Skip to main content
Outdated Browser

For the best experience using our website, we recommend upgrading your browser to a newer version or switching to a supported browser.

More Information

Fiction

Weaving Dreams

By Ananda Devi
Translated from French by Jean Anderson

And as he gazes at her, their soul-child is conceived
(Henri Michaux, Life Within the Folds)

That day as she finished weaving the few meters that would wind seamlessly around her body, she tied off the threads and eased the fabric from the loom to hold it and marvel at its lightness. Her hands beneath its sheerness had turned blue. She placed it over her face and looked through it at the softened outlines of objects. At her slightest movement it whispered, speaking to her—of what? Oh, of smoothness and heaviness, silkiness and slipperiness, richness and roughness, every possible physical sensation. It told her there was an infinite variety of caresses leading to an infinite variety of pleasures, that the different parts of the body were different kinds of fabric to the touch, and that if she wished, it would tell her . . . She didn’t blush. She knew exactly why it was telling her all this, why it was telling her the geography of her own body. The secret order it was giving her. She answered, listening to the detailed instructions of the fabric against her skin.

She saw the path of the man on his way toward her, striding out over the ground. She saw his tumbling curls, his boyish laugh, his bony ribs, his brimming eyes. She saw his hands. Just as she felt she could wait no longer nor imagine anything more, just as a warcry was about to fly free from her throat, from the darkest depths of the night there came a trickle of blue, seeping into the fabric, slipping into her body. The wind changed direction. Leaves flew free from the trees and blew against the window, clinging there like curious eyes. The time had come. She had been waiting so long for this. For this night unlike any other.

A night that eases itself over the village, so smoothly.

A brown grass snake of a night winding out from the hollows, slowly engulfing people’s minds, silencing them. Sleep takes hold of them just when they expect it least; as they lean over a plate of aubergines, as they settle into a wicker chair beneath an olive tree, the stiffness easing from their backs, in that same split second when a child’s voice calls through the torpid air. The villagers have had no time to be surprised by this drowsiness, leading to a dreamless sleep from which they will awaken rested from their fatigue. They wonder merely if this happy forgetfulness might not be a sign of something tragic to come, might not signal something harmful, or whether, on the contrary, something precious might have happened that they have allowed to get away from them. And yet this doomsday sleep that unfurled over them was greeted with relief, for they each had something to forget. A weariness that is impossible to be rid of and that grows heavier day by day; a piercing pain where the heart is, because life, and they have always known this, is a struggle. Why would they not be grateful for this miraculous forgetting in their lives, besieged by the walls of hatred?

She alone feels no fatigue. She sees night fall, another of those cloaking nights that favor lovers’ meetings, and something inside her begins to smile. Over the hills, with no other warning than the collective drowsiness of the villagers, he is coming.

He strokes the tips of his fingers across the scarf she offered him or that he took from her one day, as they were both waiting to cross, in opposite directions, the barbed-wire frontier that separates their territories. They did not know each other. Their eyes met, quite simply, and everything was said. The exchanging of the scarf is a mystery they haven’t yet plumbed: did she give it to him? Did he snatch it from her as he passed? They moved as one.

Since then, he has tried to read the mingled dreams and desires woven into the shadows and bright colors of the fabric, into the tiniest tracings of black in the midst of blue, revealing the fissures of her flesh; the silver of her saliva and her wetness; the splinters of angry red in the center of her maternal glow. She will not tolerate the slightest hesitation: if you doubt, do not come, she says. But if you are reading me with your deep eyes, it is because you do not doubt. Do not mistake any of my rhythms, because you are the one for whom this message was destined. If you hear a rushing river every time you raise my scarf to your face, to your mouth, then it is because you are the one.

Come.

She readies herself to go out.

She has taken off her clothes, her jewelry. She has loosened her braid. She takes the dream fabric and, in a single movement, like a scarcely stirring breeze, she winds it around her body. The fabric molds itself to her skin, to her curves. She is dream-blue. So light she can hardly feel it.

The door slams, the wind is heavy with muffled sounds, the silence is like a root working its way through the earth to rejoin the other root on the far side of the wall. She puts one foot on the bare earth, and it trembles. She moves slowly, she must not fall, must not lose her balance before that dizzying hole dug into her night. She is about to pass the point of no return. Outside, she feels the heat on her skin like a burn. The sweat pearls almost at once, leaving traces on everything she touches, outlining clearly along her path the rounded shape of her feet with their cushioned soles.

Outside all is still. Even the turtledoves are caught up in voiceless expectation. The olive trees spread their perfumed sap around her. She moves a little faster. Her steps become a race, then a dance. Moon, stars. Everything is there. The shadows are outraged by her brightness. Sweat keeps pouring down her back. Like insects giddily turning.

No branches, no twigs, the softness of grass under the bare soles of her feet, the suppleness of air. Tiny mouths sucking at her skin here and there. The acacias brush against her but do not scratch. Not tonight, something unique is happening, tonight.

Landing point, breaking point, she chooses the world.

She pays no attention to the tiredness of her legs as she walks, nor to the breathlessness that shakes her, nor even to the exhaustion of excessive happiness.

Only a few more meters now and neither she nor he knows it. Perhaps they have been walking in parallel for many long hours, beside the wall that seals off the village, and around which an extraordinary life is awakening, rich with fluttering colors. From time to time they hear, both of them, a little cry of impatience, sharp and shrill. They think it must be a bird or a mouse, and are briefly amazed that the cry is so heartfelt. But what awaits them is inhuman, inhuman.

Of one accord, they have stopped, hearing the mouse for the tenth time and realizing it is a human voice, crying out impatience, fear, emptiness. And that stops them in their tracks.

In front of a place where the wall, shaken by such innocence, is hollowed and gapped.

He is wearing his usual expression of a guilty child. The more he smiles, the more desperate he seems. Is it from fear of seeing his heart dig a little deeper, carving out an emptiness inside his chest, a strange kind of cavity, a hole into which she will be able to reach her hand and touch, touch again, those sensitive, burgeoning places that will make him die of happiness? He trembles in real fear.

