Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver) (1979) - full transcript

It's the middle of the day

the sky is dark.

Before me is the sea.

Today the sea is smooth, hefty,

with iron density

and without any force, it seems.

Between the sky and the sea

there is a very dark width.

It covers the entire horizon,

with the smoothness of a giant erasure,

the significance of an impassable difference.

And it could be scary.

In the window of my room

upright, veiled by the dark light,

my image appears.

I look outside.

The sailboats are still there, motionless,

over the iron sea,

still, in the movement of the waves

where they were taken by surprise by the fading of the wind this morning.

I'm looking at myself.

I can't see well in the cold glass of the window.

The light is so dark, it looks like night.

I love you beyond my strength.

I don't know you.

Here between the horizon and the beach,

a change begins to occur

within the depths of the sea.

It is slow.

It reaches with delay.

Against my body, this cold of glass,

this dead window.

I no longer see anything of myself.

I don't see anything anymore.

Thus, I start to see again.

Before me a color is born,

that is very tense, green.

It occupies a part of the sea.

It retains a lot from her inside that color, a sea,

but very small, you see,

a sea in the wholeness of the sea.

So the light came from there,

from the bottom of the sea,

of a multitude of colors in its depth.

And the backlight

came from its gushing everywhere

where water came out.

The sea becomes transparent,

of the gleam, of the shining of a nocturnal organ.

Looks like, not of emerald, you see,

not of phosphorus, but of flesh.

I've closed the doors and windows of my room.

I came back very quickly to write to you.

I stand there, with you, into the discovery of the beach.

I stepped away from the window, I look at myself.

The eyes are blue, they say. The hair, black.

You see? Blue eyes under black hair.

How I like you to see me!

I am beautiful, such

in my strange being.

I smile at you and tell you my name.

My name is Aurélia Steiner.

I am your child.

You are not informed of my existence.

You can't show signs to me.

Death keeps you from seeing me,

I know it.

And I see your death as a passing illusion of your life.

That, for example, of another love.

I don't care.

I am acquainted of you through me.

This morning, for example,

by this sudden terror,

without apparent purpose,

I was informed of our deep resemblance

before the chance of desire.

Sometimes other than you,

the others come.

They are occasionally as old

as you would have been.

In a world where you are not alive

they can take the place of our meeting.

By the lenght and adolescent grace of the body that I see you.

By the awkwardness of your approach, the sorrowful impatience

and, sometimes, tears.

And sometimes these calls for help too.

On the verge of pleasure it wouldn't be so far between them and you,

if, you, you as well,

if you could make a stop and wander about,

in the streets of the port.

I give it, my body, fresh, and they take it.

They speak,

they say they love it.

They scream, they cry, they try to hurt.

I let, I let it be

to do, to penetrate , to scream of their love, to cry.

You could have been one of them

except you would have seen me.

You would have noticed this one,

this abandoned body, delivered,

this enjoyment carried away from you

and which this one does not want to return to.

The sea, it seems, her sound, at the bottom of the city.

Eyes closed, I would have asked you:

How do you look?

Blond?

A northerly man with blue eyes?

You would've hardly taken long in answering me:

Blue-eyed, yes, but with black hair.

Black? Yes.

I would have asked: are you looking for someone?

Someone you have been told about?

You say: that's right.

You would have repeated: that's right, yes,

someone no way I'd have recognized

and someone I love beyond my strength.

I ask:

Aurélia Steiner?

He does not answer,

he moves away from me, he cries:

How do you know?

I say I heard about her

from stopover travelers.

He asks, he cries.

I say, yes, all

were black-haired men.

From the closed room of the beach, alone,

I design your voice.

You talk and I don't hear a word

but only your voice,

the voice sleeping since a thousand-years.

From now on your voice is written

weakened by time

freed from history.

You would have run away

and I would have heard this name called in the city:

Aurélia Steiner.

I would have kept track of the fall of the sound of those two words

until their disappearance.

As I heard the ascdening murmur of the sea

there would be no wind.

I still stand in this dark room facing the sea.

I have been alone in this house for years.

Everyone's gone to join the quieter zones of the earth

because of the storms.

Here, terrible.

In the afternoon a slow dislocation occurred

between the green and black waters of the sea.

The huge puddle turned blue.

The movement has returned.

The sea quivered as if under the blows of a sudden wind.

