216
PARTISAN REVIEW
quicksand of what she peddled at a particular moment. To go on was
unthinkable.
If
she said she could not speak to me then it was
forbidden to speak to me un til after the next meeting, where she
inveigled them into giving the consent or what, by a delirious misinter–
pretation of signs she took away as their consent, to our resumption of
relations. So virulent are words sometimes that when she confessed she
had a pretext for living in the confession refusing to overleap the state
that prompted it. Whatever she confessed belonged to them, implanted
in their skulls. What she confessed implied, in her own mind, all she
did not confess. Their states were fringed with omniscience. Now she
no longer waited for their go-ahead signals. They were no longer the
progenitors of her own movements, she did not sink into the quicksand
of her words the way
I
sometimes sank my prick in the quicksand of my
scrotum. Words became less incantatory for her, therefore more indica–
tive of her interior life. Words were a means of release, relief, no longer
the instruments of a thralldom. She went on and on, no longer wedded
interminably to her painful admissions, no longer waiting for their
metabolism in the gut of her tormentors. Of course she admitted
nothing, especially since she was most ashamed of progress, growing
independence of her tormentors. She had to believe in her thralldom
while corroding its fibers. But
I
cou ld see she spoke to them now to
have done with them, to have done with the inquisition, and not to
perpetuate an unhappy habit, to effect a stalemate. That one day she
was incapable of speaking to me did not mean she would be, should be,
incapable of speech the next day. Her gestures were freer. But
I
did not
make the mistake of confusing her spontaneity with warmth.
My estrangement from sentences was not worth bothering about,
from her point of view. What did she care if
I
was living in the shadow
of a final sentence. Soon
I
was no longer even hungry for sentences,
I
tried to revive my hunger, now, when the highroad awaited. The price
of her growing independence of her tormentor was certain eviction .
The sooner the better.
I
was tired of the canals, the backyards,
I
made
plans out loud. She no longer listened. My voice grew huskier, more
insistent. One wou ld say menopause, but without the telltale bri'itle
around lips and chin. She was, in a sense, the breadwinner. TheIr
words, their pauses, their unspoken verdicts, were our daily ration.
I
contented myself with her silence, it embodied, as
I
have said before, all
phenomena. Once
I
accepted her silence
I
was capable of reacting to
phenomena again. But they became impediments on the way to her
silence.
I
made sentences for them but they did not count, no wound
was sutured by them. Anticipating her daily return from the inquisi-
