Scarecrow & Other Anomalies by Oliverio Girondo Read Free Book Online Page B

the sensations of a virgin while she is being possessed, and it’s one thing to look at the ocean while standing on the shore, another to see it through the eyes of a crab.
    This is why I love to thrust myself into foreign existences, to live out their hopes and dreams, their moods and humors, fair or foul, their bodily secretions.This is why I love to graze on the pampas at twilight in the person of a cow, feeling the gravity and the foliage with a brain the size of a walnut or chestnut, or to squat in an open meadow singing to the stars with the voice of a toad.
    Ah, the enchantment of having been a camel, an apple, or a carrot, and the satisfaction of fathoming the indolence of still waters... and of chameleons!
    To think that, during their entire existence, the majority of men have never even once been a woman! How is it possible for them not to be bored with their appetites, their spasms, and not long to experience, from time to time, those of cockroaches... or of the honeysuckle vine?
    Though I have put myself, many times, in the brain of an imbecile, I have never understood how anyone could live, perpetually, with the same skeleton and the same sex.
    When life is exclusively human—all too human—can the workings of the mind result in anything except an infirmity more grandiose and tedious than any other?
    I, for one, am certain that I wouldn’t have been able to stand such a life without this aptitude for evasion that permits me to transfer myself to wherever I am not: to be an ant, a giraffe, to lay an egg and, what’s still more important, to bump into myself at the very moment I have forgotten, almost completely, my own existence.
     

SEVENTEEN: THE SUCCUBUS
     
    SHE WAS squishing me between her flattened arms and adhering to my body with the violent viscosity of a mollusk. A sticky secretion began to envelop me, little by little, until it succeeded in immobilizing me. From each of her pores oozed a sort of claw that perforated my skin. Her breasts began to boil. A phosphorescent exudation illuminated her neck, her hips, until even her sex—full of spines and tentacles—encrusted my own sex and precipitated me into a series of exasperating spasms.
    It was useless spitting on her eyelids or into the cavities of her nose. It was useless screaming my hate and contempt. Until the last drop of sperm slid away from my nape, boring through my spine like a globule of melted sealing wax, her gums continued to slurp at my desperation; and before abandoning me she left her millions of claws embedded in my flesh, and I had no other recourse than to spend the night pulling them out with a pair of pincers and splashing a drop of iodine in each of the wounds...
    Some party, being a sleeper who is the private hunting preserve for the sport of a succubus!
     

EIGHTEEN: WEEPING
     
    WEEP LIVING TEARS! Weep gushers! Weep your guts out! Weep dreams! Weep before portals and at ports of entry! Weep in fellowship! Weep in yellow!
    Open the locks and canals of tears! Let us soak our shirts, our souls! Inundate the sidewalks and the boulevards, and bear us along safely on the flood!
    Assist in anthropology courses, weeping! Celebrate relatives’ birthdays, weeping! Walk across Africa, weeping!
    Weep like a caiman, like a crocodile... especially if it’s true that caimans and crocodiles have no real tears in them.
    Weep anything, but weep well! Weep with your nose, with your knees! Weep through your navel, through your mouth!
    Weep of love, of hate, of happiness! Weep in your frock, from flatus, from frailty! Weep impromptu, weep from memory! Weep throughout the insomniac night and throughout the livelong day!
     

NINETEEN: GRATITUDE
     
    SO WHAT IF pulleys have eaten up thousands and thousands of little fingers, and still are not satisfied? So what if sewing machines threaten to stitch up our slightest gaps and fissures? So what if the depravity of globes should lead to the degradation of geometry?
    It’s disturbing