To the Wedding

23

I was standing at the bar in Piraeus. There was nobody else there. Yanni had gone to bed. I’d missed the last train back to Athens and I was waiting for Yanni’s grandson to take me up to the terrace where I was going to sleep. In the deserted bar the voice I heard was drunk.

Get it straight, pain is what you give, not receive. They’re dirt, the ones that get it. They can’t defend themselves, this shows they’re dirt. See how they talk. Pain is what you give when you have to. And the payoff is you’re Master. Being on top is being alive. They think they’re alive but they’re not. They weren’t made properly, they’re Bastards. They fiddle. Fiddle and plead. Listen to them and you’re lost. Left to themselves, they’d live longer than us. Hesitate and the men’ll slit you. With the women you know what to do. They only hate if you let them hate. Get in before they hate. If you don’t show who you are, you become dirt too. Get in. Feel them go limp. Men and women, not for the same reasons though. Each one gone limp makes you stronger. Better the first time to be with companions. You don’t know your strength yet. And if you don’t know your strength, you’re weak. That’s true in any language. Afterwards it’s routine. You say to yourself — I’ve done it once, it’s done, so what the hell? I’ve done it a dozen times, so fuck the women. I’ve done it twenty times. It makes no difference. You get a rage shaking you. Too late then. We all go through that one. Then the rage goes, and you know for sure who you are and what you can do. Being Master is being alive — until you’re dead. Amen.

In the hut on the riverbank where Jean Ferrero is sleeping, the Po is audible: it makes a noise like lips being licked because the mouth is too dry. Yet rivers never speak and their indifference is proverbial. The Alamana, the Po, the Rhine, the Danube, the Dnieper, the Sava, the Elbe, the Koca, where some lost soldiers of Alexander the Great fought stragglers of the Persian army in a skirmish of which there is no record — there’s not a great river anywhere for which men have not died in battle, their blood washed away in a few minutes. And at night after the battles, the massacres begin.