V
I know not how much longer my soul lived that way, making real in dreams what wakefulness denied her. And still she knew not whether she waited in hope or despair, when there dawned for her a day exceedingly beautiful and open to all revelations. She was waiting, as I said, with her ear attuned to the world’s sounds, when suddenly it seemed to her that invisible brass instruments rang out in the springtime and that all creatures, putting aside their silence, began to raise their voices and express themselves in an idiom both direct and passionate. That language had the mettle of the voice of beauty, the “voice that calls.” And since the call of beauty is the call of love, and love tends toward happiness, it is no wonder my soul felt moved and jubilantly saluted the advent of those voices. What good fortune! So very recently, the soul had been wanting a call of love that might set her in motion, and now here were thousands of calls resounding in her ears, as though the earth had begun to sing through the myriad mouths of her creatures! So very recently, the soul, alone, had been asking for a Friend who might relieve her solitude, and now she recognized, in all those calls, the voices of a hundred friends inviting her from without!
Thus did my soul emerge from her first immobility, on a day not lost to memory. When she steered her movement toward creatures exterior to herself, her course did not follow a straight line but spiralled outward, plucking her from her centre, leading her further and further away in ever-widening revolutions around the centre. And I emphasize the nature of her movement so that my reader (should these pages of mine ever have one) may follow the soul on her path of love and surmount the obscurity, more apparent than real, of her story.3 I said she distanced herself from her centre in each revolution of the spiral; I say now that, from call to call and from love to love, she went so far away that she eventually lost and forgot herself. In forgetting her own essence, she was converted to the essence of what she loved; a singular being, she found herself divided into the multiplicity of her loves.
VI
If the strings I plucked so vehemently in those days were still faithful to my hands, at this point of the story I would raise a song of labyrinthine loves, a disorderly drunk of a song, tottering like a grape-picker at noon. Tumbling here, getting up again there, never steady on her feet of wind, wondrously lost among her loves, thus walked my soul for so many years. I said that she forgot her form so as to take on the form of what she loved. And, through an astonishing deceit, she thenceforth gave the name “life” to that which meant her own death; in the belief that she was living, she went on dying in every one of her loves. But a science of travel was developing within her: a wisdom based on the negative gesture with which creatures responded to her loving solicitude. For, in creaturely loves, she sought happiness, a terminus, a place of repose; but it turned out that her appetite was not assuaged, nor her pleasure fulfilled. Hence, she now began to understand the failure of her loves. Now, my soul knew her movement was legitimate; and, assessing the situation, she came to suspect the failure was due not to the nature of her movement but to its direction. And she started to wonder now whether her vocation to love might not be incalculably disproportionate to the love of creatures.
Little by little, whether as a result of her fatigue or her maturity in the art of disappointment, my soul began to check her movements, to restrain herself, to tarry. Until she came to a halt by herself at the centre of the labyrinth. And just as the hunter who, upon realizing he’s lost deep in a wood fearfully pauses and tries to retrace his steps, so did my soul urgently feel the need to make the return trip back to her first intimacy. I have already recounted how she strayed from her essence following a centrifugal spiral, a movement that in one sense took her away from her centre, but in another sense maintained her in orbit around that centre and subject always to the law of its attraction. Now I declare that, to that same gravitational force, my soul owed not only the limit of her dispersion but also the will to return, which was initiated according to the trajectory of a centripetal spiral whose effects were not long in showing themselves. For, if the soul had been divided in the multiplicity of her loves, now, upon escaping from the prison gilded by creatures, she was recovering her dispersed parts and reconstructing her graceful unity. And if, in wandering from her centre, she lost intelligence of herself, in returning she found her own image already there before her; facing that image, her mind came back to life, as if for a second springtime of meditation. She was returning: she returned at last. Until finally she was immobile before her centre.
