The Scarlet House-2
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An orderly took me to the Scarlet House, a block-house with red-painted doors. He had almost to carry me because I could scarcely walk. There was no mouth in his fao mouth. His eyes were feral, wild, scarcely human."Aha!" says the t in a great good humour; "Your memory is playing tricks on you!"
He himself, such is his magnanimity, received me in a vast, eg hall hung with extravagant tapestries. I retain only the most fused recolles of its exterior but I know the inside perfectly well, now. It is a maze of cells like the inside of a braiook away my old coat that was still bundled around my shoulders and dropped it into an ior. Then he showed me the sacrificial knife, which is made of black obsidian, and said to me: "As of the present moment you inhabit the world no longer sihe least impulse of my will cause you to disappear from it."
But his methods are more subtle than the knife. Dedicated as he is to the dissolution of forms, he intends to erode my sense of being by equippih a multiplicity of beings, so that I found myself with my own profusion of pasts, presents and futures.
I am eroding, I am wearing away. I am being stroked as smooth as stone is by the hands of the sea; the elements that went to make up my uniqueness fall apart as he erases the tapes of my memory and makes his own substitutions. For, if my first capture incorporates within it ruins that do not yet exist and my sed capture resonates with too many echoes of books I might have read, then my third and by far my most moving capture might only recapitulate a Middle-European nightmare, an episode frue or Vienna seen in a movie, perhaps, or told me by a plete stranger during the exposed privacy of a long train journey. For sometimes I ot believe Ive suffered so much.
If only I could remember everything perfectly, just as it happehen loaded with the ambivalent burden of my past, I should be free.
But in this brothel where memorys the prostitute there is no such thing as freedom; all is governed by the fall of the cards. Madame Schreck, of course, is the High Priestess or Female Pope. The t has given her a blue robe to wear over that terrible red dress that reminds us all, every time we see it, of the irresoluble and animal part of ourselves we all hold in on, since we are women. She is the paradigm of sexuality. At her hairy hole ay homage as if it were the mouth of an oracular cave.
When we play the Tarot Game, Madame Schreck sits on a small throhey bring down the ts special book, the book in blak on purple paper that he keeps hanging from a twisted beam in his private apartments; they open it up and spread it out on her open lap, to mimic her sex, which is also a forbidden book.
The Tarot Game is like those games of chess that medieval princes performed on the blad white marble chequered floors of their palaces, using men for pieces. Theyd dress oeam in b<tt></tt>lad oeam in white; the knights would be mounted on suitably caparisoned chargers who sometimes unloaded a freight of dung as they stepped delicately sideways, to prove the game was real. The bishops would be properly mitred; the pawns, no doubt, dressed as ilitia. The t plays the Game of Tarot with a major ara of fourteen of his retinue. If Madame Schreck adopts the emblems of the Papess to the manner born, the Fool remains himself, of course. They mask themselves and perform random dao sounds not unlike screaming that the t extorts from aronithesiser. He reads the patterns the halluated pack make at random and so he invokes chaos. He has methodology. He is a stist, in his way.
Now, altogether Ive been erased and substituted and played baany times my memory is nothing but a palimpsest of possibilities and probabilities, there are some elements he ot rid me of and these, iingly enough, are not those of blood on an old mans hair or his leather-clad minions closing in oh mineral menace of eyes like stones; no. There is a hawk, drawing towards it in a still sky all the elements of which a plex world was onposed. And some man haunts the labyrinths inside my head and he was born without a mouth. And there are certain kinds of eyes, those eyes that, once seen, ever be fotten.
When I helplessly repeat, "I saw a hawk, I saw a h<mark></mark>awk, I saw a hawk. . ." or, "They say I have my mothers eyes", the t half flays me alive. His anger is a nervous reflex, like the crazy ce of a coward in arms against his own weakness; that still, in my extremity, I should persist in remembering reminds him of the possibility, which is appalling to him, that there might be a remedy for chaos.
