With My Dog Eyes: A Novel by Hilda Hilst Read Free Book Online Page A

I owe to Márcia, that colleague of mine from the university, mathematician and politician, did field work in Paris, later said to hell with it, got married and was always saying: kiddos, Amós, kiddos are the sum of life. As I saw. I saw Amanda’s breast sucked dry, the kid a little animal, little digging hands. Is God a woman? How I’ve sucked the breast I can’t see. I go it alone, leprous. The sow is God. All stretched out too. Dreaming. hilde and her little eyes the color of artichoke. Smooth-ribbed and innocent. The artichoke has everything to do with God. They forget. Models of interpretation. The logos is this: pain old age neglect of the living, then death. I was lucid and alert. And almost pious. I understood little of men and women. Of kiddos too. Little. Incomplete beings repeating idiocies. I am a child-person, lucid geezer, compassionate and sweet. Amós Kéres. Innocent as a little animal-child gazing On High. But they say the On High is nothing and that you need to watch your step. Your ass too. With a mirror. I’m looking. Unforgettable grotesque condition. Oh, I want the face of He who lives inside Amós, the Immortal, the Iridescent-Shining, the perceiver-Perceived. I’ll say with precision what my non-comprehending is. Of majestic meaning. Colorful. Dilated. Wearing gloves too. The ones that are elbow-high. Amanda wore them one night. You could see only smoothkid leather. Nothing of flesh. Even less of bone. A worm at the core someone said. That scary Otto Rank? The no less frightening William James? I go on: they keep beating off, reading the newspaper, or fucking and reading the newspaper, or trying to do business, acting. Or stealing. Always acting. And they’ll have expenses fridges houses TVs airplanes. Later more cars more fridges freezers houses computers robots gold dollars, leisure and pleasure. Amós. The sparkling mirror. Is there blood here? Apparently not. There’s only blood after. Like a tried-and-true formula. Blood at the core of the Unfounded. There’s blood there too. That order from above, that non-clarity reaches me, and at bottom the rivering blood, roiling. I descend into the glassy gorge. Amós Kéres. From here I can hear him comparing the lucidity of an instant to the opacity of infinite days, I can hear him thinking of the various manners of madness and suicide. The madness of the Search, which is made of concentric circles and never arrives at the center, the obscuring, incarnate illusion of finding and understanding. Madness of the refusal, one of saying everything’s okay, we’re here and that’s enough, we refuse to understand. The madness of passion, the disordered appearance of light upon flesh, delicious-tasting chaos, idiocy feigning affinities. The madness of work and of possession. The madness of going so deep and laterturning to look and seeing the world awash in vain slaughter, to be absolutely alone in the depths. Is Amós? From here can I hear him thinking how should I kill myself? or how should I kill in me the various forms of madness and be at the same time tender and lucid, creative and patient, and survive? How can the old love live in me if I understood the instant of Love and now belong to the world of mutes, my fingers wriggling with anxious signals and my throat wide with blanks? How should I kill myself? What sort of signs should Amós transmit before his fingers fall to rest for all eternity? Mute. And man. Lucid and mute. And man. He goes into a bar full of these unsayings, these so called whimsyings, alienations, illnesses, endocrine glands, Amós’s struggle is only that, perhaps the pituitary, you see, perhaps the pituitary isn’t getting on so well. A beer please? Sure, any kind? any kind. A big galoot sidles up: could you get mine, sir, I’m hard up. Yeah, I’ll get it. Six kids and no job. Hard, Amós says, that must be hard. My cock is what’s hard, sir, when I’m in shape, even harder. I bet, says Amós, it must be pretty hard.