Lilith

by J. R. Salamanca

  “I don’t know. I suppose not. I suppose if you want a love that will last forever you have to be in love with sorrow.”

  “You are still speaking with the world’s tongue. If you were perfectly happy you wouldn’t believe that. I don’t think you’ve learned my motto yet.”

  “I have. I can say it.”

  “Say it.”

  “‘Hiara pirlu resh kavawn.’”

  “And what does it mean?”

  “‘If you can read this, you will know I love you.’” I laid my hand on her closed eyes, looking up into the sky. “Those are beautiful words. I wish it had been God’s motto, when He made the world.”

  “No, I’m glad it wasn’t,” she said. “I think if it had been, you would not love me now.”

  I picked up a handful of the yellow sand and, opening my fingers, studied the tiny white and brown and scarlet grains with a kind of forgotten yearning.

  “What does it say?” she whispered, smiling at me.

  “Nothing. Nothing that I can read.”

  “But it is beautiful; we enjoy it.”

  “No, it wasn’t beautiful before I met you. You make it beautiful. You are all the beauty of the world, and all the joy I have in it.”

  I turned toward her, looking for a moment into her eyes. “How do you manage to be always glad? If I take my joy from you, where do you take yours from?”

  “From my people, and my nation. They teach me joy.”

  “But you invented them,” I said, and, when she smiled at me reproachfully, leaned toward her and kissed her eyes. “I think you are a genius.”

  She clasped my head against her breast and after a moment asked gently, “And if my genius were even greater than you thought, would that dismay you? Would you stop loving me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you should find that my capacity for joy is . . . boundless, would you love me still?”

  “Even more; then my love would be boundless, too.”

  “Ah, Vincent, you are sweet to me. Now you are speaking as I wish you to.”

  She began, as she had promised, to teach me her language. This, which knowing my limitations as a scholar I undertook rather frivolously and more to please her than for any other reason, I ended by pursuing fervently, so fascinated did I become by the grace and vigor of the language itself and by the insight which it gave me into the quality of her mind and imagination. I had expected, in keeping with her personality, to find it rather elaborate and capricious, and was astonished by the formality and dignity of the grammar. It is a very strange fact that I have forgotten almost every word of it now and that every day it fades further from my mind, like the rhymes and conundrums of childhood. I can remember only odd phrases, scraps of verse and a few rules of its syntax, although I do recall its quality perfectly—precise, severe, yet swift and dextrous and, in the delicate austerity of its sounds, delightful to speak. Its greatest originality was in vocabulary—particularly its descriptive adjectives—which was far richer than that of English. There were over forty words for colors, almost as many for varieties of odor, and over a hundred for differing degrees and modes of happiness—as if the sensibility which was its source was infinitely finer than that which produced the English tongue, and required a much greater vocabulary to cover the range of its perceptions. There was only one conjugation, and I remember this remarkable fact about her nouns: they were divided into two categories, not of gender, but of darkness and light, each of which was differently declined. Under the declension of Light came such words as noise, thirst, action, man, survival, war, pride, art and life; and under that of Dark were silence, stillness, woman, peace, humility, perfection. This curious division gave to every noun—unlike most modern languages—a moral rather than a sexual quality, and provided fascinating material for speculation as to the basis of her assignment of a word to either category. (I remember, in this respect, that there were two distinct words for beauty, one connoting perfect beauty and one imperfect; the former being relegated to the Dark declension and the latter to the Light.) Throughout the structure of her grammar there was evidence of this same preoccupation with paradox. All words which had an opposite, for example, were composed of the same letters as the antonym, spelled backward (Paral—Light; Larap—Darkness); and a particularly subtle—and rather bewildering—feature was that for certain literary or liturgical purposes a noun might change its declension—that is, be transferred from the Light to the Dark category—thus altering completely the texture and atmosphere of the prose, as if rays of light had been shot suddenly through a shower of rain, producing rainbows of radiantly invoked meaning. Although I never learned—there was not time!—to solve or practice these finer shades of significance, the study of them became a rich and engrossing adventure which gave me, as I proceeded in it, the faint and thrilling conviction that with the final mastery of her tongue there would come a kind of revelation. How fervent, how increasingly certain, this belief became! She would give me a page of text to take home, and I would pore over it for hours, into the middle of the night, by the open window of my room, feeling, with every scrap of progress in my study, that I had come a step closer toward some consummate understanding which lay within its grave and beautiful complexities. I remember with what delight I succeeded in translating the first verse of her Gospels (it is copied down in my journal so that I can reproduce it here, although I have forgotten the original):

  There was Music; and it was entire, eternal, Perfectly Beautiful.

  But He said: There must be an Instrument, for it is unfitting that there should be Music and no Instrument.

  Therefore He made an Instrument, one as might produce such music; but it was Imperfectly Beautiful.

  And I said: This is profane. How can any Instrument be fitted to Music which is Perfectly Beautiful? Therefore I swore my Oath, in which is all my Love: I will unmake this ignoble instrument. In its own music shall this rude harp be consumed, as in a fire.

