smiling — The Eternal Return — he heard her say without speaking.
But, at midmorning, there was a perfidious animal, with claws; it devoured the insects and the words, which it set down further away, unrecognizable and transformed; its language simulated a page covered with mysterious hieroglyphs constantly shifting sign and meaning. In its shadow, Nietzsche had been invaded by the terror of being another animal and he couldn’t get up from the ground, his spine immobilized — by the weight of the rings and the multiplicity of legs that he did not, logically, know how to use. A thick terror closed his eyes and his hand could not even find the remnants of the writing on the surface. The earth and the light decomposed, chewed by steely teeth lacking a face with a name.
— Is that Nietzsche? — The beast lay its head on her chest; their eyes were extremely close.
(Later, Ana de Peñalosa had completely forgotten what she thought she had seen in that gaze and not even the meditative silence of Saint John of the Cross had made her remember it. Vivid and imperceptible letters.)
— What keeps my sons on their islands? It is night. It is night. It is night.
Friedrich Nietzsche lying on my chest frightens me. The wind blows, the moon shines, O my distant, distant sons, why are you not here?
But today, loving Nietzsche so much, there is an obstacle to this evocation. The silence announces immobility and night, it does not obscure; I drift on a rhythm of texts,
my bare arm lying on the page,
dark and full,
still unaged.
Still unwritten is our future; in my arms, Nietzsche pierces our future with his blind eyes; he sees what is.
The fear that I would be unable to be alone, which threaded through all my Easter days and perverted their potential happiness, has disappeared. I feel as if I splinter melodiously in search of my multiple pleasures (the greatest one — that of the body’s sensitivity). It always begins in my eyes, which distribute subjects for meditation to the other senses.
As Friedrich Nietzsche dies, Suso the fish winds through my aquarium, the aquarium was uninhabited; half full of water; our thinking blew across the surface
my dear, distant sons, do not return while Friedrich Nietzsche does not die
Your mother, who also writes,
Ana de Peñalosa
I disappear from this place. My desires lead me to the new territory, to the house whose entrances have no doors, and the windows not even a pane of glass. A distinct brightness suffuses the entire space — in the most distant corner, shadow is still light.
I am merely a body disrobed. I turn to the aquarium where Suso the fish is
and where water, earth, fire, air cannot be distinguished.
(At the beginning of the fourteenth century a famous Dominican by the name of Suso lived in Suabia. He had a subtle intelligence like his Meister Eckhart of Cologne.)
I lower my eyes over Nietzsche’s mouth, which is still lying on my chest
it is the fish’s grave,
the fish will die at the bottom of the aquarium but the water and fire, dividing themselves, allowed me to see a space full of trees where his fins circulate through beds of leaves, dry branches, deeply marked stones.
He lives with his spirit and his solitude, of which he has not tired for ten years:
always walking, they stumbled upon a deep pit, a kind of amphitheater where young men and women were sitting. Among those who were naked there was a silken body, with gently sloping breasts that reminded him of a harp in full repose. The night, not yet fully ended, was reflected in the hole; gradually, they all undressed — Nietzsche, Saint John of the Cross, Thomas Müntzer, and she herself, Ana de Peñalosa. In their complete immobility, they began to hear the footsteps of those who were approaching. A sudden paralysis took hold of Nietzsche’s sex and heads lit up in the treetops. Truthfully, Ana de Peñalosa did not know what awaited her. The text had just been completed and had fallen at the feet of Saint John of the Cross. A drift of pigs advanced into the clearing, the bodies of the naked young women had taken on a precise luminosity. Where there was no longer any need for speech, Nietzsche agonized. Moved, Ana de Peñalosa touched a pig brought him home
to the place where she had slept
if she could be rhythm
she would leave home,
with the house,
tonight.
Tonight, the pig ate F. Nietzsche, contradicting “pearls should not be cast before swine.”
When he understood it was time to return, he raised his snout from Ana de Peñalosa’s lap,
over which he meditated
and asked
where to?
Nietzsche leaned over the river that ran incessantly with a vibrant appearance.
THERE, she answered him. If you dare.
where? repeated Nietzsche
acquainted with rivers, shadows, choirs, texts, courtyards, names, the geographical and genealogical particularities inhabiting Ana de Peñalosa’s house
THERE, repeated the writing that had been imprinted on the water with the back of a horse,
the paws of a bear,
large scales,
the smell of a pig,
and a delicious beating of oars
She moved all the books, notebooks, and papers to the right. She had never felt so quietly alone, it was strange that that strange Ana de Peñalosa had the monk Eckhart — the Pig — in her room. Not a compilation of the Sermons
Quasi stella matutina in medio
nebulae et quasi luna plena in
diebus suis lucet et quasi sol
refulgens, sic iste refulsit
not the Book of Consolation,
nor the Treatises,
but bear, woman, blood, rose
if I concentrate on a fragment of time
not today, or tomorrow
but if I concentrate on a fragment of time,
now,
that fragment will reveal all time.
Place 23 —
This was how Ana de Peñalosa read this writing and she could only see it through lace, viscera of her body; she had awoken at dawn; at that dawn’s first light she had had the following dream:
it was dawn, I left an immense unknown place with Sister Inés and
a very young daughter of mine, dressed in black (her face also hidden by a veil covered with precious stones. The two of us will lead the girl to a place) Sister Inés wept and said: This world is ending.
I tried to console her, saying certainly a new world is beginning.