VII
From that point on, my soul knew a state that belonged to neither life nor death, but rather to a frontier position where life and death were both similar and different one from the other. I found myself between two nights: the night below, that is, of the world that I was abandoning and whose forms, colours, and sounds now seemed very far away; and the night above, in which my eyes espied not the slightest sign of dawn. Placed between one night and the other, I say that my eyes never left the second night, as though they were awaiting I know not what future day. For my soul, despite her state of unmoored abandon, felt in a mysterious way that she was a captive, just as though she had chanced to take the invisible hook of an invisible fisherman who was tugging from on high. And finding myself in this state one night, cloistered in my sleepless room and bent over a book of obscure science whose useless characters danced before my eyes, I fell into a deep sleep, in which such marvellous things appeared to me that the recollection of them still leaves my mind hanging in suspense:
I found myself in a strange place, different from any I had ever seen on earth: a kind of barren landscape, cold and gloomy as an astral region. In dreams, I seemed to be suffering the same nocturnal oppression that tormented me when awake, but my suffering was so infinitely subtle that my whole being was but a studious gaze wandering over its own desolation. Suddenly, without clearly understanding, I sensed two attentive eyes staring at me from behind. When I turned my face toward that place, I saw the Man who had appeared to me so many times in dreams. He contemplated me for a long while, clothed more by his own youth and beauty than by his noble garments. And so much mercy did I read in those eyes that my own started to fill with tears. When the Man saw this, his lips parted and he said: “Why are you weeping?”4 I gave no answer, but cried even harder because of the double charity in that voice and in those eyes. Then I saw him raise his arm toward the heights and heard his command: “Look!” Following the direction of his arm, I raised my brow and seemed to see, as if pinned up in the blackness above, a great sphere of glass similar to a heavenly animal in its form and colour, but of such vivid transparency that not a single point of its mass was invisible. And, amazingly, that star had as an axis the naked body of a woman, which commanded the four directions of the sphere: the head to the north, feet to the south, right arm to the east, the left to the west. Nevertheless, I understood in my dream-state that as soon as my eyes looked up toward the prodigious vision, they wanted to lower again, as though they refused to contemplate it. Seeing this, the Lord of the night repeated his command: “Look!” Giving in to his voice, I again laid my eyes on the sphere. And something new happened then: as I studied that enigmatic figure of woman, I felt an ancient disquiet reawaken in my spirit; it came as a flux of voices I’d thought were forever dead, or as the resurrection of the image of happiness I’d interred in the first autumn of my soul. Bygone enthusiasms, lost tastes, warlike fervours, and songs of freshness held sway over me again at the mere contemplation of the woman crucified on the sphere. As a result, in my dream, I was reconstituted, my former being restored, until I was oblivious to the night and to the Lord who had invited me to such marvels. Then a great anguish came over me: I suddenly observed that the sphere was not immobile but in motion around the woman, like a planet on its axis. I watched as the sphere, like the moon entering its waning phase, began to decrease little by little, stealing away my delight in that vision, until the sphere was entirely hidden in the first darkness.
What I felt next is not easy to communicate in language: it was like the end of me, my self’s plunge into some annihilating abyss; and though in the course of my life I’d had several experiences that felt like death, what came over me in the dream seemed the deepest, the most terrible one of all. Suddenly, in the midst of my foundering, it seemed that the voice of the Man, taking hold of me and drawing me up from the abyss, commanded me for the third time: “Look!” And raising my eyes, I saw a halfring of silver, similar to the moon when it begins to wax; little by little it swelled until the original sphere was reconstituted, as though the celestial body I’d seen disappear were again advancing toward another full moon. And this time, it seemed to me, the sphere was not spinning in silence but producing a deep sound, like a bow drawn across a string. And from the immensity of the night, I heard a hundred forms of music rising and falling as they responded to the sound of the sphere, as though, by responding to that sound, all was harmonized in a graceful chord of unity. But when my eyes reached the image of the woman crucified on the sphere, on the cross of its axis and equator, my entire being, all will and understanding and sense, surrendered utterly to her. In truth, she was not the same lady I had seen earlier; nor was she different, but rather something like a sublimation of the other one. But while the woman was not different in and of herself, she differed in the effects she produced in my spirit; for it dawned on me as I watched her that henceforth I would not be able to look elsewhere, because my contemplation was born in her and in her it remained, irrevocably. And I felt that my heart burned in her fire, like fragrant wood; I felt that, in dying in myself, I was reborn in that admirable woman with a life whose savour, though tasted in dreams, will never be erased from the tongue of my soul. Afterward, the spell seemed to break when it occurred to me that the light shining from the woman of the sphere was not hers, but that it came from some sun, not yet visible to me, of which she would be the moon or mirror. And when I removed my gaze from the woman to search in the darkness for the unknown sun that must have been illuminating her, I suddenly woke up and found myself in the dark solitude of my cloister, in the wind that had blown out my lamp and was strewing papers across my table. I remember that a cock crowed in the foggy distance, and that through my window I saw the morning star shining at some thirty degrees above the horizon.
