The traps, my sly traps, could stop one attack at a time, but they couldn’t intimidate thousands of arrogant beasts. Like insects during a drought they rushed on, devouring all they found on their way, blind to fear and indifferent to pain.
The centre of my homestead, surrounded by snares and night fires, was becoming smaller as I retreated under their renewed onslaughts. In the end I hid in my ancient home, its entrance barred with two stones. I watched the animals, greedy tigers and water-pigs, giant eels and spiked giraffes, elephants and timid stags, wolves, horses and cows, I saw their herds and packs crowding in, trampling the ground which was mine, pushing against the rain walls, destroying Amo’s ditches and Eve’s paths, erasing the sacred memory of Adam’s steps.
No child of mine, none of my breed came to my rescue. I was the widow of the earth, and the earth belonged to the beasts. Even the tree-apes who tried to cheat men out of their inheritance, even they preferred to side with the multitudinous armies on four legs. The treemen still had their treetops, but the trunks below were knocked and brushed by the lowing herds on the move.
I wanted to die facing the clear water. I wanted to be close to my lake. With all the strength I had I pushed the stones aside. Into the animal throng I walked, made my way slowly, almost unnoticed by their stupid greedy eyes. No, it mattered little whether I blinded a few of them, or not; they wouldn’t even fall to the ground, so tightly they were squeezed in this enclosure.
Was I descending along my ancient path? There were no paths, no clusters of grass, no bushes, nothing but mud, dust and their dung smearing Eve’s feet. When I reached the lake, bruised by their sniffing snouts and stinking of their bristle, I fell on my knees and greeted the fragrant rushes with my mouth wide open, breathing their green air.
They were my friends, the lake was their mother. I could trust the water and all that grew from the water.
With my lips touching the lips of the lake I cried into the water, and it rippled my cry across its flat surface to the other side, invisible under the haze of the heat.
‘Eve, queen of the earth, summons you, ancient creatures, to come to Eve’s aid.’
Echoes cried with me as I chanted my lament. ‘I am old, I am tired, my children have abandoned me to the abuse of low animals, and I have had to abandon my home.’
Echoes answered echoes, but I heard no creature calling me back. So I summoned them by their names, taking upon me Adam’s authority. I called the giant eels and they didn’t leave the herds of the lower beasts; I summoned the spiked giraffes and none of them left the stagnant stampede, I even uttered the names of the water-pigs which I despised, and they, too, remained with the others. Oh, water, I whispered, take me now, spare me this humiliation. The water kept its covenant with the sky and reflected silence.
I must have fallen asleep.
When I woke up, once more on the surface of the earth which was no longer mine, I knew they had come, two ancient allies, and they took their posts at either side of my lake. Their green jewels shone across the reeds and the sedge from their thick crinkled fins to my creased face, whose ugly image I could see wobbling on the water.
The dragons, the last breathing witnesses of our beginning, had listened to Eve and now they were to guard Eve the old woman, the moonless woman, barren as the ancient life under their shimmering scales.
Now, I found my patch of ground again, untouched by animal hooves, my circle within the lost circle. Here I wished to remain, a species in itself, abandoned by the rest of his creation. I was safe as long as the dragons had jewels on their fins and breathed in the ancient fire from between the skies. Yes, they had to drink. They drank the waters of my lake. One day, how many hundreds of years from now, Eve’s lake would be dry, swallowed in gigantean gulps by the dragons, Eve’s two faithful allies.
The sly old woman had learnt much about animal traps, but the beasts lost their pluck; they would not risk a visit to the dragon lake. Birds flew over my little queendom, soft bundles of feathers migrating from warmth to warmth. I caught one with a hooked beak, and its Wings, yellow and violet, flapped through a dark passage in my memory.
Eve’s thoughts were touched by colours, violet first, then beak-red and yellow, and the thoughts tried a grimace of a smile.
‘I’ll teach you Eve’s speech,’ I said to my prisoner in a loose basket with a hole for the beak. The parrot turned and blinked her eye. Yes, she was a good listener. I told her stories. Of my genesis and Adam’s, of Amo my son-husband and Irda who went to live among the treemen. After each story I told the parrot to repeat my name again and again, so that I could hear it from her beak when the lake was still and the lowing herds asleep on the land they had taken from me. The parrot was a good learner and I didn’t mind her drowsy screech. Like my friends the dragons, I protected my slow deathless agony with frequent sleep. When my dreams were kind, they showed the earth without animals, inhabited by dragons made of ore, and hooped all round with metal.
Then a violent autumn wind sent me the present of a light acorn. I fondly thought it had come from the oak which was my last birth tree, but, of course, no growing thing could have survived the stampede of the animals. I planted the acorn and the rains lent me much juicy water in the autumn and in the spring.
After several seasons I had a child oak of my own, obedient as small children often are. So I taught the obedient oak to stride on its roots in the likeness of those ancient trees which had once protected Eve in her sleep. And the oak grew bigger and walked better in rustling circles around me, the old witch by the dragon lake. Some curious animals risked their muzzles and bulging eyes to stand nearer to such a monstrous ungodly sight. They wagged their tails, they roared or mooed in amazement, and then trotted back to spread tales in their mute wordless mumbling. No doubt the grandchildren of my grand-daughters heard these rumours and no doubt they prayed to their carved idols for my death’s first and final coming. Wasn’t Eve promised death by the big sky idol himself. Oh, yes, they knew that, such things always came down, from sacred awe to fearful piety. Good mighty Sky Man remove the witch Eve from the surface of the earth.
But the good Sky Man never hurried his big mighty ears to listen downwards.
I had, however, a listening bird, the parrot with a patient beak. And now that my tiredness seemed to age each of my senses separately, I couldn’t hear well the sound of my name, screeched from inside the red beak.
‘Repeat my name, listening bird. Lull me to sleep with my sounds. Say Eve, screech Eeeve, please, bird, I am so very old!’
The parrot gaped at me, sideways. I tempted her: ‘I will tell you again about the great King Treeman and your great ancestor, the most clever parrot of them all.’
The screeching began, but it shaped no word. I encouraged the bird, offered her food, and waited all through the night for that one soothing sound. When it came at last, it scratched the icy air up and down before hardening into speech, each word a tap on my forehead.
‘Sstupid trapper, look! you’ve trapped your deathth.’
I looked up. From whose beak was the voice coming? I tried to hold the parrot’s screech within my closing hand. Why not ask the silence overhead, between the two skies?
‘Our father, have you—?’ and I didn’t know what to ask him.
Portugal, 1964
Table of Contents
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
Book One
Book Two
Book Three
Inner Circle Page 17
