The text, as it has come to us, begins with the final five lines of an entry prior to August 10, 2111 New Age.[iv] It can be inferred that the writer, as well as so many others of his gender, already suffered the persecutions which justified the creation of the “diary.” It is also inferred that it had been at least seven years since he joined a brotherhood of peers, the former Order of Men which, back then, operated near the hills of the Notos river.
There are references everywhere to how the groups belonging to the Order were organized. Apparently, only men lived together, regardless their sexual tendencies, with very rigid communal living rules. Thus, heterosexuals and homosexuals were only allowed, provided they accepted their male gender. They could live in pairs or in trios, or in domes for single ones, like the Chronicles' writer, who was a heterosexual bachelor. Both marriage or any other type of controllled relationship were strictly forbidden, as well as was the presence of the woman. Some would "mate" to human-sized puppets for their discharges since onanism was frowned upon. Others practiced meditation, which made them worthy of contempt from their fellows as it was considered an ancient religious practice (religion was already taken as a pathology.) Of course, the norm was an open, clean, plain homosexual relationship, in addition to preserving the gender, which was permitted by the law of that Order.
The testimony of Nuary 15, 2112, five entries after the beginning of the extant text, the writer recounts the anguish of that dangerous day. That afternoon, a group in which our man participated on a mission to find foodstuffs, was intercepted by a Community of Females' scouting command. The account is particularly pathetic, not only because of the aftermath but also because of the rich imagery which reflects those wild times in spite of the "no-violence" laws under which they were ruled, the very laws that, nonetheless, decimated the male population. "The female entered the store, shouting and firing her torshes," [v] the text says. And it continues (we have adapted punctuation and spelling without adulterating, as far as possible, the author's language's lexical-grammatical features; we also replaced certain illegible or missing words between brackets):
"[...] Five, ten, plenty of armed Females began to appear while shouting and insulting us with dequalifying terms, such as ‘useless ones!’ and ‘damn nutsy-bugsies!’ One of them took Ector by the hair and dragged him down the hall. Ector is a skinny, shivering man, very badly fed. Since that Amazon beast took him with tremendous violence, she ended up with a huge lock of his hair in her hand. She was filled with such a revulsion that she started kicking him on the floor. And she kicked and kicked him while shouting in a shrill voice that caused terror until Ector moved no more [...]."
And the entry from that day is recorded as follows:
“[...] I had no way to escape from that dog-sweated smelling beast. She had chased me for several yards yelling out ‘Fag male!,’ ‘Sexless Predator!’ or ‘Gumblee-mumbler!,’ [vi] as I tried to avoid her fireballs which exploded at my sides and left burning holes in my shirt. Until I reached a dead end. This woman-like beast was just approaching, her eyes sparking hatred and her mouth humming war songs, when a tremendous explosion tossed rocks and roofs behind her. We were both shocked. She looked at me, insulted me for the last time, and got into the flames, perhaps to rescue her Commufeme sisters.[vii] Only five of us survived from our group. We returned very late that day, with no food but with painful wounds [...]”.
Raids like these are abundant in the text, some more dangerous than others. It is a list of death and searching for survival but there are also moments of intense emotions and of what was then called "masculine sensitivity." An example of the latter is the nearly exclusive record on the entry on one unspecified day in November (our Nombrer), 2113, which is transcribed below:
“[...] We had managed to overcome the Females' resistance. We entered the burrow where they had resisted our attack. We spread out to search among the fire debris at the place. I could hardly see anything due to the smoke. The smell gave me nausea. At that moment, I heard a sound I had not heard for a long time. I had nearly forgotten it, I barely remembered it from a far-off dream. It was a kind of sharp and choking moan, quite distant and weak. I started searching for that sound's source which, I insist, seemed very familiar to me, when I saw it wrapped in a red blanket that muffled its voice. Beneath it lied the Female, still alive, though her eyes had begun to cloud over in death. I approached almost without thinking. ‘Damn you, mumbler!,’ she said with [exhausted] energy. But I had hardly listened to this dying Female. What actually caught my attention was the marvel of marvels, that small creature who was crying — I could finally understand what that sound meant — beside the one I assumed was its dying mother. Taking it in my arms was my first reaction. ‘Nor even dare you!,’ the beast managed to say, she who, even defeated on the burrow's ground, insisted on her outburst of violence. A short hands-struggling followed. It was useless to tell her I would not injure her pup. By the time [the mother] calmed down, she was already dead [...]"
"My fellows were calling me because they had heard the same sound I had and were alarmed by the rampage that followed. When they returned, they themselves could not believe what they saw and became more violent, perhaps because of the unstoppable movement of their blood. [viii]I could imagine the spectacle they were seeing: a fellow-man, that is, me, with that red shaking blanket in my arms, while the crying of the wrapped creature deafened them like a piercing siren that [raised] even more tension. 'Let's do away with that pup,' Umar said. 'Let's take advantage of the fact that the whelp is small! That scourge needs to be destroyed so as it not to produce others of its kind' [...]."
