Norman Manea - The Black Envelope

“What’s her name? What’s her black hole of a name?” murmured the darkness. “What’s your jungle called? Your black mouth. Your gateway. Your man-eating flower. What’s she called? What’s the name of yours?” asked Tudor’s woman from her trance. It hurt him, the waiting and the silence hurt him, the snake in the darkness hurt him, but he knew he wouldn’t gain access until he handed over the coupling name. “Irina,” whispered the wanderer in defeat, barely heard. The walls seemed to shake, or not quite, carefully, dangerously, and the floor as well. A slight warning clank of the windows, or so it seemed. The walls and floorboards and ceiling were slowly vibrating, slowly but tangibly. “Irina,” repeated the priestess as she took him in. “Irina,” sighed the woman. “That’s my name, exactly. Exactly my name,” whispered the sleepwalker, happy and relaxed, as if she had suddenly been liberated. “Irina! My God — that’s exactly my name,” whimpered Irina, in whom Tudor was hysterically pumping the lava of the fiery night. The shell was shaking, trem-trem, trembling, earth tremor; the crater had released smells and microbes, the magma was pulsating, wounded and scattered, and the walls were swaying, swaying, the shaking ever more furious, but Irina stopped him, “No, not now,” and he was again in her witch’s hands and lips, rocking, calmed, reborn in her cool and salty hands, between marine, phosphorized lips. Her long legs trembled on the trembling ceiling, like the walls and windows and floor and the jet of fire in night’s bottomless udder. “Oh, Irina,” the orphan finally expiated, expired. “Irina, Irina,” the saved clown confessed, bowing his tearful mask on her electrified breasts, moving his vanquished head down onto the cosmic abdomen, to catch the echo, the confirmation, still lower down, when his lying lips, in the ultimate act of gratitude, glued themselves to the cannibal flower.

Healed he died, fell asleep, awake, the final sleep. The airplane banked to the left, the seats vibrated, a shiver of alarm passed through the metal belly. The stewardess was there in front to serve him, naked beneath her long voile dress. The silver tray in her long hands was shaking, as was the shell of the airplane. But she bent toward him, holding out her glossy breasts with their pea-lightbulb in the middle. Huge empty eyes in which nothing at all could be read. But her lips were quivering over small, sharp teeth. She whispered something. “Here,” she whispered. “It’s allowed here,” whispered the nymph. “Here in the air we’re allowed to. They can’t forbid it anymore. Here, up in the air,” mur-mur murmured the strip-teaser, mur-mur, the airplane spun more and more tensely, jerkily, but the whispering persisted. “Don’t be on your guard anymore. We’re up here, in the air. It’s possible up here”—and Tolea again felt Irina’s lips on his lips, nibbling ever so finely and murmuring mur-mur, melting away. Somewhere a candle seemed to be burning; the room was floating in its dim flicker of light, somewhere. He looked at the woman, her short red hair on the carpet beside him, her lips glued to his own. Naked, white, long, slim, a narrow, pale face and big green eyes and soft lips, mur-mur, glued to his lips, mur-mur murmuring: forgive me. She stretched out her glossy breasts, the left one, the right, for him to recognize them, to kiss them. Superb delicate fruits, indeed— pale violet, strong, juicy, with a long and bitter sucking bottle.

“Forgive me, Dominic.” She had fastened her mouth to the lobe of his flagging ear. “Yes, I looked in your wallet. To find out your name. Forgive me, Dominic”—and she resumed the ritual of arousing him. Still listless, worn out, the weak Dominic was in no hurry at all to recognize his name; he had no desire to replace the replacement, to play the second act, in which his role would be himself, the absent one; no, no, he did not want to wake up in his own skin — the swaying of the cupping glass would not arouse him, no, the neurosis of the earth and the walls and the somnambulist moon would not oblige him to become himself again, delivered over to nothingness. Yes, he missed Irina. Why not admit it? They would have been a couple, maybe brother and sister, better resisting the pressures of annulment that had still annuled them. Now, at least now in the cataclysmic night, when the ramshackle house of purgatory was shaking wildly and danger seemed so akin to liberation, he ought to have gone out and found her, so that after so many detours they could finally recognize themselves as a couple. “Irina and Dominic, Irina and Dominic.” The priestess cast her spell, with her hot mouth over hot torch. It grew again, very slowly, incubation, vibration, quaking, earthquake. The windows were shaking already, like the drunken walls and the floor. Her mouth, filled with saliva and bacteria and aphrodisiacs, stammered ineffable curses. He woke again in the vulva of the volcano, among voracious, moist, boiling petals, in incestuous Mother Africa. Painfully did Dominic discover the desire of the captive sorella , in the dark jungle, blazing and cannibalistic, tre-mor, tre-mor, whimpered Irina and the torrid swamp. A failed exercise in transference, that was all it had been. A humiliation, a powerless assumption of a name that didn’t work, clearly didn’t work. He woke up ejected and Irina was laughing, brazenly. “Three angels for Sarah, Abraham’s wife,” the brute was guffawing on all fours, bitchlike. “The ancestor, with the three angels. One for each orifice”—and the candle had gone out in the whirlwind of blasphemy, which was also one of fury and wild rebirth, look! fury and repulsion with himself, with his fellow creatures, and with the gods, the full, pagan, barbaric pleasure, yelping its triumph, challenging Cyclops, who was spying on his heart and mind and sex. Until this evening, until a few hours ago, when the earth shook with disgust at the tedium that kept fermenting hatching evacuating on his overly patient back. A rabid greyhound on his rabid bitch, shaking epileptically on her narrow back, setting on her snow-white neck and treacherous hips and red crewcut, yelping together with the immediate, illicit pleasure in revenge for so many postponements and prohibitions. The therapy of mad fury, liberation, yes, unfettered, unrestrained, callous pleasure which cures the horror of your own estranged body and estranged name and estranged soul in a world of estrangement. Dom-dom-min-min-nic, yelped roared Dominic and ri-ri-rina, yelped the rabid redhead, the beat of the wilds, dom rina, domirina, dum dom ri rina, domiri, until lights out. Then lethargic, pacified, stretching beside on top of each other and moving away from each other, emptied, weary, sated.

Only now, in the breakdown spleen of separation, did the longing for Irina truly return. That hysterical night, driving wild heart and mind and blood in the hazard of death and liberation, as befitted the still living dead, ought to have been one of rediscovery. For however brief a respite — if only for the minimum sequence between two final convulsions of the planet, if only for that — the orphans ought to have been able, finally, to take revenge for all the delays, to rediscover each other at last.

Yes, he really missed Irina, the one far away, who could have been if she had ever been — so yelped cur Dominic, lying on his back on the carpet, beside the bitch Irina, who fawningly licked his juices, skin, and hair. “Hair,” the bored puppy barely articulated. “You didn’t use to have red hair. Since when the red hair?” the stranger asked, scarcely breathing. “Irish, baby. I’m Irish,” the stranger promptly replied. “Pure Irish stock, I swear,” the Irishwoman repeated firmly, and she licked him again with her long, red, Irish tongue, until she dozed off from exhaustion, with her muzzle between her rear paws and her lips glued to the defunct Dominic, now a little finger, a shrunken, senile snake.