T
he memory of the lost land will not console her.
She will walk along the shore and then turn away from the sea.
She will try to remember how her life was before, when she had a companion, a hearth, village, mother, father, family.
Now she will walk alone, with her eyes closed, trying in this way to forget and to remember at the same time, shutting out sight in order to surrender to pure sound, trying to be what she can hear, only that, longing for the murmur of the stream, the whisper of the trees, the chattering of monkeys, the roar of the storm, the galloping of aurochs, the clash of the antlered beasts over a female, everything that saves her from the solitude that will threaten her with the loss of communication and memory.
She would like to hear a cry of action, unconscious and interrupted, a cry of passion tied to sorrow or happiness, she would
like especially for the two languages, that of action and that of passion, to blend together so that the cries of nature would again be converted into desire to be with the other, to say something to the other, to shout her need for and sympathy for and attention to the other, lost to her since she was driven from her home, expelled by the law of the father.
Now who will see you, who will pay attention to you, who will understand your anguished call, the call that will finally be torn from your throat as you run uphill, beckoned by the height of the stone cliff, closing your eyes to relieve the duration and the pain of the climb?
A cry will stop you.
You will open your eyes and you will see that you are at the edge of a precipice with empty space at your feet, a deep ravine, and, on the other side, on an outcropping of stone, you will see a figure who will shout to you, who will wave his arms, who will say with every movement of his body but most of all with the strength of his voice,
Stop, don’t fall, danger …
He will be naked, as naked as you.
The nakedness will identify you, and he will be the color of sand, all over, skin, body hair, the hair on his head.
The pale man will call to you,
Stop, danger.
You will understand the sounds
eh-dé, eh-mé, help, love,
swiftly being transformed into something that only in that moment, as you shout to the man on the other shore, you will recognize in yourself: he is looking at me, I am looking at him, I am shouting to him, he is shouting to me, and if there were no one there where he is, I would not have shouted the way I did, I would have shouted to frighten away a flock of black birds or from fear of a beast crouching nearby, but now I am shouting to
ask something or to thank this other person, who is like me but different from me, now I am shouting not out of necessity but desire,
eh-dé, eh-mé, help me, love me …
He will come down from the rock with a pleading gesture that you will imitate with cries, unable to avoid reverting to grunting and howling, but both feeling in the swift trembling of your bodies that you will run to hasten the meeting so desired now by you both, you will revert to the earlier cries and gestures until you meet and embrace.
Now, exhausted, you will sleep together in the streambed at the bottom of the precipice.
Between your breasts will hang the crystal seal that he will have given you before he makes love to you.
That will be the good part, but you will also have done something terrible, something forbidden.
You will have given another moment to the moment you are living and to the moments you are going to live; you have perverted time; you have opened a forbidden field to what happened to you before.
But now there is no warning, there are no fears.
Now there is the fullness of love in the instant.
Now whatever may happen in the future must await, patient and respectful, the next hour of the reunited lovers.
CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA, JANUARY 2000
Copyright © 2000 by Carlos Fuentes
Translation copyright © 2002 by Margaret Sayers Peden
All rights reserved
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
Originally published in 2001 by Alfaguara, Mexico, as Instinto de Inez
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Designed by Abby Kagan
eISBN 9781466801219
First eBook Edition : September 2011
First American edition, 2002
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fuentes, Carlos.
[Instinto de Inez. English]
Inez / Carlos Fuentes ; translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden.
I. Peden, Margaret Sayers. II. Title.
PQ7297.F793 16713
963’.64—dc21
2002020589