The Tale of Gold and Silence
Page 15
“But I’m strong.”
“You’re weak; the strong ones are me and him; the strong are those who surpass the ages of weakness, those who live for a nurturing ideal, in a determined search. You’re weak, I tell you, like all those your age, and you need to live next to the strong, and mature in their company, if you want to shore up your debility until your shoulders are firm enough. If not, go dream among the reeds; like you, they sway at the whim of the wind, and are content when it draws music from them.”
“Oh, Master Asverus, you don’t know—you can’t know—that beauty is a game of the unexpected. It seems to me that I’ve known Rizpah for centuries, that my anterior soul knew her in other existences. Our souls have surely already exchanged, in previous lives, so many words and oaths of love that it doesn’t seem possible to recommence them again. She’s a strong woman, I don’t doubt, but for how long, how many times, has my pretended debility been supported by her? Lives break, however, and existences recommence. I want a new life, without the memory, without encountering the memory in every new hour. Don’t you believe that we have already lived so many times, elsewhere, differently, and that it’s necessary to begin anew, no matter what—happiness, pain, torture—but something else, fresh waters.”
“Dreams! But if you’ve lived before; if you’ve encountered Rizpah in anterior lives, do you not see that encountering her now, on the threshold of your existence, brought by fatality under the same roof where you live, is a sign; a superior will is giving her to you.”
“It enchains me, then.”
“Does impenetrable necessity manifest itself in any other way than instructions and bonds? Whatever you want, whatever you do, whatever you dream, or whatever you flee, you’re the prisoner of the gracious face of your destiny. Do you think that, at your request, the songbirds of the world would chirp a different song, that the icy northern stars would dress in red robes, that the song of the church over there would resound with tender delight, that death would no longer be a miserable skeleton, that the steel-clad hearts of men would soften, that people would no longer hunt for gold with brutal actions or honeyed words, that flattering voices would cease to resound in white palaces? Can you not see in opposition to your design the file of monks, the file of priests, the file of soldiers, and the laughter of the crowd, a thousand open mouths, and two thousand hands full of stones—and can you believe that your idol will perceive your dream?”
“She has already perceived it.”
“Momentarily! Can your dream, pure and radiant now, but which you will soon crumple between your angry fingers, remain radiant and new for long? Dread that you might live it all your life, in some corner of an unknown lair, alone with despair, with a parody, a withered flower, an old smile that will no longer be anything but a subject of the harshest sarcasm—that which one addresses to oneself.”
“No. I’ve thought about it; I shall attempt the adventure of happiness. However far I might fall, my objective will have been beautiful.”
“So much the worse,” said Asverus.
II
In the little room, Rizpah is spinning; her dull face is shining, amid her broadly curled black hair, with the soft gleam of a mirror behind gauze, and her large black eyes have the soft languor of night over Eden. Her robust grace is as slender as a young tree, and her lips are roses in the heart of a flame. Her rather high forehead, the fine and proud bridge of her nose, and the genteel nostrils give that face a character of splendor that is almost august and heroic; her frank gaze is like a joyful fire, and the song of her intelligence rides a long way, a very long way, over beautiful plains of promise, toward a horizon of gilded cupolas, toward a fête of odorant flower-baskets.
She is alone, and the familiar things nearby seem to be admiring her.
Asverus comes in.
“Are you looking for Samuel?”
“No, I wanted to talk to you. What is Samuel doing?”
“Oh, he dreams, he dreams, he makes himself suffer.”
“Why?”
“He searches the white clouds, he meditates, disappoints himself. He suffers, and I suffer in consequence.”
“You still love him?”
“Yes.”
“And what about him?”
“If he doesn’t love me at present, he’ll love me forever. When he has gazed at the world and the white clouds, he’ll come back o me.”
“He’ll suffer.”
“Then I’ll console him.”
“Suffer a great deal.”
“Then I’ll cure him.”
And Rizpah resumes spinning, her eyes darkened, but as if words of hope are passing precipitately and silently over her delicate lips, which seem to be counting the turns of the wheel.
Chapter Two
YOUNG AND OLD VOICES
I
The days are woven with black and white threads.
The shuttle of time mingles them indifferently
beside the clock where the cadence of the hour is slow
and yet brief.
The sand on the river bank trots quickly beneath the autan
and whirls like a thousand tiny fleeting sphere;
it is the same sand and the same loquacious water
that are always juxtaposed without moving a handspan
but seem nevertheless to be running.
The slow sails of ships on the blue-tinted horizon
make haste, and a hundred willful arms are braced
against the soft liquid wall of the greenish water;
the ship arrives, the ship departs. It remains
on the same droplet of water, which dies
in the same place, and swells and swirls
and also dreams of a long journey.
