Time Ages in a Hurry (2 page)

Why talk of these things? And what fault was it of theirs? But perhaps she could say she’d recalled the expression milk and blood, a really monstrous expression in her opinion, because when she was a child her grandmother would sometimes bring her into the shed in the evening, and she would watch, fascinated, while her grandmother squeezed that white liquid from the goats’ teats into a zinc bowl that they’d then carry home with the reverence due a gift of God, yet if some drops of blood fell into that pure white liquid, it would’ve seemed monstrous to her, she’d have run away frightened, but she couldn’t say that, because it wasn’t a memory, it was a fantasy, a false memory, she’d never been in that shed, and so, running from a false memory I now find myself here, in this nice family that has welcomed me with open arms, pardon me,
everyone, what I’m saying isn’t logical, perhaps it’s because I was looking at my slightly darker hands and the expression milk and blood just sounded strange to me, perhaps I need a little fresh air, in the summer, Geneva is even hotter than Paris, even more humid, I’ve enjoyed this gathering quite a lot, you’re all so dear, I just need some air, years ago, when we were engaged, Michel took me up to the mountain pastures, we went by bus, the one that goes up to the last village, if I remember, it’s not that far, I’ll get there in half an hour by taxi, after all, the pastures aren’t even a thousand meters up. Michel must have gone already for his siesta, tell him not to worry, I’ll be back before dinner.

It was really hot. She wondered how it could possibly be hotter at a thousand meters than it was in the city. Perhaps the city felt the benefits of the lake effect, it was logical that a large body of water cooled the air all around. But maybe Geneva was the same temperature, maybe she was the one feeling the heat, an internal heat as when the body’s temperature, for reasons only the body knows, becomes much higher than that of the surrounding environment. The sun was beating down on the plateau, and there weren’t any trees, only a vast expanse of meadows, rather, a stubbly field, many years earlier when Michel had taken her up there for the first time, it was spring, the plateau was green after the winter rains, they hadn’t known each other long, she’d never been to Switzerland, they were young or nearly so, Michel was in his last year of medical school, so around fifteen years back, because that
June he’d graduated and they’d also celebrated his birthday then, his twenty-fifth. For a moment she thought of time, and of what it might be, but it was only for a moment because once more the panorama of that yellowish plain caught her gaze and thoughts, the stubble wasn’t easy to walk on, probably the grass had been cut in June for the farmers’ winter supply, green goes yellow, she thought, and then her mind returned to the calendar, the months, the years, the dates, almost forty years, she said out loud, actually, thirty-eight, but thirty-eight’s almost forty, and I haven’t had a baby yet. She was aware that she’d spoken out loud, as though she were addressing a nonexistent audience on that scorched yellowish plain, and she continued aloud: why have I never asked myself that before?. How is it possible that a woman married for almost fifteen years hasn’t had a baby yet and hasn’t asked herself why? She sat on the ground, on the bristly grass. If it had been something planned, an agreement with Michel, it would’ve made sense, but it hadn’t happened because they’d willed it, that’s just how it had gone, a baby never arrived, period, and she’d never asked why, she’d found it normal, just as she’d found it normal growing up in a beautiful building on the Grands Boulevards, as if that elegant Parisian apartment were the most natural thing in the world – it wasn’t – the most natural thing in the world didn’t exist, things exist as you want if you think them and if you want them, then you can guide them, otherwise they go along on their own. All right, she said to herself, but then what’s guiding everything? Was there something on the outside guiding that sort of huge breath she perceived all around? The grass that becomes stubble
and that will go green again as the season turns, that suffocating late-August day which was ending, and the old grandmother from the house in Geneva whom she suddenly felt she loved very much, and also the great-uncle from St. Gallen, who drank too much and read poetry, she thought of his undone bow tie and the red spider veins on his nose, and tears welled up in her eyes and who knows why she saw the image of a child and his mother walking hand in hand from a village fair, the fair is over, it’s Sunday night, and the child has a balloon tied to his wrist, he displays it proudly like a trophy and suddenly,
ploff
, the balloon goes flat, something has punctured it, but what, perhaps a hedge thorn? She seemed to herself like that child who was suddenly holding a deflated balloon, someone had stolen it from him, but no, the balloon was still there, only the air had been stolen. So that’s how it was, time was air and she’d let it exhale from a tiny hole of which she was unaware? But where was the hole? – she couldn’t see it. She thought back to Michel, to those first years when he spent his days in his laboratory and came home late at night, dead tired, it was good waiting for him till midnight and eating a little spaghetti thrown together, Michel was searching for a drug that would save young children from a cruel disease, and this was wonderful, though why save abstract children if their own child wasn’t among those to be saved? Those evenings returned clearly in her memory, Chopin’s nocturnes playing softly, Michel sometimes suggested an album of Berber music, he said the beat of the tambourine soothed his weariness and distress, but she really couldn’t stand those tambourines, and then they’d go to bed in that little apartment overlooking
an unadorned square in Paris, and they’d love each other with an intense love, but from that love a baby was never born.

