Third moment: The torturer of a clover
‘For sundry reasons and afflictions I find myself enjoying neither the pleasures of the intellect or art, nor sensual pleasures, which are there for the taking. I’m becoming deaf, music having been my greatest pleasure; the long walks amongst the hedgerows are becoming impossible because of a thousand details of physiological decadence. And similarly in other ways . . .
‘This little clover plant has been chosen by me for Pain, out of a myriad others. Chosen! Poor thing! I’ll see if I can create a world of Pain for it. I’ll see if its Innocence and Torture become such that something explodes in Being, in Universality, so that Nothingness will claim and achieve total Cessation for itself and for the whole, for the world is such that there is not even individual death: a ceasing of the Whole or inexorable eternity for everyone. The only intelligible cessation is that of the Whole; the idea that he who had once ‘felt’ should cease to feel, the remaining reality still existing but he having ceased, is a contradiction in terms, an impossible concept.
‘Chosen amongst millions, it befell you to be so, to be so for Pain! Not yet; from tomorrow I shall be an artist in Pain with you!
‘For three days, sixty, seventy hours, the summer wind was constant, swinging within a small angle; it came and went from an accent and direction to a small variation of an accent and a direction, and my bedroom door, its swinging limited by its frame and a chair I placed in its path for this purpose, swung unceasingly, and the shutter of my window also banged unceasingly, at the mercy of the wind. Sixty, seventy hours of the door and shutter giving in minute by minute to their different pressures, and I likewise, sitting or swinging in the swingseat.
‘It’s as though I said to myself, this is Eternity. It’s as though what I was feeling, that recipe of weariness, the senselessness of things, the aimlessness, the feeling of everything being the same—pain, pleasure, cruelty, kindness—spawned the thought of becoming the torturer of a little plant.
‘I’ll practise,’ I repeated to myself, ‘without trying any more to love again, torturing the weakest and most defenceless, the tamest and most vulnerable form of life; I’ll be the torturer of this little plant. This is the poor little one chosen from thousands to put up with my creativeness and zeal as a torturer. Because, when I wanted to make a clover happy, I had had to give up the attempt and banish it from me under sentence of unrecognizability, the pendulum of my perverted and battered will swung to the other extreme, emerging all of a sudden in a contrary mutation, in dislike, and quickly gave rise to the idea of martyring innocence and isolation in order to obtain the suicide of the Cosmos by shame that so repulsive and cowardly a scene should thrive in its bosom. After all, the Cosmos has also created me!
‘I deny Death. There could be no Death, not even as the occultation of one being for another, when for them all was love; and I don’t deny it only as death for its own sake. If there is no death of he who once felt, why should the total cessation of being not exist, annihilation of the Whole? You are indeed possible, eternal Cessation. In you all those of us who do not believe in death but who are not satisfied with being, with life, would take refuge. And I believe that Desire can come to work directly on the cosmos, without mediation by our bodies, that Faith can move mountains; I believe, even though no other being might.
‘I cannot rekindle the lascerating memory of the life of pain I planned, inventing new cruel methods each day to make it suffer without killing it.
‘To skim over the matter, I would place it every day close to but untouched by the sun’s rays and with the meticulousness of cruelty push it away as the patch of sunlight advanced. I watered it just enough to stop it from dying, whilst surrounding it with bowls of water, and I had invented realistic sounds of neighbouring rain and drizzle, which never refreshed it. To tempt and not give . . . The world is a table set with Temptation, with infinite obstacles interposed and no less a variety of impediments than of things offered. The world is of tantalic inspiration; a display of an immense making-itself-desired which is called Cosmos, or rather, Temptation. Everything a clover wants and everything a man wants is offered and denied. I also thought: tempt and deny. My internal orders, my tantalism, was to seek out the most exquisite states of torment without harming life, seeking on the contrary a fuller life, a more lively and excited sensitivity to suffering. And in this I succeeded, making it tremble from the pain of tantalic deprivation. But I could neither watch it nor touch it; my own actions filled me with disgust (when I pulled it up, that night so black in my spirit, I didn’t look towards where it was and its contact was too odious to me). It would writhe at the sound of rain, the moist freshness always outside its reach.