The fire that sputters in the hearth,
imagines climbing up
immense, to the blue-tinted ceiling
of the sky, and heaps itself on the floor of the hearth
in gray ash,
in gray ash,
As gray as my temples and my dirty hands
which leave in the morning for the maternal Earth
and return in the evening to the eternal Earth
and curl and knot like roots
that throw a gleam of gold and green into ravines
and winter arrives, hiding in the soil that they hollow out.
Ash, O infinite word, O eternal refrain.
Thus, in the little suburban house with the low ceiling, from the gray beams of which hung the copper lamp, next to packets of dried herbs, the serene old mother sang the old unforgotten song in a quavering voice, and Rizpah, who was spinning beside her, took up the refrain, while the old woman’s spindles rotated monotonously.
I hear the voice of my beloved,
He is coming down from the hills
His face mingles with the scarlet dawn
and I shall soon wipe away the dew
From the hair hanging over his forehead.
He is coming down from the nearby hills.
He is bringing me red roses
I await him with large lilies
and pink roses gathered
from the garden I keep for him.
I hear the voice of my beloved
Hastening toward my mouth
I hear his rapid gliding steps
rapid beside the water-tanks
where the women, to draw water,
incline their smooth and smiling bodies.
A more solar glare lights up my rings
for the eyes of his soul rests thereon
at the moment when our fingers pluck a white rose;
the fires of the Sun stop at my threshold
and amid the shade and water of the perfumed yard
where my desire waits for the scarlet to arrive
amid the white marble and scarlet pomegranates
and vines of hope and strength the color of the sea,
I shall hold him captive and joyful, and the bitter herb
of absence
will wither between the stones.
I hear my beloved coming.
And the old woman, weary and quavering, took up the refrain again, the spindles continuing their monotonous sound.
It is withered, the city that shone like a rose
in the midst of a garden of perfumed cities,
the dust stains it gray, the pearl-colored city
amid the golden sand and sapphire sky.
The powdery road
By which long caravans once came
Laden with balms and manna
Toward the palace of your kings
Jerusalem.
The columns of the temple lie amid the stone
and the voice of prayer is extinct
that rose up toward a lovely tree
toward the azure,
and the doors of sanctuaries
lie, touched by the fingers of rust,
and from the frescoes of the walls
the vultures have pecked
the verses of truth
and the lines of beauty,
and cracks run over your marbles,
Jerusalem.
The door opened abruptly, and Samuel came in, gilded by the abrupt glare of a beam of sunlight, gleaming with youth by comparison with the somber gray room where Rizpah’s beauty, facing him, was attenuated and vivid crimson colors ran over the objects.
The shadows of the room were pierced with golden streaks by an entire lacework of festival foliage, and he cried: “Mother, Jerusalem is everywhere where there is sunlight and happiness!”
But against the keen, noisy and sonorous breath that came from the city, the two women remained mute and somber.
II
On summer evenings, old Ezra admitted Master Asverus and Samuel to his garden, which descended a gentle slope toward a slow silent canal, in order that they might savor the mildness of the hour in his company. That bushy garden of broad laurels, tall linden-tress and cradles of meticulously-tailored foliage, beautiful with rare flowers, seemed a well of coolness when the rosy vapors—the reflection of the sunset—transfused the faded blue of the sky.
On a grassy bank beneath the spreading branches, whose leaves were amorously nibbled by a light wind, they listened to the silence invading the city, obliterating one by one the sounds of a soft embrace, and then, having crept up to the level of the market stalls, climb along the houses to dominate the exhausted city, formidable in its quietude, that place abandoned to dreams and so much inaction and the subtle poison of fatigue that stops the movement of the body.
One might have thought that the garden was far from any city, apart from any epoch, devoid of any neighbors, on the shore of some enigmatic infinity, and in a shadow that no other light could penetrate but that of the Moon and the stars. The three men conversed in a leisurely manner in low voices, emptying a few cups.
One evening, as calm, as fine, as perfumed and as uniform as any other fine summer evening in that enclosure of saps and meditation, it seemed to Samuel that his cup escaped from his fingers and that he was gazing with dreaming eyes at an ancient landscape familiar to him, but which he had forgotten for a long time, and which, in the long deployments of its palm-trees, its terraces and its profound thickets with golden fruits, was saying to him: do you recognize me?
In the background, endless stairways rose up toward enormous towers crowned with thick obscurity, and from that altitude of dream solemn voices were shouting: “Truth! Truth!”
And one more solemn voice replied: “The great fires are not yet lit; and one senses that numerous watchers, present and hidden, are searching the horizon.”