I need hardly tell you that we, the women of the Scarlet House, live in absolute isolation, although the planned interpeion of all our experience gives us a vague but pervasive sense of closeo one another. When on a pilloith tears, I live aial moment of capture, it might be your dread I feel, or yours, or yours -- a different kind of dread than mine whievertheless, I experience as though it were my own and so I draw o you all.
Yet our lives have tracted to the limitations imposed upon us by the grisly maery of the ts harem. We are not ourselves; we are his playing cards, a shifting chorus to the t, to Madame Schreck, to the Fool and to the others I do not know but only see on the nights he plays the Tarot Game, hieratic figures like apparitions from a fotten theogony who rise and fall at the random dictates of whim. "God is random," says the t who believes in the irresolute triumph of time over its owifiemory.
We whisper among ourselves, of course, like toys might in the privacy of the toy cupboard after the little master is tucked up in bed for the night. Our whispers are soft, awed by the predit in which we find ourselves. In the night-time darkness of our quarters, we ake out one anothers features. Our disembodied voices rustle like dead leaves and sometimes we stretch out our hands to toue another, lightly, to lay a finger on one anothers mouths to assure ourselves a voice issues from that aperture. Like drifting cobwebs, the insubstantial caresses linger for a moment upon our skins. We ma ourselves in a ghostly fashion for are we not already shadows? Phantoms of the dead, phantoms of the living, there is little to choose between two states of limbo.
heless, I have certain prenemonics. A hawk; a man without a mouth; and eyes without a face. As long as I retain them in my memory, even if I fet any kind of text for them, then I keep baething of myself from the ts dissolving philosophy. He may beat me as much as he pleases; Im not afraid of enterihs grisly skeleton in the gavotte of the ara, and thats something.
(If you do find yourself partnering the skeleton, you vanish, of course.)
The Fool never says a word but only screeches and babbles; hes growing perfect, hes quite fotten how to speak. When the t beats me and I scream, he says: "Now youre talking! Who needs words?"
We are his harem and also his finishing school. The curriculum is divided into three parts. First, we learn how tet; sed, we fet how to speak; third, we cease to exist.
There are no mirrors in the Scarlet House because mirrors propagate souls. A mirror shows you who you are and not one single one of us pirls has the slightest notion of what that might have bee, when the t beats us, we feel pain and so we know we are still living, not yet quite annihilated, and the anguish that overes me when I remember I am no longer myself is quite real and persists all the time.
Yet the fugue of our emory is also a kind of solation. Though I am not myself, sometimes, when we are forced to play at the Tarot Game, I and the rest of the minor ara, I sense I may be, in some as yet formless and i way, almost a legion of selves. When we lie in our sleeping quarters and toue ao firm that the ripped envelopes of our bodies are still there, even if the tents have all been misdirected, it is almost as though my body had been transformed into one of those many-limbed and many-headed effigies sculptured in Indian temples -- no point, any longer, in trying to ascertain the inal from my bewilderment. The more the t scrambles the tapes, the more the harem bees one single woman with a multiplicity of hands and eyes and no name, no past, no future -- first, a being in a void; and, soon, a void itself.
Chaos is like a vat of acid. Everything disies.
heless, I g to my mnemonics like a drowning man to a spar. As time passes and wears me away, I meditate upon them more and more. I am beginning to recile myself pletely to the fact that they may not tain any element at all of real memory. It was hard to bear, at first, but soon I uood how the hawk, the face without a mouth, the eyes without a face, are all the residue of the world I still carry with me that does not elude me and, if they are not precisely memories, then they may be, in some sense, like those odds and ends that all refugees carry with them, from which they refuse to be parted, although theyre quite insignifit -- a spoon with a bent handle, say; or a tram ticket issued by a city that no longer exists. Small items, meaningless in themselves, a keys to aire system of meanings, if only I remember. . .
The hawk, now. If I think about the hawk long enough, I remember that I do not remember it. Thats a painful beginning; but one must begin somewhere. There was a sky, certainly; theres plenty of sky outside the Scarlet House, though we see none of it inside. Sky. Now, the hawk -- down! he es, like a butchers cleaver thwag through meat. The hawk drops on the plump, careless bunny romping through the clover and young grass; the hawks eye, like a telescopis, zooms in on me as I lie in the sun with the smell of fresh grass in my clothes. Yes. I remember the gree of a summers day, not uhe spicy odour of crushed geranium leaves. (trate of fleshly impressions, any fleshly impression; reef it in from the past, from the time before my time in the Scarlet House. St of grass, of geraniums, of slivered lemons. All these sts bring back the world.)
