Then she threw off her covers and softly pushed you until you were lying at her feet, headfirst and on your back, and she opened her short hairy legs and emitted a cry of pain that blended with a cry of joy as you lay on your back, as if you had just been expelled from the woman’s womb, and then she smiled and took your arms and drew you to her, and you saw the slash of her sex like a split strawberry, and she pulled you close and kissed you, she licked you, she spit out what she sucked from your nose and your mouth, she guided your mouth to her flaccid, hairy red breasts, then in pantomime she repeated the motion of reaching down to her exposed sex and acted out taking your just-born body in the long arms made for giving birth alone, effortlessly, with help from no one …
Satisfied, the woman folded her arms; she looked at you with affection and said to you, Be careful, you are in danger, never say you came here, keep what I gave you, give it to your descendants. Do you have children? Do you have grandchildren? I do not want to know, I accept my fate, I have seen you again, daughter, this is the happiest day of my life.
She got up and moved beside you, on four feet, as you crawled from the dark hovel.
A few steps away, your loving confusion made you turn to look back.
You saw her hanging from a tree branch, waving one long hairy arm, and the last thing you saw was the rosy palm of her hand.
You told neh-el, with tear-filled eyes, that your one labor in this place was to care for your daughter and for the woman in the forest, to serve her, to give life back to her.
Neh-el seized you by the arms and for the first time shook you roughly. You cannot, he told you, for my sake, for yours, for our daughter’s, for her own sake, ever say what you have seen, you did not remember her, the fault is mine, I should not have taken you, I let myself be moved by pity, but I remembered, yes, ah-nel, we have different mothers, never forget that, different mothers. Of course, neh-el, I know, I know …
Yes, but the same father, the young man with the braided hair, olive skin, and clanking bracelets said that night. Now look at your father. At our father. And tell me if he deserves to be chief, the father, the fader basil.
They brought him from the house of ivory, naked except for a loincloth. In the center of the open space was a tree trunk stripped of branches. A greased column, said the man with the braids, to see if our father can climb to the top and demonstrate that he deserves to be chief …
The metal rings on his arms clanked, and the old man was freed and led to the column by guards carrying lances.
Sitting on a throne of ivory, the dark young man explained to the young couple from the other shore: The tree is greased with musk, but even without it our lord and father would be unable to put his arms about it and climb. He is no monkey—he laughed—but, more than that, he is weak. It is time to replace him with a new chief. This is the law.
The old man repeatedly put his arms around the greased column. Finally, he capitulated. He dropped to his knees and bowed his head.
The young man on the throne gestured with one hand.
With a single swing of his ax the executioner cut off the old man’s head and delivered it to the young one.
He showed the head, holding it aloft by its long white hair, and the community shouted or wept or sang their rehearsed jubilation; you felt the impulse to join in the shouting, to transform it into something more like song. Dimly, you respect those shouts, because you sense that if neh-el recovered his memory because of language, you will recover it only through song, the gestures, the shouts, which inhibit you because you have returned to the state you were in when first you needed them: you fear that you have returned to the conditions of the first time you had to cry out like that …
The new chief held the old chief’s head by hanks of its hair and showed it to the men and women of the community of the bone stockade. They all sang something and began to disperse, as if they knew the length of the ceremony. But this time the new chief stopped them. He shouted an ugly sound, neither animal nor human, and said that the ceremony did not end there.
He said, The gods—everyone exchanged glances, not understanding, and he repeated: the gods—have ordered me to carry out their orders this day. This is the law.
He reminded them that the time was approaching for them to send the women away and to deliver them to other villages in order to avoid the horror of having brothers and sisters fornicate and engender beasts that walk on four legs and cannibalize one another. This is the law.
He told them with a dreamlike gaze that some remembered the time when mothers were the chiefs and they were loved because they loved all their children equally, without distinction.
People shouted their agreement, and the young fader basil shouted louder than anyone: That was the law.
