But maybe she saw in Gabriel what he saw in her: an avenue
to the unknown. Making a supreme effort to think clearly, Atlan-Ferrara realized why Inés and he should never have sex. She rejected him because she saw another woman in his gaze. But, equally, he knew that when she looked at him she was seeing someone else. And yet couldn’t they, servants of time, be him and be her, be themselves and be others in each other’s eyes?
I won’t usurp my brother’s place, he said to himself as he drove off toward the burning city.
His mouth tasted bitter. He murmured: “Everything seems primed for the farewell. Road, sea, memory, wooden death stools, crystal seals.”
He laughed. “The stage set for Inés.”
Inés made no effort to return to London. And she did not return to rehearsals for
The Damnation of Faust.
Something held her here, as if she were condemned to live in this house facing the sea. She walked along the seashore and was afraid. With ancestral fury, a battle among the winter birds erupted in the sky. The savage birds were fighting over something, something she couldn’t see, but something sufficiently prized to justify pecking each other to death.
The spectacle terrified her. The wind scattered her thoughts. Her head felt like a crystal worn smooth.
The ocean terrified her. She remembered, with terror …
The little island terrified her, more clearly defined every time she saw it outlined between the coasts of England and France, beneath a flat-ceilinged sky.
It terrified her to think of starting down the deserted road, lonelier than ever—worse, with its murmuring woods, than the silence of the tomb.
What a strange sensation, to walk beside a man along the shore, each attracted to, each frightened of, the other … Gabriel
had left, but the nostalgia he had sown in her remained. France, the beautiful blond youth, France and the youth united in the nostalgia Gabriel was able to express openly. Not she. She felt bitter toward him. Atlan-Ferrara had left her with the image of something she could never have. A man that from this time forward she would desire but could never know. Atlan-Ferrara did know him. The face of the beautiful blond youth was his heritage. A lost country. A forbidden country.
Her instinct communicated to her an insurmountable separation. A prohibition now stood between her and Atlan-Ferrara. Neither wanted to violate it. But prohibition violated Inés’s instinct. Alone, mulling over these things, on the way back to the house, she felt trapped between two temporal boundaries that neither of them wanted to cross.
She went into the house and heard the stairs creaking, as if someone were going up and down, impatiently, uninterruptedly, not daring to show himself.
Then, once back in the house facing the sea, she lay down between the two funerary stools, stiff as a corpse, her head on one support and her feet on the other, and upon her breast the photograph of the two friends, comrades, brothers, signed
To Gabriel, with all my affection.
Except that the beautiful blond youth had disappeared from the photo. He was no longer there. Gabriel, bare-chested, one arm held open, was alone. That arm wasn’t embracing anyone. Inés placed two crystal seals on her transparent eyelids.
After all, it wasn’t difficult to lie there, stiff as a corpse, between the two funerary stools, buried beneath a mountain of dream.
Y
ou will stop and look at the sea. You will not know how you got here. You will not know what you are supposed to do. You will run your hands over your body and it will feel sticky, smeared from head to toes with the same viscous substance that will coat your face. You will not be able to clean yourself with your hands because they too will be covered. Your hair will be a tangled, filthy nest and a thick paste will dribble down into your eyes, blinding you.
When you wake you will be perched among the branches of a tree with your face cradled against your knees and your hands covering your ears to block out the screeches of the capuchin monkey that will club to death the serpent that will never reach the leafy branches where you will be hiding. The capuchin will be doing what you would like to do yourself. Kill the serpent. Now the serpent will not prevent you from climbing down from the tree. But the strength the monkey will reveal as it kills the
serpent will frighten you as much as the threat of the snake, or maybe more.
You will not know how long you will have been here, fem, living alone beneath the jungle canopy. There will be moments when you will not be able to think clearly. You will put a hand to your forehead every time you try to weigh the difference between the threat of the serpent and the violence with which the capuchin will kill it but not kill your fear. You will make a great effort to think that first the serpent will threaten you, and that that will happen
before, before,
and the capuchin monkey will club it and kill it, but that will happen
after, after.
Now the monkey will lope away with an air of indifference, dragging the heavy stick and making noises with its mouth, moving its tongue the color of salmon. The salmon will swim upriver, against the current: that memory will illuminate you, you will feel happy because for a few instants you will have remembered something—although the next instant you will believe that you have only dreamed, imagined, foreseen it. The salmon will swim against the current to give and to win life, to leave their eggs, to await their hatch … But the capuchin will kill the serpent, that will be certain, as it will also be certain that the monkey will make noises with its mouth as it completes its work, and the serpent will be able to do no more than hiss something with its forked tongue, and it will also be certain that now the animal with spiky bristles will approach the motionless serpent and begin to strip away its jungle-colored skin and devour its moon-colored flesh. It will be time to climb down from the tree. There will be no danger now. The forest will protect you forever. You will always be able to return here and hide in the thicket where there is no sun …
Sun …
Moon …
You will try to articulate words that serve what you see. The words are like a circle of regular movements that hold no surprise but have no center. One moment when “jungle” will be identical to itself and will be covered with darkness and only the changing sphere the color of the wild boar’s back will penetrate some branches. And that other moment when the jungle will fill with rays like the swift wings of birds.
