130
PARTISAN REVIEW
Metropol, like here, he had the top floor. It was the bridal suite."
I threw my hands over my ears. "I don't want to hear it! You have to
forget about it. Don't you know about Geli? What they did to her? With
Hitler's own pistol!"
"Then don't listen, lamb. Or don't remember what you hear. Are you
afraid they will torture you for information? Or torture me? If they pierce
me with burning wires I'll tell them that Magda does not know anything
about the Jews. She also doesn't know why she did what she did in the
hotel in Vienna - or after Vienna, or whether she would do it again if she
had the chance. The question I ask myself is, was all of it at bottom a kind
of flattery? I knew he was the most powerful man in the world. But with
me he was powerless. He was a beggar. I wish I could tell you it was tor–
ture. Or a humiliation. Or that it wasn't me. Do you understand? That I
had abstracted myself, made myself into a machine without a soul, a body
without a mind; or had turned myself into another person, the way I do
before the camera. But it is pointless to pretend that I was anyone else but
Magdalena Mezaray, the name I was born with, and that when he lay
under me, like a baby, really, naked and helpless, wailing, covered with
slime, I felt anything other than what he does when, with the might of his
armies, he straddles the world."
"Magda, I -"
"Shhh. Lambkins, hush. I know what you are too dear a lamb to ask:
why didn't I feel, instead of that glory, simple human revulsion? I did. But
not until later, months later, when he started to use a piece of glass. It was
a coffee table. I squatted on top. He was beneath with his bulging eyes.
That was when I felt the disgust. Waves of it. And nausea. Because now
that he was to be clean and pure, I felt covered wi th dirt. The only part of
him I could bear to look at was his moustache, because it was a reminder,
like a smudge of filth . Oh, these English words:
the pain ofglass!
It shat–
tered me,lambie. I'd lost him. That's what happened to that little girl, Geli:
she'd lost him, too.
Liebe auf den Ersten Blick?
I made that to get back my
power. I wanted to be a giant, a giantess, sixty feet high on the screen, with
an audience of pygmies writhing beneath me. A colossus! A star! That's
what I'd had before. The knowledge that at anyone moment, in all the
capital cities of the world, men were gazing at me. Devouring me with
their eyes. I used to think of them: crowds of men, armies of men,
my
armies, with their pale white faces. There they are, turned like sunflowers
- or moonflowers, if such a thing is possible - to the light of the illumi–
nated screen. I would feel the heat of their breathing. I would hear their
soft moans. Ah! To imagine the pleasure I gave them, those uncountable
millions, as they touched themselves in the dark."
I did nothing. I do not think, through the whole of that speech, I took