What does he want from her? Does he even know? After such a long journey, he cannot tell what comes next. Does anything come next? Should they not both drop dead on the spot, to underline the tragedy of the occasion and the despair of what they have snatched away from the daily routine and the grey lives of people chained by their useless beliefs? To defy everything that tries to make them less than they are, is that not the only solution, the only way out? But there’s nothing tragic about what he feels. He has no desire to die. Living, at this moment, is looking. And so he looks, and he waits.

She too is waiting, with astonishing patience, waiting to unfurl. She reads the hunger within him that has always cut him off from everything and brought iridescent reflections to the emptiness of his dark eyes. Dug craters into his smoothest surface. Made his bony ribs stand out, hollowed his concave belly, drawn a bilious liquid from his organs. Grooved that constant bafflement between his eyebrows.

He was not made to live with such emptiness. To walk like this along a knife-edge, in his mind already falling. And so for a long time his expression was colored by resignation. He was not made to walk along this path of smoldering fires and buried violence. The soles of his feet, she knows, are so tender. (She would take them in her hands and rub them gently with her thumb, pressing down on the painful spots, below the big toe and at the base of the heel where he once stood on a thorn, unawares: from now on you will walk on my dreams, she tells him).

She can think of only one thing now. Quickly, to fill in, fill up, fill out the hollowness dug deep into his eyes, into his body, to cover the flayed flesh and its terrible pulsating, the retching disillusionment that takes him so close, so close to death even though he doen’t know this. Such pallor, in his eyes alone. To close those eyes by pressing her lips there, so as not to see that aching emptiness anymore. And to reach out her arms even further, to go beyond the absence that has scattered its burning salt deep in his heart, locating the vein that connects him to his body and instilling there her venom of life.

In her, he sees only one thing. She is life, life. In the fabric that seems to enfold her in just an idea of blue, no, a suggestion of blue, in the shape of her, so completely exposed, entirely tangible, behind which layer upon layer can be guessed at, organic, no less living, in her mouth that receives his breath as it flows through the hole in the wall, and drinks it in, in her eyes and her forehead and her nose and her smiles, there is life, nothing but life.

Is that not enough? What else do we need, dear gods! What else do we need beside this improbable life here on this planet, the meetings that take place between the trunks of the olive trees on a night when the rainy moon casts its halo; this hole through the heart of a wall built by centuries of distrust, and that now dares to present, to offer up this face, the face of a wholesome angel, angel of flesh, angel of earth, who at this very moment is consecrating it and baptizing it with her sweet saliva?

Pressured by this gaze, the hole becomes wider and wider, cracking and groaning quietly. A little wider, just a little wider, just far enough to see a surprised face, alarmed and joyful, a little wider, just a little wider, to reveal the rest, because a head without a body is not enough for the overflow of love that unfurls from them, they must embrace even more, and still that is not enough, they each want to see the world as it is contained in the whole of the other.

When they are completely visible through the hole, now become an oblong opening as tall as a man and as wide, a tunnel dug through the wall that might be five or ten meters deep, what does it matter, even one meter would still be too much for them, they smile at each other. She knows, when she sees him, that he was the one in her heart as she wove the dream fabric, he and his youth, he and his slenderness, he and his beard-blued cheeks, he and his constellations that she cannot yet see but whose existence she guesses, that she knows must be there because she knows everything about him, immediately and in detail, with love’s wondrous intuition.

Now she understands his hunger. It is the hunger of a man who has refused barriers. The surfaces of his body are lacerated by the bitterness of the wall, and a great empty shape has grown within him, an emptiness that cries out unceasingly, that groans and moans and growls and complains, a concave shape with smooth surfaces, a double emptiness faithfully copied at this moment in his gaze. She sees it and knows what is needed, knows exactly what has the right shape and density to fill it.

Her eyes fixed on his, she barely touches the fabric that covers her, the tiniest movement, and away it slips, it slides easily, happily, created for precisely this, it falls free, flies away, swells on the wind, a cry muffled by the velvet night, in this brief moment it has dissolved, only the grass remembers it as it mingles with the threads. She has no need of it anymore, the night is enough to both cover and reveal her, the fabric that now lies spread in open folds is beyond her dreams and Here I am. The man opens his mouth, she fills it, and the miracle of his hunger reaches its peak then is satisfied, slowly, curling in on itself like a wave.

He gazes at her, dreams her, contemplating this infinity that he could scarcely contain in the palms of his hands, knowing that the shape of her is perfectly matched to his, the opening of her mouth, her hollowed belly, her coiled tongue, the bowl of her wide palms, they will fill him as no vase has ever been filled, will press against him, penetrating deep into his every crevice until there is nothing left of the desolate notes that have forever played in his head the music of absence.

She is there, brown-skinned, vast. The picture of womanhood. Ochre smell of her skin, mingled with sweet perspiration, reaching him. He drinks in the wind and turns himself inside out like a glove to show her the inside of his body, all those surfaces waiting to receive her, his flesh stripped bare, his naked being. He slides over her like oil. From a distance, from a distance. In the openng in the wall, the impossible awaits. Will he be able to reach it? He doesn’t know, doesn’t yet dare. She hasn’t yet beckoned to him. She waits, the woman.

The man’s eyes cannot take it all in. Bit by bit, he murmurs, piece by piece, and that way each second will last a lifetime, and each separate part will be a world to discover. She smiles, says ‘yes’. Raise your arms, he says. She raises her arms. Turn around. Dance.

He shines bright, so bright that the moths awaken.

From a distance, the gaze is everything, it replaces the other organs, unites all the senses and crosses the chasm. They need nothing else. They know instinctively that it is pointless to try to go through the wall. As soon as they look at the hole, they see the uncertainty and doubt that would contaminate them if they tried to go beyond. Their passage would be a lifetime: their lifetime together, at first explored by the joys of its beginnings, then tortured by knowledge, then come to grief on the reef of misunderstanding. They do not want to follow this way. The moment is enough. I am here, right here, now. Noone else. At this precise moment, you are the world. No past, no future. Present. That is enough. In the present I am entirely yours, I offer myself to you in this present that has become eternal because it contains all of me. The resolution of time, of every second of my existence, of everything I have been and will be, the resolution of all my beings. Into one, here and now. Present.

The gaze is plunging water. She is large, calm, open, he is sinuous, viscous, able to infiltrate, able to examine the tiniest fragment of her shadows.

And from now until morning comes, he has all the time he needs to examine the immense nakedness of this woman.

