Read Online With My Dog Eyes: A Novel by Hilda Hilst - Free Book Online

think. Well now. Will they hang the bishop, the Professor? I’m standing by. I never even spoke with any of the condemned. And I could talk to them, why not? They’d be shut up from then on, forever. But I’m cautious. Thingscan change from one moment to the next. Didn’t they just change? He takes a few steps through the rubble and thinks that later they’ll definitely come to make a bonfire of the whole field, later he’ll definitely come across some other people and he’ll speak with the magistrate. Because he fulfilled his duty and understands it’s not his fault the escorts were negligent with their escorting, it’s not his fault if God or the devil spewed wind and water to bring everything down. After the tenth hanged man you’re done, he remembered very well what the magistrate said. He’d get the runaround, they’re going to tell him that there’s no hanged man without a wrung neck. Well, they’ll see, I’ll find that blabbermouth, that blather-world and dead or alive I’ll get him in the noose.
    Blind I will walk over hot coals
    Mangled and demented for all
    But a trilling troubadour
    Of the black paradise of your face
    Or if you like, fold me.
    Your hand on the back of my head
    Will curve my body down to the waist
    In the barrels of the question. I must know the pit
    Of never understanding. As they have been until now
    Over me, these sandy winds of your breath
    Or quiet me. My heart joined to the moss of the stone
    Exempted from this search.
    I do a few somersaults. Mirror and boots. I’m a castaway from myself and a gardener. I’m in the depths but I plant as though I were outside. I’m an executioner in a classroom. If they ask me I don’t respond. This is who I am. Somersault, cuddle, fish, silken tail, water, grindstone clouds in this aquarium. The eyes eye me. The faces lean their noses into my space. Mutely I roam through the room. There is a circle of glass between us. There are a bunch of people in the entryway: is that the professor? Begonia. I revisit the window in its yellows. We are questions in an extensive and inconclusive ball of twine.
    I lie down on the thread, the twine nestles me, it goes concave, gets longer, makes a hammock, I sleep hearing groans and complaints. The ones who can see me are very annoyed. A man crosses the room, sits down, farts on my black chair. I ask: did you say your name, sir? There are laughs from the desks in the back. Someone gives me a jasmine. I am mutely bored. The questions grow and form cubes in the air. They collide. I stretch out on the smoothness of the mats. A cube wounds my worn-out elbow. Another bangsagainst my forehead, testing my bone brown with shackles. Women invade the room. They stomp on me with their high heels. Sado-slippery I’m sweating and laughing. Grotesquely I’m dispersing. There’s blood spattering the walls of the circle. An avalanche of cubes blankets my tissues of flesh. I’m empty of anything good. Full of the absurd.
    Lift me, Shining One
    To the opulence of your shoulder.
    With my dog-eyes I stop before the sea. Tremulous and sick. Bent, thin, I smell fish in the driftwood. Fishbone. Tail. I gaze at the sea but don’t know its name. I remain standing there, askance, and what I feel is also nameless. I feel my dog body. I don’t know the world, nor the sea in front of me. I lie down because my dog body orders it. There’s a bark in my throat, a gentle howl. I try to expel it but man-dog I know that I’m dying and I will never be heard. Now I’m a spirit. I’m free and fly over my miserable being, my abandonment, the nothing that contains me and that made me on Earth. I am rising, wet like fog.
    The snares: As if a dead man
    Believed the sunflower of life
    To grow upon his chest.
    Amós Kéres, 48 years old, mathematician, was nowhere to be seen. In the arbor, the she-dog looked to the sky, sniffing. His mother found a phrase on paper: God? a Surface of Ice Anchored to Laughter. And below it: