E
very time the two of you part, you will cry out: neh-el in the forest growing colder and more deserted, ah-nel in the cave growing less and less warm, to which he will bring skins ripped from the few bisons wandering nearby, animals he will kill not merely to feed you and your daughter but now to robe you against the icy winds filtering through unexpected cracks in the cave like the breath of a white, vengeful ram.
An invisible layer of ice will be forming on the cave walls, as if reproducing there an image of the sickness of the ever more barren and inert earth, as if the blood of animals and the sap of plants were about to shut down forever after spewing a great mouthful of death.
Neh-el will cry out in the winter forest. His voice will have so many echoes that no beast will be able to locate him; his voice will be the disguise of neh-el the hunter. That voice will spread across the blinding white of forests, plains, frozen rivers, and a sea astonished at its own motionless chill … It will be a solitary
voice that will become multitudinous, because the world will have become one great dome of white echoes.
In the cave, you will not cry out, ah-nel, you will sing, crooning to the girl who soon will have lived three flowering seasons, but in your den of stone your voice will resonate so strongly that the crooning will sound like a cry. You will be afraid. You will know that your voice will always be yours but now will also belong to the world surrounding you with threat. A great downpour of icy rain will resound like a drum in your head. You will look at the paintings on the walls. You will feed the flame of the fire. Sometimes you will venture outside with the hope of finding herbs and berries easy to pick for you and for the girl whom you carry on your back in a pouch of elk hide. You will know that game will always be brought by him, sweating and red-faced from the ever more arduous hunt.
The man will enter the cave, he will look with sadness at the paintings and he will tell you that the time has come to go. The earth will freeze and will give no more fruit or meat.
But, most important, the earth will move. This very morning he will have seen how the mountains of ice are shifting, with a life of their own, slowing as they encounter obstacles, swallowing everything in their path …
You will all go out wrapped in the skins that neh-el will wisely have gathered, because it will be he who knows the world outside and who will know this time is coming to an end. But you will pause at the cave entrance and you will run back to the shelter of your life and your love and there you will again sing with the always clearer feeling that it will be your voice that binds you forever to this place, which will always be the hearth of ah-nel and her daughter.
You will sing today as you will sing at the beginning of everything, because in your breast you will feel something taking you
back to the stage where you will once again be when you have need of it for the first time …
Your feet wrapped in pigskin tied with gut will sink into the deep snow. You will cover the child as if she had not yet been born. You will think that the march is long even though he warns you: We are going back to the sea.
You will expect to find a coast of motionless cliffs and dashing waves, but everything you knew will have disappeared beneath the white robe of the great snow.
You will align your footsteps in the direction of the remembered place of the fish and distressed you will search for the dark line of the horizon, the accustomed limit of your gaze. But now everything will be white, color without color, and everything will be frozen. The sea will not be moving. It will be covered by a great slab of ice, and you will stop, confused, holding your daughter warmly wrapped in skins, watching the group that will be slowly approaching, moving toward you from the invisible limit of the frozen sea as you, you and your daughter, led by neh-el, will go forward to meet the group that will lift their voices with an intent that you will not know how to decipher but that will evoke in the expression of your man an uncertainty about whether to continue forward or to return to the frigid death of the vast shifting ice that is advancing with a life, intelligence, and sinuousness of its own behind you, robbing you of your accustomed hearth, the cave, the cradle, the paintings …
The sea of ice will be breaking up like a pile of cold and forgotten bones, but the group of men who will come out to meet you will guide you from block to frozen block until you reach the other shore. Then you will realize that this is the coast or the island that neh-el and you will have seen like a mirage in the old time of the flowers, which will also be the new time awaiting you
here, for the men who will lead you will be shedding their heavy mantles of skins cured from the blond deer of the cold to uncover garments of much lighter pigskin. You will have crossed the frontier between ice and green, growing things.
You too will throw aside the heavy pelt you are wearing and you will feel enough warmth return to your breasts to protect your child. You will feel the heat, following the group of men whom now you will begin to tell apart by the way they hold their sharp-pointed lances, together singing a song that will announce triumph, joy, return …
You will come to the barrier of a white fence that you will quickly recognize as a wall of the huge bones of vanished animals embedded in the ground to form an impregnable stockade, which, one by one, the men-guides will enter, preceding you, and you will follow through openings in the stockade until you come to a large open area of stamped-down earth amid a cluster of small shelters of baked clay and burning-hot flat roofs.
They will assign you a hut, and they will bring vessels with milk and pieces of raw meat impaled on iron skewers. Neh-el will bow in thanks and will follow the men outside. At the door he will turn and he will tell you with a hand gesture that you must be calm and say nothing. There will be something new in his eyes. He will look at the men of this place the way that before he looked at the beasts he hunted. But now he will also look with suspicion, not caution alone.
You will spend several hours feeding the little girl and crooning songs to her. Then neh-el will return and he will tell you that he will go out every day to hunt with the other men. They are to meet at the edge of a treeless prairie where there will be great herds. They will surprise their kill when the beasts stop to graze. You will go out with the other women to pick herbs and fruit
near the huts, without exposing yourself to the beasts that come up almost to the stockade.
You will ask him if here he will paint again. No, he will tell you, here there will be no cave walls. There will be walls of earth and stockades of bone.
Will they be happy to have us?
They will be. They will say that when they see the waters of the sea withdraw and freeze on the other shore, they will feel isolated, and they will wait for us to have proof that the world on the other side still exists.
Will they like our world, neh-el, will they want it?