He warned them they must forget that time and that law—he lowered his voice and opened his eyes very wide—and that whoever said that that time was better and that law better than the law of the new time would have his head cut off, like the useless old father, or run through with a lance, like the weak, moaning widow. This is the law.
He instructed them, showing sharply filed teeth, that this was a new time, in which the father commands and indicates his preference for the eldest son, but if the eldest son prefers pleasure and a woman’s love to commanding men, he must die and yield his place to the one who knows how and wishes to command without temptations and on his own. This is now the law. He who commands will live alone, without temptation or counsel.
The young basil made a gesture with his arms that brought a great roar from the community.
Then he said, calming the voices, that this was the new order and all must respect it.
When the mother ruled, everyone was equal and no one could stand above another. Individual merit was stifled in the cradle. It was the time of no foresight, of hunger, of a life that blended into everything surrounding it, animal, jungle, mountain stream, sea, rain …
That is no longer the law.
Now the time has come for a single chief to organize tasks, rewards, and punishments. This is the law.
Now is the time when the first male son of the chief will in his turn someday be chief. This is the law.
He stopped, and instead of looking at you, as everyone expected, he turned away from you, from your man, and from your daughter.
Brother and sister shall not fornicate together. This has always been the law. The descendants of the guilty brother and sister shall never know carnal pleasure. This is the law. The descendants will pay for the guilt of the parents. This is the law.
Then, in a single unforeseeable instant and with the lethal strike of the lightning bolt, the men in the service of the young chief pinioned neh-el’s arms, took the girl from him, jerked her legs apart, and with a stone knife sawed out her clitoris and threw it, ah-nel, in your face.
But you were not there.
You fled from this accursed place, your only possession, clutched in your fist, the small, worn statue of the woman that kept wearing away until it turned into a crystal womb with silhouettes forever etched upon it of the recovered memory of the naked blond man—a memory discovered one ancient night in the dust on the other side of the sea, and of your dark-eyed, red-haired daughter tortured and mutilated by order of a maddened king, a devil posing as a god, and you running far away, shouting and howling with no one pursuing you, they content with your having seen what you saw and you condemned to live forever with that pain, with that rancor, with that curse, with that thirst for vengeance born in you as a song, feeling again the passion that can give birth to a voice, liberating the passion’s natural song, allowing the violent external movements of a body on the verge of exploding to be expressed as voice …
With your cry you approach the beasts and birds that from now on will be your only companions, again possessed of an impetuous inner tumult to which you give an ululating, jungle, marine, mountain, fluvial, subterranean voice: your song, ah-nel, allows you to flee the brutal turmoil of a life destroyed
in one instant for acts that you neither control nor understand but that make you guilty; you add them all up and eliminate the quadruped mother of the forest, the handsome husband who was your brother, the older brother who possessed the power and was dead before dying because of the death he lived in life, the decapitated father stripped of his vigor by life and of his life by the cruel usurping son; you eliminate everyone but yourself, you are the guilty one, ah-nel, you are responsible for the mutilation of your daughter, but you will not go back to ask forgiveness, to get your daughter back, to tell her you are her mother, to keep from passing on to the girl what was passed to you, separated forever from your mother, from your father, from your brothers, from your dead brother, from your abandoned lover … So you come back, crossing the frozen sea, to the beach of your meeting, and from there to the frozen valleys, and from there to the cave painted by neh-el, and there, ah-nel, you fall to your knees and press your mother’s hand to the mark left one day by the hand of your newborn daughter, and you weep, you swear that you will find her, that she will be yours again, that you will steal her from the world, from power, from deceit, from cruelty, from torture, from men, that you will wreak revenge on all of them in order to fulfill your maternal duty to your daughter and live with her the life you cannot have today but will have one day in the future.