When it rains in the night like showering heat, they will roll in the mud loosened from the riverbanks and laugh.

The rest of the rain will wash them and make them glow like burnished copper.

In the morning, he will tell her he can wait no longer. By what miracle he did not find release the moment he first saw her, he will never know. But in the morning, he will be able to wait no longer. She will gaze at him, missing nothing, not a sigh, not a shiver, not a grimace of pain, not a teeth-baring laugh, not an enfolding hand. And at the exact split second, she will reach out her hand, she will say, give it to me. The hole in the wall, narrower. He reaches out. She doesn’t yet know if she has the right. If her hand will be crushed by the forbidden passage the way she senses their bodies would be if they tried to go through. No, their arms move forward, sensing that it is time to cross over. A thick, spongy fog, a cloud of unreality and impossibility. Their hands travel toward each other. Their bodies remain separate on either side of the barrier. The hands arrive, they touch. One tips into the other the night’s offering. The other withdraws and carries the substance to the place where it should have been, to the place where, still living, it will move to meet its maternal space, to the place where she will finally create for him his soul-child.

Rain, for a long time. The two of them, lying peacefully on either side. Listening to the leaves beating out a thousand silences, listening to the strange absence of life inside the wall, sensing that there is where everything is pouring out that could have saved them from disaster, that the wall is soaking up and breathing in all the living burning energies, and that everything has been said, already: one day, there will be nothing left, and its inhabitants will have been wiped away so completely that it will be as if they had never existed.

She knows this. The man too, he knows this now. They were made for this one meeting, there will be nothing more. Taut threads still attach him to the path he followed to come here and to the uniform he cast aside and that he will refuse to ever wear again. And she . . . The evidence of the wall that surrounds her cannot be denied. It has stood between them for generations. It hurts him deeply, but he can do nothing about it. The threads, elastic, pull them back. Their time is over.

He sits up, still gazing at her. Her eyes are open, but she seems to be sleeping. Even without the fabric, her flesh looks blue in the pale light. Dream-blue, the color of her. Do you exist? Or not? No, he knows that his body did not dream this upheaval.

He too has received something that fills him. He will never hunger again, as he leaps to his feet and sees the hole closing slowly, slowly, crushing his heart, but he is not really saddened because what he has received is forever. The gift will not be taken back.

He breathes in, smelling such a strong odor of femaleness that it makes him dizzy. Then he goes on his way, troubled by that perfume of bursting ripeness.

The wall trembles, defeated by so much love.

© Ananda Devi. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2012 Jean Anderson. All rights  reserved.

English French (Original)

And as he gazes at her, their soul-child is conceived
(Henri Michaux, Life Within the Folds)

That day as she finished weaving the few meters that would wind seamlessly around her body, she tied off the threads and eased the fabric from the loom to hold it and marvel at its lightness. Her hands beneath its sheerness had turned blue. She placed it over her face and looked through it at the softened outlines of objects. At her slightest movement it whispered, speaking to her—of what? Oh, of smoothness and heaviness, silkiness and slipperiness, richness and roughness, every possible physical sensation. It told her there was an infinite variety of caresses leading to an infinite variety of pleasures, that the different parts of the body were different kinds of fabric to the touch, and that if she wished, it would tell her . . . She didn’t blush. She knew exactly why it was telling her all this, why it was telling her the geography of her own body. The secret order it was giving her. She answered, listening to the detailed instructions of the fabric against her skin.

She saw the path of the man on his way toward her, striding out over the ground. She saw his tumbling curls, his boyish laugh, his bony ribs, his brimming eyes. She saw his hands. Just as she felt she could wait no longer nor imagine anything more, just as a warcry was about to fly free from her throat, from the darkest depths of the night there came a trickle of blue, seeping into the fabric, slipping into her body. The wind changed direction. Leaves flew free from the trees and blew against the window, clinging there like curious eyes. The time had come. She had been waiting so long for this. For this night unlike any other.

A night that eases itself over the village, so smoothly.

A brown grass snake of a night winding out from the hollows, slowly engulfing people’s minds, silencing them. Sleep takes hold of them just when they expect it least; as they lean over a plate of aubergines, as they settle into a wicker chair beneath an olive tree, the stiffness easing from their backs, in that same split second when a child’s voice calls through the torpid air. The villagers have had no time to be surprised by this drowsiness, leading to a dreamless sleep from which they will awaken rested from their fatigue. They wonder merely if this happy forgetfulness might not be a sign of something tragic to come, might not signal something harmful, or whether, on the contrary, something precious might have happened that they have allowed to get away from them. And yet this doomsday sleep that unfurled over them was greeted with relief, for they each had something to forget. A weariness that is impossible to be rid of and that grows heavier day by day; a piercing pain where the heart is, because life, and they have always known this, is a struggle. Why would they not be grateful for this miraculous forgetting in their lives, besieged by the walls of hatred?

She alone feels no fatigue. She sees night fall, another of those cloaking nights that favor lovers’ meetings, and something inside her begins to smile. Over the hills, with no other warning than the collective drowsiness of the villagers, he is coming.

He strokes the tips of his fingers across the scarf she offered him or that he took from her one day, as they were both waiting to cross, in opposite directions, the barbed-wire frontier that separates their territories. They did not know each other. Their eyes met, quite simply, and everything was said. The exchanging of the scarf is a mystery they haven’t yet plumbed: did she give it to him? Did he snatch it from her as he passed? They moved as one.

Since then, he has tried to read the mingled dreams and desires woven into the shadows and bright colors of the fabric, into the tiniest tracings of black in the midst of blue, revealing the fissures of her flesh; the silver of her saliva and her wetness; the splinters of angry red in the center of her maternal glow. She will not tolerate the slightest hesitation: if you doubt, do not come, she says. But if you are reading me with your deep eyes, it is because you do not doubt. Do not mistake any of my rhythms, because you are the one for whom this message was destined. If you hear a rushing river every time you raise my scarf to your face, to your mouth, then it is because you are the one.

Come.

She readies herself to go out.

She has taken off her clothes, her jewelry. She has loosened her braid. She takes the dream fabric and, in a single movement, like a scarcely stirring breeze, she winds it around her body. The fabric molds itself to her skin, to her curves. She is dream-blue. So light she can hardly feel it.

