The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana   ::   Эко Умберто

I dislike the sun, and yet I did not mind it at all at Solara. They observe that I often squint, crinkling my nose: "You act like you can’t see, but it’s not true," they scold. I am waiting for the fogs of autumn. Why should I love the fog, since it was in the fog of the Gorge that my night of terror was consummated? Because even there it was the fog that protected me, leaving me with the ultimate alibi: it was foggy, I saw nothing.

With the first foggy days, I rediscover my ancient city, and those exaggerated, sleepy spaces are erased. The voids disappear and out of that milky grayness, in the light of the streetlamps, outcroppings, corners, and sudden façades emerge from nowhere. Comfort. As during the blackouts. My city was made, conceived, designed by generation after generation to be seen in this penumbral light as you walk, sticking close to the walls. Then it becomes beautiful and protective.

Was it that year or the next that saw the appearance of Grand Hotel , the first comic book for adults? The first image of that first photo-romance led me toward temptation, but I fled.

That was tame compared to something I later came across in my grandfather’s shop: a French magazine that as soon as I opened it made me burn with shame. I filched it, slipping it in my shirt and leaving.

I am home, stretched out in my bed on my stomach, and as I flip through the pages I press my crotch into the mattress, just as they advise you not to do in the devotional handbooks. On one page: a photo, fairly small but immensely evident, of Josephine Baker, topless.

I stare at her shadowed eyes so as not to look at her breasts, then my gaze shifts, they are (I believe) the first breasts of my life-the ample, flaccid things on the à poil Kalmyk women were something else entirely.

A wave of honey surges through my veins, I feel an acrid aftertaste in the back of my throat, a pressure on my forehead, a swoon in my loins. I stand up frightened and moist, wondering what terrible disease I have contracted, delighted by that liquefaction into primordial soup.

I believe it was my first ejaculation: more forbidden, I think, than cutting a German’s throat. I have sinned again-that night in the Gorge was the mute witness to the mystery of death, and this moment is the interloper penetrating the forbidden mysteries of life.

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I am in a confessional. A fiery Capuchin entertains me at length on the virtues of purity.