Hilda Hilst - With My Dog Eyes

Designifying

I make truces with myself

I am not flesh and blood

Nor dust. A black wall

With cracks of dark blue

Espy my new armor

My face of wax.

Mathematics. Fervor and vigor. And in university meetings, asskissers, pointless rivalries, gratuitous resentments, jealous talk, megalomanias. He’d leave, totally spent, despondent after listening to so many drawn-out tiffs. At night returning to his studies, searching, searching principally for order, mind and heart integrated once more in those magnificent suns of ice formulas expansions expressions, Amós would drift sublimely over some pages, and wasn’t it in a sudden burst that everything was no longer? Like if you thought you knew every little corner of your own house and then discovered, for instance in the hall through which you’d passed many times, in the hallway my God, you discovered a crag with mirrored surfaces or a black prism. But they weren’t there, I shout, they weren’t there. And everything is a beginning-anew. This strangely distant look I let fall on my son is also a beginning-anew? As if the kid had nothing to do with me, and the yard and the hibiscus fence and the hour, I’m not even sure of the time, a light illuminating and shading my son’s face, he on the bicycle, now going slower around through the arbor, and this sofa where I’m still stretched I pass my fingers over the cloth, I cross my hands. Am I still alive? and one day I will leave this house, the sofa for sure, I’ll never see the boy or the man again, and the hibiscus and the arbor and I’ll stop seeing any kind of light or any kind of shade. Or will I myself be a shade? And I will stop feeling you, Amós, and I will never again touch paper and books, nor anybody’s flesh, not even my own flesh. I swallow as though I were sighing and swallowing at the same time, I get up and shout from the room: son, I’m leaving, stay here and I’ll be back in a little bit. You too? he says. Me too? I say to myself.

Designifying

I’m melting the measure

I created.

Blotting the lines:

Circles

That all around me I drew

And where I lived

Distorted and trembling

Before the auburn of life.

I can tell my head is inclined too far to the left. I try to center it. It keeps leaning gradually to the left. And the fact that I am standing also worries me. How is it possible that I can stay standing up? I’d be more comfortable on all fours, my eyes scraping the floor, my hands wide-open and stuck to the surface of the streets. It would be safer for me. Now I should get in the car. I’m going to Isaiah’s. We always understand each other even though we almost never speak. It’s true he lives with a sow and he seemed to be doing fine the last time. And why not live with hilde? A Germanic name. She must be blonde. What I mean is she must be a white sow. They’re rare. And what will I say to Isaiah? About all that. He’s going to ask: does it tend to zero? The moving streets. Five o’clock in the afternoon, I see from a clock on the avenue. I stop at a signal. An old man carrying books and papers is doubting if he should cross. One of the papers falls to the ground. Another man stoops to help him. Maybe they know each other? They smile. They exchange a warm handshake. The one who knelt places his hands on the old man’s shoulders. People swerve around the two and make annoyed faces. The old man seems to be explaining something about the papers. He’s upset. It’s not possible, he’s crying. The horns behind me. I advance. I look in the rearview. The one who knelt points for the old man, to what? The bar on the corner. I lose sight of them. I am affected and tense. Am I showing my papers to somebody else, and also in such despair? My equations. Hopes: Amós Kéres, mathematician, proved today by scientific methods his conception of the univocal universe. He’s being hailed by physicists and mathematicians, more later on the eleven o’clock news. I almost run over a dog. Finally, Isaiah. His pants threadbare, his sweater black. hilde comes along behind. Various pairs of eyes upon us. The neighbors. hilde’s eyes on me. Isaiah: come on in, my friend, come on in. hilde comes in too. You remember her, right? hilde brushes against my legs. Just like a cat. I say amazing and always this charming? Oh always, says Isaiah. Acrylic triangles suspended from the ceiling. A huge desk and lots of papers filled with purple ink. I’m not bothering you? It’s been twenty years since anyone bothered me, Amós, twenty years of these purple hopes and the only surprise resolution was hilde. A beautiful nonobvious. Immediately: what’s up with your head, there a crick in your neck? c’mere, sit down, would you like some wine? I say okay and tell him everything: the hill, the tips of my shoes, the ants, the pondering of sounds, and all that about incommensurable meaning.

