You must say nothing, ah-nel. I will hear more, and I will tell you.
Will we understand them and they us?
We will. I do not know why, but I think that, yes, we will understand each other.
Neh-el, I am beginning to understand what the women say …
Neh-el will stop in the doorway and will turn to look at you with the kind of alarm and amazement that are like the division between inside and outside, yesterday and today.
Standing in the entrance to the hut, with the yellow light at his back, he will say:
Ah-nel, repeat what you just said.
I too understand what the women say.
You understand, or you will understand?
I understand.
You know, or you will know?
I learned. I know.
What do you know?
Neh-el, we have returned. We have been here before. That is what I know.
Now the sky is moving. Swift clouds not only bear wind and noise but are possessed of time; the sky moves time, and time moves the earth. Storm follows storm like lightning, flashing and
immediately gone but never preceded by the sound of thunder, the bolts as they fall rip the firmament and rivers run again, forests are inundated with penetrating scents and trees are revived, yellow birds flock, redbreasts, whitetails, blackcrests, blue fantails, plants grow, fruit falls, and later leaves, and again the forests will be denuded, and all this while neh-el and you keep the secret of your resurrected past.
You have been here.
You know the tongue of this place, language returns, but in this moment no one pays attention to you, because the widow of the chieftain’s first son has thrown a mantle of black skins over her husband’s tomb, hurling curses against the second son, accusing him of killing the firstborn, accusing the aged
fader basil
of blindness and powerlessness, of being unworthy to be
basil,
until the company of men with lances bursts into the open space before the house of bones and a young man with black braided hair, large lips, a darting, furtive gaze, uncompromising gestures, and an attitude of new beginnings, and adorned with large metal bracelets at his wrists and stone necklaces around his neck, gives the order to run the woman through: if she loved her dead husband so much, let her be joined with him forever. He is your brother, the widow manages to shout before she is silenced, bathed in blood.
Blood moistens the earth, and she seems to sink into it and become one with the corpse of her young husband.
I do not want to go out, you say, hugging your daughter. I am afraid.
They will suspect, neh-el answers. Go on working as you have been. As I shall do. Do you remember anything more?
No. Just the language. With the language, the place came too.
I knew, too. I knew that we had been here.
Both of us? Only you?
He was silent for a long while, stroking the little girl’s red hair. He stared at the walls of this, his former homeland. For the first time ah-nel saw shame and pain in the eyes of her daughter’s father.
I know how to paint only on stone. Not on earth. Or ivory.
Answer me, you say, your voice low and anguished. How do you know that I was here too?
Again he does not speak but goes out as usual to hunt, and returns with a faraway look on his face. Many nights go by like this. You grow more distant, you cling to your daughter as if she were your salvation, you and he do not speak, a silence more confining than any captivity weighs on you both, each of you fears that silence will become hatred, distrust, separation …
Finally, one night, neh-el cannot bear it any longer, and he throws himself in your arms weeping, he asks your forgiveness: When memory returns you see that it is not always good, memory can be very bad, I believe we must bless and treasure the not remembering, it was because of forgetting that you and I came together, but also—he tells you—the memories of a man and a woman who meet again are not the same, one remembers some things the other has forgotten, and the other way around, and at times we forget, because the memory is painful, and we must believe that what happened never happened, we forget what is most important because it may be the most painful.
Tell me what I have forgotten, neh-el.
He did not want to go in with you. He led you to the place, but once there he took the girl with the red hair and black eyes from your arms and told you that he would go back to the hut so no one would suspect … And to save the girl? you wondered, wanting to ask.
Yes.
You saw a small hillock of baked earth covered by tree branches, hidden by them. This mound had a hole in the top, and many branches overhanging it and thrusting inside. There was another hole at ground level.
That was how you went in, on all fours, taking a while to grow accustomed to the darkness but slowed also by the pungent odors of rotted herbs, discarded pods and husks, old seeds, urine and excrement.
You were led by the rasp of irregular breathing that sounded as if it came from someone caught unawares between wakefulness and sleep, or between dying and death.
When, finally, your eyes adjusted to the shadows, you saw the woman sitting propped against the concave wall, covered with heavy skins and surrounded by ruminants with gray backs and white bellies, companions to the woman, whose smell was strongest of any. You recognized that smell from your life on the other shore, where small herds of musk deer took cover in the caves and filled them with that same secreted scent of nightfall. Fruit peels and gnawed bones were also scattered near the woman.
She was watching you from the moment you entered. Shadow was her light. Motionless, she seemed not to have the strength to move from that hidden place in the forest outside the ivory stockade.
Ah-nel could not see the woman’s arms beneath the coverings. The appeal in her eyes was enough to call you to her side. The ceiling was higher in the center than at the sides. You knelt beside her and saw two tears roll down her wrinkled cheeks. She did nothing to brush them away. She kept her arms beneath the skins. You wiped the tears, using the ends of her long wiry white
hair to dry the face with gleaming eyes set deep above wide nostrils and a large, half-open, drooling mouth.
You came back, she said to you, her voice trembling.
You nodded yes, but your eyes betrayed your ignorance and confusion.
I knew you would come back. The aged woman smiled.
Was she truly so old? She seemed old because of the wild white hair that hid much of her strange, emotional face. And she seemed old because of her posture, as if her very weariness was proof that she was alive. Beyond the fatigue you had sensed when you saw her, there could only be death.
She told you she could see you clearly because she was used to living in darkness. Her sense of smell was very sharp, her most useful sense. And you would have to speak in a low voice, because living in silence she could hear the most distant murmurs, and loud voices frightened her. She had unusually large ears—she pulled back her hair and showed you a long, hairy ear.
Pity me, the woman said suddenly.
How? you murmured, instinctively obeying.
Remember me. Be kind.
How shall I remember you?
Then the woman pulled a hand from beneath the skins bundled around her.
She extended an arm covered with thick gray hair. She held out a closed fist. She opened it.
In the rose-colored palm lay something ovoid in shape, worn down from constant handling yet still recognizable. You could make out, ah-nel, the shape of a woman with a small, nearly featureless face and an ample body with generous breasts, hips, and buttocks narrowing into legs and tiny feet.
The figure was so old and eroded that it was becoming transparent. The original forms were by now egg-smooth.
She placed the object in your hand without a word.
Then, immediately, she put her arms around you.
You felt her wrinkled, hairy skin against your pulsing cheek. You felt both repulsion and affection. You were blinded by the unexpected and unfamiliar pain from the center of your throbbing head, a pain identical to the effort you were making to recognize this woman.
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.