2.

She was four when she started doing it. Ernesta with the polka dotted heart. She roamed the garden, gingerly turning every leaf and blade of grass in search for the seasonal food, the delicate two winged ladybird.

Ladybird, ladybird fly away home,

Your house is on fire,

Your children shall burn!

But there was no fleeing from the gravity of Ernesta's strange appetite. It pulled you in-that is if you were a ladybird- and nothing was ever heard of you. At the age of 64 Ernesta will meet Carlito, a painter of zebra crossings in Sighmeria . His lines will join her dots in holy matrimony. But the marriage won't last.

The waters of the Thames flow over a terrible secret. Not far from the old cemetery on Wapping High Street, on the foreshore lies the rock of immobility. Under it, hidden from the uninitiated, carefully tucked away in the excrements of Londoners alive and long dead, is the Right Eye Of God. A glass eye, marble-like and cool to the touch. The Almighty dropped it on one of His Sunday strolls on the 23 of September 1674. In the same year, on the 8^th of November, John Milton found his Paradise lost. The eye of God -conveniently located in the proximity -saw that and was delighted.

Three centuries and eight years later Ernesta was born, on the 8^th of November. Legend goes it was Monday and the Left Eye of God frowned upon her. He had a shitty weekend, the vulgar say. Weighed down by this metaphysical frustration Ernesta turned her attention towards coccinellid snacks, street liners and obscure books about the Right Eye of God.

In this strange concordance of seemingly unrelated events lay, buried under piles of frustrations and psychological filth, the explanations of why we -You the reader, the Other in the bath, and I, Ernesta's accomplice- find our protagonist on her knees, in front of the mirror, face washed in salty tears and other viscous liquids I will only hint at. You see, Ernesta thought of herself as being unhappy, an unhappiness not quotidian, but reserved to the select few who were frowned upon by the one-eyed You know who. However, when she found the Right Eye, smiling, as if bathed in the early autumn sunshine of that momentous September, Ernesta lost all her reasons to be unhappy. The gestures of pain she executed in the mirror to her own amusement were all mechanical, hollow, untimely.

Meanwhile, the Other was having a bath, ignorant to all that was going on in the distant house in which the smell of fermenting garbage mingled with pretentious patchouli perfume. With the black washcloth he scrubbed away, behind the ears, under the arms, between the toes, under his balls. Ernesta used to love watching him absorbed in the ritual of the meticulous ablution. Her infatuation went so far, that she even worshiped the line of dirt that was left on the tub after he rose, in all the glory of his ebony nudity. Erection in hand, he walked down his red carpeted stairs (or was it blue, Ernesta wonders) sat down and turned his computer on.

Now memory, that is a strange thing. Mnemosyne feeds on caprice. Ernesta remembers the dust particles flying in the early morning rays of sun. She remembers the patterns the stains of sex formed on the sheets, sometimes white, sometimes black. She remembers the torn schoolbag in the laundry basket, the name written on the clock that stopped working, the number of toothbrushes, the olives in the refrigerator and the decorative string of onions in the kitchen window, but the colour of the carpet eludes her. She was on her knees, a green leash of her own making around her neck. The carpet was red as passion. The carpet was blue as cool detachment. Now you understand the significance of her musings. Passion?Detachment? Red? Blue? Hot? Cold? It is not merely a perceptual failure, her inability to make a decision in the question above. For us it would be easy to replace one bad comparison with the other, but for her form and content are inseparable.

What will happen when the Other turns on the computer? Will they argue? Will it be blue argument, detached, or will it be red argument, passionate? Will they talk about making love? Red. Will they evoke their copulations? Blue. The Other, the Other knows for sure.

The first thing she saw was the Chocolator. Now, now Ernesta, don't blush. We can all appreciate the playfulness with which lovers create the Adamic language of their leafless universe, the enthusiasm of naming as a process of taking possession. Adam named plants and animals in Paradise. On the 8^th of November Milton returned there. You were born on the 8^th of November. You name cocks. Paradise takes many forms.(That remark, I am sure, makes even the Left Eye smile.)

