The Poisoned Kiss

Contents

Note
Our Lady of the Easy Death of Alferce
The Brain of Dr. Vicente
Loss
Parricide
The Enchanted Piano
Distance
In a Public Place
The Seduction
Maimed
Two Young Men
The Secret Mirror
The Cruel Master
Sunlight/Twilight
Husband and Wife
The Poisoned Kiss
The Son of God and His Sorrow
The Murderer
Impotence
Letters to Fernandes from a Young American Poet
The Letter
Plagiarized Material
Journey
Afterword

Epigraph

. . Oh night that was my guide!
Oh darkness dearer than the morning's pride,
Oh night that joined the lover
To the beloved bride
Transfiguring them each into the other!

—St. John of the Cross

Excerpt

"The Poisoned Kiss"

Not one hundred yards from my courtyard the first stranger lurched in front of me—it was necessary for me to shove him aside. He stumbled back against a wall firm and weathered with the centuries, too surprised to cry out after me. I hurried on toward you.

Again someone blundered in front of me—my precious pathway to you!—and I seized him by the arm, shook him viciously, tried to thrust him aside. But he struggled. It was necessary for me to close my fingers about his throat. He fell to his knees, choking, and I rushed past.

And again, as I ran through the tumbled-down cloister, scattering the old bones about me in my haste to you, a sight-seer approached me and tried to detain me with idle questions. Blood rushed into my eyes—my vision was nearly obliterated—I was led by my rage to shout into this fool's face and beat him away from me. He persisted. There was an open tomb in which some whole bones lay in the midst of dust and rubble; I took hold of this fool and, with a strength I did not know I possessed, forced him down into the tomb.

Did he choke in all that dust?

Running, soaring to you—to your kiss—I dream with my bloodied eyes wide open, dreaming of your arms and your slender neck and your white, white skin, your laughter delicate as a thrush's song, your eyes so darkly lidded, so beautiful. I dream again and again of your kiss.

Why do they insist upon approaching me, touching me? blocking my way? Why do they address the most absurd questions to me, as if I were a mere stroller with no destination, a gentleman on a Sunday afternoon with no one awaiting him? As soon as they see my face darkened by the blood of my anger, they understand—but by then it is too late.

I have acquired a small, sharp dagger.

The ground between you and me is uncertain, and as I run it cracks and threatens to split. So I must run faster. I run soaring over the deepening cracks, and behind me there are gaps in the earth into which other men have fallen, weeping in agony.

Awards

New York Times Notable Books of the Year

Other Editions

Reviews

• Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 1975, p674-675
• Publishers Weekly, June 16, 1975, p74
• Washington Post Book World, July 6, 1975, p2
• Library Journal, August 1975, p1441
• National Observer, August 2, 1975, p19
• Village Voice, August 4, 1975, p36
• New York Times Book Review, August 31, 1975, p6
• Atlantic, September 1975, p85
• Booklist, September 1, 1975, p25
• Choice, November 1975, p1171
• New Statesman, May 21, 1976, p685
• Times Literary Supplement, May 21, 1976, p601
• Spectator, May 29, 1976, p30

Afterword

In November of 1970, while I was occupied as usual with my own writing, I began to dream about and to sense, while awake, some other life, or vision, or personality . . . . Since my mind is always receptive to a multiplicity of stimuli, this did not seem to me unusual. One day I wrote a story that was strange to me, a highly abstract story set nowhere at all; I did not understand the story and in a way I felt it was not my own. I could not make sense of it and set it aside; ultimately it became "Our Lady of the Easy Death of Alferce."

The Fernandes stories came out of nowhere: not out of an interest in Portugal (which I have never visited), or a desire to write parables to pierce through the density of existential life that I dramatize in my own writing. I much prefer the synthesis of the "existential" and the "timeless" in my own fiction; I believe that writing should re-create a world, sanctifying the real world by honoring its complexities.

If I did not concentrate deliberately on my own work, or if I allowed myself to daydream or become overly exhausted, my mind would move—it would seem to swerve or leap—into "Portugal." There seemed to be a great pressure, a series of visions, that demanded a formal, aesthetic form; I was besieged by Fernandes—story after story, some no more than sketches or paragraphs that tended to crowd out my own writing. I was able to alternate a "Fernandes" story with one of my own or with a chapter from the novel I was writing (Wonderland), as a kind of bargain; otherwise, Fernandes would have overwhelmed me.

The only way I could accept these stories was to think of them as a literary adventure, or a cerebral/Gothic commentary on my own writing, or as the expression of a part of my personality that had been stifled. Yet I was never able to designate myself as the author of the stories; they were all published under the name "Fernandes," and I was listed as having translated them "from the Portuguese."

Contrary to what one might believe, an experience like this—either real or imagined "possession"—is not really disturbing. Fernandes drifted into my life at a time when I was in normal health, and while his stories drained some of my energy, I was able to keep up with my own writing and my university teaching without much difficulty. It seemed that there was a harmony in what I did, without knowing what it was or why I did it; it seemed to be an almost impersonal function.

Since this experience, I have been reading voluminously in parapsychology, mysticism, the occult and related subjects, but so far I have not been able to comprehend, to my own satisfaction, what really happened. There is a considerable difference between reading about something and actually experiencing it, a lesson that intellectually oriented people must learn again and again, at times to their chagrin. My fairly skeptical and existential attitude toward life was not broad enough to deal with the phenomenon I myself experienced, and yet, at the present time, I find it difficult to accept alternative "explanations."

Repeatedly, one is brought back to the paradox that one can experience the world only through the self—through the mind—but one cannot know, really, what the "self" is. Does the brain contain the mind? Does the brain generate the mind? Is the brain a kind of organic mechanism, in each of us unique as a mechanism, through which a larger transhuman or trans-species consciousness is somehow filtered? But what would the nature of this consciousness be, and what human being could ever delude himself into imagining he might deal with it, especially in words?

Fernandes retreated when his story seemed to be complete. A kind of harmony or resolution must have been established, and the manuscript came to an end. Years later, writing this afterword, I am almost tempted to return to my earliest and most conventional diagnosis of the experience and claim it to be only "metaphorical"—the stories, the book they gradually evolved into, the afterword itself. But in truth none of it was metaphorical, any more than you and I are metaphorical.

Joyce Carol Oates
March, 1975