_Toward Another Name for Love (excerpts from a new novel)
(translated from the Spanish)
Nivaria Tejera
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 82 (May 2011)
XVII
When Nerval says that dreams are a second life whose ivory doors separate us from the invisible world, he hasn’t quite fathomed, without trembling, the blind man’s desperate eagerness that is based in hope, in the spark of frail inquiry, in sounding the mystery where man’s destiny must lead.
By the tense glow of his eyes he wants to uncover more than what magical scales and magnifying glasses reveal to us: meaning, that the fragile tissue we are composed of contains essential substances like oxygen, nitrogen, gold, silicon, calcium, and magnesium . . . but that, at a pole beyond the stratosphere surrounding us, certain secret currents (called dreams) escape that corporeal composition to transport us to the other side of the barriers where we remain indefinable . . . Like this black page, this triangular page, this spiral page . . . Each laying out floating passages that prevent him from slipping to the edge of the abyss.
At the end of the garden-jungle always that arm of sea, the back of an immense stretch of sand pointing toward the ocean, the sky, their dual horizon. In front one can see, like the end of the earth, Beniguen, the desert island, inhabited only by seagulls. Unsociable and fertile, between signals and alarms that seem like omens of death, they have made that island their springboard for jumping to the continent.
How to define a desert island? The image stored in memory from passing through there is of a time stopped that repels human presence, but which links together traces of an essential experience. Though almost imperceptible in its intensity, such experience still moves things there.
On this island everything is vertical in its horizontality . . . The tension of the silence absorbs sounds, smoothes them out, polishes them, joining them together and emitting them in its dialogue with the ocean. There is no imaginary arc, on the island, that shapes it at its cardinal points (north to south or east to west), but rather one of front and back, a tense line that embraces its full span when one turns the head to take it all in. The sky passes above the height of the arc and flies higher still until it coalesces into an autonomous space. The ground of the island is shifting sand bristling with rocks and twisted shrubs, earth lashed about, a monumental slab settling after so many jolts. Stone, gravel, husks surfaced, lived, and rest, subsoil absorbing all moisture, vigil of boundless light that survives giving shade to an edge. Plateau slanting between the light and the object, the island. That object there, between the infinite and the infinitesimal, fragile muscle stretched, supporting it. Everything happens on this island like a rejection. And that rejection requires the elements traversing it to unfold their nature, to leave behind the burnt worn-out body, to incarnate another in which the right chords join to prolong it.
Remember . . . From the long and narrow ship that took them away from the continent, from its lower deck, the coast seemed a decomposed face in an infinity of faces, the houses aligned like a single construction awaiting the stranger behind its cracks. Jostled about by the voluptuous waves on a short crossing, they arrived at the island with growing amazement, longing for a precipice that would reveal (as in L’Avventura, by Antonioni) convex mirrors, sliding horizons that slip up the mystery, that strangeness which eludes us.
The island welcomed them from its craggy bluffs, alien, intemporal, between two enormous slopes: on one side the sea, and on the other the plateau wrapped in a thick flight of gulls which began to emit sharp cries resembling signals before the hectic human presence; who knows if they were gathering deposits to improvise a route for us or an opening through their shelter. “It’s a desert island,” someone repeated mouth agape. Not so deserted: in rare cavities the gulls incubate their young which swarmed among the rocks in their first steps toward flight.
Like a Mahler symphony hatched by exorbitant hidden instruments, the silence of the island offers itself in dense, concentrated form. And Veronica absorbs it with the humility and the devotion of a rite, holding her breath, with that passive annoyance in noting how a man is only that, a man, without ramifications to change him, to transfigure him; how natural habitats like this desert island no longer belong to him; how its rocks and bushes are unaware of him. Thus deprived of his hidden privileges, excluded in his fragility, threatened by the imminence of an abstract though latent harm, man withdraws crestfallen to the continent that stifles him.
For now, on the island, they walk in single file, following each other at a short distance, each body like a detached member of the other body, in the shadow of a vast landscape of clouds, all alone. A coupling and a discontinuity is established among them, although the silence of the island annihilates that sporadic convergence. Lost, walking on legs that seem like stilts, half sunken in the sand, each footstep stirs up echoes of their ancient adventures delineating a common point in the interminable journey. But perhaps that common point is the beginning of an abyss.
And it’s as if the body were shedding its obesity, its excess, the parallel path traveled as if that were left over. And each one becomes its singular self, without a mask, without familiar gestures, without a face, without features, without a grimace, without a past . . . as if, step by step, they were starting to turn into polished stones, into pieces of granite, into rubbings, into weatherings, into wild vegetation, into stars set loose, into shifting sand, into ISLAND.
She knows that from one moment to the next night will fall over them. Although time seems to have stopped in the splendor of the dusk. It is a lasting irremovable half-light, ecstatically prolonged in other hours, it lies over the bushes, the rocks, the gravel in the inert slab. Its splendor confronts the wind, attenuates it. If she were able to advance (still trembling with fear), she might chance upon a refuge of gulls, scrambling among them like one more layer of the island.