What followed was confusing and quick, and I reacted in this way. Umar and the others began moving to snatch the little creature from my arms. So, as in a reflex action, I clutched the baby against my chest, as I pointed the crossbow at them. I think that, more than fear of the weapon, they were stopped by surprise at my unthinkable reaction. 'I'll keep it,' I shouted in every language I knew. 'I'm not gonna kill any defenseless creature, risking that perchance it means a crime, a murder and, therefore, a kind of suicide.'
"I don't know why, but this little Daughter of Female — the pup was a 'she' — moves me to tears that I need to restrain until I am alone for not raising suspicion among my fellows. I feel the urge to protect her, I can't explain the reason.
"I resolutely settled in my own dome for single with her. After all, I have no partner, and even though Females are forbidden in the Order, it is also true that Mara - that's the baby's name, I think that was my mother's - she is not an adult yet. So, she's not formally a Female. Maybe I can keep her in the community without endangering her life or mine [...]. "
The following entries refer the way this document's writer had to keep his decision at the cost of his own tranquility. As he writes: "I shall never again be able to rest in my life." From the different entries, we know details of the tension lived within the Order of Men during those days, the contempt, the discredit for the protagonist in this account; the hostility, sometimes deaf and sometimes blind, to that lonely man who took Mara to live with him.
"Don't call her 'a female cub!,' reads the entry of Nuary 5, 2114 as a demand to an interlocutor during what the writer calls "Fifth Extraordinary Assembly because of Mara." In other entries, he records that he knew that his Confreres called her "whelp of a bitch" at his backs, as though they muttered the fear and disdain provoked by that creature among the men.
The following texts are entries that, according to the dates, reveal long periods in between but with the advantage that, in each of them, the writer offers a generous summary of the accuracies to give us a quite precise idea of those days. This is how we know that, by common yet not unanimous agreement, the Order allowed Mara to stay in our writer's individual dome (who, from now on and for the sake of this report, will be called "Mr X.") But she would not be permitted to have any contact with the men, except for Mr X himself, who became a foster father from that moment on. This would be a
momentary solution. Her situation should be reviewed at annual assemblies until she becomes a Female. "I hope to save Mara from my fellows' brutality," he confesses in the diary’s entry on March 24, 2114. And on the same entry, he shares his main argument for that Assembly's final decision is partly transcribed below:
"[...] Umar, the most intolerant of all," is read at the only entry from that day of the fragmentary, shakily handwritten in unusual red ink — some scholars suspect that it is animal blood mixed with transparent resin. And he continues: "Umar (who felt offended because I had decided to adopt the meditation regimen without any kind of sex participation, and who was responsible for me being given the searing nickname 'The Monk'), he himself, in a single movement approached two fingers distance from my face, so close that it came to me his raw-meat breath. He shouted to everyone, while was looking fixedly at me, that I was a traitor to the Order of Men; that I was an abomination to my sex; that if they accepted my proposal to rear Mara, when she came of age she would eat us all because that would be in her blood, in her own genitals, in her rotten brain because of Female deviation. And he ended up pushing me to the ground, near the fire circle."
And a little further on in the text: "Then the idea came to me as a shining certainty. I confess that what I had just thought as a mere possibility worried me greatly. I recovered quickly and got up from the dust. I addressed the Confreres rather recklessly: ‘Honorable Men, Umar accuses me of treason but there can be no worse traitor than he who satisfies his own needs in hiding from his fellows. I am going to show how Umar, or someone whom he wants to convince, may have committed a sacrilege which puts our Order in danger.’
"At that moment, Umar himself was surprised at my words. I saw an intrigue wrinkle in his brow. When I saw that kind of wrinkle in my Confreres' faces, I understood they were willing to hear me out. In my defence, I brought out some questions that pierced everyone's thought:
"'Honorable Men, how can it be that there have been no births registered for many years? If offsprings, as we know, are conceived only because of the union between Men and Females, then how can it be that this baby girl, the union's daughter between a Female and one of our fellows, is among us? If in this territory, there are only one Order of Men, ours, and only one Community of Females, in which we found Mara, so how can it be that she has been begotten without our knowing? Well, I think that one of our Fellows slipped in among the Females during a past mission to discharge their procreative juice into the mother and fathered the girl. And there may be more than one accomplice to this fact. So I uphold that the traitor must be among us. That one is the true criminal. Over him should fall our law that holds us together.'"
The text insists that these rhetorical questions were the key to Mara staying in the Order of Men for at least several more seasons. And, also, that the tension for Mr X was increasingly difficult to be borne. In subsequent months, he had to reinforce his alert since, on some occasions, attempts were made against his life or the girl's. It is also inferred that the internal relations in the Order underwent a notable modification: now everyone suspected everyone. Somehow, that question sowed uneasiness among them: Who was Mara's father?
One day, Umar summoned an assembly to accuse Mr X of being Mara's father due to the strange need to protect her he had manifested. The diary's writer put to rest that theory by showing proof of his inability to produce procreating liquid: the man had been horribly mutilated after a time of torture in the Community of Females; an occasion in which he himself had rescued Umar from the Commufemes when the latter was a toddler.
