alarm and she regrets she cannot muster the control
to deal with this sudden preponderance of authority. Could she please
identify the soldier she has been with? She again denies the existence
of such a man. Has she, he begs her pardon, slept with anyone of
late who has slept with someone who has slept, might have slept, with
a soldier? She has slept with no one. Nonetheless, he reminds her, she
has contracted, as he calls it, "a social disease." It must have come
from somewhere. W'omen can pick up such infections without inter–
course, she infon11S him. Not this one, she is told. To be perfectly