With this dream, I bring to a close the story of my soul in its abstract aspect, in order to recount now the advent of The One for whom I write these lines, and to whom the following paragraphs will be dedicated, as the dawn is to the day or the flower to the fruit.
VIII
It was springtime in Buenos Aires the day and the hour when she first appeared to me; her real name will not be written in these pages, since it was given her at birth by men and women who knew not how to name her in a suitably loving idiom. While I dare not declare that at the hour of our meeting the wisteria and the peach tree at her house were in bloom only for her and me, I shall nevertheless sing praises to the Great Harmony that brings together in a single chord the grace of a woman and the beauty of the earth on the day men call their first, according to the numbers of love.
As I recall, I was in the garden at Saavedra, in the company of the friend who had introduced me, and of the women of the house, all young and of gracious aspect. My friend was talking with the women in one of those Buenos Aires conversations in which clever words are used to both hide and reveal all.5 And I remained silent, smiling at my interlocutors, but in reality given over to the magic of the garden, within whose confines the afternoon and the silence were one and the same person. And there I was, at once distant and near the friendly voices, when the extraordinary creature of my tale appeared on the path of the mimosas: she was approaching as if tarrying, so slow was her gait at that moment precious to memory. But her smile went before her like an emissary. Since her dress was the colour of azure, dissipating in the subtle air, it is no surprise that I took her for a vision and wondered if the afternoon had not been personified in that exceedingly sweet womanly figure. Hearing my name from her sister, she inclined her brow and lowered her eyes in greeting. So absorbed was I in the task of admiring her, and so unusual was the commotion her presence caused in my spirit, that I was incapable of response. However, though my tongue was mute, a familiar voice now rose above the new tumult in my heart; as if finally to answer the vital question my being had been circling for some time, the voice seemed to exclaim: “There is the wing’s direction and the polestar of the dove!”
Fearful that people might notice my confusion, I then made an effort to follow what my friend and the women were saying in conversation. But my eyes could not leave The One (who shall henceforth thus be named). She was smiling in silence, as though she did not yet dare let her voice rise among the mature voices of her sisters; and her regard was turned earthward, a felicitous circumstance that allowed me discreetly to gaze upon her in rapt contemplation, my eyes now seeming to discover their true métier. Her youth was not yet in full flower, but rather the whole of her, in my eyes, hinted at a dawn comparable to the moment of first light hesitating at the brink of day. Space was ecstatic in her body’s three dimensions, time delighted in every beat of her heart, and light found sublimation in her entirety. Seeing her, I could not discern what substantial form or what adorable number of creative power had been incarnated in her fragile clay, but I did understand that it was a number brimming over, a form transcending or overflowing into a kind of beauty whose splendour, uncontainable, preceded her like a messenger, followed her like a shadow, and flanked her on the right as her lance, on the left as her shield. Tall and straight beneath the airy dress concealing her, her form seemed ready to sprout, painfully, like the bud of a leaf that swells and breaks and ventures a new lobe. And as I observed that lifeward tension in her being, along with the stature of her grace, I recalled the friend’s poem, which begins thus:
Tall among women now, the girl
wants the name Wind . . .6
So well did my friend’s image fit her that, never ceasing to look at her, I repeated in mente the two lines of verse, marvelling at how their meaning was only just then revealed to me. For, if Wind was the name that suited her, so then would her foot be wind and so her hand, when it would eventually rise and come down upon the flower of the soul. And at that thought, my soul quaked, as if intuiting in the woman a new heartache, the prelude of another war.
