By Diamela Eltit

Translated by Ronald Christ

The nails of her toes are to my nails unidentical twins with pinkish stains streaked by white lines.

Her toenails are to my nails twins in the gnawing of their tips.

They too are perfect thick scales as they mark the dimension of the toes that appear again at their edges. To the touch they seem granitic or eroded or diseased if one notes the spots that cross every nail, but each one of these curvatures restores the balance. Her toenails grow wider in accordance with the broadening shape of the toes, but each one of them preserving the preceding margin of flesh. That's why her smallest nails appear like infinitesimal hardnesses that do not protect the toes' flesh in all its magnitude.

Her toenails are to my nails twins in their identical functions, preserving for the touch certain mounds that imply their characterizing forms. Her toenails are to mine twins in keeping at bay fear of the lawn, in obstructing transparency.

Her toenails are to my nails twins in the disorderliness of their cut, in their run-down care. More than finery, her toenails are the element that mediates with the grass, that prevents the dissolution of the flesh of her toes which this way remain fragmentarily protected.

Her toenails are to my nails twins in their absurdity, in being an eyesore, demonstrating that way domestication of the gaze that does not stop to classify their functions.

Her toenails foretell the abandonment of her whole image which has been engraved in the multiple uneven cuts that bound their edges.

Her toenails are just like my nails, crusts.

The toes of her feet are to my toes twins in each joint that provides the mobility necessary for their being shown with the extreme slimness that defines them. This delicacy no doubt begins in their privileged skeletal formation, since despite the natural agglutination of her toes they do not look like discor­dant parts, keeping instead the definition of their color, which, whitish rose, they retain as a unit.

Her toes are to my toes twins in their texture, not a single blemish on the skin, their lack of erosion distinguishes them as unique and even the natural down ringing them is almost imperceptible except to the touch.

Resting on the ground they spread apart a little and that allows clearer confirmation of the beauty of each one of them in its outline. Her toes are to my toes twins in their sinking into the grass, in that decoration by color where pleasure manifests itself undisguised. That's why the lawn does not hinder the grazing by each one of her toes which tirelessly seek rubbing with the grass.

The soles of her feet are to my soles rough and arched, marked lengthwise by multiple striations that stand out despite the hardened skin that frames them, but in spite of everything they maintain the curve that is measured in their resting on any floor. The soles of her feet are to my soles twins in their concealment and in the resistance, which lessened by the lawn, only there permits deferred rubbing against the earth.

Her eyes are to my eyes sufferers from the gaze, that's why they are the slight nexus that staves off abandonment. My eyes are to her eyes the constant that does not permit mistaking grass for branches.

Elucidating the abandonment, her eyes are to mine the sustenance of the pale people who cross the square and who when no longer in need of her twin eyes will lead their very own to the same irreversible failure.

Her eyes are to my eyes twins in their pigmentation, in the perpetual transparent moistness that protects them. Her eyes generate in my eyes the same twin gaze contaminated by so much of the city of Santiago reduced to grass.

Her eyes are to mine guardians.

Her hands are to my hands twins in their smallness. With fingers so extremely pointed her nails appear limpid, filtering the rosiness of the flesh which that way accents its curvature.

Each one of her fingers is covered by multiple granulations, intractable lines that become inevitable over each joint which corresponds to the very thickness of the fingers and which mark, finally, the crease separating them from the next one.

Gazed at from the palm, her hands are to my hands sinuous.

Absolutely rose colored her palms are to mine the stage for palmistry and bear no destiny out of keeping with what goes on in the square. Her palms are to my palms the true founda­tion of pleasure.

Her hands are to mine twins in the absence of gold rings.

Naked, the fingers half open like the sun's rays when electric light does not illuminate the premature darkness in the public square.

Her arms are to mine twins in their symmetry. Perfectly slender they show in the skin's transparency the tracery of veins that encircles them. Covered with down, they assume in the exposure to light a different periphery that is confirmed in the delicacy of her movements cutting the void. Nevertheless, her arms are to mine twins in their failure, their absolute uselessness, in the want of arms that — perhaps — pro­grammed for a fruitful destiny, are denied and they touch the leavings intertwining them with the trees.

