So it was that they told us one day, as if it were a revelation whose consequences one had to weigh before bringing it to light – not wanting to disturb the fragile equilibrium already in place – they told us that despite its apparent eminence, there were times when the sun could not stop night from falling right in the middle of the day. We had not seen this exceptional occurrence, this enormity, and it was very hard for us to imagine such a thing. But the phenomenon had been brought to our attention, and even if it was hard for us to imagine, we could not ignore it. This revelation, and that’s what it was, aged us by a few years. We feared that such a night might catch us unawares when we were far from home tending the sacrificial goat where it grazed, or were absorbed in a game. And what would we do if that happened, how would we deal with this night, sudden as the death that sometimes caught up with its victim, we were told, while he was walking along or working away, with no hint of its imminent arrival? That made us even angrier with the sun; this business of night in the middle of the day was one more caprice, more dust in our eye. We children discussed the matter, but we couldn’t decide on the kind of behaviour that would be appropriate to such a catastrophe. What could we do if faced with an unsuspected night, a night that would arrive with no other warning than its falling in the middle of the day?
The revelation shook our faith in the sun. It meant that it could not fulfil its primary task. Up to then, at least on that point, we had no reason to find fault with it. Day was day and night was night. No beating about the bush, it was decisive. At dawn, there was no more night; at dusk, there was no more day. The day was white thread; the night was black thread. There was no question of one interfering in the other’s life, one taking on the other’s colour, or one throwing a veil over the other. But now we had learned something new. And we couldn’t understand it. How could night fall in the middle of the day? How could it become dark when the sun was in the sky? And how could the sun permit such an act of treachery to take place in its own domain? We had seen black clouds accumulating layer upon layer and spreading themselves out before the sun. We had seen black storms unfurl in the mountains on all four sides, cover the sky and the sun, and let loose on the roofs, the terraces, the woods, and the fields. That took away much of the sun’s light, made the day a little darker, sowed uncertainty among us at twilight; but from this to changing the face of the heavens, so that they went dark, so that there would be night in the middle of the day …
But we had to face facts. What we were told must have happened, and would happen again. It was not one of those jokes for which the grownups, some grownups in particular, had the secret, jokes they tossed our way with malicious delight to fill us with uneasiness and fear. They were informing us of a truth, telling us about something we were going to witness in our lifetimes, one day. And if we had any doubt, all we had to do was ask the grownups in confidence. Knowing about such an event was better than being taken by surprise, they told us. We had to expect, we had to accept that we could be overtaken by night in the middle of the day. And we had to live with an uncertainty that made the sun a being that could stumble and disappear at any moment. It was like the sudden death they had told us about, and there was nothing we could try, nothing we could do about either of them. One more thing to mourn, one less certainty.
The grownups told us that once, in bright daylight, when there were no clouds in sight – no storms, no blemish in the sky, no mist – a black shadow had come out of nowhere and begun to creep across the sun. It covered the sun like a blanket, as if the sun felt cold and sick – covered the sun so slowly that one would have thought it to be at the end of its strength like someone stricken, ill, someone departing this life. Burning with fever and shivering at the same time, moaning, complaining about the cold. Like someone dying, waiting for the angel, asking to be covered with all the eiderdowns, blankets, and carpets in the house. And who, no matter what one did, shivered and burned more and more, leaving us powerless, fearful witnesses.
And could there be any greater fear than the fear of the end of the sun, any greater death than its death? They were there, witnessing the death of the sun, which would be their own death.
Or, some said, it was as if the sun felt sleepy, as if it were preparing itself for a moment of pleasure. For in this slowness there was also the pleasure of letting itself lapse into forgetfulness, the rapture of letting itself be invaded by sleep or by a supreme contentment. Death throes or rapture, we could not know which, with everything taking place so far off, somewhere so inaccessible. But the word had been spoken, and the face of things had changed. Changed were the lives of those who, between heaven and earth, watched things happen. There was nothing to stop night from falling in the middle of the day and plunging everything into darkness.
