PARTISAN REVIEW
0401
woman amuses herself with the naked body of
this
young girl, un–
washed and curiously without eyebrows or hair. She can recognize
contours in this body out of some obscure memory. With her long
fingernails she draws blood on the girl's breast and elicits the scream
which has hung suspended over the years. Her response is a cackle
and Perfidia understands she has become a witch. From out of the
marshes of her misery she has pulled forth a sort of madness, and built
on it a viable ending for her life. She dabbles, these days, in the
stars, finding puzzles and mythologies which bear her dying body
along thc roads of magic. She has turned her grief to mystic advant–
age and Perfidia feels a new and secret bond with this gypsy. Across
her charts, she seems to be calling her to revolt, to ride the wind and
accept the darkness of the days.
But she has merely come for the costumes. She dresses, again
in the trappings of the 1940s and, as she turns to leave, presents the
old woman with a vision of younger times, a recognition of her "soul"
at the peripheries of its decay. To kiss each other now would be a
gesture to sentiment designed to obscure their new covenant. Instead,
the Mother has turned back to her triangles in a heat and the daugh–
ter has fled to her upheavals in a flash.
The threatening eyes of her emissary greet her in the cellar. Per–
fidia has calculated plenty of
time
before the event, but she is in–
fom1ed that the maneuver has been put forward, indeed, is imminent.
Can she explain her disappearance? Not now. She is ready to perform.
There is no room for dialogue;
the
performance is
all.
She
dresses, paints her face, puts on a blond wig. In the hazy
mirror she has become her Mother.
The emissary now drives her, in a van with black windows, to
a room where she will collect her explosive device. Then she is told
she will take her bomb to an electrical works on the city's perimeter,
carry it in a handbag and leave it in a second-floor Ladies Toilet.
Perfidia asks if she must wait until the building is cleared. On the
contrary, she is told, this bomb must take lives. When she sees the
face of Kropotkin behind the device, she knows it
is
his decision.
He
stares at her absently as he sets the time mechanism and hands her
the package. Before she leaves he goes to her and adjusts her wig,
then hands her a folded piece of tissue paper in which she finds two
eyebrows.
On the way, she understands at last the gravity of her objective.
