Mercy

by Andrea Dworkin

  didn’t need to pay it back and everyone knew that which is my

  weakness, how everyone got to know things but I don’t know

  them. I can’t think o f any stories about pacifists that aren’t

  true. There’s nothing imaginary about walls, or eating,

  nothing fictive as it were, but more especially there’s nothing

  imaginary about them when they’re missing. M y walls are

  thin; yeah I wish they were mine. N othing’s yours. God hurts

  you if you think they’re yours. In one second o f a bad thought

  you can bring evil down on you. The walls are thin. I dream

  there’s holes in them and I get scared as if it’s not really inside.

  There’s not much food and I know it ain’t mine in any

  meaningful sense. Y o u ’re supposed to make things up, not

  just write down true things, or sincere things, or some things

  that happened. M y mother who you can’t make up either

  because there’s nothing so real as one named me Andrea as if I

  was someone: distinct, in particular. She made a fiction. I’m

  her book, a made-up story written down on a birth certificate.

  Y ou could also say she’s a liar on such a deep level she should

  be shot by all that’s fair; deep justice. if I was famous and my

  name was published all over the world, in Italy and in Israel

  and in Africa and in India, on continents and subcontinents, in

  deserts, in ancient cities, it would still be cunt to every fucking

  asshole drunk on every street in the world; and to them that’s

  not drunk too, the sober ones who say it to you like they’re

  calling a dog: fetch, cunt. if I won the Nobel Prize and walked

  to the corner for milk it would still be cunt. And when you got

  someone inside you who is loving you it’s still cunt and the

  ones w ho’d die i f they wasn’t in you, you, you in particular, at

  least that night, at least then, that time, that place, to them it’s

  still cunt and they whisper it up close and chill the blood that’s

  burning in you; and if you love them it’s still cunt and you can

  love them so strong you’d die for them and it’s still cunt; and

  your heartbeat and his heartbeat can be the same heartbeat and

  it’s still cunt. It’s behind your back and it’s to your face; the

  ones you know, the ones you don’t. It’s like as i f nigger was a

  term o f intimate endearment, not just used in lynching and

  insult but whispered in lovemaking, the truth under the truth,

  the name under the name, love’s name for you and it’s the

  same as what hate calls you; he’s in you whispering nigger. It’s

  thugs, it’s citizens, it’s cops, it’s strangers, it’s the ones you

  want and the ones you deplore, you ain’t allowed indifference,

  you have to decide on a relationship then and there on the spot

  because each one that passes pisses on you to let you know he’s

  there. There’s some few you made love with and yo u ’re still

  breathing tight with them, you can still feel their muscles

  swelling through their skin and bearing down on you and you

  can still feel their weight on you, an urgent concentration o f

  blood and bone, hot muscle, spread over you, the burden o f it

  sinking into you, a stone cliff into a wet shore, and yo u ’re still

  tangled up in them, good judgm ent aside, and it’s physical, it’s

  a physical m em ory, in the body, not just in the brain, barely in

  the brain at all, you got their sweat on you as part o f your

  sweat and their smell’s part o f your smell and you have an ache

  for them that’s deep and gnawing and hurtful in more than

  your heart and you still feel as if it’s real and current, now: how

  his body moves against you in convulsions that are awesome

  like mountains m oving, slow, burdensome, big, and how you

  m ove against him as i f you could m ove through him, he’s the

  ocean, yo u ’re the tide, and it’s still cunt, he says cunt. H e’s

  indelibly in you and you don’t want redemption so much as

  you want him and still it’s cunt. It’s w hat’s true; Andrea’s the

  lie. It’s a lie we got to tell, Jane and Judith and Ellen and

  whom ever. It’s our most desperate lie. M y mother named me

  Andrea. It means manhood or courage. It means not-cunt. She

  specifically said: not-cunt. This one ain’t cunt, she declared,

  after blood spilled and there was the pain o f labor so intense

  that God couldn’t live through it and w ouldn’t which is w hy

  all the pain’s with us and still she brought herself to a point o f

  concentration and she said: not-cunt. This one’s someone, she

  probably had in mind; a wish; a hope; let her, let her,

  something. Something. Let her something. D on ’t, not with

  this one. Just let this one through. Just don’t do it to this one.

  She wrote: not-cunt, a fiction, and it failed, and the failure

  defeated her and turned her cold to me, because before I was

  even ten some man had wrote “ this one’s cunt, ” he took his

  fingers and he wrote it down on me and inside me, his fingers

  carved it in me with a pain that stayed half buried and there

  wasn’t words I had for what he did, he wrote I was cunt, this

  sweet little one who was what’s called a child but a female one

  which changes it all. M y mama showed that fiction was

  delusion, hallucination, it was a long, deranged lie designed to

  last past your own lifetime. The man, on the other hand, was a

  pragmatist, a maker o f reality, a shaper o f history, an

  orchestrator o f events. He used life, not paper, bodies, not ink.

