On this page the letter "G", the number 7.

 

Her face was so creased it might have been a piece of freshly kneaded pastry. But this was not because it was old; it was because it was constantly changing. She was wearing something provincial but effective; my eyes glided across her, registering a general sensation of grey and wool. I realised she was much shorter than me, although not particularly short for a woman. Her lips seemed to seal themselves too completely when she closed her mouth - as though she wore dentures, but was not wearing them now - so that the movement of her jaw caused her lips to puff out like figs. Similarly, her eyelids, uncertain which side of her skin they preferred, creased into little black twigs and vanished completely when she blinked. Now she was talking in a low, calm voice, which nevertheless was filled with enthusiasm; she was talking among the furls and creases of her face. For an instant I had the feeling someone had put a boot up there and wiped the whole thing around like an old cloth over her skull.

It was the intensity of her passion that made the face both attractive and inhuman. The lips were producing words, and with those words, meanings; and this constant verbal meaning somehow protected and redeemed the face, as if - so long as she spoke - it was powerless to become an object on its own terms, and thus something susceptible to judgment. From somewhere I remembered the phrase, "To provoke wild laughter in the throat of death," - and this was exactly what she seemed to be doing - putting up words in the place of something else, so that she could remain a part of humanity through the words she spoke.

Already I felt drawn to her, but I did not want her to stop speaking. So long as those lips moved, making sounds, I - in turn - could move around her, circling her, bound to her by the complicity of language, for which meanings are only possible when they are shared.

In fact, it was as if speech were the only force that made it possible for us to endure the presence of one another, deferring the terror of the thing she was - a spectre, a nothing, a less-than fact vivisected from death and memory and the past – all things whose meaning I would never be capable of facing.

And so the words - placatory, measured, inspired - words that would be effective so long as my ears remained screwed to the sides of my head. She herself did not want to stop talking, and even if I had never been there, I think she would have gone on talking, all the same. For she was not talking to communicate any particular thing, but in order to keep the silence from her - the meaning which is not built up by words, but which collapses inward across them, and against whose lack of a name even she herself would be powerless to struggle.

 

On this page the letter "D", the number 4.

 

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All that separates the two markers of the charm, and all that runs between.