  I took it to her, spelled out tremulously on one of the lined pages of my journal, watching with breathless suspense while she whispered the English words of my rendition. I cannot express how deeply moved I was when she turned toward me, taking my hand and clinging to it silently, her eyes shining.

  “Is is correct?” I asked.

  “Oh, Vincent, it’s beautiful. It is a great gift to understand and to translate, so perfectly. Almost a poet’s gift. Do you feel closer to me now?”

  “Yes,” I said, my heart burning with fantastic pride.

  By my intense application I developed very quickly a command of her language which, though somewhat halting, was sufficient to allow simple spoken exchanges between us; and this was a source of exquisite pleasure to me. What a sense of private, inviolable communion it gave us to wander in the sunlight on the hillsides, calling out to each other our discoveries of wildflowers, pretty stones or orioles in the rippling chiaroscuro phrases, dappled with alternate consonant and vowel sounds, like the passage of swallows through an arbor. Why have I forgotten them so soon? I remember only this fragment of a ballad that she often sang—one of the oldest, she said, in her literature:

  Tomáslar, Tomáslar, Irian?

  Iría, bar dolán shalár . . .

  True Thomas, True Thomas, do you follow?

  I follow, although the way be wild . . .

  I knew many, then, however; and loved to sing with her. She would droop her head, her hanging hair glowing with an incandescent brilliance in the sunlight, gazing sorrowfully at her laced hands while her soft voice wandered by plaintive half tones over the rueful verses.

  Once, in the shadow of an oak to which we had run for shelter in a sudden dazzling shower of sunlit rain, she paused, crouching against the gray bole and stretching out her hand to touch my own, her face transformed.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Hush! Listen—do you hear it?”

  “No, I don’t hear anything.”

  “The music! Can’t you hear the music?
Oh, listen! It’s my people, singing.”

  I bent my head breathlessly, watching her eyes, which were intensely bright and seemed to plead with me to hear it, too.

  “They’re singing in your presence! Oh, Vincent, I think they are almost ready to reveal themselves to you!”

  I felt a swift cold spray of delight run through my nerves and stood motionless with weird anticipation.

  “You don’t hear them? They’re there—among those boulders—Alman and Roth and Trygg. They’re dressed in silver.”

  “Do you see them?”

  “Yes. Not clearly, because there is so much shadow. But they’re there.”

  I moved my head toward the place she indicated with quick involuntary caution; and it was this movement, I think, which wakened me into a state of shocked dismay—this absurdly stealthy, credulous maneuver, seeking with my eyes the imaginary creatures of her fantasy, which I suddenly discovered myself performing. There was a strange willful innocence about it which I found disgusting; and in a wave of startled indignation I said severely, “I don’t hear anything. There isn’t anything to hear.”

  “Oh, you will soon, Vincent! I’m sure of it. They would not sing in your presence if they didn’t mean you to hear them.”

  The quiet confidence with which she said these words—the very modesty of her conviction—increased unpleasantly the obscure alarm by which I had been touched, and it was with difficulty, and no very great success, that I concealed my discomposure from her for the rest of the afternoon. She was not impatient or critical of my mood, however, seeming to interpret it as one of appropriate gravity at so distinguished an advent, and pressing my hand, when we parted in her room, with an unusual, benedictory-like caress.

  “You frowned. Didn’t you like the way I touched you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mustn’t lie to me.”

  “I don’t know; it seemed . . . possessive.”

  “And you don’t like possessive love?”

  “No.”

  “Why, Vincent?”

  “Because . . . my grandfather loves that way.”

  “I think all love is a possession,” she said.

  Whatever dismay I felt at this occurrence was overwhelmed—like my guilt, my sense of shame, my every misgiving—by the constant delight of her company, the wild, bewildering joy of her favors, the brilliance of her mind—all things, I was now willing to confess, which I could no longer live without. If I had been inclined to condemn my credulity as wanton or fatuous, I was able to condone it by reminding myself that in a world where most dreams are of money, power or personal glory, it is very easy to forgive—even to prefer—a dream which is of a noble, gentle, imaginary race of men, of song, wisdom and delight; and equally easy to forgive—even to love—the maker of such a dream, a graceful, generous, joyful creature who spoke with so true and original a tongue amid the babel of the world.