Not dependent on benches in the square, her arms are to my arms unaware on the grass, touching as the one and only skin her very own which even in itself avoids the rubbing.

Her arms are exactly like mine sensitive at the wrists so that no sort of life escapes through some hypothetical orifice. The wrists of her arms are for this reason obsessively watched over.

Her waist is to my waist the twin in its wearing away, different in its measurement. In any case irreducible, her waist becomes provocative in demarcating erogenous zones in the balancing that makes room for the torso and the shifting of the thighs. But nobody could find there any form of beauty because her waist is connoted by its amorphousness, nothing about it comforts the gaze or arrests it at that point and in not leading to the flight of imagination, her waist remains like mine unexplored.

Her waist is to mine the twin in its nonexistence.

Her waist is a final point of abandon.

Her waist is the penitentiary/ it is the ecstasy of the end.

Her waist is the twin to mine in its obstinate insistence on this life, it is margination.

Her waist — oh, her waist! — is the twin to mine in its transparency to the soul.

Her soul is material.

Her soul is being established on a bench in the square and choosing as the only true landscape the falsification of this same square.

Her soul is shutting the eyes when thoughts come and reopen­ing them on the grass.

Her soul is this world and nothing else in the lighted square. Her soul is being E. Luminata and offering herself as another.

Her soul is not being called diamela eltit/ white sheets/ cadaver.

Her soul is to mine the twin.

Dress Rehearsal

[insert photo 1, photo by Lotty Rosenfeld, courtesy of Diamela Eltit]

D.R. 1

She moo/s/hears and her hand feeds mind-fully the green dis­entangles and maya she erects herself sha/m-an and vac/a-nal her shape.

D.R. 2

She anal-izes the plot = thickens the skin: the hand catches= fire and the phobia d is/members.

D.R. 3

She moo/s/urges round corp-oral Brahma her sig/n-ature ma lady man ual betrays her and she bronca Brahamas.

Horizontal direction betrays the first line or cut on the left arm.

It is solely a mark, sign or writing that is going to separate the hand that frees itself by means of the preceding line. This is the cut by the hand.

Whereas — upward — the epidermis becomes bog/

barbered barbaric baroque

The second cut on the left arm is manifestly weaker. The blade has been sunk into the skin superficially. This second cut is ruled by the first on the left arm.

The distance that separates the two cuts is the surface of the skin that appears and emerges rigorously following the very shape of the wrist.

The third cut is flawed by interrupting in an oblique line the horizontal direction of the preceding lines.

It displays a wider swath of skin to the eye and the cut itself widens leaving obscured the birth or end of its trace.

The third line is discontinuous from the ones that precede it,

despite preserving the straight direction.

The third line — gazed upon jointly with the others — betrays

an erratum or rather the attempt to change course.

The first cut, if isolated, is the dress rehearsal.

Is it really a cut?

Yes, because it breaks with a given surface. On this same surface the cut sections off a fragment that marks a different limit. The cut should be seen as a limit. The cut is the limit.

Then, what is the border? The cut itself? No, it's scarcely even the signal. The first cut establishes itself as dress rehearsal in so far as the others are successively integrated. In that sense its isolation is resorted to only so as to show the first mark that is established. The first cut is a seizure — it is a theft — on the plane of the skin's surface which is divided by breaking its continuity. A line is given so that it may be acted upon.

(Concerning the photographic cut.)

Is the cut represented in itself as in the photograph itself? Rather it is fixed as such. The performance takes place to the degree that the cut is acted upon.

For example, the track of the cut is a furrow that is operated on by divulging it in that way as a signal. Yet, being like a furrow, it becomes a trench or breastwork behind which is protected or hidden a performance. As furrow, it is sunk beneath a surface that has been pen­etrated. If it is restored photographically it becomes flattened by the precision of a new surface, which will be broken only by the eye that cuts its gaze there.

And what about the eye then?

The eye that reads it, erratic, constrained only by its own contour, imprisons itself in a linear reading.