6
She dreamed that the ice was beginning to recede, uncovering rugged boulders and deposits of clay. New lakes have formed in the mountain sculpted by the snow. There is a new landscape of striated rocks, and flocks of stone. Beneath the ice of the lake an invisible storm is brewing. The dream is forming into a chain. Memory becomes a cataract that threatens to drown her, and Inez Prada wakes with a cry.
She isn’t in a cave. She’s in a suite at the Savoy in London. She casts a sideways glance at the telephone, the hotel notepad and pencils, to reassure herself. Where am I? An opera singer often doesn’t know where she is or where she’s just come from. This place, however, resembles a luxurious cavern, everything is chromed and nickeled, the bath, chair backs, and picture frames gleam like a silver shop. Even more calming is the view of the sad, wasted river, tawny as a lion, its back to the city (or is it the city that refuses to give its face to the river?). The Thames is too wide to flow, as the Seine does, through the heart of a city. The domesticated Seine, reciprocally reflecting the river’s beauty and that of Paris. Sous le Pont Mirabeau coule la Seine …
She pulls back the curtains and watches the slow, tedious Thames with its escort of barges and tugs churning back and forth past warehouses and empty lots. Dickens, who loved his city so deeply, had good reason to fill his river with corpses that were first murdered and then robbed of valuables at midnight …
London turns its back to the river; she closes the curtains. She knows that the person knocking at the door of the apartment is Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara. Almost twenty years have gone by since she sang and he conducted The Damnation of Faust in Mexico City, and now there will be a repeat performance at Covent Garden, but just as when they were working together in the Bellas Artes they have wanted their first meeting to be private. The year 1949, and now the year 1967. She had been twenty-nine, he forty-two. Now she was forty-seven and he sixty, and both were a little like ghosts from their own pasts—or maybe it’s only the body that ages, imprisoning youth forever within that impatient specter we call “soul.”
Their prescribed meetings, however long it had been since they’d seen one another, were a homage not merely to their youth but to personal intimacy and artistic collaboration. She—and she wanted to believe that he as well—seriously believed that that was the gist of things.
Gabriel had changed very little, but at the same time he was more handsome. The gray hair, as long and unruly as ever, softened his slightly barbaric features, his mix of Mediterranean, Provençal, and Italian blood, with maybe a little Gypsy and North African thrown in (Atlan, Ferrara). The gray set off his dark skin and ennobled even more the broad brow while detracting not at all from the unexpected and savage strength of flaring nostrils or the perpetual grimace—for, even when he smiled, and today he was particularly happy, his smile was a bitter twist of wide, cruel lips. The deep lines in his cheeks and at the corners of his mouth he had always had, as if his duel with music left wounds that never healed. Nothing new. But when he took off the red muffler, a less preventable sign of age was visible beneath his chin; that skin had grown loose, even though—Inez smiled—since they shave every day men naturally slough off the reptilian scales we call “old age.”
First they studied one another.
She had changed more than he, women do, more quickly, as if to compensate for their earlier sexual maturity—not just physical, but mental, intuitive. A woman knows more about life, and sooner, than a man, who is slow to give up his childhood. Perpetual adolescent or, worse, aged child. There are few immature women, but many children disguised as men.
Inez knew how to cultivate her identifying features. Nature had gifted her with a head of red hair that as she aged she could tint in the tones of her youth without attracting comment. She knew that nothing underscores the advance of years like changing hairstyles. Every time a woman changes her hairdo, she adds a couple of years. Inez let the flaming, naturally exuberant mane become her artifice: fiery hair was her trademark, contrasting with unexpectedly black eyes, not the green that usually goes with red hair. If age was gradually dimming those eyes, an opera singer knew how to make them gleam. The makeup that in another woman would be exaggerated, in Inez Prada the diva was an aftermath, or announcement, of a performance of Verdi, Bellini, Berlioz.