I had something like that once. But I saw shapes.

What kind?

Polyhedrons. Shining.

And then?

And then I understood that only polyhedrons exist. I myself do not exist. I’m certain of it to this day.

Of what?

Certain that I don’t exist. It was a relief. That’s why I can live with hilde. She, as you can see, is also a polyhedron. We don’t exist, get it? We’re very happy. Drink, Amós. Hope. Don’t pluck green fruit. Drink. This one here’s imported. Kadek left me his whole cellar, remember? Poor guy, always yearning for similarities. He used to say the thing was to get as drunk as everybody else around here. Only cachaça. I stood to gain. Even without existing, I’m enjoying it very much. Drink. Tomorrow you can come back for your car. I drink. On the fifth glass, I try out a few poems. On the tenth glass, I finish them. Then I read them aloud:

Vertex Edge and Face

I saw the breath of the bird.

Tetrahedron: four vertices

Six edges, four faces

I’m immersed

Vivid inside your room.

Hexahedron: eight vertices

Twelve edges, six faces

My beak rots

Over the short page.

Octahedron: six vertices

Twelve edges, eight faces

Swaying of the rooster

On the nightbranch.

Icosahedron: twelve vertices

Thirty edges, twenty faces

Sweat and ink

Patrolling the limit.

Monstrosity: twenty-one vertices

Forty-five edges, twenty-six faces

Wall of ferns shedding fronds to kill the king

I blanch, Atlanta

A Vivien wind

Sweeping the flank

Amós Kéres

Amós Kéres?

Tremored de viño

Mi cuerpo of fearlessness.

Amazing, Isaiah says, amazing. I’m leaving. Walking will do me some good, bye-bye hilde good-bye my friend, he smiles, she opens her little eyes, stretched out, dreaming.

Dreaming of God.

A pig’s foot and

Bushnuts on the table.

There’s loose ends and lavender

In the bewigged baldness of the old.

Amós: doctor of numbers

But starved of letters.

There’s folds pauses bunches

In the memory. And soft sounds in the guts.

There are taciturn guests

At the table. My hirsute father

In a corner

Embracing a little bird.

The little boy: it

was God that

makes this silly

world, daddy?

Yes, little buddy.

He was also a

Nobel Prize?

Yes, little buddy.

How ddodered

What?

How dog, daddy.

The green fruit was plucked? Is that what he said? The wall on the other side of the street. There are certain walls that should never be seen before we grow old: moss and ocher, dahlias across some of them, lacerated, sounds that should never be heard, pulsations of a lie, the metallic sounds of cruelty echoing deep down to the heart, words that should never be pronounced, hollow eloquences, the vibrations of infamy, the throbbing ruby-reds of wisdom. Frights. How do I feel? As if they’d placed two eyes on the table and said to me, I who am blind: this is that which sees. This is the material that sees. I touch the two eyes on the table. Smooth, still tepid (recently wrenched out), gelatinous. But I don’t see the seeing. That’s how I feel trying to materialize in narrative the convulsions of my spirit. Cursing and cruel, stained in inks, those dark-dusks of not knowing how to say it, I attempt an amputee’s step forward, a blind knowledge of light, an armless embrace of you, Knowledge. I go about drunk. Someone will some day discover part of my trajectory if they apply the Law of Disorder (I’m still able to smile), I vomit in the gutter (smile’s gone), I take a piss against a lamppost. I’m filthy and alone. Dark, sinister, mute, and alone. Someone: you sick, brother? I eject three acid heaves onto the sidewalk and make a motion to whoever asked that everything’s just fine.