‘Chosen amongst millions for a martyr’s destiny! Chosen! Poor thing! Oh, your Pain would leap over the world! When I pulled you up, you had already been chosen by my yearning to torment.’
Fourth moment: New smile
The radical, intimate formula of what He was doing so wretchedly was the ambition and anxiety of achieving the replacement of the Whole by Nothingness, of everything that there is, that there was, that is, of all the Reality of the material and spiritual. He thought that the Cosmos, the Real, couldn’t survive long, being ashamed to harbour in its midst such a scene of torture inflicted on a member of one of the lower echelons of the weakest and most fragile of life-forms, because of the greater power and endowment of the living. Man tyrannizing a clover! So that’s what the advent of man was about!
The irritation of denial of what has been offered can drive the most thoughtful of men to perversity. Thus the cowardly martyrdom, the disgusting satisfaction of the greater power in the treachery towards a minimal life.
He conceived of the equal possibility of Nothingness and Being, and thought a total substitution of the All-Being by the All-Nothingness plainly intelligible and possible. He, as the highest of Life Consciousness, as a man, and a man who is exceptionally endowed, was the one who could, in an ultimate refinement of thought, have found the mainspring, the talisman which could choose the option of Being for Nothingness, option or replacement or ‘pushing out’ of Being by Nothingness. Because truly, tell me if I’m mistaken, isn’t it true that there is no mental element which can decide that Nothingness or Being differ in the possibility of being in some degree; is it not entirely possible that Nothingness should exist instead of Being. This is true, evident, because the world is or is not, but if it is, it is causalistic, and thus, its cessation, its not being, is causable; although the mainspring sought doesn’t determine the cessation of Being, perhaps another might determine it . . . If the existence of the World or Nothingness are absolutely equally possible, in this equilibrium or balance of Being and Nothingness, a wisp, a dewdrop, a sigh, a desire, an idea, could be capable of pushing the alternative to a World of Non-Being from a World of Being.
One day the Saviour-of-Being would come . . .
(I comment and theorize on what He did, but I am not He.)
But She came one day: ‘Tell me, what did you do that night, because I heard the dampened sound of a little plant being uprooted, the sound of the earth muffling the pulling up of a tender root? Is that what I heard?’
But He felt he was once more in his element after a long pilgrimage in search of the answer, and he burst into tears in Her arms and loved her once more, immensely, as before. They were tears which hadn’t been shed for ten or twelve years which swelled his heart, which had made him want to blow up the world, and as he was reminded of the little scream, the humbling murmur of vegetable pain, of a torn rootlet, that was it! what his nature needed so that tears, overflowing, should rinse his entire being and return him to the days of his abundance of love . . . The suffocated scream of a suffering root in the earth, just as all Reality was able to decide towards Non-Being, was able to change His entire inner life.
I believe in it. And what the whole world believes is much more than I say I believe in—who is judged by their beliefs?—therefore don’t accuse m
e of an absurd rashness in belief. Any woman believes that the life of her beloved can depend on the wilting of the carnation she gave him, if her beloved forgets to put water in the glass she once gave him. Every mother believes that her son who leaves with her ‘blessing’ departs protected from evil; every woman believes that what she prays for fervently can overcome fate. Everything-is-possible is my belief. Thus I believe it.
I am not deceived by the swollen verbiage of the placid ideology of many metaphysicians, with their opinions founded on opinions. An Event, an event which drives one mad with humiliation, with horror, the Secret, the Being-Mystery, the martyrdom of Vegetable Innocence for the maximum personalization of Consciousness: Man, for extreme non-mechanical power. I believe such an event, without need of proof, merely conceived by human consciousness, can edge towards Non-Being everything that is.
It is conceived; therefore Cessation is potentially caused. We can await it. But the miraculous re-creation of love conceived at the same time by the author will perhaps battle with Cessation or triumph later after the realization of Non-Being. In truth the psychological continuum of conscience is a series of cessations and re-creations rather than a continuum.
I have seen them love each other once again; but I cannot watch him or listen to him without experiencing sudden dread. I wish he had never made his terrible confession to me.