As I lie in the fresh grass I have restructed out of memory, I begin to perceive some element of paranoia in the image of the hawk. For I did not know that I was watched. I was ignorant of my clawed, feathered fate. And so I will be seized by force. Capture; and rape, from the Latin, rapere, to seize by force. . . thats a curious pedantiny to hunt out from the back alleys of memory. I must have studied Latin, ohough for urpose I t imagine. So the capture and the rape elide. Man is an animal who insists on making patterns, says the t ptuously; all the world you think so highly of is nothing but pretty floral aper pasted up over chaos.
The t prepares chaos in his crucible. When he plays his Tarot Game, he makes an institution out of chaos. He signs himself, yours entropically, with the quill of a hawk dipped in the blood of ruptured virginities.
The hawk drops. They throw me down on the silk birds of the antique Persian carpet and rape me. And, to my amazement, a pattern emerges, although it is stylised as those woven birds I may once have walked on. For the hawk is nothing more and nothihan the memory of my capture, preserved as an image, or an i.
I ot tell you with what inexpressible relief I greeted the cretisation, not of a memory, but of an inter-e that made some sense in my plight to me. It was as if Id goo the fused jumble of limbs and hands and eyes scattered promiscuously on the floor of the harem and unerringly been able to piy own hand, screw it ba to my wrist ahe blood flow bato it. Or pull out my mothers eyes from the mess, wipe them carefully on my sleeve and slip them bato my own eye sockets, where they belong.
Now, these are my mothers eyes that jumped out of the old photograph into my head; and there are also the eyes of the mute an that were full so full of pity for me that my heart stopped momentarily, out of fear for my own predit. Those eyes, too, are rimmed with endless black lashes, theyve been put in with a sooty fihey move me as only the mute language of the eye do and I do not know if, ihey are my own eyes, because there are no mirrors here, or if they are the eyes of somebody I loved, once, before they dissolved in my memory. However, I must slip these eyes bato some head or other; any head will do, to make sense of those eyes which will tio speak even if the mouth is sealed up.
Those eyes hold all the speech which will be deo me when fetting fes my lips together and I ot speak at all, like the mute an, like the mute orderly whose eyes had been excised and replaced with those of a beast of prey. Or else with stones, like the bikers, whose mouths were hidden by their leather hoods so you could not tell whether they had mouths or no.
And so I established the desion of my undoing, from capture to annihilation: the hawk, the face without a mouth, the eyes without a face. After that will e nothing. I shall be perfectly silent.
When I perceived Id ahese disparate elements into a grid, or system of es, I felt for the first time I ehe obscure portals of the Scarlet House, a flood of joy. I examihe abused flesh of my breasts and belly a, not sorrow Id been so mauled, but ahe t had mistreated me; and what if its only that the puppet turns against the puppet-master: Isnt the puppet-master depe on the submission of his dolls for his authority? t I, in the systematidomness of my es, trol the Game?
The ghost reassembles the events that re into non-being. As it does so, hourly it grows more substantial.
And where theres no hope, theres no fear, either. Not even fear of Madame Schreck, through whose hole we must all crawl to extin, one day; unless it is the way to freedom.
This m, the t busily erased all the tapes of my Viennese apocalypse; I am glad of it, it was a vile memory and I am heartily sorry for whoever it was among my panions to whom it belonged. He tittered with his habitual beastly glee when at last hed rid me of the pulsion, that nervous, that hicg reiteration; "They say I have my mothers eyes." But that was because he does not know I no longer o remember it, whether it were true or no; I know all that I o know to enable me to ehe time of the torturers and all its sedhand furniture of fear -- the magic robes, the book of pretend-spells, the silence of the fool, the extin of the whore.
This worlds a vile oubliette. Yet in its refuse I will find the key to free me.
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