You will close your eyes in order better to hear the one thing that will be with you if you continue to live in the forest, the murmurs of birds and hissing of serpents, the meticulous silence of insects and chattering voices of monkeys. The terrifying incursions of the boars and the porcupines in search of carcasses to strip.
This will be your refuge and you will abandon it reluctantly, crossing the frontier of the river that separates the forest from the flat, unknown world, which you will move toward pushed by something that is not anxiety, lethargy, or remedy, but the impulse to know what is around you while maintaining the absence
of before and after, you who will live now, now, now
…
You who will swim across the turbulent, muddy river, washing off the second skin of the dead leaves and ravenous fungi that will cover you as long as you live in the branches of the tree. You will come out of the water coated with the dark mud of the riverbank, to which you cling desperately, battling the trembling of the earth and the force of the river in your struggle until you find yourself, on all fours, totally spent, on the opposite shore, where you will fall asleep without ever having stood.
The earth’s trembling will wake you.
You will look for a place to hide.
There will be nothing beneath the dingy sky, a sky like a level, opaque ceiling of reverberating stone. There will be nothing but the plain before you and the river behind you and the jungle on the other side of the river and on the plain the herd of gigantic hairy quadrupeds making the earth ring with their hooves and scattering in every direction the troops of panicked reindeer that will abandon the field to the aurochs until the earth grows still and it is dark and the plain sleeps.
This time the incessant scrabbling of the ugly small creature with the pointed nose will wake you as it pokes into the ground rooting out and devouring all the crawling, wiggling little things it can cram into its mouse-spider snout. Its shriek is nearly inaudible, but it is joined by many just like it, until there is a sea of milling, restless, dissatisfied shrews, prophets of a new trembling that will shake the plain.
Perhaps the shrews will hide and the reindeer will return, tranquil now, first displaying themselves, circling on the plain but marking it out into spaces, which other antlered hordes approach only to be aggressively chased off by the lord of that piece of earth. A ferocious battle will take place between the proprietary deer and those disputing its territory. You, hidden, invisible and unimportant to them, will watch that combat of bloodied antlers and penises engorged in the frenzy of combat until one animal establishes itself as master of that space and expels the bleeding vanquished, and in every neighboring space only the beast with the greatest rack and the greatest penis will take possession of the field where now, tame and indifferent, the females of the herd will come to graze and be mounted by the triumphant deer, never lifting their heads or interrupting their
grazing, the males puffing and snorting like the accursed heavens that will damn them to eternal combat in order to enjoy this instant, the females silent to the end …
And at the end, you alone in the following darkness, crying out alone, as if the antlered herd and their females were still occupying the plain as solitary as you, fem, will be, sensing that you will have to flee from this place, go far away from here, obscurely fearful that an enormous antlered beast will surprise you calmly eating plants by the riverbank and will be confused by your strange scent and your red mane and your four-footed, loping gait …
Suns later … You will stop and look at the sea. You will not know what to do now. You will feel yourself and find your body sticky, smeared from head to toes with the same viscous substance that will be coated on your face and on hands that will not clean you because they will be coated too and your head will be a tangled, filthy nest, and a thick paste will dribble down into your eyes and blind you. You will wish and not wish to see.
Two sea-dwellers, as long as two
yous
laid end to end, will roil the sea with their battle, at times feinting and at times direct and lethal, now that the two fish use their mouths the way the monkey will use its club, attacking with sharp teeth. This you will see.
You will not understand why they battle in this way. You, hom, will feel abandoned and lonely and sad when you walk along the rocky beach and you find small fish on the rocks identical to the large ones but for their size, their bodies mangled and the mark of the teeth of the large fish imprinted on them like the symbols—and like a light from the sky that memory will return—scratched with stone in the protective hollows in the mountainsides.
You will see the largest fish attack each other in the ocean
until one is killed or flees, and you will think you understand that battle but not the death of the fish-babies murdered by their own progenitors—you will see them attack their young again and again—abandoning them, dead, on the beaches …
Other times, those same large white lighthearted fish will frolic in the waves, making gigantic leaps and taking the sea as their playground. You will seek a way to have thoughts, feeling that if you think you will have to remember. There will be things you do want to remember and others you would like, or that you will need, to forget.