Eternal Life
James George Frazer British social anthropologist, born in Glasgow in 1854, died in 1941. His major work is The Golden Bough (1890-1915). He also wrote The Devil’s Advocate: A Plea for Superstition (1909) and Totemism and Exogamy (1910).
A fourth story, taken down near Oldenburg in Holstein, tells of a jolly dame that ate and drank and lived right merrily and had all that heart could desire, and she wished to live always. For the first hundred years all went well, but after that she began to shrink and shrivel up, till at last she could neither walk nor stand nor eat nor drink. But die she could not. At first they fed her as if she were a little child, but when she grew smaller and smaller they put her in a glass bottle and hung her up in the church. And there she still hangs, in the church of St Mary, at Lübeck. She is as small as a mouse, but once a year she stirs.
A Secure Home
Elena Garro Mexican writer, born in Puebla. Her books include the volume of comedies Un hogar sólido and the novel Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963).
CLEMENTE (aged 60); DOÑA GERTRUDIS (aged 40); MAMÁ JESUSITA (aged 80); CATALINA (aged 5); VICENTE MEJÍA (aged 28); MUNI (aged 28); EVA, a foreigner (aged 20); LIDIA (aged 32).
(Interior of a small room with stone walls and ceiling. There are no windows or doors. To the left, built into the wall and also of stone, some bunks. In one of them, MAMÁ JESUSITA, wearing a lace nightdress and lace sleeping-cap. The scene is very dark.)
VOICE OF DOÑA GERTRUDIS: Clemente, Clemente! I hear footsteps!
VOICE OF CLEMENTE: You’re always hearing footsteps! Why are women so impatient? Always anticipating what’s going to happen, prophesying disasters.
VOICE OF DOÑA GERTRUDIS: Well, I can hear them.
VOICE OF CLEMENTE: No, woman, you’re always mistaken; you get carried away by your nostalgia for catastrophies . . .
VOICE OF DOÑA GERTRUDIS: That’s true . . . but this time I’m not mistaken.
VOICE OF CATALINA: There are lots of feet, Gertrudis! (CATITA emerges, in a white dress as worn around 1865, little black boots and a coral necklace around her neck. Her hair is pulled to the nape of her neck with a red bow.) Goody, goody! Tralala, tralala! (CATITA jumps and claps her hands.)
DOÑA GERTRUDIS (appearing in a pink 1930s dress): Children don’t make mistakes. Isn’t it true, Aunt Catalina, that somebody’s coming?
CATALINA: Yes, I know! I knew ever since they first came. I was so scared here, all alone!
CLEMENTE (He appears in a black suit and white cuffs.): I think they’re right. Gertrudis! Gertrudis! Help me find my metacarpi! I’m always losing them and I can’t shake hands without them.
VICENTE MEJÍA (appearing dressed as a Juarez partisan): You’ve read too much, Don Clemente; that’s where the bad habit of forgetting things comes from. Look at me, complete in my uniform, always ready for any arrival!
MAMÁ JESUSITA (straightening herself in her bunk and poking out her head, covered with the lace sleeping cap). Catita is right! The footsteps are approaching. (She puts one hand behind her ear, as though listening.) The first ones have stopped . . . unless something awful has happened to the Ramirezes . . . this neighbourhood has already disappointed us several times.
CATALINA (jumping): You go to sleep, Jesusita! All you like doing is sleeping:
Sleep, sleep,
The cockerel’s crowing
in San Agustin.
Is the bread done?
MAMÁ JESUSITA: And what do you expect me to do? They left me in my nightdress . . .
CLEMENTE: Don’t complain, Doña Jesús. We think that out of respect . . .
MAMÁ JESUSITA: Out of respect! And out of respect, such lack of respect?
GERTRUDIS: Had I been there, mother . . . but what did you expect the girls and Clemente to do.
(Above, we hear many footsteps. They stop. The sound of footsteps returns.)
MAMÁ JESUSITA: Catita! Come here and polish my forehead; I want it to shine like the Pole Star. Blessed was the time when I ran around the house like lightning, sweeping, shaking the dust which fell on the piano in deceitful torrents of gold; later, when everything shone like a comet, to break the ice of my cubes left out in the open, and bathe with the water full of winter stars. Do you remember, Gertrudis? That was living; surrounded by my children, straight and clean as slate pencils.