One of the grownups who had participated in distant gatherings during his adventures in smuggling had brought back accounts so bizarre that they came close to blasphemy, were accused of being blasphemous. Where these gatherings took place, he had told them, people assigned a sexual identity to every denizen of the heavens and earth. For them the angels, the stars, the mountains, the seas, the night, the day, all had a sexual nature, were male or female. And for them the sun was a woman, reported this master of contraband, thereby becoming a master of blasphemy. But he pursued his account to the end, pointing out that we too, in our village, saw the sun, the moon, and the stars as feminine, and wind, fire, and the mountain, as masculine. All of which met with approval.
And so the sun was female for those people under distant skies, just like a cow was said to be female. It shared that female disposition, which was to attract through its radiance the seed of man, the small male seed, making of it, thanks to its inherent nature, living beings, men and women, cows and bulls, billy goats and nanny goats. That little seed, which left no trace if it fell elsewhere, became offspring, thanks to the strength and the inner nature of the woman, and ensured that man and his species would endure on earth. The sun also, through its light, would in this way share that disposition, drawing from the earth the substance that was life. The earth, which was nothing but mud and darkness, became, thanks to the radiance of the sun, a place of colour and life. Through its grace, the sun transformed the darkness of the earth into a place where life proliferated in all its diversity. The earth, which was as dark as the blackness that obscured our heavenly cow, abounded with living things after the sun passed over it. The sun, through its light, transformed the space between itself and the earth into a womb, and what was embryonic in the earth’s darkness grew toward the sun, toward this womb, just as the solicitations of man mounted toward woman, toward the womb of woman, who in her turn perpetuated the species through her nature and her grace.
The sun, feminine in nature, stretched out upon the bed of the sky, afire with longing, burning with desire, toward which there turned, there rose, all expectancy and all desire. It would be the white heat of this desire that would endow all those who dwelt in the heavens and on earth with sustenance, longing, a lust for life, and the means to go on multiplying.
For these distant people, there were two marriages for the woman-sun, said the master of contraband. Those that were ordinary, that were consummated every day, with the earth, and from which our earthly life was born. And those that were exceptional, entered into with that black thing in the sky to engender other dwellers in the heavens. As the sky-dwellers lived longer lives than the earth-dwellers, the rarity of these unions was a consequence of the longevity of the celestial beings.
One only had to see the sun, radiant with desire, ablaze with longing, like a white cow in wait for a bull that would come to it but once in its lifetime. That night in full daylight would be the union, renewed each time, of the woman-sun with the black bull of the heavens, come to stir the fire, to keep ablaze, to keep alive this white heavenly flame that endowed us with life, that bestowed life on what filled the sky. Did not the couplings of cow and bull unfold like those of the sun with the black thing in the sky? That w
as the way the cow in heat attracted the bull, the way the bull approached and covered the cow with its massiveness, the way he lingered for a while and then moved off her like the black thing with the sun.
The sun-woman waited, languishing, exercised her attraction, and the black thing came to her. Because it was out of the question that oblivion, a dearth of pleasure, a kind of death, should have its way with the sun. It would mean the death of everything that lived thanks to its being there, thanks to its light. It was out of the question that a prolonged waiting period should dim its fire, compromise its whiteness. A waiting period to quicken desire, yes, but not to kill it. And so these reunions would each time fan the fire and the sun’s desire, and would perpetuate the light it shed on those around it, those who lived from its light, those whom its light drew toward life.
The union of the sun and the black bull of the skies brought forth stars and heavenly bodies to replace those that had disappeared since their last coupling. As on earth, there was degeneration and regeneration among the dwellers in the heavens. They too were subject to birth and death. Stars died, that we knew. On clear nights we saw stars falling, emptying themselves of their light just as those who lived on earth emptied themselves of their blood after a wound or a sacrifice; they vanished, leaving a luminous trail behind them.
