acting calmly and quickly. Nervous, edgy, extremely emotive in daily life, I have a tremendous reserve of calmness and aptness as soon as itâs a question of carrying off a dead body. I become another person. Iâm suddenly a stranger to myself, all the while being more myself than ever. I stop being vulnerable. I stop being unhappy. I reach a sort of quintessence of myself; I fill the task that fate has destined for me.
Around six oâclock, the rain started falling with enough force to send away the threat of the fishers with their lampare . I experienced a happy urgency. Two hours later, I took the road to Seiano, where the landing is more convenient than the one at Vico. I left the car in the bus garage, a murky, rusted hanger with an oil-spotted floor, which is never closed because its door no longer closes.
Today there are only a few rickety houses, just two or three hundred years old, there where once stood the villa of Seianus. All the lights were out except the lamppost at the edge of the pier that blinks each night with a false glow. There was the sound of crackling rain and the seaâs undertow between the rocks. I headed toward a boat I had spotted that afternoon, a nasty old plank-board shell that I detached without noise. I rowed to the hotel beach. There, too, the lights were out. Unable to land on the pebbly shore, I took off my pants, attached the boat to a rocky protrusion, and, entering the water up to my thighs, I advanced toward the grotto. The night, the whispering rain, the voice of the sea, and above all the thought of what I was going to discover intoxicated me. I lifted up the cover that concealed the two bodies and carried them one at a time into the boat. Then I went back to Seiano, rowing as quickly as I could. I didnât yet have the time to appreciate the sight of my dead ones, but they seemed as light as children. Once again, everything went without a hitch, even though I had to execute each manoeuvre twice. I carried the Swedes into the car, where I had some difficulty getting them in. They were already stiff, but I managed to arrange them diagonally on the backseat, the one against the other, hidden with a cover.
I donât deny that going up in the elevator to my apartment was one of the most critical moments of the whole undertaking. I had the same problem, for that matter, in Paris, and Iâd often thought of renting or buying a ground level apartment more favourable to my love affairs.
When I had laid out the Swedish adolescents on my bed, I didnât regret my trouble. They must have been sixteen or seventeen years old and I have never seen anything as beautiful as those two. They resembled each other in an indescribable way and had no doubt been twins. Death had changed the quality of their tans, which the salt had frosted into a gold of a strange, subtle pallor comparable to that given off by a candle flame. Each of them had a long asexual body â the virility of the boy hardly stood out; the breasts of the girl were practically nonexistent, though infinitely desirable, and evoked I donât know which angelic nature to my eyes. The languor of their silvery-blond hair, the absence of eyebrows above their severely bulging eyelids, their protruding cheekbones â like those of fleshless skulls â and the evanescent colour of their thin, mauve lips, expressed in them a most mortal predestination. Strangers to the world of the living, they had been made to die and, right from the start, Death had passionately marked them.
Now that they are in my presence, I hardly dare approach their beauty.
Outside, the tempest has let up and shakes the trees of Posillipo. Enormous clouds roll across the sky. Hecateâs dogs roar past.
October 17, 19...
Iâm acting as I did for Suzanne, sending away the staff, forbidding any disturbance, turning off the heat, establishing cold drafts. Certainly, I am far from feeling for my beautiful angels the tender
Around six oâclock, the rain started falling with enough force to send away the threat of the fishers with their lampare . I experienced a happy urgency. Two hours later, I took the road to Seiano, where the landing is more convenient than the one at Vico. I left the car in the bus garage, a murky, rusted hanger with an oil-spotted floor, which is never closed because its door no longer closes.
Today there are only a few rickety houses, just two or three hundred years old, there where once stood the villa of Seianus. All the lights were out except the lamppost at the edge of the pier that blinks each night with a false glow. There was the sound of crackling rain and the seaâs undertow between the rocks. I headed toward a boat I had spotted that afternoon, a nasty old plank-board shell that I detached without noise. I rowed to the hotel beach. There, too, the lights were out. Unable to land on the pebbly shore, I took off my pants, attached the boat to a rocky protrusion, and, entering the water up to my thighs, I advanced toward the grotto. The night, the whispering rain, the voice of the sea, and above all the thought of what I was going to discover intoxicated me. I lifted up the cover that concealed the two bodies and carried them one at a time into the boat. Then I went back to Seiano, rowing as quickly as I could. I didnât yet have the time to appreciate the sight of my dead ones, but they seemed as light as children. Once again, everything went without a hitch, even though I had to execute each manoeuvre twice. I carried the Swedes into the car, where I had some difficulty getting them in. They were already stiff, but I managed to arrange them diagonally on the backseat, the one against the other, hidden with a cover.
I donât deny that going up in the elevator to my apartment was one of the most critical moments of the whole undertaking. I had the same problem, for that matter, in Paris, and Iâd often thought of renting or buying a ground level apartment more favourable to my love affairs.
When I had laid out the Swedish adolescents on my bed, I didnât regret my trouble. They must have been sixteen or seventeen years old and I have never seen anything as beautiful as those two. They resembled each other in an indescribable way and had no doubt been twins. Death had changed the quality of their tans, which the salt had frosted into a gold of a strange, subtle pallor comparable to that given off by a candle flame. Each of them had a long asexual body â the virility of the boy hardly stood out; the breasts of the girl were practically nonexistent, though infinitely desirable, and evoked I donât know which angelic nature to my eyes. The languor of their silvery-blond hair, the absence of eyebrows above their severely bulging eyelids, their protruding cheekbones â like those of fleshless skulls â and the evanescent colour of their thin, mauve lips, expressed in them a most mortal predestination. Strangers to the world of the living, they had been made to die and, right from the start, Death had passionately marked them.
Now that they are in my presence, I hardly dare approach their beauty.
Outside, the tempest has let up and shakes the trees of Posillipo. Enormous clouds roll across the sky. Hecateâs dogs roar past.
October 17, 19...
Iâm acting as I did for Suzanne, sending away the staff, forbidding any disturbance, turning off the heat, establishing cold drafts. Certainly, I am far from feeling for my beautiful angels the tender
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