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the dazzling whiteness of her neck, the red swirl of hair on the pillow. I cannot endure the sight of a naked woman for very long: no one can. That’s why we always elude this moment, submerged in the shadows of close proximity, the single, blind, tactile continuum that is all women, the same basal heat. I subjected her (subjected myself) to this scrutiny because I sought to destroy any feeling of love that might otherwise contaminate the purity of my experiment. I examined her slowly, through the wee hours of that morning, piece by piece: the ceaseless play of valves, the measured flow of secretions, the unending skin like the surface of a Klein bottle, without a single point of rupture, artificiality, anything modeled by the hand of man.
    It was getting lighter by the moment. A fly buzzed around and flew into the windowpane. L INDA turned over and I stood up in alarm. The black dot of the fly alit next to the girl’s neck. I fixed my eyes on the distended skin of the twin beanies that were her breasts and as I approached to observe them better—those purple nubbins, the serosities beneath the skin—I retched and was momentarily overcome with vertigo. I wobbled back on my heels unable to tear my eyes away, irresistibly attracted by one of those pores, and realized in horror that I was falling toward it in trigonometric increments. Then I passed through the black hole and opened my eyes onto a white clarity.

    The moonlight covered the ground like snow, bathing all that surrounded him in phosphorescent splendor. At first he couldn’t tell what sort of strange being lay there but after observing it a while he realized it was the putrefying corpse of a young woman. He knew the body had belonged to a woman because the skin and the extremities had kept their form and whiteness. But her long [red] hair had slipped off the skull like a wig and the face was a shapeless mass, swollen as if she’d been severely beaten. The entrails poked out of the belly and the worms were busying themselves across the entire body. ( Captain Shigemoto’s Mother, Junichiro Tanizaki)
    I. Someone—a hand—helped me down the stairs. Once in the street, I collapsed to the pavement and dragged myself up against the wall like a BRODIAGA , filthy and in rags, resting after a long journey. I realized L INDA had left me there in the secret hope that I would never come back, that I would die, would forget her. I heard my own desperate panting as I tried to probe the distant walls of that deep black well and, little by little, my vision returned: sunflower seeds on the asphalt, a cigarette butt, still smoking. When the veil finally fell from my eyes, I saw, for the second time, the bridge with its Nubian lions, their gilded wings gleaming in the pale sun of the north.
    With great difficulty I rose to my feet and crossed to the opposite sidewalk to take note of the building and the choppy curls of water in the canal. Suddenly, at the startling speed of a light source erupting into our field of vision, a Bach prelude flowed from one of the windows on the top floor. It was L INDA who, seeing me down there suffering in the light’s unbearable brilliance, was making use of this simple and touching prelude to bring the chapter to a pious close. And—why not admit it?—I was overwhelmed with true emotion, standing in front of that gray building, with L INDA in her garret, and the flapping wing of a sob hit me full in the face.
    Other sources: 1) Cristo in scurto , Andrea Mantegna, 1480; 2) Danaë, Gustav K LIMT , 1907.
    C ZARS (T WILIGHT OF THE ). In a Saint Petersburg antique shop I discovered an old photo album and spent half an hour examining it in minute detail. It opened with a postcard bearing an image in sharp focus of a woman who, to judge by her dreamy air, had gone out shopping that morning, more than seventy years earlier. An annotation on the back was written in Roman characters, “Vera Vasilievna, 1907,” and when I had managed to decipher