The door slams, the wind is heavy with muffled sounds, the silence is like a root working its way through the earth to rejoin the other root on the far side of the wall. She puts one foot on the bare earth, and it trembles. She moves slowly, she must not fall, must not lose her balance before that dizzying hole dug into her night. She is about to pass the point of no return. Outside, she feels the heat on her skin like a burn. The sweat pearls almost at once, leaving traces on everything she touches, outlining clearly along her path the rounded shape of her feet with their cushioned soles.

Outside all is still. Even the turtledoves are caught up in voiceless expectation. The olive trees spread their perfumed sap around her. She moves a little faster. Her steps become a race, then a dance. Moon, stars. Everything is there. The shadows are outraged by her brightness. Sweat keeps pouring down her back. Like insects giddily turning.

No branches, no twigs, the softness of grass under the bare soles of her feet, the suppleness of air. Tiny mouths sucking at her skin here and there. The acacias brush against her but do not scratch. Not tonight, something unique is happening, tonight.

Landing point, breaking point, she chooses the world.

She pays no attention to the tiredness of her legs as she walks, nor to the breathlessness that shakes her, nor even to the exhaustion of excessive happiness.

Only a few more meters now and neither she nor he knows it. Perhaps they have been walking in parallel for many long hours, beside the wall that seals off the village, and around which an extraordinary life is awakening, rich with fluttering colors. From time to time they hear, both of them, a little cry of impatience, sharp and shrill. They think it must be a bird or a mouse, and are briefly amazed that the cry is so heartfelt. But what awaits them is inhuman, inhuman.

Of one accord, they have stopped, hearing the mouse for the tenth time and realizing it is a human voice, crying out impatience, fear, emptiness. And that stops them in their tracks.

In front of a place where the wall, shaken by such innocence, is hollowed and gapped.

He is wearing his usual expression of a guilty child. The more he smiles, the more desperate he seems. Is it from fear of seeing his heart dig a little deeper, carving out an emptiness inside his chest, a strange kind of cavity, a hole into which she will be able to reach her hand and touch, touch again, those sensitive, burgeoning places that will make him die of happiness? He trembles in real fear.

What does he want from her? Does he even know? After such a long journey, he cannot tell what comes next. Does anything come next? Should they not both drop dead on the spot, to underline the tragedy of the occasion and the despair of what they have snatched away from the daily routine and the grey lives of people chained by their useless beliefs? To defy everything that tries to make them less than they are, is that not the only solution, the only way out? But there’s nothing tragic about what he feels. He has no desire to die. Living, at this moment, is looking. And so he looks, and he waits.

She too is waiting, with astonishing patience, waiting to unfurl. She reads the hunger within him that has always cut him off from everything and brought iridescent reflections to the emptiness of his dark eyes. Dug craters into his smoothest surface. Made his bony ribs stand out, hollowed his concave belly, drawn a bilious liquid from his organs. Grooved that constant bafflement between his eyebrows.

He was not made to live with such emptiness. To walk like this along a knife-edge, in his mind already falling. And so for a long time his expression was colored by resignation. He was not made to walk along this path of smoldering fires and buried violence. The soles of his feet, she knows, are so tender. (She would take them in her hands and rub them gently with her thumb, pressing down on the painful spots, below the big toe and at the base of the heel where he once stood on a thorn, unawares: from now on you will walk on my dreams, she tells him).

She can think of only one thing now. Quickly, to fill in, fill up, fill out the hollowness dug deep into his eyes, into his body, to cover the flayed flesh and its terrible pulsating, the retching disillusionment that takes him so close, so close to death even though he doen’t know this. Such pallor, in his eyes alone. To close those eyes by pressing her lips there, so as not to see that aching emptiness anymore. And to reach out her arms even further, to go beyond the absence that has scattered its burning salt deep in his heart, locating the vein that connects him to his body and instilling there her venom of life.

In her, he sees only one thing. She is life, life. In the fabric that seems to enfold her in just an idea of blue, no, a suggestion of blue, in the shape of her, so completely exposed, entirely tangible, behind which layer upon layer can be guessed at, organic, no less living, in her mouth that receives his breath as it flows through the hole in the wall, and drinks it in, in her eyes and her forehead and her nose and her smiles, there is life, nothing but life.

Is that not enough? What else do we need, dear gods! What else do we need beside this improbable life here on this planet, the meetings that take place between the trunks of the olive trees on a night when the rainy moon casts its halo; this hole through the heart of a wall built by centuries of distrust, and that now dares to present, to offer up this face, the face of a wholesome angel, angel of flesh, angel of earth, who at this very moment is consecrating it and baptizing it with her sweet saliva?

Pressured by this gaze, the hole becomes wider and wider, cracking and groaning quietly. A little wider, just a little wider, just far enough to see a surprised face, alarmed and joyful, a little wider, just a little wider, to reveal the rest, because a head without a body is not enough for the overflow of love that unfurls from them, they must embrace even more, and still that is not enough, they each want to see the world as it is contained in the whole of the other.

When they are completely visible through the hole, now become an oblong opening as tall as a man and as wide, a tunnel dug through the wall that might be five or ten meters deep, what does it matter, even one meter would still be too much for them, they smile at each other. She knows, when she sees him, that he was the one in her heart as she wove the dream fabric, he and his youth, he and his slenderness, he and his beard-blued cheeks, he and his constellations that she cannot yet see but whose existence she guesses, that she knows must be there because she knows everything about him, immediately and in detail, with love’s wondrous intuition.

Now she understands his hunger. It is the hunger of a man who has refused barriers. The surfaces of his body are lacerated by the bitterness of the wall, and a great empty shape has grown within him, an emptiness that cries out unceasingly, that groans and moans and growls and complains, a concave shape with smooth surfaces, a double emptiness faithfully copied at this moment in his gaze. She sees it and knows what is needed, knows exactly what has the right shape and density to fill it.

Her eyes fixed on his, she barely touches the fabric that covers her, the tiniest movement, and away it slips, it slides easily, happily, created for precisely this, it falls free, flies away, swells on the wind, a cry muffled by the velvet night, in this brief moment it has dissolved, only the grass remembers it as it mingles with the threads. She has no need of it anymore, the night is enough to both cover and reveal her, the fabric that now lies spread in open folds is beyond her dreams and Here I am. The man opens his mouth, she fills it, and the miracle of his hunger reaches its peak then is satisfied, slowly, curling in on itself like a wave.

