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.There are walls which impede breathing, flying, escape from the earth.The thickness of such walls upon which bodies have left grease, breath, and dampness, is something no destroyers can pull down.When the house is pulled down, it is this stain which will remain, like the stain of blood, and when this stain is removed, stone by stone, layer by layer, there is still the odor in the air, an odor of death.Helba has just washed her walls with a solution of ammonia and her hands have swollen.She was trying to erase the presence of death, she said.Ivan helped her, half-naked, while all the while he explained Einstein and geometry to her, shouting with the hope she would hear him.Gonzalo shakes his head like a lion, impatient under a harness of knowledge, closes his eyes as if he were meditating, charging into the delicate framework of logic and science, snorting fire.He looks for the wine to forget how happy he was in the jungle, on his horse, and what a blight it was the day he was taught to read.He curses the aunt who played the piano all night in the hacienda, a maiden aunt whose loved one had deserted her, was dying of love and committed suicide by playing the piano day and night and not eating.She left Gonzalo a treasure of music, and the haunting sound of the piano, so that when she died, with her hand on the keyboard, he felt compelled to continue, to study the piano.At that time, no man ever studied the piano.It was an art for women, like embroidery.When he arrived at the music school, fresh off his horse, still in white boots and leather coat and vicuña fur, all the little girls laughed at him.He seeks a state of being, a state of consciousness which is far from the intellectual conversations held around him.He sought it in opium, in cocaine, in chewing coca as the Indians did, and taking the mysterious beverages given to him by his Indian nurse, the concoctions they took at church to achieve an ecstasy not known to the Catholic priests.I would like to take care of them all, to break into my father's unused, silent house and let them live there, because they have the courage to be, to act what others only dare to dream of at night.Gonzalo passed by a bookshop on the Boulevard Montparnasse and saw House of Incest open in the window.Underneath it was a reproduction of Cranach.He said he did not know if it was intentional on the part of the bookshop, but that there was a resemblance between the Cranach figure and me.I came home and opened a copy of the Minotaure Gonzalo had just given me.It had a full reproduction of Cranach's woman.I opened the New York Times the next day and found the reproduction again.***Henry is a celebrity now, due greatly to his own efforts, his sociability, gregariousness, correspondence, his boundless energy and ambition.Dream: Sitting on the roof of a house in China waiting for the darkness.Sitting among the roof tiles made of broken Chinese cups and saucers, with the last of the tea leaves still at the bottom of the cups.Sitting among the cups and saucers and waiting for the darkness when I could slip down and enter the city secretly.Sliding down the sandalwood beams, finding that the walls were made of sliding panels.A Chinese woman, with a porcelain face, slid open the panel and showed me the way in.I was kneeling before a meal, an immense round plate on my knees, filled with pearl-studded slippers, angel-hair, filigrane, icicles, melted gold.I looked intently and lovingly because I knew that I would be only once in each room, and that all I saw I would see only once, so I looked lingeringly at the carved panels, at the dish, I smelled the incense odor of the room, I saw the light filtered through parchment paper.Each panel I moved led me through the Chinese house but also out of it, and once I would be out of it for good, and so I pushed the panels slowly, passing through each room with regrets, meditating in the soft filtered light, and on the carving on the wood, which was so precise I thought, given time, I could read it like a book.I began to decipher the carving but its meaning eluded me, it reminded me of many things, none of which I could remember entirely, and the last panel which I pushed gently found me out in the street of China with doorless houses, windowless, with lanterns swinging, all alike, and dolls sitting on the sidewalk.Ivan was sitting on a park bench.A hobo addressed him.He did not answer him.The clochard said: "Et moi qui croyais que tu étais de la cloche." ("And I who thought you were one of us.")When I was thirteen I wrote in my diary: "What I call making a heaven for myself is making a heaven for others."Henry is in a blaze of activity.People.Letters.Hopes.Reviews.New friends.Ideas.Tired eyes.Cannibalism: "What was it you read me the other day about a brooch without stones? That was a marvelous image.""Don't steal it, I need it for my portrait of Helba.""I won't," said Henry, but he made a note of it.He is collecting addresses.He wants to communicate with the whole world.Like a telegraphist, I said.Laughter.Lao-tze Miller, I call him.The Chinese rogue.He was having dinner at some Dutch people's home.I asked: "What are they like?" He answered they were boring, but they knew a lot of people.In the morning I write letters, I try to sell my Indian sari dress because I am out of money.I continue to copy diaries for Denise Clairouin.I get deeply tired because everything touches me, I am never indifferent.Indifference or passivity are impossible to me.Louveciennes is dead.It was dismantled.I never wrote about its last days.When I wanted to enter a new cycle and move to Paris, into a modern apartment with modern furniture, I had to part with Louveciennes and its furnishings
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