And frightened by this chimera she starts to run stumbling over hollows in the sand and pointy stones (with signals of alarm that seem like omens of death) shouting to the gaping procession that never again would she return to these deceptive deserts, never again never again never again never againnnnnnnn . . .
XXIII
Veronica picks up the pages scattered on the ground, reads them, rereads them . . . Following the sense of the lines she threads the fragments of words between the end and beginning of the pages breathing the air that seems to resist penetrating her nostrils . . . She breathes forcefully to animate that essential current of life . . .
. . . She bends over to pick them up because they resist, clumping together, obstructing the imperious desire to absorb them again letter to letter, to examine their signs, the significance of so many messages that go off in their own shady and slippery directions, abrupt passages among which her trembling body slides in slow motion beneath the weight of those pages made opaque by time where she would struggle to define, interpret, capture (with an automaton’s touch detonator of madness) the unhinged senses of a demonic archangel: that menacing pull adrift, lubricious wizard in insidious flight segregating death as if it were life . . . as if life alone could incubate death as if death were the only thing to extract from life.
She closes her eyes to remember . . .
. . . And once more she feels a boundless gratitude ascend to her brow, a surprise so forceful and fleeting that it becomes unbearable And it’s as if the deafening roar of the rising river could cover again that parcel of lost and always found authenticity . . .
. . . It is the mind consumed in the art of evoking Andrea so that she emerges from that Nothing into which her own identity was transformed, tracing of illusory images reproduced indefinitely . . .
. . . Soon we shall be, even today I would like to tell her, space and wind . . . soon we shall be stone and step, foam and sand . . . And at nightfall, at the vast supper, at that hour when the spirit closes up in itself and objects fall soundlessly and bodies float about, we shall be shadowy rainbow and night crystal suspended from one point to the other in the arc of those two minuscule cities stranded on the shores of the eye . . .
From this ambiguity of the past emerges her force, the shrewdness of guileless pride that nourishes her only freedom . . .
. . . But we must go through a door, must push that door and gaze at the night, the abyss that it shelters and not disguise its blackness . . . There is a limit-moment when this becomes necessary, because we cannot keep denying that night devoid of place, direction, volume . . . Our freedom depends, as well, on possessing that creature such as it is . . . And it demands more abandon, more nakedness, more atrophy of language, more absence of history . . .
. . . Because the time has run out for creating history. For knowing ourselves in our limits . . .
All that remains is the void serving as a medium of expression . . . And only in that void---she feels vaguely---does life reside, what it conceals of clarity, order, inexhaustible beauty . . .
(translated from the Spanish)
Nivaria Tejera
published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (New York) 82 (May 2011)
XVII
When Nerval says that dreams are a second life whose ivory doors separate us from the invisible world, he hasn’t quite fathomed, without trembling, the blind man’s desperate eagerness that is based in hope, in the spark of frail inquiry, in sounding the mystery where man’s destiny must lead.
By the tense glow of his eyes he wants to uncover more than what magical scales and magnifying glasses reveal to us: meaning, that the fragile tissue we are composed of contains essential substances like oxygen, nitrogen, gold, silicon, calcium, and magnesium . . . but that, at a pole beyond the stratosphere surrounding us, certain secret currents (called dreams) escape that corporeal composition to transport us to the other side of the barriers where we remain indefinable . . . Like this black page, this triangular page, this spiral page . . . Each laying out floating passages that prevent him from slipping to the edge of the abyss.
At the end of the garden-jungle always that arm of sea, the back of an immense stretch of sand pointing toward the ocean, the sky, their dual horizon. In front one can see, like the end of the earth, Beniguen, the desert island, inhabited only by seagulls. Unsociable and fertile, between signals and alarms that seem like omens of death, they have made that island their springboard for jumping to the continent.
How to define a desert island? The image stored in memory from passing through there is of a time stopped that repels human presence, but which links together traces of an essential experience. Though almost imperceptible in its intensity, such experience still moves things there.
On this island everything is vertical in its horizontality . . . The tension of the silence absorbs sounds, smoothes them out, polishes them, joining them together and emitting them in its dialogue with the ocean. There is no imaginary arc, on the island, that shapes it at its cardinal points (north to south or east to west), but rather one of front and back, a tense line that embraces its full span when one turns the head to take it all in. The sky passes above the height of the arc and flies higher still until it coalesces into an autonomous space. The ground of the island is shifting sand bristling with rocks and twisted shrubs, earth lashed about, a monumental slab settling after so many jolts. Stone, gravel, husks surfaced, lived, and rest, subsoil absorbing all moisture, vigil of boundless light that survives giving shade to an edge. Plateau slanting between the light and the object, the island. That object there, between the infinite and the infinitesimal, fragile muscle stretched, supporting it. Everything happens on this island like a rejection. And that rejection requires the elements traversing it to unfold their nature, to leave behind the burnt worn-out body, to incarnate another in which the right chords join to prolong it.
