Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

From Persephone 2014

2017; Boston University; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/arn.2017.0028

2327-6436

Gwenaëlle Aubry,

Psychodrama and Leishmaniasis Studies

From Persephone 2014 GWENAËLLE AUBRY (Translated by Benjamin Eldon Stevens) 1. koré (theory of the young girl) All will be well, pretty one, all will be well, we don’t want to hurt anything or force anything, all will be very well —Pierre Jean Jouve, Hécate) You are eighteen you think that you’re immortal (and you’re right, since it’s still you who says “I” through me). You are eighteen years old and you leave, you run, you quit, leaving, you do that very well, it’s almost what you do best, even younger you quit family dinners, classrooms, men who took you to their beds or showed you your nakedness in the mirror, you would leap up, you would slip through the doors without ever making them slam, and you ran, you rushed down, drunk with flight. Now you don’t quit anything, not anything or anyone (aside from yourself, perhaps). You don’t flee, you go forward, you gallop , without knowing towards what. You are still in a darkened corridor, a narrow stall that constrains your leaps, on both sides closed doors (behind one of them, your mother), but at the end, all the way at the end, this blank, this blank that flares, hypnotic, blinding. It’s towards it that you go, light or emptiness, you don’t know, you’re not seeing well, you mix things up. You know that you must go quickly. Even for immortals, time counts. You keep watch, you keep watch for the imminence , the rift, the thunderbolt, the moment that will seize arion 25.3 winter 2018 you by the hair and turn your head forever. You know that it awaits you, the moment when everything slips, the precipice moment, that it keeps watch for you, too, voracious , impatient. You don’t want to miss it. You go out. You go into the street. You are this, first of all, at eighteen: this girl who goes into the street and who walks, briefly at times, in great galloping leaps that no rhythm governs , advances, does not fall (would like to fall). Men follow you, from their mouths fly words like a throw of knives, their blades vibrate and cut the space between them and you, but you go quickly, they do not reach you, they’re hardly able to sketch your silhouette on the unmoving air. No shadow attaches itself to your feet. (It must be said, too, that it’s an eternal April, cruel, imperious and sour, that never have facades and squares been cut out so cleanly, as if the city, where you continue to go forward , has just been carved out of a glacier, cut in sharp angles that shear at you with every step. The world, too, is just beginning, it is not yet tarnished, not yet blunted.) You go quickly and straight, legs bare, hair in the wholesome wind. All that stops you are the men on the ground, lying all stretched out or kneeling, hamstrung marble statues, gods corroded and filthy. They know your name, they hail you, young girl says the one, doll the second and little sister the third: you stop short. Bankside, the river is flowing at his feet, he is seated, raised up high on bundles of paper cinched with twine, yellowed sheets with the acrid scent of dog, and already you sense—later he will tell you—that they are soaked with piss and tell his story. There he is, the one who lords it over the eternal history of fallen gods, of deposed fathers, and who consecrates this theogony with piss. You continue to go forward. You keep watch for the encounter, a different one, the true one, you track its signs, you decipher them in the faces of passersby, the names of streets, the impassive statues. You lift your eyes to the birds in the milky sky, too, but their cries tear at you, and those magnetic clouds that they form sometimes, when evening 162 PERSEPHONE 2014 comes, amidst great rustlings of wings, those compact, erratic blocks that rise up suddenly from the foliage and whirl, magnetized, distraught, crying their panic aloud. You are...