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.The question was: what had I killed?That calm woman that I had always been, had she gone crazy with pleasure? my eyes still closed, I was trembling with jubilation.Killing.was so much greater than I, was of a piece with this measureless room.Killing had at last opened up the dry sands of this room to moisture, at last, as though I had dug and dug, with hard, avid fingers, until I found inside myself a potable stream of life that was the stream of a death.I slowly opened my eyes, now in sweetness, in gratitude, timidity, in a shyness of glory.From the finally moist world from which I was emerging, I opened my eyes and encountered again the great, harsh, open light, I saw the wardrobe door, now closed.And I saw the cockroach's front half sticking out of the door.Sticking forward, erect in the air, a caryatid.But a living caryatid.At first I didn't understand, I just looked in surprise.Slowly I realized what had happened: I hadn't pushed the door hard enough.I had, to be sure, trapped the cockroach in the door so it couldn't come out any farther.But I had left it alive.Alive and looking at me.I turned my eyes aside in a quick, violent reaction.I still needed, then, the final stroke.One more thrust? I didn't look at the roach, but I kept telling myself that I needed one more thrust—I kept slowly telling myself that, as though every repetition worked to send a command order to my heartbeats, the beats that were spaced too much like a pain whose sensation I couldn't feel.Until—succeeding at last in hearing myself, at last succeeding in giving myself orders—I lifted my arm up high, as if my entire body weight would come down on the wardrobe door along with the blow from my arm.But it was then that I saw the cockroach's face.It was aimed straight ahead, at the same level as my head and eyes.For an instant I paused with my hand poised in the air.Then, gradually, I lowered it.An instant before I might not have been able to see the expression on the cockroach's face.But it was too late by a split second: I had seen it.My hand, which came down when I stopped the blow, slowly rose again to my stomach: though I had not moved from the spot, my stomach had recoiled inside my body.My mouth had become too dry, I passed my tongue, which was also dry, over my rough lips.It was a shapeless face.The antennae stuck out in whiskers at the sides of the mouth.The brown mouth was clearly demarcated.The thin, long whiskers moved about slow and dry.Its faceted black eyes looked around.It was a cockroach as old as a fossilized fish.It was a cockroach as old as salamanders, and chimeras, and griffins, and leviathans.It was as ancient as a legend.I looked at its mouth: there was the real mouth.I had never seen a cockroach's mouth.I, in fact.I had never really seen a cockroach.I had only felt repugnance at their ancient, ever-present existence.but I had never come face to face with one, even in my mind.And so I discovered that despite their compactness, they are made up of shell after shell, gray and thin, like the layers of an onion, as though you could lift one layer up with your fingernail and there would always be another one underneath, and another.Maybe those layers were the wings, but then it would be made up of layer after thin layer of wings compressed to form that compact body.It was an auburn color.And all covered with cilia.Maybe the cilia were the multiple legs.The antennae were quiet now, dry, dusty filaments.Cockroaches don't have noses.I looked at it, with that mouth of its, and its eyes: it looked like a dying mulatto woman.But its eyes were black and radiant.The eyes of a girl about to be married.Each eye itself looked like a cockroach.Each fringed, dark, live, dusted eye.And the other one just the same.Two cockroaches mounted on the cockroach, and each eye reproduced the entire animal.Each eye reproduced the entire animal."Pardon my putting this all on you, hand that I have in mine, but I don't want to keep it for myself! take the cockroach, I want nothing to do with what I saw."There I was, mouth agape, offended, drawn back— face-to-face with the dusty being that was looking back at me.Take away what I saw: for what I saw, with a compulsiveness so painful and so frightening and so innocent, what I saw was life looking back at me.How else could I refer to that horrible, brute raw matter and dry plasma that was simply there while I shrank back within myself in dry nausea, I sinking centuries and centuries deep in mud—it was mud, and not even dried mud but mud still wet, still alive, it was an ooze in which the roots of my identity were twisting about with intolerable slowness.Take, take all that for yourself, I don't want to be a living person! I disgust myself, I marvel at myself, thick ooze coming slowly forth.That's how it was, that's how it was, then.I had looked upon the live cockroach and had discovered in it my deepest life identity.In a difficult demolition, hard, narrow passages were opening inside me.I looked at it, at the cockroach; I hated it so much that I was changing sides, forming solidarity with it, since I couldn't bear being alone with my own aggressiveness.And all at once I groaned out loud, this time I heard my groan
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