  So such dark moments of perturbation and self-mistrust were swept aside by golden August afternoons in the fields surrounding Stonemont; by a visit to the county fair which still reigns in my heart with the brazen witchery of carousel music, and from which I have a hundred haunted images:

  Lilith, shrieking in my arms, her hair streaming and her eyes wild with horrified delight, as the two of us go hurtling outward from the earth in a spinning, dizzy, sickeningly exalted violation of all its gravities—then, as the machinery slows, leaning forward to grasp the bar of our “Torpedo,” shaking her head from side to side and laughing with soft hysterical hilarity; Lilith with her lips stained and her cheeks appliquéd with a fine scarlet web of spun sugar, refusing to wipe it off; and a sudden sticky kiss in a canvas-walled passage between two tents: cloyed, candy-tasting kiss, our lips adhering slightly, magnificent maudlin leaping of my heart; Lilith with an apple, glittering, red, shellacked, Original; Lilith crouching at a spigot to drink, her head turned sideways, her eyes closed, making dulcet noises with her dripping lips; Lilith standing with her arm about the shoulders of a little girl with equally golden hair to watch a puppet show, their faces equally innocent, serene, enchanted, gravely offering each other salted cashews—“Why did he hit her with the stick?” “He is very wicked.” “Will he hit her again?” “Oh, I hope not.”; Lilith deformed, hideous, with a ravaged, hollowed face and blighted body, staring at me with steadfast mockery from the mirror of a fun-fair; Lilith sleeping sweetly as a child in my arms, in the shadow of the gray oaks above the cemetery, her fingers clasped about the body of a china fairy with blue, inane glass eyes, a shred of pink, diaphanous skirt and a tinseled, star-tipped wand. (A piece of bark falls in her hair; I pick it out cautiously, staring down at her with wounded eyes.) Oh, my love, my lady!

  Once, when she had signed for an evening movie trip to Stonemont, we went instead to the orchards north of town, and in among the silent, moon-drenched trees, in the darkness with its fragrant reek of fruit-tree sap, with a dog distantly lamenting our iniquity, and her whole body wet with the juice of rotting peaches, I purged myself of a fantasy that had harrowed me for months.

  I DO not know how long I expected this state of heedless rapture to endure—a week, a month, two months, perhaps; I do not think much longer, for although I never gave it conscious consideration (the states of faith, love, ecstasy and so forth being, by their very nature, immune to any awareness of their finitude) I do remember my persistent, barely conscious preoccupation with time, and the constant obsessive calculations which I made: “There are eight weeks of summer left, there are seven weeks of summer left, there are six weeks of summer left . . .” Still, this may have been more a concern with the future complexity and disjunction of our relationship than with its actual ending, for I realized that when the winter came our outdoor idylls would have to be suspended, there would be many less opportunities and pretexts for escorting her, and that we should have to resort to the difficult and dangerous business of arranging indoor trysts. I suppose if I had thought about it consciously at all, I should have felt that with proper caution and barring the possibility that she might be transferred to another hospital there was no reason why it could not go on forever; certainly I had lost all fear of detection, for I had gained, as I say, a bitter confidence in my own duplicity; and I knew that Lilith would never be discharged. She was resolved to resist all efforts to “rehabilitate” her, and I had come to respect her will as greatly as I later learned to fear it. But, as I say, I never made any such conscious estimations; I lived in a trancelike state of joy, with only faintly—ever more faintly—recurring spasms of shame at my own deceptions, breathing an atmosphere which seemed to blow from some far country where I had always longed to go, and which is as lost to me now as the shrill scent of her hair and the sovereignty of her beautiful white hands.

  Certainly I had never expected it to be so soon transmuted into the torment and the horror which I have to describe now—not by her own hand.

  Under the date of the 23rd of August there is written the briefest of all the entries in my journal:

  Maybe if I try to write it down here some of the awfulness will go away, because they say that if you

  I can remember dropping my pen with a shudder at this point and bending suddenly forward over my desk, grinding my forehead against the warm wood in a helpless, prayerlike throe of anguish. A few lines below—undated, although I think it was written about three days later—is inscribed a fuller testimony of my degradation:

  “Nothing exists but joy,” she told me once. “Its servants do not exist, because if they are perfect servants they will be consumed by it.” Conjuror, whore! Nothing exists but perfidy!

  What am I to do? I can see nothing ahead but horror. But I am hopelessly trapped. What will she force me to do next? Will she go on forever, demonstrating this “boundless capacity for joy” of hers? And she expects me to share it! To increase in my devotion to her with every monstrous thing she does. To enjoy these awful things myself, and even help her—willingly—to accomplish them! And the ghastly, the r
eally fearful thing about it is that I may—she may persuade me to! Because the other morning, just for an instant, when I was standing there outside the barn, listening in that terrible way, I felt the faintest stirring of a hideous delight in my heart.

  And afterward, when I was half mad with pain and indignation, when I seized her hair and shook her wildly, flinging her against the wall, she confronted me with this vicious piece of sophistry: “If you discovered that your beastly God loved others as greatly as he loved you, would you hate him for it? He shows love for none of you, and you worship him; I show my love for all of you, and you despise me.”

  I think it has cost me my soul to learn the nature of her madness. It was suddenly so apparent when she said those words; why have I never been aware of it before? She believes—she really believes—that she is divine.

  Good God, what can I do? I must somehow force myself to be calm, to think properly. There must be some way to defeat her. But the terrible thing is that she knows—she knows as well as I—that I will not betray her to them; not to protect myself, but because I will do anything to keep her love. For some monstrous reason I want her more now than I ever did before! Whore, monster, oh, beautiful tender child!