She says ladybirds taste different these days. It is not them, she adds, it is my palate. I taste them differently. The Eye smiled, but the carpet was blue. Like the celestial abode of you know who. It shouldn't have mattered so much. After all a carpet is a carpet, and not emotion manifest. She saw the Chocolator and it was beautiful. So was the Other, black pigment ablaze, corrupting the birds of Indian summer with His urge. Ernesta whispered, desire flowed out of her in a mellow, hypnotic tone, punctuated by a whimper here and there. At the end, her knickers were wet. Solemn slut, her wantonness sanctified by his semen. The jargon of filth fails me. If it is POV porn, it is the Right Eye that beholds this scene. And smiles, needless to say.

POV porn. Forgive the liberal and random associations here. The Other taught Ernesta this expression. She disputed the existence of such a genre in a game of scrabble. L-O-V-E. Four letters he gave her, when she left London. And a small green breadbasket the tiles could go in. L-O-V-E, her bread. But the carpet was blue and fingers strayed on a keyboard. A bread roll was left half-eaten and a heart broken. Ernesta's heart. The general view was that Ernesta's heart was made for polka dots, and not to be broken by love. But when Ievachka came with her Latvian charm and the boyfriend to put suspicious minds at ease, she was made to feel loved and wanted. Yes,by the Other. Then and there Ernesta got a heart, instantly broken. Polka dots everywhere. The dead ladybirds danced in Heaven. The Other remained the Other but every night ievachkas slept in Ernesta's bed, followed her around in her ambles and helped her in pairing socks. Ernesta tried to avoid them,the ievachkas, but they sneaked up on her, sometimes blond and vibrant, sometimes brunette and docile, with humble breasts and crooked legs, dimples, freckles, sports shoes and biker boots. Jealousy is just as creative as love. So tell me dear, do you like it when the Bumblebee stings?Do you care to reserve the privilege for yourself? And thus leaves were introduced in the lover's paradise. Amor fati and fetid love.

Now I don't blame the Other. Ievachka truly sounds like someone who has a flair for reality. Someone who could raise a son, take him to the dentist, empty the dustbin and still find the strength to jog herself out of consciousness once in a while. And have a boyfriend in the same time, you know, just to put suspicious minds at ease. On the other hand, Ernesta, well, if you must know, she was preoccupied with her collection of mythological beasts. Eating ladybirds was not her only peculiarity. The Right Eye of God was just one of the many exotic objects in her possession. Although homeless in essence, she always had a room reserved for her eccentric bric-a-brac: the Behemoth's tail that “moves like a cedar”, a flock of Dionysian hair, torn by the maenads, the exact measurements of Atlas' shoulders, the location of the Archimedic point, Polyphemus' monocle and a picture of her father, digitally encoded.

One does not have to be an ornithologist in order to recognize the cuckoo's egg in the nest. It is the odd one out. An aging man with an imbecile grin, wearing a blue T-shirt and showing off a sizable fish with an equally imbecile grin-hardly something one would have described as exotic, eccentric or odd. In fact, it would have been a rather ordinary image of a rather ordinary man. Except it wasn't. That man was the translation of the transcendental frown into crude reality: the Father, from now on referred to as P.A., standing for Pater Absconditus, or Pathetic Asshole, depending on whether Ernesta wants to sound pretentious or vulgar.

Until the age of 22 Ernesta believed with a conviction almost divine that she was the offspring of a second virgin birth. Her mother did not claim to have seen angels nor to have heard voices, nonetheless she never took measures to correct her daughter's blasphemous ideas about her own origin. Ernesta had no father. In her birth certificate the place where her father's name should have been, a line was drawn by some puzzled clerk. This line, black ink on a medium spring bud background served as a springboard for Ernesta's imagination. It was an ontological blank cheque which freed Ernesta from the limitations of the stories about birds and bees, storks and cabbages.