When he turned toward someone who was nearby, at ground level like himself, to ask what the strange country was, he saw Ezra and Asverus, but not as he knew them.
Ezra wore a luminous tiara on his head; a necklace of gems scintillated over his white a tunic, bordered in scarlet, and his face was extraordinarily old, furrowed by a thousand wrinkles. His eyes were blazing with an extraordinary youth, a fire of childhood and generosity. Asverus, thinner and more tanned than Samuel had ever seen him, seemingly robust, his hair black and bushy, clad in a coarse, dark robe, was talking to him, and they were both looking toward the high towers.
A tall old man was coming down the steps, who was carrying something like a large luminous vase in his hands, and Ezra and Asverus took a few steps toward him—but in a strong gust of wind, the luminous vase went out like a lantern.
With infinite sadness, Ezra and Asverus watched a kind of opaque and murky wall veiling the stairways, the tall towers and the deep thickets full of golden fruit, and the darkness grew, becoming ominous, while in the distance—far away—denatured like a feeble echo, the voice repeated: “Truth! Truth!”
The reply was almost imperceptible, with so much weariness, its tone neutered by distance, little more than a whisper: “The great fires are not yet lit.”
Samuel thought he saw himself kneeling before Ezra; it was his own face, and the rhythm of his body, but clad in a long and archaic white tunic. Ezra looked at him with a kindly expression; then the darkness invaded the last terrace of the unknown country, and it seemed to him that he woke up after a long absence of his soul.
Ezra and Asverus were beside him, mute.
Then, getting up and adjusting his long black velvet cloak, Asverus said: “Seigneur Ezra, I shall leave you; tomorrow I have to supervise the departure of one of my ships from the port.”
He made his farewells, and Samuel followed him.
PRINCESS MARIE’S CASTLE
Already, as she was a little more than a child but not yet a young woman, Princess Marie often said: “I would like to have a castle like my soul, a castle made in the appearance of my soul. I’m sure that an important person, when she is rich and powerful, especially the daughter of an Emperor, can have a castle built on the model of her soul. I’m sure that the fortunate who have reached Heaven by means of martyrdom or bounty possess, beyond the clouds, in the great expanses where the earth is blue, where white clouds run instead of our springs, have castles built according to the model of their souls, entirely enveloped by marvelous flowers that are the colors of their souls. For souls have a color, like everything else in the world; is it not said that green leaves are the color of hope, and yellow ones the color of glory, violets the color of mourning and red flowers the color of love? Souls have a color, and one glimpses the color in one’s soul on sleepless nights, when the feeble gleams of night-lights have, by chance, not gone out, and one sees them better in dreams, when they float above you of their own accord, in the pathways of the great infinite garden, and one knows that, at a sign from them, the roofs would open and let them escape toward the stars.”
And when the women whose duty it was to augment her wisdom asked her: “What color is your soul, then, Princess?” she replied: “You’ll see when I’m grown up, and I build the castle of my soul.”
The Emperor—who was a tall and solid soldier with a gray beard, who loved playing with his children between wars, and hiding in order to give them a scare and console them immediately—having also questioned her, she replied: “My castle will be similar to yours, and dissimilar; it will have neither the same form nor the same color, but I think that it will be in the same land.”
Then she had run away, laughing.
When the Emperor caught up with her, he tried once again to sit her on his knees and interrogate her; she wanted to tell him the fine story of the child who found two horseshoes.
“Poor Pierre had found a horseshoe. He hung it on the wall in a corner of his little room. He had a little room because he was very small. The next year he found another horseshoe. Then he worked hard until he had made enough money to have the two horseshoes welded together. Then he worked hard until he had enough money to have his two horseshoes gilded. Then he wanted to wear them like a crown, but as his head was very small, the gilded horseshoe crown kept falling on to his shoulders, so that he no longer had a crown but a necklace.
“Annoyed, little Peter had his horseshoes recast and made smaller, so that they became a true crown for his head. But as the horseshoe had been altered, it no longer brought good luck to everyone, but none at all, any more than any other piece of metal, and as poor Peter wore rags and a crown at the same time, everyone made fun of him, which irritated him. It is even said that he was hanged on a great horned gibbet, by a very surly executioner, with a face covered with scars. Is that true, Father, the story of little Pierre?”
She ran away laughing, and the Emperor could not discover any more, for he was called away that day, perhaps to recommence the war.
When the wise chaplain charged with teaching her to read and write enquired in his turn about the future castle, he received this explanation: “The castle won’t contain anything black that might be reminiscent of ink, nothing white that might be reminiscent of parchment, nothing gray that might be reminiscent of sand; people there will laugh, they will dance, they will sing, they will recite verses.”