That was the dream of the Magnetic North Pole.
Then there is the dream of the woman hanging out there, the “Hanging Girl”, also unforgettable despite the passage of many years.
The Hanging Girl is suspended on a sloping roof between heaven and earth, in an uncomfortable position, with her legs hanging out over the eaves. She does nothing to hold on, and is completely indifferent to the possibility that she could easily slip and slide down into the depths. Her head rests on her right shoulder, which is drawn up, and her hip rests on her limp right hand. Her left arm and hand are hesitatingly turned up, with half-open fingers hanging down. The semi-spheres of her breasts are pouring out over a thin piece of cloth that serves as a wet cover over her midriff. Otherwise, she is entirely naked.
The Hanging Girl’s face hangs as well; her eyelids are half closed; her lower lip hangs down from her half-open mouth; she has a bow hanging down from her hair, limp and wet.
(Such is the picture of the Hanging Girl as it was seen on an old page that had been torn out of a book and which you found in one of the two drawers in the desk, and, as you have subsequently been able to ascertain, it is a reproduction of Michelangelo’s famous “Morning” on the tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici.)
Your first dream about this woman was terrifying and you will never forget it: you are flying, as so often happens in your dreams; you are floating among some high roof ridges, and there, on a roof slope with beautifully carved barge boards is the Hanging Girl with her lethargic, self-abandoning face and limp arms and huge inert thighs. She moves reluctantly, as if warding you off and telling you to leave her alone, but as though guided by invisible but determined arms, you are led into her embrace, and then something terrible happens: all the hanging parts of her start to shake; she starts slipping and slides slowly out over the eaves, down into the bottomless depths, and you yourself slip with her into the boundless abyss and are lost in a kind of evil and abhorrent state of rapture…
After this dreadful enervating dream you are long oppressed by secret shame, and at the same time you are possessed by the vision of the huge hanging girl; her picture must be taken out time after time and examined by voracious eyes, be re-experienced bit by bit: the disconsolate, weak face with the apathetic eyes and the open, sagging mouth, the unresisting lazy arms, the body’s landscape with the two arched curves of the breasts, the navel’s lonely grave in the desert, the desolate nothingness of the lap that hides something incomprehensible but desperately attractive, riches at once blissful and revolting…