Ice And Fire

to it. It is up a steep hill. N is hurting very bad in her side. We

want to move there, we have the money in hand, but how will

we get more for next month and the month after? She is very

sick. We have to leave the hotel. I take her to the Lower East

Side apartment of a woman who has always wanted her. I

deliver her. The building is a piss-hole, a stagnant sewer. The

apartment is five flights up. In the hall there are caverns in the

wall, the plaster broken away, with screen and wire covering

them. Behind the screen and wire, as if they are built into the

wall and caged there on display, are live rats, big ones, almost

hissing, fierce. N is in acute pain. N bleeds. I take the money I

need. I leave her there. I arrange to have pills waiting for me in

Europe. The film isn’t finished. N can’t stand up. I leave her

there on a soiled mattress, curled up in pain. I make her

promise to finish the film. I don’t think about her again. I

don’t feel anything. I take the money and leave on a boat for

Europe. The great thing is to be saturated with something—

that is, in one way or another, with life; or is it?

78

I love life so fiercely, so desperately, that

nothing good can come of it: I mean the

physical facts of life, the sun, the grass,

youth. It’s a much more terrible vice than

cocaine, it costs me nothing, and there is an

endless abundance of it, with no limits: and

I devour, devour. How it will end, I don’t know.

Pasolini

*

I can’t remember much of what anything was like, only how

it started. No light, no weather. From now on everything is

in a room somewhere in Europe, a room. A series of rooms,

a series of cities: cold, ancient cities: Northern European

cities: gray, with old light: somber but the gray dances: old

beauty, muted grandeur, monumental grace. Rembrandt,

Breughel. Mid-European and Northern winters, light. Old

cruelties, not nouveau.

He was impotent and wanted to die.

On the surface he was a clown. He had the face of a great

comic actor. It moved in parts, in sections, the scalp in one

direction, the nose forward, the chin somewhere else, the

features bigger than life. A unique face, completely distinct, in

no way handsome, outside that realm of discourse altogether.

Someday he would be beautiful or ugly, depending on his life.

Now he was alternately filled with light or sadness, with great

jokes and huge gestures or his body seemingly shrivelled down

to a heap of bones by inexplicable grief, the skin around the

bones sagging loose or gone. He was a wild man: long, stringy