Forget and remember, facing the sea, there will be two moments in your head difficult to tell apart—instinctively you will put a hand to your forehead every time you think this—because until very recently there will have been no before or after for you, fem, only this, the moment and the place where you will find yourself doing what you will have to do, losing all your memories the more you begin to imagine that one day you will be a different age, you will be small like those dead little fish, you will live close to a protective woman, all that you will forget, fem, at times you will believe that you have done all these things this very minute on this rocky beach, that you will not do anything before or after this moment—it will take a great effort for you to imagine “before” or “after”—but this dark morning with an opaque sun, you will watch the large white fish leap, see them frolic in the sea after killing their offspring and abandoning them on the beach, and for the first time you will tell yourself that this cannot be, this will not be, feeling something flooding inside you like the waves where the lighthearted, murderous fish will be playing.
Then something within you will drive you to move along the beach, twisting and writhing, lifting your arms, clenching your
fists, shaking your breasts, parting your legs, squatting as if you were going to give birth, or urinate, or let yourself be loved.
You will cry out.
You will cry out because you will feel that what your body wants to say here by the sea and the game of the white fish and the death of the slaughtered fish will be too violent and impulsive if you do not express it somehow. You will feel this: you will rage explosively while summing up what must happen to you—the monkey will again kill the serpent, the serpent will again be devoured by the porcupine, you will climb down from the tree and you will cross the river; panting, you will fall asleep, and you will wake on the drum of the plain, where the herds of hairy aurochs will scatter and the deer will skirmish to establish their territory and mount their females, and you will wake by the sea watching the fish fight each other and kill their offspring and then happily play—if you do not cry like the bird that you will never be, if you do not give voice to a strange song, throaty and guttural, if you do not cry out to say that you are fem, alone, that the movements of your dance will not be enough, that you will long to go beyond your gestures and say something, shout something beyond your instantaneous gestures by the shore, that you want to shout and sing passionately something that says you will be here, present, available, you …
For a long time, alone, you will wander across the solitary land fearing that no one is like you, fem …
“Long time” is very difficult to think, but when you say those two words you will always see yourself living beside the immobile woman, in one place and in one moment.
Now, as soon as you begin to walk, you will feel bad that you are not with anyone, and this will fall into your life with the
force of brutal abandonment, as if everything you see, feel, or touch is not true.
Now there will be no protective woman. Now there will be no warmth. Now there will be no food.
You will look about you.
There will be only what surrounds you, and that will not be you, because you will be only what you would like to be again.
You will go back toward the trees, because you will be hungry. You will understand that need brought you from the jungle to look for sustenance, and that now the same need will send you back into the thicket with empty hands. You will be thirsty, and you will have learned that the sea where the lighthearted fish will always be playing does not calm you. You will return to the muddy river. On the way you will find blood-colored fruit that you will devour, and then later you will find your hands stained. You will realize that you will walk, eat, stop, and sleep in silence.
You will not understand why you repeat the dance by the sea now, the impetuous movement of body, hips, arms, neck, knees, fingertips …
Who will see you? Who will pay attention to you? Who will send the anguished call, the call that will finally be torn from your throat when you run to plunge again among the trees? You are raked by thorns, you are panting as you come out onto a new barren clearing, you run uphill, summoned by the heights of a rock cliff, you close your eyes to relieve the length and the pain of the climb, and then a cry will stop you, you will open your eyes, and what will you see at the edge of the precipice? The cliff sliced away, with emptiness at your feet. A deep ravine, and on the other side, on a high white stony shelf, a figure that will shout to you, that will wave both arms in the air, that will jump
up and down to catch your attention, that will say with every movement of his body but especially with the strength of his voice: Stop, don’t fall, danger …
He will be naked, as naked as you. Something will happen to you for the first time. You will see another moment in which both of you will be covered, but not now, now nakedness will identify you, and he will be the color of sand, all over, skin, body hair, the hair of his head; a pale man will shout to you, Stop, danger, and you will understand the sounds—
eh-dé, eh-mé, aidez, aimez,
help, love—that are rapidly transformed in your look and your gestures and your voice into something that only in this moment, as you call to the man on the other side, you will recognize in yourself: He is looking at me, I am looking at him, I am calling to him, he is calling to me, and if there were no one there where he is standing I would not have cried out, I would have shouted to frighten a flock of black birds or out of fear of a beast lurking in ambush, but now I will call for the first time to ask something of or thank that other being like me but different from me, and now he will not call out of necessity, he will call because he wants to,
eh-dé, eh-mé,
help me, love me …