Mouth of Hell

About the book:

Mouth of Hell is a collection of short prose poems inspired by the dramatic and eccentric life of Italian Duke Pierfrancesco Orsini, whose story also prompted Manuel Mujica Lainez to write Bomarzo. Negroni’s imaginary creature wanders around the paths of a garden filled with the massive statues the misshapen Duke had built in honor of his late wife Giulia. Through the voice of her character, delivered in a delicate and vulnerable manner, the author peers into the heart of a man overcome with sorrow. The book was published in Argentina and México, and was translated into English.

Excerpt:

The Mouth of Hell

At night we are closer to God.

Manuel Mujica Lainez

 

The dark frond, as ever, with no latitudes. And an aide-de-camp to say something about nothing and go up the river of blood. As if there was some shelter in the human board. And then, in the middle of the road, where the endless finds an end, an immense door, crossable and uncrossable, into the glacial zones of a soul.

* * *

Where fears grow feathers like pheasants, I, the frail man, the dark one, the widower who finds no consolation. Here is a refuge; to expose the damage, to celebrate the inhospitable of being. Little else is possible; a dictionary of the body, a frenzy of private images against a background of shame and massacre. In that tangled course, space without a figure, the other creatures. The torches blaze. The frieze of desires mutinies.

* * *

What in this world is most mine? What form takes root at the root of that which I don’t have? What scandal of swords like ironic and failed little music? In this pitiful orgy, the actors change, but not the torment, not the undecipherable museum of love and death. It is all powerful the nothingness that dwells in me.

* * *

Striking the stupidity of some men. In their meticulous burrows, they hoist sails that cover them, and thus they amass a weak joy, a gloomy tapestry seamed with greedy deeds. A remarkable machine, that nest. A little farther, blurred, against the background of a pointless game, the absolute music. Last body. Water not to drink.

* * *

Hell has multiple mouths; one of them is the confusing lyrics of my life, which bears the sign of my own death. That mouth I have rarely seen. There was terror in there, a dreary and intense energy field. From afar, it looked like a temple, a boiling cloud of smoke with hyenas lurking in lewd zeal. To that abstract emblem, I owe my best pages, the least phony.

* * *

The ephemeral, suddenly, dazzling, like the insightful game of writing. A wide curve. A river of secretive prestige diverted from its own journey. Some possible visions, which could capture the human scream. Sinister beauty singing in our ears, a distant relative of God, like the excrescence of something we have forgotten.

* * *

My works do not exist. This has not prevented me from grazing the mystery. Especially when I think about my childhood country, and the grief and I are naked and very busy, and all of a sudden the night is an immense lake where the rowboat of the moon sails high.

* * *

Sometimes the euphoria and the passion of chaos appear as well. From the heights of their niches, men classify nothingness, like someone who fills the leaves of a distinguished tree. So hours, centuries pass. Every now and then, they descend from one fence to another, approach some desire they know nothing about or mate with violence, picturing some heroic deed. The city is this school of futile emphasis.

* * *

Another mouth is she, vilified and feared, whose forms duplicate the full void of the feminine. I will never know how to say it, but I know it for a fact: towards her I go when I forget about myself, from her stem my love for no one, my thoughtful house, my final truth. From her glow of flames of blazing path, home to the monsters reared by my pride.

* * *

Fires and predations. Ruffians and other filth. Drowning. Ignominies. Put to the sword. What new life sprouts from these crimes? What supreme sanctity in red gloves? Unusual turn of the vilification, also the word in its cave, its evil jungle, its dark night that waters it, indecipherable plant from hell.

* * *

Disheveled hair, concave womb, the pendulum of the hips. Exposed stain and the mound of the sex. As if open to intimacies, ever more certain and more uncertain, her and her delights. Beauty as great relief or as agonizing suffering? Fearful progress into the premises of sensuality. Submissive animal. Life awaits with its weapons ready.

* * *

More secret from me than from the rest, like someone speaking and crying at one time, she has entered her fief. Both hands as if showing the way to the city in pain. There is no truce in her illusion. Still limb not one she keeps. Between the edge and its average, the world goes to great lengths at her feet. Swift, the loudest song as if running from what.

* * *

Odd impatience of horses. Confusion of crossbows, arquebusses. Some sort of luxurious circus or royal company. This is how a militia always starts; the toughest men, the manliest and most beautiful, ready for sexual combat, for a one-to-one fight with death. Sometimes, a hand coated in rings. There is a long way to courtesy. Secret meetings follow, and the skilled sadness of the acrobats.

* * *

Aberrations with no more preliminary drawing than this one; men train the emotion of the flesh, they perfect their repertoire of doubts, they come and go around the sheds, like cruel gods. Restless and confident at the same time, they gnaw their fingernails, they hunt, they compose verses to a single two-headed ambition: to be and not to be a luxurious bird in the mortal cage. These scenes do not belong to reality. They barely want it. They turn it into a fall, commitment in favor of an urgent wound.

* * *

A hand like a tulip, a secret in the brief chest. Standing against a nest of shadows, a lunar apparition, the body toward some eloquence. There are specters dancing in that living coven, still monsters exchanging savage glances with no one. What to make from such ambiguity? From the conscience that expels the world each time it thinks of it? Again and again, between the earthy things and the problematic beyond, the thread of my hallucinated life.

 

Translated by Sebastián Gutiérrez - Edited by Laura Estefania