They stared at one another to reacquaint themselves and also to “run down the checklist,” as Inez called it, using one of her many and frequent Mexican phrases, hand in hand, holding each other at arm’s length, and exclaiming, You haven’t changed, you’re just the same, the years have been kind, your gray hair is so distinguished. They had had the good taste, in addition, to favor classic clothes: she a pale-blue peignoir, since a diva was permitted to receive at home wearing what she did in her dressing room; he a wool suit, black, but nonetheless showing the influence of the current street mode of swinging London, 1967. Both knew that they could never get away with dressing like kids, like so many ridiculous adults who didn’t want to be left out of the “revolution” and suddenly forsook stodgy business attire and resurfaced sporting bushy sideburns (and advancing bald spots), Mao jackets, bell-bottom trousers, and macrame belts, or respectable matrons wearing four-inch Frankenstein platform shoes and miniskirts that revealed varicose veins not even pink pantyhose could disguise.
They stood like that for several seconds, holding hands, staring into each other’s eyes.
What have you been doing all this time? How have you been? they asked each other with their eyes. They knew about the professional careers, both brilliant, both independent of each other. Now, like Einstein’s parallel lines, they would finally meet at the juncture of the inevitable curve.
“Berlioz is bringing us together again.” Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara smiled.
“Yes.” Her smile was not so broad. “I hope it’s not like a bullfight, a farewell performance.”
“Or, as in Mexico, a prelude to another long separation. What have you been doing, what all has happened to you?”
She thought about it, and the first thing she said was, “What might have happened? Why didn’t what might have happened happen?”
“Because it wouldn’t have worked?” he ventured.
His body had recovered from the beating he received from the mustached man and his thugs in Alameda Park.
“But your soul hasn’t …”
“I think you’re right. I couldn’t understand the violence of those men, even knowing one of them was your lover.”
“Sit down, Gabriel. You don’t have to keep standing there. Do you want tea?”
“No, thank you.”
“That boy was nothing to me.”
“I know that, Ine
z. I never imagined that you sent him to beat me up. I understood that his violence was directed against you because you’d thrown him out. I realized he was beating me so he didn’t have to beat you. Maybe that was his idea of chivalry. And honor.”
“Why did you leave me?”
“A better question, why didn’t we make a move to get back together, either of us? I can also see it as your leaving me. Were we so proud that neither of us dared take the first step toward reconciliation?”
“Reconciliation,” Inez murmured. “Maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe that poor devil who beat you up didn’t have anything to do with us, with our relationship.”
It was a cold morning, but sunny, so they went out for a walk. A taxi took them to the church of St. Mary Abbots in Kensington, where as a girl, Inez told Gabriel, she had gone to pray. This church with the very tall steeple wasn’t all that old, but it had an eleventh-century substructure that to her dazzled eyes seemed to surge from the depths of the earth and form the real church, as ancient as its foundation and as new as its construction. Everything conspired to make it all—the layout of the cloisters, the shadows, the arches, the labyrinths, and even the gardens of St. Mary Abbots—look as ancient as the abbey’s foundation. It was, Gabriel commented, almost as if Catholic England were the self-confessed phantom of Protestant England, appearing like a mischievous spirit in the corridors, ruins, and cemeteries, all without images, of the Anglo-Saxon Puritan world.
“No images, but music, yes,” Inez reminded him, smiling.
“Obviously as compensation,” said Gabriel.
High Street is comfortable and civilized, lined with hardware and carry-out shops, stationery stores, office-supply shops selling typewriters and copying machines, children’s boutiques, magazine-and-newspaper stalls, bookstores, and a large, open park behind an elegant iron fence: Holland Park, one of those green spaces that punctuate the city of London and give it its unique beauty. The main streets are utilitarian, wide, and ugly—unlike the grands boulevards of Paris—but they protect the secret of quiet little streets that with geometric regularity lead to fenced parks with groves of tall trees, manicured greensward, and benches where one can read, rest, or be alone. Inez loved to return to London and find those quiet oases where the only things that change are the seasons, and those unvarying gardens untouched by the tribal rites and noises with which youth announces its presence, as if silence might annihilate it.
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