Whereas there was no wind,

it was the evening that arrived.

And I opened the doors and windows to my room

and a soft light entered.

The horizon had become usual again,

Smooth and clear.

My mother, dead, put to sleep

under the lower flanks of the camp,

burnt dead

with the victims of gas chambers.

Aurélia Steiner, my mother.

My mother looks at the big white rectangle in front of her

of the assembly yard of the camp.

Her death agony is interminable.

Next to her side, the child is alive.

The whole sea has turned blue again

as always at this hour, you see?

It is a strong clarity

just before the blushing of the night.

I cry, without sadness,

the evening that always falls on absence.

Here the great orange and golden beaches of heaven

above the sea.

Under the color it glitters, already discolored.

Here is the gold of the sky becoming milky

and then gray.

I can't do anything, I can't do anything

against the eternity that I bear

at the place of your last glance,

the one over the white rectangle of the camp assembly yard.

It was a summer's day,

death was winning you over.

You still see, I believe,

but there isn't to be any more suffering,

insensitivity has already been reached.

You bathe in the blood of my essence.

I was next to you

within the dust of the soil.

Around you, hard and cracked with the sun, this German land,

this foreign land, this light,

this perfect summer,

this warm sky.

In front of you, the white rectangle

where they died.

The storm arrived during the night.

A little after midnight, the wind.

And after that, she, the sea,

moved by the wind

she followed.

She has risen to storm the city, she climbed,

invaded, she broke, she shattered,

she burst through the walls, the doors, the windows,

she carried away roofs

and the city remains thus, open, under the wind.

I was listening to the cries of the sea.

Just before dawn, in the ghastly white,

the big salt silos burst.

The salt poured into the sea.

Its salinity has become fatal.

She passed from life to death in seconds.

The day has risen. Then, weighed down, poisoned,

the sea has calmed down.

In the white rectangle of the assembly yard

Aurélia Steiner still perceives

the hanged, soup thief,

who wriggle at the end of his rope,

????, very lightweight.

They can't hang on their own weight.

It is the morning of the second day.

My mother, eighteen years old, is dying.

In front of her, at the end of his rope, he calls out to her,

he cries out for mad love.

She can't hear anymore.

This is the place in the world where Aurélia Steiner is.

She hears that the whole world is fighting the same fear.

She sees that the center of fear is shifting,

that it sinks around her, Aurélia Steiner.

She sees that the whole world feared her, Aurélia Steiner.

The next morning the city is still dripping,

the sea recedes from the land, from the streets,

parks, cathedrals.

The boats of the port lay down on their sides.

The beaches are covered with dead fish.

In the sky, in the frozen sky

the sun is harsh, she is rotund.

The whole town falls asleep in this broad daylight

in the acuteness of the orange sky.

I go out into the sleepy city under the scary sun.

The sea is there, in bursts she cries again

and then she goes back to sleep.

A child's sleep

haunted with nightmares.

The city is white with salt

that the sea left behind.

I walk.

Little by little, without me focusing on the future

you come back to me from exile,

from the night, from the other side of the world,

this tender darkness where you stand.

You go through the city.

I see you entering a hotel in the port.

Today you are a dark haired sailor,

tall.

Always this leanness of youth or hunger.

You turned around, you hesitated

and then you walked away.

I know that when the night comes

you will go to this side of the street

and that you will look for her,

she, the one you met this morning in the city

and who caught your eye.

The reason for this feathery clothing, perhaps,

and that blue gaze under the black hair.

I went to lie down on the depths of the sea

facing the frozen sky.

She is still feverish, hot.

Little girl, dear.

Little child.

I called her by different names.

Aurélia from that of Aurélia Steiner.

In her depths she was still struggling

between exhaustion and the desire to kill.

Sometimes great movements lifted her up.

Love.

All of the things that speak for us.

You. Child. The sea.

I told him about the state of the city

and then I told him about the story.

He was under my back

A depth of, 10 meters?

Or eight hundred meters.

Who knows? The difference did not exist.

The surface was pure illusion,

an open tear.

A silk of icy air.

I spoke to him for a long time.

I told him about the lovers in the white rectangle of death.

I sang.

I was talking to him and listening to the story.

I felt her under me

she, the sea, of the irrefutable strength of God.