Remember . . . From the long and narrow ship that took them away from the continent, from its lower deck, the coast seemed a decomposed face in an infinity of faces, the houses aligned like a single construction awaiting the stranger behind its cracks. Jostled about by the voluptuous waves on a short crossing, they arrived at the island with growing amazement, longing for a precipice that would reveal (as in L’Avventura, by Antonioni) convex mirrors, sliding horizons that slip up the mystery, that strangeness which eludes us.
The island welcomed them from its craggy bluffs, alien, intemporal, between two enormous slopes: on one side the sea, and on the other the plateau wrapped in a thick flight of gulls which began to emit sharp cries resembling signals before the hectic human presence; who knows if they were gathering deposits to improvise a route for us or an opening through their shelter. “It’s a desert island,” someone repeated mouth agape. Not so deserted: in rare cavities the gulls incubate their young which swarmed among the rocks in their first steps toward flight.
Like a Mahler symphony hatched by exorbitant hidden instruments, the silence of the island offers itself in dense, concentrated form. And Veronica absorbs it with the humility and the devotion of a rite, holding her breath, with that passive annoyance in noting how a man is only that, a man, without ramifications to change him, to transfigure him; how natural habitats like this desert island no longer belong to him; how its rocks and bushes are unaware of him. Thus deprived of his hidden privileges, excluded in his fragility, threatened by the imminence of an abstract though latent harm, man withdraws crestfallen to the continent that stifles him.
For now, on the island, they walk in single file, following each other at a short distance, each body like a detached member of the other body, in the shadow of a vast landscape of clouds, all alone. A coupling and a discontinuity is established among them, although the silence of the island annihilates that sporadic convergence. Lost, walking on legs that seem like stilts, half sunken in the sand, each footstep stirs up echoes of their ancient adventures delineating a common point in the interminable journey. But perhaps that common point is the beginning of an abyss.
And it’s as if the body were shedding its obesity, its excess, the parallel path traveled as if that were left over. And each one becomes its singular self, without a mask, without familiar gestures, without a face, without features, without a grimace, without a past . . . as if, step by step, they were starting to turn into polished stones, into pieces of granite, into rubbings, into weatherings, into wild vegetation, into stars set loose, into shifting sand, into ISLAND.
She knows that from one moment to the next night will fall over them. Although time seems to have stopped in the splendor of the dusk. It is a lasting irremovable half-light, ecstatically prolonged in other hours, it lies over the bushes, the rocks, the gravel in the inert slab. Its splendor confronts the wind, attenuates it. If she were able to advance (still trembling with fear), she might chance upon a refuge of gulls, scrambling among them like one more layer of the island.
And frightened by this chimera she starts to run stumbling over hollows in the sand and pointy stones (with signals of alarm that seem like omens of death) shouting to the gaping procession that never again would she return to these deceptive deserts, never again never again never again never againnnnnnnn . . .
XXIII
Veronica picks up the pages scattered on the ground, reads them, rereads them . . . Following the sense of the lines she threads the fragments of words between the end and beginning of the pages breathing the air that seems to resist penetrating her nostrils . . . She breathes forcefully to animate that essential current of life . . .
. . . She bends over to pick them up because they resist, clumping together, obstructing the imperious desire to absorb them again letter to letter, to examine their signs, the significance of so many messages that go off in their own shady and slippery directions, abrupt passages among which her trembling body slides in slow motion beneath the weight of those pages made opaque by time where she would struggle to define, interpret, capture (with an automaton’s touch detonator of madness) the unhinged senses of a demonic archangel: that menacing pull adrift, lubricious wizard in insidious flight segregating death as if it were life . . . as if life alone could incubate death as if death were the only thing to extract from life.
She closes her eyes to remember . . .
. . . And once more she feels a boundless gratitude ascend to her brow, a surprise so forceful and fleeting that it becomes unbearable And it’s as if the deafening roar of the rising river could cover again that parcel of lost and always found authenticity . . .
. . . It is the mind consumed in the art of evoking Andrea so that she emerges from that Nothing into which her own identity was transformed, tracing of illusory images reproduced indefinitely . . .
. . . Soon we shall be, even today I would like to tell her, space and wind . . . soon we shall be stone and step, foam and sand . . . And at nightfall, at the vast supper, at that hour when the spirit closes up in itself and objects fall soundlessly and bodies float about, we shall be shadowy rainbow and night crystal suspended from one point to the other in the arc of those two minuscule cities stranded on the shores of the eye . . .
From this ambiguity of the past emerges her force, the shrewdness of guileless pride that nourishes her only freedom . . .
. . . But we must go through a door, must push that door and gaze at the night, the abyss that it shelters and not disguise its blackness . . . There is a limit-moment when this becomes necessary, because we cannot keep denying that night devoid of place, direction, volume . . . Our freedom depends, as well, on possessing that creature such as it is . . . And it demands more abandon, more nakedness, more atrophy of language, more absence of history . . .
. . . Because the time has run out for creating history. For knowing ourselves in our limits . . .
All that remains is the void serving as a medium of expression . . . And only in that void---she feels vaguely---does life reside, what it conceals of clarity, order, inexhaustible beauty . . .