We shall learn to know them, ah-nel. We shall wait.
But again there will be uneasiness in his eyes, as if something that has not yet happened were about to be revealed.
You will join the other women of the stockade to pick fruit and will bring elk’s milk to the little girl in her cradle of skins.
You will not be able to communicate with the other women, because you will not understand their languages; not you theirs or they yours. You will try to communicate by singing and they will answer, but it will not be clear to you what they are saying, because their voices will be unvarying and monotone. You will try to intone voices of happiness, pity, pain, and friendship, but the other women will look at you oddly and they will answer you with the same unvarying tone, which prevents you from divining what they feel …
Days and nights will go by in this manner, until one evening, at sunset, you will hear footsteps, so light that they communicate pain, as if the one walking did not want her feet to touch the ground. But the person who will approach your hut will knock with a steady sound that will frighten you because until now the footsteps and noises of this place will have been characterized by a monotonous sadness.
You will not be prepared for the appearance in the frame of your doorway of a woman covered in skins as black as her hair, with deep circles under her eyes and a partly opened mouth: black lips, black tongue, black teeth.
She will clutch the black staff she will use to knock at your door. She will appear at your doorstep, and with one hand she will lift the staff, and you will fear her threat, except that with the other hand she will touch her head with a resignation, a sweetness, and a sorrow that will make your fear vanish. She will touch her head as if she were touching a wall or were announcing herself in a way not to cause fear or because she wanted to greet you, but there is no time, the somber features of the woman, your visitor, will ask something of you, but you will not know how to answer her plea in time, the other women of the community will have reacted, they will come to your door, inflamed, they will yell at the dark woman, they will tear the black staff from her hands, they will throw her to the ground and kick her, and she will get to her feet with darting glances of fear and pride, and, defiant, she will cover her head with her hands and she will leave, dragging her feet, until she is lost in the mist of twilight.
Neh-el will return, and he will tell you that the woman is a widow who has no right to leave her hut.
Everyone will be wondering why, knowing the law, she will have dared go outside and come to you.
They will suspect you.
The law will say that to see a widow is to expose oneself to death, and they will not be able to explain why this widow will have dared come out and go looking for you.
It will be the first time that the other women will lose their calm or their distant indifference, they will change their tone of voice, they will become excited and passionate. The rest of the time, they will be submissive and silent. They will gather the yellow
strawberries and the black berries and the white ones, they will pull up edible roots, and they will count with particular care the little green spheres they call
pisa
, opening the green pods and dropping the round fruit into clay vessels.
They will also gather eggs of the birds that flock to feast on grains and the black berries. For their men they will cook the brains, the tripe, and the fat throats of the beasts of the prairie. And as the evening light wanes they will braid rope from the fibers of the fields and make needles of bone and clothing of leather.
You will realize, when you go with the women to distribute food and clothing to the huts of the men and the ill, that, although the scope of this daily, monotonous labor is restricted to the area of the bone stockade, farther away there is a space within a fortress where a building more sumptuous than the others will be built—it, too, of the ivory of death.
One night there will be a great uproar and everyone will run to that space, summoned by the drums that you will have heard before but also by a new music, rapid as the flight of the raptor, only of a sweetness you will never have heard before …
The men will have dug a space deeper than wide, and from the large house, yellow as a mouthful of infected teeth, they will carry the body of a naked young man, followed at a slow pace—in its very slowness as much rage as grief—by a man with long white hair and sagging shoulders, his face covered by a mask of stone and his body protected by white hides. He will be preceded by a second young male, as naked as the corpse, carrying a vessel. The men will set the body of the young man on the ground and the old man will go over to look at it, for a moment removing his stone mask in order to take in every detail of the cadaver.
He will have a face that is bitter but lacking the necessary will to contest or to act.
Then the men will lower the body into the hole, and the aged, masked man will slowly empty over it the vessel of ivory pearls the sad adolescent will have in his hands.
Then will rise the song that you will have expected from the beginning, ah-nel, as if everyone were awaiting that one occasion to add to the plaintive chorus the cries, caresses, and sighs that the old man will hear, unmoved, as he sprinkles the pearls over the corpse, and then, exhausted, he will support himself on two men, and all three will return to the house of ivory accompanied by the sound of sad, sweet music issuing from a tube drilled with small holes, while the other men of the stockade will continue to toss objects into the open grave.
That night neh-el will show you something stolen from the tomb. It is the bone tube with many holes. Instinctively neh-el will lift it to his lips, but you, also instinctively, will put your hand over the instrument and over neh-el’s mouth. You will be afraid of something, you will suspect even more, you will feel that your days in this place will not be peaceful, ever since the visit from the woman with the staff you will have convinced yourself that this place is not good …
There will be a portent in the flight of vultures over the fields where you will be working the morning after the burial of the young man. Neh-el will return with more news. The hunters will have talked, even though the women will have been silent. Neh-el will quickly learn the key words of the language of the island and will tell you, ah-nel, that the boy is the oldest of the old man’s sons, that the old man is the one who commands here, that the dead youth was to have been the one to ascend to the ivory throne, the first among all the sons of the
basil,
for that is what the old man is called,
fader basil,
that he has several sons but that they are not equal, that there are a first, a second, and a third, but
now the second will be the favorite and the one who will succeed the aged
fader basil.
Terrible things will be said, ah-nel, it will be said that the second son killed the first in order to be first himself, but, then, ah-nel will ask, will not the old man fear that the second will kill
him
in order to be the new
fader basil?