When I got home, a newsagent

shouted the headlines of 'the wrath of the sea'.

In my room, I rinsed my body and my hair with fresh water

and then I waited for the young sailor with black hair.

It is while waiting for him that I am writing to you.

It is with the trembling desire I have for him, that I love you.

I bring them together through you

and with the bunch of them I make you.

You are he who will not be

but who thence is.

Out of everything, you appear

always unique

inexhaustible place of the world,

tireless love.

You are finally dead.

You had been untied of your rope, laid down

curled up on yourself

in an untidy, sleepy, childish pose.

The white rectangle of the courtyard is empty,

except your body.

The lovers are dead.

You stole soup for the little girl, Aurélia.

You were discovered, you were hanged.

Above you, for three days,

the German sky.

Before your eyes this sky full of water and fruitful rain.

You called for three days

at the end of your rope.

You screamed, repeated endlessly

that a child named Aurélia Steiner had just been born in the camp.

You asked that she be fed, that she is not be given to dogs,

you screamed, begged the world

that the little Aurélia Steiner is not forgotten.

Towards the evening of the third day

you were shot in the head

to put an end to this scandal.

She, she was dead in the morning.

At her side, the child.

The words Aurélia Steiner could not resonate in the camp,

they have been taken up elsewhere,

in other stages, in other areas of the world.

Towards evening here, there are always flashes of light on the horizon

even though the weather was overcast all day,

the same way if it rained.

The clouds for a moment move away

and let in sunlight.

In the evening again

I saw it again in that stroke of light on the sleeping sea.

I closed my eyes.

I just did it,

apparently I stopped writing to you.

So sometimes I see the color liquid and blue

empty eyes, already taken by death,

of the young hanged man, of the assembly yard.

I also see his youth.

He is eighteen too.

At that age he already reached his full size.

I don't know his name.

It's curious, you see?

I do not see the mother under the low flanks.

Nothing from her,

except the gesture of hiding the child.

The dark haired sailor is behind the window.

He looks at me.

He asks me where I am from.

I say I don't know.

He tells me he was on the beach.

He doesn't remember well

the woman he met in town this morning.

He says he met another person.

I ask him which one he desires.

He tells me the one he met in the morning.

I tell him it was me.

I say to him: I will give you a name.

You will pronounce it,

you won't understand why

and yet I ask you to do it,

to repeat it

without understanding why,

as if there was nothing to understand.

I tell him the name:

Aurélia Steiner.

I write it down on a blank page and give it to him.

He deciphers slowly,

then he looks at me to see if he has read correctly.

I do not say anything.

I lie down next to him.

He repeats the name, he sees that I am listening to him.

He is clumsy at first

not knowing in which language to say it.

And then he throws the paper away, he comes back to me,

he talks to me with the name.

One would say he had all the time in the world.

He begins to discover the body of Aurélia Steiner.

She still doesn't look, her eyes closed

on the white rectangle of death.

Sometimes he says the whole name,

sometimes he only says the first name,

sometimes the last one.

He can no longer say any other name.

He says it in between kisses,

lips against the skin.

He says it in a low voice.

He shouts them.

He calls them inside the body,

against the mouth,

against the wall.

Sometimes he stands still.

As if he lost the memory of the names.

And then whispering, he says it again.

In a painful effort,

as if the utterance itself was painful.

He says: Jüdin (Jewess)

Aurélia the Jewess.

Aurélia Steiner the Jewess.

He is standing still, entering Aurélia Steiner's body

and he stays there,

always in the extreme care to carry out the torture to its end.

Then he enters the body.

In a very slow movement

in contrary to his overflow,

he enters the body of Aurélia Steiner.

Slowness makes lovers scream.

Again he says the name,

he repeats them in low tone again.

He said the names again.

He repeated it again,

but without voice, in a brutality that was marked

by an unknown accent.

I woke up at dawn.

The dark haired sailor was lying on my bedroom floor.

He was looking at me.

I heard him say his eyes burned him

for watching the beauty of Aurélia Steiner,

that his boat was leaving at noon,

but that he would not be on board,

that the boat would leave without him,

that he wished to stay with Aurélia Steiner,

whatever becomes of him.

I said I didn't belong to anyone in particular,

that I was not free of myself.

My name is Aurélia Steiner.

I live in Vancouver where my parents are teachers.

I am eighteen years old. I write.