his left hand suddenly, and the two of them, off balance, scuttle out of the room with that same eerie laughter. Even the sound of the speaking voice is not natural, it has a shrillness to it if you do not control it, pitch it down. So there is that too. He can envision a time, suddenly, when he will not even speak aloud.
He pulled at the heavy frame of the bed. At first it didn’t move, but then, as if ripped free, it slid on the bare floor, so that he might shove it up against the door, and only then fall down again into sleep.
But the sky was red suddenly, he’d seen it from the corner of his eye, and imagination told him there had been a faint sound. It seemed he heard movement throughout the building, and then advancing to the window, he saw it was the mountain in the distance on fire.
There are always two nightmares:
The first.
You are running in that calle and you get away. When the hands go to draw you back, you throw yourself forward and hit the quais, but then you roll into the water and you are safe. You are swimming like a rat, silently, swiftly, through the water as they run helplessly on the bank. You are terrified. But you get away! You are throwing everything into trunks and packing cases, and rushing down the steps out of the palazzo, out of Venice, you have gotten away.
And then that awful realization, that slow dawning that cracks through the darkness of the dream, that you are asleep, this is not real, it is the other that is real, you are dreaming!
This has really happened, and oh, how you played into their hands! Singing, singing, singing, it is almost possible for a moment to hear your voice echoing up those damp walls, amplified beyond your wildest expectations, almost possible to hear it without deafening rage.
The second dream:
They are still there. You’ve still got them between your legs because they have grown back. Or is it that they did not cut them away properly? A little part of it was left and from that the whole has grown back. They have made a terrible error. On any account they are still there, and a physician is explaining all this to you, matter of fact, yes, it does happen in these cases where it was not cleanly done, yes, they have completely come back, examine them for yourself if you like.
He sat in the dark. He did not remember having left the warm cleft of the bed, but he is at the window, feeling the salt breeze from the sea as it stirs the heat which is trapped beneath this low-slung ceiling. It horrified him suddenly that he could touch the roof over his head, but then he collapsed with his arms folded on the sill, the tumbling-down lights of the city a blur. Listen. Listen. There was some distant rhythm as if from a tavern. Or street singers here, wandering these low slopes. He opened his mouth as if gulping for air, and closed his eyes.
Dreams again.
It is summer and a heat like this hangs in all the great empty rooms of the palazzo. He counts the panes in the windows, there are some forty panes to a window, and he is lying naked with his mother, she having stripped off everything above her waist so that her lovely breasts are exposed, the heat tracing her damp tresses against her forehead and her cheek. She stirs, she turns over towards him, the down mattress giving with a groan, and she lifts him on his side, and draws him in so that he feels the very definite heat of her breasts against his naked back, her lips raising the hairs on the nape of his neck.
Ooooooh, God, nooooooo, you are dreaming!
The bell sounds.
It begins again.
“Put on the red sash!”
“I will not!”
“Do you want to be whipped for this?”
I do not want anything.
Why is there never a dream like this:—that I have him in my hands, that he cannot get away from me, and that I may do to him what he has done to me, done to me—where is that dream?
“What is it you hope to gain by this?” Guido Maffeo was walking back and forth. “Talk to me, Tonio! Speak to me. You have admitted yourself to this place, I did not admit you! What is it you must accomplish by this, this