And why was she wondering just then about the why, in this place that wasn’t hers, on this desolate plain shrouded in August heat? Perhaps because Greta, two years younger, had produced two splendid children? That was the word exactly,
produced
, and she regretted thinking it, the word was somewhat obscene, but at the same time she sensed its intimate truth, the truth of flesh, because the body produces, and flesh reproduces itself, propagating, when it’s alive, through the vital humors circulating within it, when there’s water, that amniotic fluid of the placenta nourishing the tiny witness who’s received the transmission of the flesh. Water. She felt she’d grasped that everything depended on water and all she could do was ask herself if her own body lacked water, if she too couldn’t avoid the destiny of her people who’d fought against the desert for centuries, resisting the sand that covers everything, and who then had to surrender and go somewhere else, and by now the wells were all buried where her ancestors once lived, only dunes remained, she knew that. Panic invaded her, her gaze wandered, lost, over that yellow plain where a too-red sun was beginning to set. And in that moment, she saw the horses.

A herd of a dozen horses, maybe more, almost all of them gray, some dappled. And a little farther on, head raised proudly as though he was the leader, a black stallion pawed at the ground and whinnied. The
horses weren’t far, no more than two or three hundred meters, yet she hadn’t seen them, and only now, looking at them, it seemed to her that they were looking at her, and then the black stallion whinnied louder, and as though their mutual gaze were a sign of agreement, the horses started forward in waves on that trembling hot afternoon, the stallion shook his mane, whinnying louder now, and began galloping on, dragging the herd behind him. She watched them advance, unable to move, realizing that the space of the vast plain had distorted the view, they were more distant than she’d thought, or they were taking too long to approach, like certain scenes in films where movements occur more slowly in space, almost like liquid, as though their bodies were endowed with a hidden grace revealed only by a strange sorcery. They advanced like this, the horses, with that fluidity a dream sometimes offers, almost as though they were navigating in the air, but their hooves were touching the ground because behind them rose a thick curtain of dust, veiling the horizon. They advanced, changed formation, now a line, now fanning out, now splintering off as if each had a separate aim, and finally reuniting in a compact line, each head and neck following the same rhythm, the same pace as they fanned out again like an ocean wave of bodies. For a moment she thought of fleeing, but realized she couldn’t. She turned toward the animals and stood still, hands crossed over her breasts as if to protect them. In that moment the black horse halted, planting his hooves in the dust, the whole herd stopped with him as though an unknown conductor’s baton had decreed a pause in that mysterious ballet without music, it was only an interval, this
she understood. She watched and waited, they were no more than ten meters away, she could see their huge moist eyes, their pulsing nostrils, the sweat shining on their backs. The black horse raised his right hoof as circus horses do when the show begins, kept his hoof raised, then bolted ahead, circling around her, his hooves scoring a perfect circle in the soil, and then, almost as if this were an agreed-upon signal, all the other horses began following after, first at a trot, then at a gallop that gained in intensity, their speed set by the stallion’s, like a crazy whirling merry-go-round with broken brakes. So she saw them streaking by, an ever faster circle, so fast there was almost no space between them, only a wall of horses become one horse, the uninterrupted shape of a horse whose head resumed with a tail and whose tail was a head; and the hooves, raising a cloud of dust all around her resounding on the dry ground, seemed to her like the pounding of drums from a place she didn’t recall but sensed with utter clarity, and for a moment she saw hands beating the drum skins, the music rising to her ears emerged from the soil, as if the earth were shaking, she sensed it, before reaching her ears it climbed from her feet to her legs, her torso, heart, brain. Meanwhile the horses were circling, ever faster, fast like her thoughts gone circular, a thought that thought itself, she was aware only of thinking she was thinking, nothing more, and in that moment the leader of the herd, in the same sudden way he’d drawn the circle, now broke it, and with an unexpected swerve that seemed to defy the laws of nature, he slanted off dragging the whole herd behind him, and the horses galloped away.

She stood there, watching the shimmer of the straw specks raised in the dust as they glinted in the sunset, she thought she should keep thinking of not thinking of anything, she sat down and scraped at the grass stubble, searching for the ground, the sun was disappearing and the orange light already held hints of indigo, up there the horizon was circular, it was the only thing she was able to think, that the horizon was circular, it was as though the circle drawn by the horses had expanded to infinity, transmuting into the horizon.

The pain that woke him ran down his left leg, from the groin to the knee, but its provenance was elsewhere, by then he knew this all too well. With his thumb he began to press from his tailbone upward, when he arrived between the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae, he felt a sort of electric current running through his body, as if right from that spot a radio station was broadcasting out from the neck to the toes. He tried rolling over in bed. At the first attempt the pain paralyzed him. He stayed on his side, actually not even on his side, on half his side, which isn’t a precise position, it’s a would-be position, a passage. He stayed suspended in this movement, if one can put it that way, as in certain Italian Baroque paintings where the saint, male or female, gracefully overexcited from fasting or from Christ, remains forever suspended within the painter’s brushstrokes, because the craziest of painters, who
are also the ones of genius, are marvelous at catching the unfinished movement of their depicted character, usually crazy himself, and the pictorial miracle happens as a kind of bizarre levitation that seems to dispense with the force of gravity.