He gazes at her, dreams her, contemplating this infinity that he could scarcely contain in the palms of his hands, knowing that the shape of her is perfectly matched to his, the opening of her mouth, her hollowed belly, her coiled tongue, the bowl of her wide palms, they will fill him as no vase has ever been filled, will press against him, penetrating deep into his every crevice until there is nothing left of the desolate notes that have forever played in his head the music of absence.

She is there, brown-skinned, vast. The picture of womanhood. Ochre smell of her skin, mingled with sweet perspiration, reaching him. He drinks in the wind and turns himself inside out like a glove to show her the inside of his body, all those surfaces waiting to receive her, his flesh stripped bare, his naked being. He slides over her like oil. From a distance, from a distance. In the openng in the wall, the impossible awaits. Will he be able to reach it? He doesn’t know, doesn’t yet dare. She hasn’t yet beckoned to him. She waits, the woman.

The man’s eyes cannot take it all in. Bit by bit, he murmurs, piece by piece, and that way each second will last a lifetime, and each separate part will be a world to discover. She smiles, says ‘yes’. Raise your arms, he says. She raises her arms. Turn around. Dance.

He shines bright, so bright that the moths awaken.

From a distance, the gaze is everything, it replaces the other organs, unites all the senses and crosses the chasm. They need nothing else. They know instinctively that it is pointless to try to go through the wall. As soon as they look at the hole, they see the uncertainty and doubt that would contaminate them if they tried to go beyond. Their passage would be a lifetime: their lifetime together, at first explored by the joys of its beginnings, then tortured by knowledge, then come to grief on the reef of misunderstanding. They do not want to follow this way. The moment is enough. I am here, right here, now. Noone else. At this precise moment, you are the world. No past, no future. Present. That is enough. In the present I am entirely yours, I offer myself to you in this present that has become eternal because it contains all of me. The resolution of time, of every second of my existence, of everything I have been and will be, the resolution of all my beings. Into one, here and now. Present.

The gaze is plunging water. She is large, calm, open, he is sinuous, viscous, able to infiltrate, able to examine the tiniest fragment of her shadows.

And from now until morning comes, he has all the time he needs to examine the immense nakedness of this woman.

When it rains in the night like showering heat, they will roll in the mud loosened from the riverbanks and laugh.

The rest of the rain will wash them and make them glow like burnished copper.

In the morning, he will tell her he can wait no longer. By what miracle he did not find release the moment he first saw her, he will never know. But in the morning, he will be able to wait no longer. She will gaze at him, missing nothing, not a sigh, not a shiver, not a grimace of pain, not a teeth-baring laugh, not an enfolding hand. And at the exact split second, she will reach out her hand, she will say, give it to me. The hole in the wall, narrower. He reaches out. She doesn’t yet know if she has the right. If her hand will be crushed by the forbidden passage the way she senses their bodies would be if they tried to go through. No, their arms move forward, sensing that it is time to cross over. A thick, spongy fog, a cloud of unreality and impossibility. Their hands travel toward each other. Their bodies remain separate on either side of the barrier. The hands arrive, they touch. One tips into the other the night’s offering. The other withdraws and carries the substance to the place where it should have been, to the place where, still living, it will move to meet its maternal space, to the place where she will finally create for him his soul-child.

Rain, for a long time. The two of them, lying peacefully on either side. Listening to the leaves beating out a thousand silences, listening to the strange absence of life inside the wall, sensing that there is where everything is pouring out that could have saved them from disaster, that the wall is soaking up and breathing in all the living burning energies, and that everything has been said, already: one day, there will be nothing left, and its inhabitants will have been wiped away so completely that it will be as if they had never existed.

She knows this. The man too, he knows this now. They were made for this one meeting, there will be nothing more. Taut threads still attach him to the path he followed to come here and to the uniform he cast aside and that he will refuse to ever wear again. And she . . . The evidence of the wall that surrounds her cannot be denied. It has stood between them for generations. It hurts him deeply, but he can do nothing about it. The threads, elastic, pull them back. Their time is over.

He sits up, still gazing at her. Her eyes are open, but she seems to be sleeping. Even without the fabric, her flesh looks blue in the pale light. Dream-blue, the color of her. Do you exist? Or not? No, he knows that his body did not dream this upheaval.

He too has received something that fills him. He will never hunger again, as he leaps to his feet and sees the hole closing slowly, slowly, crushing his heart, but he is not really saddened because what he has received is forever. The gift will not be taken back.

He breathes in, smelling such a strong odor of femaleness that it makes him dizzy. Then he goes on his way, troubled by that perfume of bursting ripeness.

The wall trembles, defeated by so much love.

© Ananda Devi. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2012 Jean Anderson. All rights  reserved.

Le tissu des reves

Et pendant qu’il la regarde, il lui fait un enfant d’âme.
Henri Michaux,
La vie dans les plis

Le jour où elle a fini de tisser les quelques mètres qui s’enrouleraient sans couture autour de son corps, après avoir noué les fils et détaché le tissu du métier, elle l’a tenu entre ses mains et s’est étonnée de sa légèreté. Sous sa transparence, ses mains étaient devenues bleues. Elle l’a posé sur son visage et a regardé à travers le profil adouci des objets. Au moindre mouvement, il chuchotait. Ce qu’il racontait ? Oh, du lisse et du feutré, du soyeux et du glissant, du matelassé et du rugueux, toutes les sensations possibles de la matière. Il lui disait qu’il existait des gammes infinies de caresses qui aboutissaient à des gammes infinies de plaisir, que les différentes parties du corps étaient des types d’étoffes différents sous les doigts, que, si elle le souhaitait, il lui dirait… Elle ne rougissait pas. Elle savait exactement pourquoi il lui disait tout cela, pourquoi il lui racontait ainsi la géographie de son propre corps. L’ordre intime qu’il lui donnait. Elle lui a répondu, écoutant les instructions précises du tissu contre sa peau.

