Play of the Phoenix (pgs. 28-30)

Oliveira liked to make love to La Maga because there was nothing more important to her and at the same time, in a way hard to understand, she was in a sense dependent on his pleasure, she would reach him for a moment and would therefore cling desperately and prolong it. It was if she had awakened and recognized her real name, and then she would fall back into that always somewhat twilight zone which enchanted Oliveira, fearful of perfection, but La Maga really did suffer when she returned to her memories and to everything that in some obscure way she had to think about but could not. Then he would have to kiss her deeply, incite her to new place, and the other woman, the reconciled one, would grow beneath him and pull him down, and she would surrender then like a frantic animal, her eyes lost, her hands twisted inward, mythical and terrible, like a statue rolling down a mountainside, clutching time with her nails, with a gurgling sound and a moaning growl that lasted interminably. One night, she sank her teeth into him, something in her that was not her awakened self, a dark form demanding annihilation, the slow wound which on it's back breaks the stars at night and gives space back to questions and terrors. Only that time, off center like a mythical matador for whom killing is returning the bull to the sea and the sea to the heavens.

He bothered La Maga in a long night which they did not speak much about later. He turned her into Pasiphae, he bent her over and used her as if she were a young boy, he knew her and demanded the slavishness of the most abject whore, he magnified her into a constellation, he held her in his arms smelling of blood, he made her drink the semen which ran into her mouth like a challenge of the Logos, he sucked out the shadow from her womb and her rump and raised himself to her face to anoint her with herself in that ultimate work of knowledge which only a man can give to a woman, he wore her out with skin and her and drool and moans, he drained her completely of her magnificent strength, he threw her against a pillow and sheet and felt her crying with happiness against his face which another cigarette was returning to the night from the room.
Later on Oliveira began to worry that she would think herself jaded, that the play would move on to sacrifice. Above all he feared that most subtle form of gratitude which turns into doglike love. He did not want freedom, the only suit that fit La Maga, to be lost in any strong feminimity. He didn't have to worry, because as soon as La Maga was back on the level of black coffee and a trip to the toilet, it was obvious that she had fallen back into the worst of confusions. Terribly mistreated that night, opened up to an absorbent space that beats and expands, his first words when she was back on this side came like whiplashes, as they had to, and when she came back to the side of the bed she was the image of a progressive consternation which tried to soften itself with smiles and a vague hope, which left Oliveira quite satisfied.
Since he did not love her and desire would stop, he would have to avoid like the devil any kind of sacred ritualizing of their play. For days, for weeks, for some months, every h otel room, and every square, every position of love, and every dawn in a marketplace cafe: a savage circus, subtle operation, and rational balance. That's how it came to be known that La Maga was really waiting for Oliveira to kill her, and that hers would be a phoenix death, entry into the council of philosophers, that is to say, the discussions of the Serpent Club. La Maga wanted to learn, she wanted to be educated. Oliveira was the exalted, the chosen one, the one to fill the role of purifying priest, and since they never understood each other because when they were discussing something they would be off on different tracks and different interests (and she knew this and understood it well), therefore the only possibility of coming together would be if Oliveira were to kill her by making love, where she could get together with him in the heaven of some hotel room where they would come together equal and naked and there the resurrection of the phoenix could take place after he had strangled her delightfully, dripping a string of saliva into her open mouth, looking at her ecstatically as if he had just began to recognize her. To make her really his, to take her to his side.