Interlude

Under The Sun, by Edward Hopper

They both stood naked, facing each other's skins, and underneath the bones. He realised he did not recognise her anymore. She was a ghost, her milky-white flesh almost translucent in the pale-blue twilight that shone through the curtainless window of the room.

'I don't know you,' he said. His voice sounded hollow, opening up a void between them.

'I am L., your lover. We have been seing each other for as long as I can remember.'

'How long is that?'

'Always.'

'That is not true. I remember other L.'s, other times and places before that. What happened in-between?'

'Nothing. And everything. In-between, I've made myself anew. The person you are now facing is a stranger.'

He tried looking hard into the halo-like hulk of L.'s body, searching for invisible traces of himself like a dog sniffing its master but found none. He explored with his eyes the triangle of her ebony-haired pubis, her firm, rounded breasts, the moon-like shape of her buttocks but found nothing that he could hold onto.

She said: 'Memory is of the body not the eyes.'

'Who am I, then?' His voice was shaky and broke on the last syllable, leaving an invisible scar across the void seperating them.

'You are P., my lover.'

'Have we already slept together? I cannot remember.'

'Only slipped, but never slept. Touch me, you'll know.'

He threw both his hands across the void and snatched her own hands in his. He watched the intricate entanglement of their joined fingers.

He said: 'These are not your hands anymore, nor are they mine, nor anyone's. Whose hands are they?'

She answered: 'These are the coarse hands of an anonymous worker. They kneaded all their lives at the factory and are now dying.'

He disentangled himself from the cobweb of her hands and reached for her breasts. He watched his own hands as they settled underneath and adjusted themselves to the parenthetical curves of her breasts.

'Whose breasts are they?' He interrogated.

'These are the heavy breasts of an unknown mother/child-bearer. They gave life but are now falling.'

He removed his hands in horror and went to stand behind her, covering both her eyelids with his palms.

'Whose eyes are they?'

'These are orbitless eyes. They are the maggot-eaten eyes of a dead soldier whose corpse has been rotting under the sun for as long as I can remember.'

She now turned to him and secured his croissant-like penis in-between the cusp of her hands in the same delicate way that one would hold a bouquet of flowers.

She pressed hard on it, sqeezing its life out, and asked: 'Whose penis is this?'

'This, would be Hitler's penis if only he had not been impotent.' They both laughed. Their joined laughter resonated for a fleeting moment across the void of the empty room and receded.

'Take me,' she said, 'But before you do you must promise me never to mention my name again. Lovers are better nameless.'