Elle a vu le chemin de l’homme qui lui venait, enjambant la terre de part en part. Elle a vu ses boucles désordonnées, son rire d’enfant, ses côtes saillantes, ses yeux débordants. Elle a vu ses mains. Au moment où elle a senti qu’elle ne pouvait plus attendre davantage ni imaginer plus loin les choses, au moment où un cri de guerre allait s’échapper de sa gorge, il y a eu, du plus profond du soir, une coulure de bleu qui s’est emmêlée au tissu et s’est infiltrée dans son corps. Le vent a changé de direction. Des feuilles se sont échappées des arbres et sont venues se coller à la fenêtre comme des yeux curieux. Le moment était venu. Elle l’avait attendue longtemps. Cette nuit à nulle autre pareille.

 

Une nuit qui survient en glissant sur le village, sans aspérité.

Une nuit de couleuvre brune sinuée hors des creux, qui engouffre lentement les esprits et les fait taire. L’endormissement les prend au moment où ils s’y attendent le moins : au-dessus d’une assiettée d’aubergines, dans l’instant même où l’on s’installe dans un fauteuil en rotin sous un olivier et où les reins se dénouent, en cette seconde suspendue où la voix d’un enfant perce la torpeur d’un appel. Les gens du village n’ont pas eu le temps d’être surpris par cette somnolence qui annonçait un sommeil sans rêves d’où l’on sortirait reposé de toutes ses fatigues, en se demandant seulement si cette heureuse amnésie ne présagerait pas quelque chose de tragique, ne serait pas l’annonce de quelque chose de néfaste, ou si, au contraire, il s’était passé entre-temps quelque chose de précieux qu’ils auraient laissé échapper. Toujours est-il que ce sommeil de fin du monde qui a déferlé sur eux a été accueilli avec soulagement, car tous avaient quelque chose à oublier. Une fatigue dont il est impossible de se débarrasser et qui s’alourdit de jour en jour ; une lancinance à l’endroit du cœur parce que la vie, ils le savent depuis toujours, est un combat. Pourquoi ne recevraient-ils pas avec reconnaissance cet oubli miraculeux de leur vie d’assiégés par les murs de la haine?

 

Elle seule ne ressent aucune fatigue. Elle voit tomber cette nuit complice comme le sont toutes les nuits propices aux rencontres, et quelque chose en elle se prend à sourire. Au-dessus des collines, sans effet d’annonce autre que l’ensommeillement collectif des gens du village, il arrive.

Il passe le bout charnu de ses doigts sur le foulard qu’elle lui a tendu ou qu’il lui a pris un jour, alors qu’ils attendaient tous les deux de franchir en sens inverse la frontière de barbelés qui sépare leurs territoires. Ils ne se connaissent pas. Leurs regards, tout simplement, se sont croisés, et tout a été dit. L’échange du foulard est un mystère qu’ils n’ont pas encore résolu ; le lui a-t-elle donné ? Le lui a-t-il arraché au passage ? Le geste était simultané.

Depuis, il tente de lire l’entrelacement de rêves et de désirs dans les ombres et des couleurs du tissu, dans les infimes ciselures de noir au milieu du bleu, dévoilant les failles de sa chair ; l’argenté de sa salive et de sa glaire ; les échardes rouge-colère au centre de sa lumière maternelle. Elle ne tolérera aucune hésitation : si tu doutes, ne viens pas, dit-elle. Mais si tu me lis de tes yeux profonds, c’est que tu ne doutes pas. Ne manque aucun de mes rythmes, car tu es celui auquel ce message était destiné. Si tu entends un grondement de rivière à chaque fois que tu portes mon foulard à ton visage, à ta bouche, c’est que c’est bien toi.

Viens.

Elle même s’apprête à sortir.

Elle a enlevé ses vêtements. Elle a enlevé ses bijoux. Elle a défait sa natte. Elle prend le tissu des rêves, et en un seul geste, comme une brise à peine remuée, elle l’enroule autour de son corps. Le tissu adhère à sa peau, à ses courbes. Elle est bleu-rêve. C’est à peine si elle le sent.

La porte claque, le vent s’alourdit de bruits sourds, le silence ressemble à une racine cheminant à l’intérieur de la terre pour rejoindre cette autre racine de l’autre côté du mur. Elle pose un pied sur le sol nu, et il tremble. Elle va lentement, il s’agit de ne pas tomber, de ne pas perdre l’équilibre face au vertige de ce trou creusé dans sa nuit. Elle est sur le point de faire un pas définitif. Dehors, elle ressent la chaleur sur sa peau comme une brûlure. Une sueur en naît presque aussitôt, qui laisse des traces sur tout ce qu’elle touche, qui dessine clairement la forme pleine de ses pieds, et leur matelassé, sur le chemin.

Dehors immobile. Même les tourterelles sont prises d’une attente sans voix. Les oliviers étalent leur sève odorante autour d’elle. Elle va un peu plus vite. Ses pas deviennent une course, puis une danse. Lune, étoiles. Tout est là. L’ombre s’exaspère de son éclat. La sueur continue à couler à flots dans son dos. On dirait des insectes pris de tournis.

Pas de branches ni de brindilles, mollesse d’herbe sous la plante nue de ses pieds, souplesse d’air. Ventouses minuscules lui aspirant la peau par endroits. Les acacias la frôlent mais ne la piquent pas. Pas ce soir, il se passe quelque chose d’unique, ce soir.

Point de chute et de cassure, elle choisit le monde.

 

 

 

Elle n’écoute ni l’épuisement dans ses jambes, tandis qu’elle marche, ni le halètement qui la secoue, ni même la fatigue de trop de bonheur.

Il ne reste plus que quelques mètres et ni elle, ni lui ne le savent. Peut-être ont-ils marché en parallèle depuis de longues heures, le long du mur qui interdit le village, et autour duquel s’éveille une vie extraordinaire et charnue, papillonneuse de couleurs. De temps en temps, ils perçoivent, l’un et l’autre, un petit cri d’impatience, très aigu. Ils croient que c’est un oiseau ou une souris, et s’étonnent passagèrement que ce cri contienne tant de cœur. Mais ce qui les attend est inhumain, inhumain.

D’un commun accord, ils se sont arrêtés, se rendant compte, après avoir entendu la souris pour la dixième fois, que c’est une voix humaine échappée d’une impatience, d’une crainte, d’une béance. Et cela les fige aussitôt.