  The Nazis, o f course, synthesized the two: bodies and ink.

  Y ou can’t even say it would solve the problem to have

  numbers on us, inked on. Numbers is as singular as names

  unless we are all zero, 0, we could all be 0; Pauline Reage

  already suggested it, o f course, but she’s a demagogue and a

  utopian, a kind o f Stalinist o f female equality, she wants us all

  equal on the bottom o f anything that’s mean enough to be on

  top; it has a certain documentary quality. Unlike Reage, my

  mother just made it up, and her fiction was a lie, almost

  without precedent, not recognized as original or great, a

  voyage o f imagination; it was just a fucking lie. I don’t want to

  tell lies, not for moral reasons but it’s m y idea o f pride, you

  name it, I can take it. I was born in a city where the walls were

  falling down; I didn’t see many solid walls. The streets were

  right next to you it seemed because you could always hear the

  buzz, the hum, the call, as if drums were beckoning you to the

  tribal dance; you could see the freedom. Inside was small and

  constrained with rules designed to make you some kind o f

  trained cockroach and outside was forever, a path straight to

  the heart o f the world; there were no limits, it spread out in

  front o f you to anywhere, with anyone. Limits were another

  lie, a social fiction all the zombies got together to tell. The

  destination was always the street because the destination was

  always freedom; out from under; no rule on top o f you. Y ou

  could almost look thr
ough the brick, which was crumbling,

  and you had this sense that every building had holes in it, a

  transparency, and that no walls were ever finished or ever

  lasted; and the cement outside was gray, cracked, streaked

  with blood from where they threw you down to have fun with

  you on hot nights and cold nights, the boys with their cars and

  knives; I knew some o f those boys; I loved Nino who said

  “ make love” as if it was something real special and real nice

  and so fine, so precious and kind and urgent, his eyes burned

  and his voice was low and soft and silk, it wrapped itself

  around you, he didn’t reach out, he didn’t m ove towards you,

  you had to let him know, you had to; I could still fucking die

  for what he promised with his brilliant seduction, a poor,

  uneducated boy, but when he did it I got used to being hurt

  from behind, he used his knife, he made fine lines o f blood,

  delicate, and you didn’t dare m ove except for your ass as he

  wanted and you didn’t know if yo u ’d die and you got to love

  danger i f you loved the boy and danger never forsakes you; the

  boy leaves but danger is faithful. Y ou knew the cement under

  you and the brick around you and the sound o f the boys

  speeding by in their cars and the sudden silence, which meant

  they were stalking you. I was born in Camden down the street

  from where Walt Whitman lived, M ickle Street, he was the

  great gray poet, the prophetic hero o f oceanic verse; also not-

  cunt. Great poet; not-cunt. It’s like a mathematical equation

  but no one learns it in school by heart; it ain’t written down

  plain on the blackboard. It’s algebra for girls but no one’s

  going to teach you. Y ou get brought down or throwed down

  and you learn for yourself. There’s no mother on earth can

  bear to explain it. I can’t write down what happened and I can’t

  tell lies. T here’s no words for what happened and there’s

  barely words for the lies. if I was a man I would say something

  about fishing and it would be a story, a perfectly fine one too;

  the bait, the hook, the lake, the wind, the shore, and then

  everything else is the manly stuff. If I was a man at least I’d

  know what to say, or I’d say it so grand it wouldn’t matter if it

  was true or not; anyone’d recognize it and say it was art. I

  could think o f something important, probably; recognizably

  so. If I was a man and something happened I could write it

  down and probably it would pass as a story even if it was true.

  O f course, that’s just speculation. I’d swagger, too, if I was a

  man; I’m not proud to say it but I’m sure it’s true. I would take

  big steps, loud ones, down the street; I could be the Zen master

  o f fuck you. I would spread m yself out and take up all the

  space and spread my legs wide open in the subway to take up

  three seats with just m y knees like they do. I would be very

  bold and very cool. I’d be smarter than I am now, I’m sure,

  because what I knew might matter and I’d remember more,

  I’m sure. I don’t think I’d go near women though because I

  wouldn’t want to hurt them. I know how everything feels. I

  think if I was a man m y heart would not hurt so much and I

  wouldn’t have this terror I am driven by but cannot name. I

  think I could write a poem about it, perhaps. I think it could

  probably make a very long poem and I could keep rewriting it

  to get every nuance right and chart it as it changed over time;

  song o f himself, perhaps, a sequel. Ginsberg says he chased

  Whitman through supermarkets; I fucking was him; I

  embraced all the generations without distinctions and it failed

  because o f this awfulness that there is no name for, this great

  meanness at the heart o f what they mean when they stick it in; I

  just don’t know a remedy, because it is a sick and hostile thing.