As the happy rhythm of the tertulia intensifed, so did the tumult in my being. And with my attention divided between the voices coming from outside me and the restless and unsettled voices within me, I resolved to get away from there, wishing to measure in solitude the proportions of that new conflict. So I left the house in Saavedra, and, as in a dream, I covered the distance separating that house from my cloister, its habitual four walls. Immediately upon arrival, my soul, secluded in her intimacy, began to reconstruct the image of The One in all her lines, weights, and colours. So perfect was the reconstruction that my soul again trembled in wonder before the image alone; aware of the nature of her excitation, my soul became fearful because she believed she had already lived it to the point of disillusionment, so that now, rearmed within immobility, she might be free of any new anxiety. That is why my soul pulled back for a moment from the sweetness of that new summons and began to reproach herself for her fragility: “What? After such a long journey, you are going to plunge back into the deceitful river of creatures? Will you again descend into the finitude and danger of earthly love, after having attained the notion of an infinite love?” But the voices of alarm could not gainsay the enchanted vision she bore within her. Instead, revolving around that image, she realized that the more she gazed at it, the more completely her will would surrender to it. Meanwhile, night had fallen upon the earth and was peopling my room with shadows. As I remember, I then opened the two shutters of my window, fell back into an armchair, and began to contemplate the vault of the starry sky, where a crescent moon pretended to sail above the little clouds of silver. The spr
ingtime night, its air humid and fragrant as a girl’s breath, brought forth a long-forgotten tremor within me, freshening in some ineffable way the dryness of my soul, as if suddenly inviting her to put forth new buds. From the suburban street a chorus of childish voices wafted up:
Between Saint Peter and Saint John
they built a new boat:
the sails were of silver,
the oars were of steel . . .7
Allowing my eyes to wander over the field of stars, I noticed a tenderness from bygone days stealing back into my heart, nudging it along broad roads to benevolence. And on that memorable night so much mercy seemed to rain down from on high that my eyes suddenly filled with tears, not of anguish, as was usually the case, but tears of relief at the peace brought me by the night sky. Attributing such salutary effects to the revelation of The One, I then turned again in imagination to contemplate her; and resuming my soliloquy, I wondered what might be in store for me, what goodness I would find in that mysterious figure of girlhood.
Recalling the episode of that afternoon, I noted first of all that the vision of the woman in Saavedra had suddenly bedazzled me, as happens when one perceives the light of beauty. As I contemplated her image now, it seemed beyond doubt that her beauty alone could be responsible for the dazzling effect. Moreover, I said to myself, there can be no bedazzlement unless some “splendour” causes it, and I remembered that all beauty was defined as a certain “splendour.” Next, I made two parallel observations. On the one hand, I told myself, all splendour implies a source of the resplendence, which raised the question, What was resplendent in The One? Whence the splendour of her beauty? On the other hand, I observed, her beauty did not dazzle my eyes as material light does, but rather my soul as does intelligble light. Now, given that her beauty was a light I attained through my mind, I reasoned, and that the mind is a power that tends toward the truth, then her beauty could be nothing other than the splendour of something true. To be sure, this last conclusion told me very little, for though I was certain her beauty revealed the presence of something true, I was still in ignorance of the truth being revealed to me by The One. And now I understood the double meaning of the word “revelation,” since her beauty raised a corner of the veil that covered her truth and then let it fall again, as if at once wanting and declining to manifest the truth.
Adam Buenosayres: A Novel Page 46