Devant un endroit où le mur, troublé par tant de candeur, se creuse et s’écarte.

Il a son habituel sourire d’enfant pris en faute. Plus il sourit, et plus il semble désespéré. Est-ce la peur de voir son cœur se creuser un peu plus, créer un vide à l’intérieur de son thorax, former une drôle de poche, puis un trou par lequel elle pourra passer la main et toucher, toucher encore, ces aires trop sensibles et trop vivaces qui, au premier effleurement, le tueront de bonheur? Il tremble d’une vraie peur.

Qu’attend-il d’elle ? Le sait-il lui-même ? Après un si long chemin, il ne connaît plus la suite de l’histoire. Y a-t-il une suite ? Ne devraient-ils pas tous les deux mourir là sur le coup pour bien marquer le tragique de ce moment et le désespoir des choses arrachées à la routine des jours et au gris des vies d’hommes enchaînées par leurs croyances inutiles, pour bien défier tout ce qui voudrait les rendre inférieurs à eux-mêmes, n’est-ce pas la seule solution, la seule issue ? Mais ce qu’il ressent n’a rien de tragique. Et il n’a aucune envie de mourir. Vivre, pour l’instant, se résume à regarder. Alors, il regarde, et il attend.

Attendant elle aussi avec une étonnante patience de déferler, elle lit en lui la faim qui le désunit de tout depuis toujours et irise de vide ses yeux noirs. Ouvre des cratères sur sa surface la plus lisse. Fait saillir ses côtes maigres, rend concave son estomac, excave de ses organes un liquide bilieux. Creuse entre ses sourcils cette constante perplexité.

Il n’est pas fait pour vivre avec un tel vide. Pour marcher ainsi sur un bord aigu, déjà basculé dans sa tête, de sorte que, pendant longtemps, son regard a eu la couleur de la résignation. Il n’est pas fait pour marcher sur ce chemin de feux couvants, de violence enfouie. La plante de ses pieds, elle le sait, est si tendre. (Elle les tiendrait dans ses mains et les frotterait doucement de son pouce, appuyant plus fort aux endroits douloureux, sous le gros orteil et à la naissance du talon où il a rencontré une épine par inadvertance : tu marcheras désormais sur mes rêves, lui dit-elle).

Elle ne pense plus qu’à une chose. Vite, combler, remblayer, remplir ce vide fouillé dans ses yeux, dans son corps, masquer la chair à vif et sa terrible pulsation, la vomissure de désillusion qui le rend si proche, si proche de la mort alors qu’il ne le sait même pas. Tant de pâleur, dans un seul regard d’homme. Fermer ses yeux de la pression de ses lèvres pour ne plus voir cette immensité incomblée. Et tendre les bras plus loin que, passer outre l’absence qui a posé son sel au bout de son cœur, retrouver la veine qui le connecte à son corps pour y instiller son venin de vie.

 

D’elle, il ne voit qu’une chose. La vie, la vie. Dans le tissu qui semble l’envelopper seulement d’une pensée de bleu, non, d’une insinuation de bleu, dans les formes absolument livrées, résolument tangibles, sous lesquelles on devine des couches et des couches de tissus, organiques, ceux-là, et non moins vivants, dans sa bouche qui cueille son souffle tandis qu’il franchit le trou dans le mur et le boit, dans ses yeux et son front et son nez et ses sourires, la vie, rien d’autre que la vie.

N’est-ce pas suffisant ? De quoi d’autre avons-nous besoin, grands dieux ! De quoi d’autre que l’improbable de la vie, son occurrence sur cette planète, ses rencontres entre les troncs des oliviers dans une nuit auréolée d’une lune pluvieuse, ce trou creusé à même la matière d’un mur construit par la méfiance des siècles, et qui livre, qui ose, qui offre, ce visage d’ange sain, d’ange de chair, d’ange de terre, qui le consacre en ce moment même et le baptise de salive parfumée ?

Le trou, sous la force de ce regard, s’élargit de plus en plus avec maints craquements sournois. Encore un peu, rien qu’un peu, juste pour voir davantage qu’une tête surprise, effarée et joyeuse, encore un peu, rien qu’un peu, pour découvrir aussi ce qui l’accompagne, car une tête sans corps, ce n’est pas suffisant pour l’excès d’amour qui déferle d’eux, il leur faut embrasser davantage, toujours plus, et même là cela ne suffirait pas, ils veulent voir le monde tel que contenu dans l’entier de l’autre.

Lorsqu’ils sont entièrement visibles à travers le trou qui est devenu une fente oblongue, haute comme un homme et large de même, un tunnel creusé dans le mur dont l’épaisseur atteindrait ici cinq mètres ou dix, peu importe, même un mètre serait encore trop pour eux, ils se sourient. Elle sait, en le voyant, que c’est bien lui qu’elle avait dans le cœur en tissant le tissu des rêves, lui et sa jeunesse, lui et sa maigreur, lui et ses joues bleues de barbe, lui et ses constellations, qu’elle ne voit pas encore mais devine, sait déjà car elle sait tout de lui, tout de suite, sans à peu près, belle intuition de l’amour.

Elle comprend désormais sa faim. C’est celle d’un homme qui a refusé les barrières. Les parois de son corps sont cisaillées par les aigreurs du mur, il s’est créé en lui un grand volume vide qui crie tout le temps, qui grogne, qui gémit, qui gronde, qui se plaint, un volume à la forme concave et aux surfaces lisses, un double creux honnêtement reproduit en ce moment dans son regard. Elle le voit et sait ce qu’il faut pour le remplir, sait exactement ce qui a une forme et une matière suffisamment denses pour le combler.

Le regardant de tous ses yeux, elle tire à peine sur le tissu qui la recouvre, minuscule secousse, et il glisse, glisse, facilement, heureusement, fait précisément pour cela, il s’échappe, tire d’aile, devient une enflure du vent, un cri estompé par la matité de la nuit, dans un si bref instant il s’est dissous, l’herbe seule en garde le souvenir en se mélangeant à ses fibres, elle n’en a, elle, plus besoin, la nuit suffit à la fois pour la couvrir et la révéler, le tissu qui s’étale à présent, pans écartés, est en deçà de ses rêves et Me voici. L’homme ouvre la bouche, elle la remplit, et le miracle de sa faim parvient à son paroxysme avant de s’assouvir lentement, s’enroulant sur elle-même comme une vague.