  Even if there were no wars I think I could say some

  perceptions I had about life, I wouldn’t need the C ivil War or

  the Vietnam War to hang m y literary hat on as it were, and I

  could be loud, which I would try, I’m sure, I could call

  attention to m yself as i f I mattered or what happened did or as

  i f I knew something, even about suffering or even about life;

  and, frankly, then it might count. I could stop thinking every

  minute about where each sound is coming from and where the

  shadows are each minute. I can’t even close m y eyes now

  frankly but I think it’s because I’m this whatever it is, you can

  have sophisticated words for it but the fact is you can be

  sleeping inside with everything locked and they get in and do

  it to you no matter how bad it hurts. In magazines they say

  w om en’s got allure, or so they call it, but it’s more like being

  some dumb w riggling thing that God holds out before them

  on a stick with a string, a fisher o f men. The allure’s there even

  i f you got open sores on you; I know. The formal writing

  problem, frankly, is that the bait can’t write the story. The bait

  ain’t even barely alive. There’s a weird German tradition that

  the fish turned the tables and rewrote the story to punish the

  fisherman but you know it’s a lie and it’s some writer o f fiction

  being what became known as a modernist but before that was

  called outright a smartass; and the fish still ain’t bait unless it’s

  eviscerated and bleeding. I just can’t risk it now but if I was a

  man I could close m y eyes, I’m sure; at night, I’d close them,

  I’m sure. I don’t think m y hands would shake. I don’t think so;

  or not so much; or not all the time; or not without reason;

  there’s no reason now anyone can see. M y breasts w ouldn’t

  bleed as i f God put a sign on me; blessing or curse, it draws

  flies. Tears o f blood fall from them; they weep blood for me,

  because I’m whatever it is: the girl, as they say politely; the

  girl. Y o u ’re supposed to make things up for books but I am

  afraid to make things up because in life everything evaporates,

  it’s gone in mist, just disappears, there’s no sign left, except on

  you, and you are a fucking invisible ghost, they look right

  through you, you can have bruises so bad the skin’s pulled o ff

  you and they don’t see nothing; you bet women had the

  vapors, still fucking do, it means it all goes aw ay in the air,

  whatever happened, whatever he did and how ever he did it,

  and yo u ’re left feeling sick and weak and no one’s going to say

  w hy; it’s ju st wom en, they faint all the time, they’re sick all the

  time, fragile things, delicate things, delicate like the best

  punching bags you ever seen. They say it’s lies even if they just

  did it, or maybe especially then. I don’t know really. There’s

  nothing to it, no one ever heard o f it before or ever saw it or

  not here or not now; in all history it never happened, or if it

  happened it was the Nazis, the exact, particular Nazis in

  Germany in the thirties and forties, the literal Nazis in

  uniform; when they were out o f uniform they were just guys,


  you know, they loved their families, they paid o ff their

  whores, just regular guys. N o one else ever did anything,

  certainly no one now in this fine world we have here; certainly

  not the things I think happened, although I don’t know what

  to call them in any serious way. Y ou just crawl into a cave o f

  silence and die; w hy are there no great women artists? Some

  people got nerve. Blood on cement, which is all we got in my

  experience, ain’t esthetic, although I think boys some day will

  do very well with it; they’ll put it in museums and get a fine

  price. W on’t be their blood. It would be some cunt’s they

  whispered to the night before; a girl; and then it’d be art, you

  see; or you could put it on walls, make murals, be political, a

  democratic art outside the museums for the people, Diego

  Rivera without any conscience whatsoever instead o f the very

  tenuous one he had with respect to women, and then it’d be

  extremely major for all the radicals who would discover the

  expressive value o f someone else’s blood and I want to tell you

  they’d stop making paint but such things do not happen and

  such things cannot occur, any more than the rape so-called can

  happen or occur or the being beaten so bad can happen or

  occur and there are no words for what cannot happen or occur

  and i f you think something happened or occurred and there are

  no words for it you are at a dead end. There’s nothing where

  they force you; there’s nothing where you hurt so much;

  there’s nothing where it matters, there’s nothing like it

  anywhere. So it doesn’t feel right to make things up, as you

  must do to write fiction, to lie, to elaborate, to elongate, to

  exaggerate, to distort, to get tangled up in moderations or

  modifications or deviations or compromises o f m ixing this

  with that or combining this one with that one because the

  problem is finding words for the truth, especially if no one will

  believe it, and they will not. I can’t make things up because I

  w ouldn’t know after a while w hat’s blood, w hat’s ink. I barely

  know any words for what happened to me yesterday, which