The eye that surveys the photograph stops at the cut (her cut)

and recasts the gaze when confronted by an annoying, unforeseen interruption.

The cut's like that too?

Trompe l’ oeil.

Let's suppose:

That the surface was chosen by chance and on it the first cut was also made anywhere at all.

This way, the third cut could have been the first cut made. If the obliqueness of its track is observed, it is perfectly possible that that's how it was. On seeing that oblique result, it then could have been corrected by instilling horizontality in all the other lines. If that's how it was, then the first cut (which is the third) did not end up freeing the hand, rather it marked a limit, trace, border, trench, breastwork, between one part and another of the arm.

Solitary, isolated this third cut — the first actually — is scarcely graffiti on the skin of the arm that it enters upon obliquely like a signature on a painting. Because it's curious that this third cut should be the only one that changes its direction in relation to the strict horizontal course maintained by the others.

Is that perhaps why this third cut was the first and was made shakily?

That's not likely. The third cut — by the oblique straightness of its track — betrays no trembling course.

If it was the first cut, this deviation is explained only by the whole scene's change to the horizontal.

What exactly does this third cut mean?

If first, this third cut is really the dress rehearsal.

Between the first cut and the cut first (the third) there is —

aside from the skin — a 2^nd cut.

There is a second cut.

There's a second between cut and cut?

The interruption of a second between cut and cut?

Was there additionally a second after the cut? Was there?

The fourth line, on the other hand, is shorter than the previous ones, but returns to the horizontal direction sketched by the first and second cut on the left arm.

The track of the fourth line is briefly interrupted by a fragment of skin, which allows the supposition that:

a) The line was made in more than one stage.

b) The blade that made the cut was raised slightly.

The fifth cut on her left arm betrays its inlay over a new surface. The surface on which it appears is modified by a burn on the skin. So this fifth cut is inscribed over (or under) the burned epidermis, which has in all certainty become bog/ barbered, barbaric, baroque in its weave. The fifth cut as soon as it enters in relation with another form of attack, establishes the duality of the mark: a) Cut that horizontally fragments the verticality of the arm. b) Verticality that also is suffered by the trace of the burned skin. c) Cut and burned skin doubly darkened by the darkness of the photograph. The fifth cut, plus the burn is the rehearsal of the corporeal scene.

The fourth cut on the left arm repeats the first and second marks, eliminating that way the oblique track which the third cut could have imposed.

From the previous scenes it follows that:

Defining the various cuts in isolation turns out to be subter­fuge in so far as they are articulated to the degree that each one is illuminating the course of the others.

(The efficacy of this broken surface is repeated gestural research.)

It's plausible to determine an objective staging on the basis of the marks on the skin:

Razed by the burn the down on her left arm disappears, the raised scab, bristled over the burned down is another set for the dress rehearsal.

The truth about the first five cuts plus the burns lies in thinking of them, say, as pose and pretexts.

About the previous fragments plus the sixth cut.

1. Archaic sounds are mixed in with their art: recognizable quotations. Also registers from an old track also on their archetypal plane: the blade on which is written the brand.

2. The utility of their fragmentary element: the metallic and fine set of instruments recedes from the photographic trace. Everyday material. From trivial objects a pose is fabricated.

It has gone through. Her sixth cut is the apathy of the others, the vertigo and the habit.

The surfeit of the sixth element is a loose thread of burns,

obsessive and fleeting it is scarcely marked along their edges.

The in-cine-ration absorbs it and determines everything. It is appropriated from the linear space pushing, expelling the sixth cut.

Brutal seizure at the slash, but the skin blisters obscuring the

sixth line.

The sixth line by its weakness is the rehearsal's surplus.

It's cold and maybe that alone is why she holds her pose in the square.

She sits down on the ground barefoot, her head bent slightly

downward, she remains that way for a lapse of time and then raises her head and looks.

She keeps her sight fixed with quick blinks. The fingers of her right hand hold up the small sharp blade. Without looking she brings it toward her hide.

The Dress Rehearsal is going to begin.

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