It’s true that we’d already been told that every person living on earth had his star in the sky, and that when one of them died, his star died with him. And so the stars that fell each night and disappeared from the sky in numbers we could count were those whose corresponding beings had just vanished from the earth. When there was a death in the village or in a village nearby, we kept our eyes on the sky to see if we could spot the star that would be falling. And we’d been told that the longer and brighter the trail the star left behind it, the better lit and smoother would be the deceased’s journey to the sky, and the more beautiful and luminous his place in the heavens. The achievements of each individual on earth, the good he had done, would lend their intensity or their faintness to the trail his star would leave behind it as it disappeared. The value of a life, of what had been accomplished in the course of a life, could not be judged by man, but the trail his star left behind could give some sense of the worth of the person who had just passed beyond the stars. According to whether the deceased was close to us or distant, whether he was dear to us or despised, we attributed to him one or another of the stars that had just fallen, without divulging our choices to others scanning the sky. We ought only to speak well of the dead, said the grownups, who, even when there had been ill feelings, asked the heavens to bless the deceased. And so we were reluctant to choose a star with a short trail as the star of one of our disappeared, trying to think of circumstances that would incline us to a star that was more brilliant at the time of its fall. We also tried to see which star among this multitude might be ours, and resolved to work for what was good. Because we wanted to have a brilliant star with a luminous tail when we disappeared, one that would make our return journey an easy one.
And so we were taught that these couplings in the middle of the day would be a renewal, a return to life for the sun and what surrounded it. To stoke the flames of the sun and replenish the stars, for, even if we could not perceive it, the sky had thinned out with the disappearance of stars since the last union. In the brightness that followed these couplings, a certain number of stars and heavenly bodies would be born, in anticipation of the beings who would appear on earth between then and the next reunion. So it was that our stars would precede us in the sky, and would leave it only after our death, to shed their light on our return path. Their ashes would drop into the river that encircled the earth and watered it with freshness and rain when it threatened to dry up from the heat of the sun and the strength of its desire. All of that made for a strange chaos over our heads and beneath our feet. We had trouble knowing where we were. We realized that these couplings, along with the stars, made the sun and the stars and the heavenly bull as mortal as ourselves. There must have been star graveyards in the sky and sun carcasses strewn along the celestial roads, just as we would find them along the roadsides near the village. We didn’t know which way to look. Besides its dust, its whims, and its daylight nights, the sun gave birth and died. It was something we had to accept. Our small death was sleep, and the sun’s was night. For those who experienced a small death, there was still the big one on the horizon. Everyone knew that when there was a storm, large clouds followed on the small.
He who multiplies also dies, we were told. In sowing a seed of birth, we also sow a seed of death. But if the sun had children, why did we not see other suns in the sky? Were its children going to grow up and become suns? Were they going to replace the sun we had in our sky, as children on earth replaced their parents? Or would the sun-cow, after coupling with the black bull in the sky, only give birth to stars and other sterile and childless heavenly bodies, as when mules were born of the coupling between a mare and a donkey?
No one knew. No one could know. Blasphemous thoughts, some said. They added that we had to spare the sun from speculations that bordered on indecency. But now that they had begun, we wanted them to finish the story of the sun, even if they didn’t agree on the cow. Cow or bull, angel or demon, the sun was accessible to no one. If those who wanted to stare at the sun, even to worship it, burned their eyes, so those who wanted to embrace it in an excess of enthusiasm would burn their hands and arms, and those who wanted to soil it with spittle and words would burn their mouths and be reduced to ash. That is how they warned us. But the sun remained in its place, and the grownups picked up the thread of their story.
They then told us that while the sun was covered over in its entirety, it did not, to their relief, remain that way for long. In freeing itself, it freed them from this vise that they thought would be there forever, both for them and for the sun. Now it was warming them again and shining as brightly as before, and that gave them a new lease on life. Once things had settled down, they had prayed together on the village square and prostrated themselves to thank the Creator for the reprieve he had given to the sun, to the earth, to all that lived between sky and earth, and by the same token, to man.