From this datum, as well as from others that are reflected in the text, two theories are deduced. Firstly, Mr X's age: he is, if not an elder, at least an above middle-aged man. The second theory is that Umar may be a recovered "Son of a Female," who had been rooted out from his original community. Thereby the suspicion increased that these sexual interchanges among Confreres and Commufemes had a long, clandestine history. This doubt was a real scandal among them which kept a tense and violent relation.
Entries from 2115 to the end of 2118 are missing for unknown reasons. Many believe it was due to his intense work as a "caretaker." Hence his scarce activity in the community. When returning to write, he sometimes offered certain information about occurrences during this time window, such as when three fellows used to come every other day to chat, to bring them food, and to see how the girl was growing up.
The next entry is the one from Nombrer, 15, 2118 in which he transcribed, full of wonder, Mara's questions, now aged five. We know the girl had blond hair, was rather small but very lovely, in Mr X's eyes, and extremely intelligent, with a sense of humor which he could not remember having existed among Females. He was amazed by her curiosity, the ability to relate reasonings, and her way of inventing songs. In many texts, he confesses his admiration and love for Mara, whose innocent gaze he poetically compares to "a lake of heaven in the dust of this desert." Here and there, he strives to leave a testimony of the girl's occurrences, who continued growing; of her sayings and thoughts; of what he himself taught her and, above all, of her keen eye over the concrete reality and the mysteries of life and the universe. He taught her cooking, gathering edible herbs, inquiring about the secrets of healing and meditation. He found himself reasoning with the girl about being a woman - based on questions about her origin - and being a man; about the possibility offered to them to overcome these differences, the origin of which had been forgotten in that kind of New Middle Ages.
In Tobrer 2122, he describes with the skill of a painter a fact which, from then on, transformed the girl. Mara woke up startled in the wee hours of the morning and went out of the dome to the cold breeze of the hill. From there she saw — as Mr X recalls when he worriedly followed her — how a group of noisy Commufemes had invaded the zone of the Order’s domes, located now at quite a distance. She saw the smoking hot spots, heard the screams of deep voices, the untempered chants of the she-invaders, the whistles of arrows and the shots of torshes that pierced the cold, sleepy morning air. Mr X just watched Mara from a prudent distance without interfering at any moment in her experience. Thanks to this nearly anthropological observation of his ward, he left us a testimony of the impression on the face of the girl:
"Mara watched everything wide-eyed and with her body stiffened, nearly paralyzed by the brutality of that slaughter. I could hear her ragged breath through her involuntarily gaping mouth. She scratched anxiously her arm (the right one I guess,) a reaction of her that I had never seen before. It was the first time she saw 'The Massacre.' I imagined that somewhere in her remote memory would still remain those missions of her mother, which the little baby must have been witnessed when she was not yet aware, such as the time when I found her and I accepted my own destiny and meaning of being alive. I felt the sudden fear that this spectacle might awaken her instincts, as my most radical Confreres had predicted, and she might run down the hill and attack, with her sweet voice transformed into a song of hatred, as ancestral as incomprehensible. At that moment, Mara looked at me. I saw her girlish face, all her questions in the look. But her reaction was immediate. She hugged me tightly as she hid the face in my lean, shake-hearted chest. I also hugged her, as I covered her ears. I could feel her trembling as I was. 'We still have to wait,' I thought at that moment. I suddenly calmed down, I manage to calm her down. Somehow, Mara told me that perhaps the prophecy (the desire?) of the soothsayers of my Order might not be fulfilled."
In an entry from 2124, Mr X leaves the testimony of another "human-quake" of him when Mara confessed to him about the bleeding between her legs. "She told me nearly naturally: 'Father, I am a woman now, as you promised me.'" And Mr X continues with the precision of a physician: "My legs no longer supported me. I knew what she meant and its full extent. I knew, from that moment on, that my stay in the world would already begin to make no sense." The fears of Mr X were soon confirmed that same year when, one evening, a group of Confreres came to the dome. He describes it in the diary in t
his way:
"[...] 'Come out of your burrow, effeminate monk!' Umar called from the entrance of the dome. Mara looked at me with a new look with which she used to look at the worldly things after her first bleeding. Things had changed in the Order since the Females had killed our leader some time ago. Now Umar had taken the throne as the First Confrere, having certain prerogatives that he held with little delicacy. 'Come on, monk! Your old comrades summon you.' Mara suggested me with a look that I should not go out. But my mission with her was still current, I had to protect her, even at the cost of my own life. I went out. There were Umar and three of my Confreres, old friends of mine with whom we had shared several dangerous missions searching for food."
Then Mr X relates how Umar demanded that he deliver Mara for evaluation since they considered that she was no longer a girl, for she had changed into a Female, and that, in her new state, the entire community was in danger. Mr X defended his position with the usual firmness and tried in vain to convince the men that the girl was not dangerous, that her Female instincts were not like that, that she had developed friendship and wisdom, and sensitivity for everything that moves and other qualities which would speak on behalf of her. Umar was not convinced, and demanded to take the young woman.
The Unravelled Frames Page 7