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the edge of a forest. We wanted to rest a while during our trip back and we especially wanted to embrace and stare at Marcelle.
    “But who is the Cardinal?” Simone asked her.
    “The man who locked me in the wardrobe,” said Marcelle.
    “But why is he a cardinal?” I cried.
    She replied: “Because he is the priest of the guillotine.”
    I now recalled Marcelle’s dreadful fear when she left the wardrobe, and particularly two details: I had been wearing a blinding red carnival novelty, a Jacobine liberty cap; furthermore, because of the deep cuts in a girl I had raped, my face, clothes, hands—all parts of me were stained with blood.
    Thus, in her terror, Marcelle confused a cardinal, a priest of the guillotine, with the blood-smeared executioner wearing a liberty cap: a bizarre overlapping of piety and abomination for priests explained the confusion, which, for me, had remained attached to both my hard reality and the horror continually aroused by the compulsiveness of my actions.

8. The Open Eyes of the Dead Woman
    For a moment, I was totally helpless after this unexpected discovery; and so was Simone. Marcelle was now half asleep in my arms, so that we didn’t know what to do. Her dress was pulled up, exposing the grey pussy between red ribbons at the end of long thighs, and it had thereby become an extraordinary hallucination in a world so frail that a mere breath might have changed us into light. We didn’t dare budge, and all we desired was for that unreal immobility to last as long as possible, and for Marcelle to fall sound asleep.
    My mind reeled in some kind of exhausting vertigo, and I don’t know what the outcome would have been if Simone, whose worried gaze was darting between my eyes and Marcelle’s nudity, had not made a sudden, gentle movement: she opened her thighs,saying in a blank voice that she couldn’t hold back any longer.
    She soaked her dress in a long convulsion that fully denuded her and promptly made me spurt a wave of semen in my clothes.
    I stretched out in the grass, my skull on a large, flat rock and my eyes staring straight up at the Milky Way, that strange breach of astral sperm and heavenly urine across the cranial vault formed by the ring of constellations: that open crack at the summit of the sky, apparently made of ammoniacal vapours shining in the immensity (in empty space, where they burst forth absurdly like a rooster’s crow in total silence), a broken egg, a broken eye, or my own dazzled skull weighing down the rock, bouncing symmetrical images back to infinity. The nauseating crow of a rooster in particular coincided with my own life, that is to say, now, the Cardinal, because of the crack, the red colour, the discordant shrieks he provoked in the wardrobe, and also because one cuts the throats of roosters.
    To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savour the “pleasures of the flesh” only on condition that they be insipid.
    But as of then, no doubt existed for me: I did not care for what is known as “pleasures of the flesh” because they really are insipid; I cared only for what is classified as “dirty”. On the other hand, I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.
    I associate the moon with the vaginal blood of mothers, sisters, that is, the menstrua with their sickening stench….
    I loved Marcelle without mourning her. If she died, then it was my fault. If I had nightmares, if I sometimes locked myself up in a cellar for hours at a time