The tent bed was the broadest imaginable, and she lay down beside him; stretched out like him. Except that although she lay there as still as he did, completely still, she did not seem dead at all. No greater contrast than between these two bodies, stretched out side by side, a hairsbreadth apart, yet not touching anywhere.
To the degree that the man had become emaciated, presenting an image of progressive wasting, the woman at his side now blossomed. As his cheeks shrank to the last shreds of skin still attached to his facial bones, sunken like those of a mummy, the woman’s cheeks swelled and took on the sheen of a freshly plucked apple, polished with a cloth. All of her forms expanded, grew taut, stretched. Altogether she acquired volume, grew larger and firmer, and at the same time became heavy and heavier — warmly heavy, beautifully heavy. While his forehead shriveled, acquiring creases and cracks “like the varnish on an old painting,” his eyes sucked in by their sockets, his lips drawn back over his teeth (which would never bite again), his legs transformed into cold sticks, she experienced, right there beside him, a generalized swelling, one which “in contrast to the four sleeping vassals had nothing at all to do with any kind of exhaustion.”
Her thighs, next to the wretched male quasi-skeleton, rose, curved, and filled out, as did her breasts; her mouth, the reverse of the man’s cadaver-like one, stood slightly open, showing the tip of her tongue, “the smile of the flesh and the woman victorious”; and above them the woman’s eyes now opened as wide as possible, with a gleam despite their blackness “that represented the triumph of life and survival, the triumph heightened by the man lying there next to her on the tent bed, so waxy and wan, from head to toe, body and soul, in his ermine. And how in that moment, during the night, this night, her hair gleamed, came loose, fell over the head of the bed, spread over the pillow and the bolsters, snaking toward the bald, deader-than-dead skull of her neighbor, of that witness to her aliveness, all the sweeter now, in this night!” In a film one would have seen the two of them from above, from the dome of the tent chamber, first in a long shot, then in a close-up.
In the course of her life she had become a ruler, for better or worse. “And this sort of ruler,” she then told the author, “is something I do not want to be anymore.” But the realm in which she had always been eager to reign was that of the sleepers, with her as the only one still awake, as during that night in Pedrada. From early childhood on, she had had the notion that sleepers were not bad people. