Georges Bataille - Story of the Eye

Now this extreme unreality of the solar blaze was so closely attached to everything happening to me during the bullfight on May 7, that the only objects 1 have ever carefully preserved are a round paper fan, half yellow, half blue, that Simone had that day, and a small illustrated brochure with a description of all the circumstances and a few photographs. Later on, during an embarkment, the small valise containing those two souvenirs tumbled into the sea, and was fished out by an Arab with a long pole, which is why the objects are in such a bad state. But I need them to fix that event to the earthly soil, to a geographic point and a precise date, an event that my imagination compulsively pictures as a simple vision of solar deliquescence.

The first bull, the one whose raw balls Simone looked forward to having served on a plate, was a kind of black monster, who zoomed out of the pen so quickly that despite all efforts and all shouts, he disemboweled three horses in a row before an orderly fight could take place; one horse and rider were hurled aloft together, loudly crashing down behind the horns. But when Granero faced the bull, the combat was launched with brio, proceeding amid a frenzy of cheers. The young man sent the furious beast racing around him in his pink cape; each time, his body was lifted by a sort of spiraling jet, and he just barely eluded a frightful impact. In the end, the death of the solar monster was performed cleanly, with the beast blinded by a scrap of red cloth, the sword deep in the blood-smeared body. An incredible ovation resounded as the bull staggered to its knees with the uncertainty of a drunkard, collapsed with its legs sticking up, and died.

Simone, who sat between Sir Edmond and myself, witnessed the killing with an exhileration at least equal to mine, and she refused to sit down again when the interminable acclamation for the young man was over. She took my hand wordlessly and led me to an outer courtyard of the filthy arena, where the stench of equine and human urine was suffocating because of the great heat. I grabbed Simone's cunt, and she seized my furious cock through my pants. We stepped into a stinking shithouse, where sordid flies whirled about in a sunbeam. Standing here, I exposed Simone's cunt, and into her blood-red, slobbery flesh I stuck my fingers, then my penis, which entered that cavern of blood while I jerked off her ass, thrusting my bony middle finger deep inside. At the same time, the revolts of our mouths cleaved together in a storm of saliva.

A bull's orgasm is not more powerful than the one that wrenched through our loins to tear us to shreds, though without shaking my thick penis out of that stuffed vulva, which was gorged with come.

Our hearts were still booming in our chests, which were equally burning and equally lusting to press stark naked against wet unslaked hands, and Simone's cunt was still as greedy as before and my cock stubbornly rigid, as we returned to the first row of the arena. But when we arrived at our places next to Sir Edmond, there, in broad sunlight, on Simone's seat, lay a white dish containing two peeled balls, glands the size and shape of eggs, and of a pearly whiteness, faintly bloodshot, like the globe of an eye: they had just been removed from the first bull, a black-haired creature, into whose body Granero had plunged his sword.

"Here are the raw balls," Sir Edmond said to Simone in a light British accent.

Simone was already kneeling before the plate, peering at it in absorbed interest, but also in an unwonted quandary. Apparently, she wanted to do something but didn't know how to go about it, which exasperated her. I picked up the dish to let her sit down, but she grabbed it away from me with a categorical "no" and returned it to the stone seat.

Sir Edmond and I were growing annoyed at being the focus of our neighbors' attention just when the bullfight was slackening. I leaned over and whispered to Simone, asking what had gotten into her.

"Idiot!" she replied. "Can't you see I want to sit on the plate, and all these people watching!"

"That's absolutely out of the question," I rejoined, "sit down."

At the same time, I took away the dish and made her sit, and I stared at her to let her know that I understood, that I remembered the dish of milk, and that this renewed desire was unsettling me. From that moment on, neither of us could keep from fidgeting, and this state of malaise was contagious enough to affect Sir Edmond. I ought to say that the fight had become boring, unpugna-cious bulls were facing matadors who didn't know what to do next; and to top it off, since Simone had demanded seats in the sun, we were trapped in something like an immense vapor of light and muggy heat, which parched our throats as it bore down upon us.

It really was totally out of the question for Simone to lift her dress and place her bare behind in the dish of raw balls. All she could do was hold the dish in her lap. I told her I would like to fuck her again before Granero returned to fight the fourth bull, but she refused, and she sat there, keenly involved, despite everything, in the disem-bowlments of horses, followed, as she childishly put it, by "loss and noise," namely the cataract of bowels.

Little by little, the sun's radiance sucked us into an unreality that fitted our malaise-the wordless and powerless desire to explode and kick up our asses. We grimaced, because our eyes were blinded and because we were thirsty, our senses ruffled, and there was no possibility of quenching our desires. We three had managed to share in the morose dissolution that leaves no harmony between the various spasms of the body. We were so far gone that even Granero's return could not pull us out of that stupefying absorption. Besides, the bull opposite him was distrustful and seemed unresponsive; the combat went on just as drearily as before.

The events that followed were without transition or connection, not because they weren't actually related, but because my attention was so absent as to remain absolutely dissociated. In just a few seconds: first, Simone bit into one of the raw balls, to my dismay; then Granero advanced towards the bull, waving his scarlet cloth; finally, almost at once, Simone, with a blood-red face and a suffocating lewdness, uncovered her long white thighs up to her moist vulva, into which she slowly and surely fitted the second pale globule- Granero was thrown back by the bull and wedged against the balustrade; the horns struck the balustrade three times at full speed; at the third blow, one horn plunged into the right eye and through the head. A shriek of unmeasured horror coincided with a brief orgasm for Simone, who was lifted up from the stone seat only to be flung back with a bleeding nose, under a blinding sun; men instantly rushed over to haul away Granero's body, the right eye dangling from the head.

Under the Sun of Seville

Thus, two globes of equal size and consistency had suddenly been propelled in opposite directions at once. One, the white ball of the bull, had been thrust into the "pink and dark" cunt that Simone had bared in the crowd; the other, a human eye, had spurted from Granero's head with the same force as a bundle of innards from a belly. This coincidence, tied to death and to a sort of urinary liquefaction of the sky, first brought us back to Marcelle in a moment that was so brief and almost insubstantial, yet so uneasily vivid that I stepped forward like a sleepwalker as though about to touch her at eye level.

Needless to say, everything was promptly back to normal, though with blinding obsessions in the hour after Granero's death. Simone was in such a foul mood that she told Sir Edmond she wouldn't spend another day in Madrid; she was very anxious to see Seville because of its reputation as a city of pleasure.