GERTRUDIS: Yes, mother. And I also remember the little burnt cork you would use to paint rings under the eyes; and the lemons you used to eat so that your blood would become water; and those evenings when you would go with father to the Teatro de los Heroes. How pretty you looked with your fan and your earrings on!
MAMÁ JESUSITA: You see, child, life is so short! Every time I got to the box . . .
CLEMENTE: (interrupting): For pity’s sake, now I can’t find my femur!
MAMÁ JESUSITA: How inconsiderate! Interrupting a lady!
(CATITA, meanwhile, has been helping JESUSITA to fix her cap.)
VICENTE: I saw Catita playing the trumpet with it.
GERTRUDIS: Aunt Catalina, where have you left Clemente’s femur?
CATALINA: Jesusita! Jesusita! They want to take my trumpet away from me!
MAMÁ JESUSITA: Gertrudis, leave that child alone! And as to you, I say:
worse than my child being ill
is what it has done to her will . . .
GERTRUDIS: But mother, be fair, it’s Clemente’s femur!
CATALINA: You’re horrid, mean! I’ll hit you! It’s not his femur, it’s my sugar trumpet!
CLEMENTE (to GERTRUDIS): Perhaps she’s eaten it? Your aunt is unbearable.
GERTRUDIS: I don’t know, Clemente. She lost my broken collar-bone for me. She loved the whitewashed trails left by the scar. And it was my favourite bone! It reminded me of the doors of my house, surrounded by heliotrope. I told you I fell, didn’t I? We’d been to the circus the night before. The whole of Chihuahua was there to see Ricardo Bell; suddenly a tightrope-walker came out, looking like a butterfly, and I never forgot her . . .
(We hear a bang above and GERTRUDIS interrupts herself)
GERTRUDIS (continuing): . . . in the morning I went to the brambles, to dance on one foot, because all night long I dreamt I was her . . .
(Above we hear a louder bang.)
GERTRUDIS: . . . Of course, I didn’t know I had bones. As a child, one doesn’t know anything. Since I broke it, I always say it was the first bone I had. Life’s full of surprises!
(The bangs follow more rapidly,)
VICENTE (smoothing his moustache): No doubt. Somebody’s coming, we have visitors. (He sings.)
As night casts its shadow
/>
The moon glitters
And in the lagoon
The kingfisher sings . . .
MAMÁ JESUSITA: Be quiet, Vicente! It’s not the time to sing. Look at those intrusive people! In my day, people said they would be coming before dropping in for a visit. There was more respect. Let’s see who they bring us now. One of those strangers who married the girls! God strikes down the humble, as poor old Ramon used to say, God rest his soul.
VICENTE: You haven’t changed for the better, Jesusita! You find fault with everything. You used to be so cheerful; the only thing you enjoyed doing was dancing polkas. (He hums ‘Jesusita en Chihuahua’ and dances a few steps.) Do you remember how we used to dance at that Carnival? (He carries on dancing.) Your pink dress whirled around and around, and your neck was very close to my mouth . . .
MAMÁ JESUSITA: For goodness’ sake, cousin Vicente! Don’t remind me of those silly things.
VICENTE (laughing): What would Ramon say now? He, so jealous . . . and you and me here together, whilst he rots alone, in Dolores’ Pantheon.
GERTRUDIS: Uncle Vicente, be quiet! You’ll be upsetting her.
CLEMENTE (alarmed): I’ve already explained to you, Doña Jesús, that at the time we had no money to move him.
MAMÁ JESUSITA: And the girls, what are they waiting for to bring him? Don’t give me any explanations. You always were lacking in tact.
(We hear a louder bang.)
CATALINA: I saw light! (A ray of light comes in.) I saw a sabre! St Michael is coming to visit us again! Look at his spear!
VICENTE: Are we all here? Well then, fall in and we will arise!
CLEMENTE: Muni and my sister-in-law are missing.
The Book of Fantasy Page 17