However, no one could say they had been taken unawares. When they were small the grownups in their time had already told them – as those who preceded them had already warned them, and as they now repeated to us – that the sun would find itself covered over from time to time. Not often, but once in a lifetime, it was said. No one understood why or how it would be covered, but they knew it could happen one day, and that it would happen, because from time immemorial it had been observed. They were warned about this strange phenomenon so that when it occurred they would not be disoriented like butterflies when a lamp was darkened. Because only ignorance could let a goat fall from a cliff, make a donkey stumble in the mud; only ignorance could throw a man into disarray when he was being put to the test.
As for this story of the sun as a cow in perpetual heat, this occasional union with the bull in the sky, these couplings with the earth – and as for this pregnancy, this bringing forth of stars and heavenly bodies, the sun fornicating in the middle of the sky with a bull, they had to ask for help and protection from these aberrations. Not only should they not speak of all this; they could not even go near it in their thoughts. It was contrary to everything the grownups of their time had passed on to them regarding modesty, propriety, good behaviour. Only demons fornicated openly and publicly, in the middle of the day, the grownups of their time had told them. And could the sun be a demon? This star that banished what was dark from the face of the earth, granting it heat and light, could it transgress like a demon? Those were thoughts that could only be whispered in ignorance within the skull of man. They had to be put aside in order not to trouble the spirits, in order not to sully a being as pure as the sun, who deserved to be fairly judged by all beings and all things. We had to know that it was compassion and divine generosity that gave rise to the heavens and
the earth and those that dwelt there, and not the rut or the heat of one individual or another. This was the conclusion they came to without heeding any further the master of contraband, who would have liked to talk of the role of love in creation, of breathing the spirit into the body, and of the spirit’s going forth as an act of love, of intimations of the beyond clothed in the delectable garb of the flesh … They didn’t listen, reproaching him for the fact that in his story love was confused with indecency, and indecency was the sworn enemy of both love and beauty.
Those who had news of gatherings in other lands where some sage had also reflected on these strange occurrences brought other interpretations before the village. It was the djinns who had darkened the sun so that it would stray from its path and do harm to humans, they had heard the sages say. And they had decreed how people should behave, should a disaster occur during their own lifetime. Those present had taken this advice to heart and shared it with others on their return. The grownups we knew were aware of what had been said. But as time passed the words lost their sheen, became less vibrant, and settled quietly and inconspicuously into a corner of their memory trove. And when the hour came, it took some time to search them out and bring them back to life.
And so when they saw the sun being covered over, they were at first dumbfounded at the gravity of what was happening over their heads. But they pulled themselves together and, remembering the advice the grownups had given them when they were children, they lit fires in an attempt to bring warmth back to the sun. Seeing it being covered more and more, they lit more and bigger fires. They ran this way and that, urging everyone to fetch more logs to feed more fires. In all the village squares enormous blazes burned, but they didn’t stop the sun from being obscured. While some lit fires, others brought out cooking pots and big metal objects they’d been able to find, and they banged on them with all their might. There arose a din, a clamour, along with the cries and tears of children and women, the panicked animals, the smoke and the flames. In their haste some burned their hands, others the hems of their skirts or jackets. People were running everywhere, screaming, hammering away, hoping to frighten the djinns that blocked the sun, hoping to scare them away. But it was all in vain. They didn’t even know whether it was the djinns that were covering the sun, and if so, whether they heard the noise, or whether, from the sun, their fires were visible to those trying to obscure it. When a fire broke out in a distant neighbourhood, burning fields and crops, it appeared from our village as a redness, like a campfire that no longer gave off light or heat to those a few metres away. Similarly, the loudest commotion from a wedding or celebration in a neighbouring village reached us like a buzzing that didn’t even disturb our goats. The sun must be just as far away, if not farther, than these fields and villages. And djinn or bull, spirit or creature, veil or mountain – nothing fled, nothing moved. Inexorably, the sun was being obscured. The light failed and darkness overwhelmed it.
To the Spring, by Night Page 5