Il la regarde et la rêve, contemple cet infini qu’il pourrait à peine contenir dans les paumes de ses mains, sait que ces formes-là sont parfaitement concordées aux siennes, l’ouverture de sa bouche, la concavité stomacale, les enroulements de sa langue, la vasque de ses grandes paumes, le rempliront comme jamais vase n’a été rempli, le longeront en pénétrant profondément dans toutes ses failles jusqu’à ce qu’il ne reste plus rien de ces notes désolées qui depuis toujours font résonner en lui la musique de l’absence.

Elle, ample et brune. Incomparablement femme. Souffle ocré de sa peau, mêlée de douce sueur, qui lui parvient. Il boit le vent et se retourne comme un gant pour lui montrer l’intérieur de son corps, toutes les surfaces prêtes à la recevoir, sa chair à cru, son pelage d’être nu. Il glisse sur elle comme une huile. De loin, de loin. Dans la fente du mur, il y a l’impossible. Pourra-t-il le franchir ? Il ne le sait pas, n’ose pas encore. Elle ne lui a pas fait signe. Femme, elle attend.

Les yeux de l’homme ne parviennent pas à tout prendre. Bout par bout, murmure-t-il, morceau par morceau, ainsi, chaque seconde prendra une vie, et chaque partie sera un monde à découvrir. Elle sourit, dit « oui ». Lève les bras, dit-il. Elle lève les bras. Tourne sur toi-même. Danse.

Il brille clair, si clair que les papillons de nuit se réveillent.

 

De loin, le regard est tout, remplace tous les organes tactiles et sensoriels, réunit tous les sens et franchit le gouffre. Ils n’ont besoin de rien d’autre. Ils savent d’instinct qu’il est inutile de tenter de traverser le mur. Dès qu’ils regardent le trou, ils y voient l’incertitude et le doute qui les contamineraient s’ils essayaient de passer outre. La traversée serait une vie : la vie de couple, d’abord explorée par les joies de sa naissance, puis tourmentée par la connaissance, puis naufragée sur la méconnaissance. Ils ne veulent pas de ce parcours. L’instant suffit. Je suis là, ici, maintenant. Personne d’autre. En ce moment précis, tu es le monde. Pas de passé, pas de futur. Présent. Cela suffit. Au présent je suis toute à toi, je m’offre à toi dans ce présent devenu éternel parce qu’il contient tout de moi. La résolution du temps, de tous mes instants, de tout ce que j’ai été et serai, la résolution de tous mes moi. En une seule, ici, maintenant. Présente.

Le regard est une eau qui plonge. Elle, grande, étale, ouverte, lui sinueux, visqueux capable de s’infiltrer, capable d’interroger le moindre fragment de ses ombres.

Et, d’ici que le matin arrive, il aura eu tout le temps d’interroger l’immense nudité de cette femme.

Lorsqu’il pleuvra dans la nuit une chaleur ébrouée, ils se rouleront dans la boue dégagée des berges de la rivière en riant.

Le reste de la pluie les lavera et les briquera comme des cuivres reluis.

Au matin, il lui dira qu’il ne peut plus attendre. Par quel miracle il ne se sera pas délivré à la minute même où il l’a vue, il ne le saura pas. Mais au matin, il ne pourra plus attendre. Elle le regardera, ne perdra rien, pas un soupir, pas un tremblement, pas une grimace de douleur, pas un rire décharné, pas une main enveloppante. Et à la demi-seconde près, elle tendra la main, lui dira, donne-moi. Le trou dans le mur, rétréci. Il tend la main. Elle ne sait pas encore si elle y a droit. Si sa main sera broyée par ce passage interdit comme elle a senti que leur corps le serait s’ils tentaient la traversée. Non, leur bras avance, sentant qu’il franchit le temps. Un brouillard épaissi et élastique, un nuage d’irréalité et d’impossible. L’une vers l’autre voyagent les mains. Les corps restent de part et d’autre de la barrière. Les mains parviennent, se touchent. L’une déverse dans l’autre le produit de la nuit. L’autre se retire alors et apporte la matière là où elle aurait dû se trouver, là où, encore vivante, elle voyagera à la rencontre de son espace maternel, là où elle lui fera, enfin, son enfant d’âme.

 

La pluie, longtemps. Eux, étendus sages de chaque côté. Ecoutant ses mille silences scandés par les feuilles, et écoutant l’étrange absence de vie à l’intérieur du mur, sentant que par là se déverse tout ce qui aurait pu les sauver du désastre, que ce mur absorbe et aspire toutes les énergies vives et brûlantes, et que, déjà, tout est dit : un jour, il n’en restera rien, et ses habitants seront effacés si définitivement que ce sera comme s’ils n’avaient jamais été.

Elle le sait. L’homme aussi, à présent, le sait. Ils n’étaient faits que pour cette unique rencontre, il n’y aura pas de suite. Des fils tendus le rattachent encore au chemin qu’il a pris pour venir et à l’uniforme qu’il a jeté bien loin et qu’il refusera à jamais de porter. Et elle… L’évidence du mur qui l’entoure ne peut être niée. Cela fait des générations qu’il est entre eux. Cela lui fait très mal, mais il n’y peut rien. Elastiques, les fils les tirent. Leur temps est écoulé.

Il se lève, la regardant encore. Elle a les yeux ouverts, mais semble dormir. Elle sourit. Même sans l’étoffe, sa chair semble bleue dans la pâle lumière. Bleu rêve, couleur d’elle. Existes-tu ? Ou pas ? Non, il sait que son corps n’a pas rêvé le tumulte.

Lui aussi a reçu quelque chose qui le remplit. Plus jamais faim, alors qu’il se met debout d’un bond, voyant le trou se refermer lentement, lentement, serrant son cœur, mais sans véritable tristesse parce que ce qu’il a obtenu est pour de bon. Le don ne sera pas repris.

Il respire et sent une si lourde odeur de féminité qu’il en a le vertige. Puis il reprend sa route, troublé par ce parfum de déhiscence.

Le mur, lui, frémit, vaincu par tant d’amour.

Read Next

A black and white photograph by Q Sakamaki of a policeman standing in front of a burning bus in...