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Protista 1
There was a great drought in our region. All the rivers dried
up. All the wells dried up. There was not a drop of water
anywhere. I lived alone in a hut next to the barren fig-tree
which had never been known to have any fruit on it. Now and
then it would show signs of being alive but these always
withered and were carried away by the relentless winds from
the south-east which were dry and dusty and would sting into
the very coolness of our minds. Those winds, they were fierce
and scathing and not a drop of moisture was left.
My hut was on a slight rise on the shoulder of the Lesapi
Valley. The valley was red and clayey and scarred with
drought fissures from the burning sun and the long cold nights
when I lay awake thinking of Maria the huntress who had one
morning taken down her bows and arrows and had gone out
into the rising sun and had never been seen again. But before
she left she had drawn a circle in red chalk on the wall by my
bed and said: 'If the circle begins to bleed and run down the
wall that means I am in danger. But if it turns blue and breaks
up into a cross then that means I am coming home.'
The drought began the very day she left me. There was not a
green blade of grass left. There was not a green leaf of hope
left; the drought had raised its great red hand and gathered
them all and with one hot breath had swept all the leaves into a
red dot to the pencil-line of the horizon where Maria had last
been seen taking aim with her bow and arrow at a running
gazelle.
And twelve long lean years had passed by somehow.
I still had three more years to serve. I had been exiled to this
raw region by a tribunal which had found me guilty of various
political crimes. Maria had been my secretary and my wife and
had for long endured the barren fire of exile with me. And the
sun burnt each year to cinders that darkened the aspect of the region. I began to forget things. My dreams still clung defiantly
to the steel wire of old memories which I no longer had the
power to arrange clearly in my mind. My imagination was
constantly seared by the thought of water, of thirst, of dying
barren and waterless and in the grave to be nothing but
dehydrated 'remains'. It was not so much forgetting as being
constantly preoccupied with the one image of water. And
water in my mind was inextricably involved with my thoughts
about Maria, about my own impotence, about the fig-tree, and
about the red soil of the Lesapi Valley. The years of my life that
had gone were so much time wasted, so little done, so many
defeats, so little accomplished; they were years I would have
preferred to forget if they did not in themselves contain my
youth and the only time Maria and I had been happy together.
And now, disjointed, disconnected, they came back to me
unexpectedly and with such a new grain in them that I hardly
recognised them for what they were. There was the story my
father had told me, when I was barely six years of age, about
the resilience of human roots: a youth rebelling against the
things of his father had one morning fled from home and had
travelled to the utmost of the earth where he was so happy that
he wrote on their wall the words 'I have been here' and signed
his new name after the words; the years rolled by with delight
until he tired of them and thought to return home and tell his
father about them. But when he neared home his father, who
was looking out for him, met him and said 'All this time you
thought you were actually away from me, you have been right
here in my palm.' And the father opened his clenched hand
and showed the son what was written in this hand. The
words -and the very same signature-of the son were clearly
written in the father's open palm: 'I have been here.' The son
was so stunned and angry that he there and then slew his
father and hung himself on a barren fig-tree which stood in the
garden. I dreamed of this story many times, and each time
some detail of it would change into something else. At times
the father would become Maria the huntress; the son would be
myself; and the fig-tree would become the tree just outside my
own hut. But sometimes the son would become Maria and I
Would be the father whose clenched hand contained everything that Maria was.
The scarred hand of exile was dry and deathlike and the
lines of its palm were the waterless riverbeds, the craters and
fissures of dry channels scoured out of the earth by the
relentless drought. My own hands, with their scars and cal-
louses and broken fingernails, sometimes seemed to belong
not to me but to this exacting punishment of exile. And yet
they had once tenderly held Maria to me; and she had been
soft and warm and wild and demanding in, these very same
hands. These hands that now were part of the drought, they
had once cupped the quickening liquids of life, the hearty
laughter of youth, the illusory security of sweet-smelling
illusions. These hands that now were so broken, they had once
tried to build and build and build a future out of the bricks of
the past and of the present. These hands that had never
touched the cheek of a child of my own, they were now utterly
useless in the slow-burning furnace of the drought whose
coming had coincided with Maria's going away from me.
To be
continued |
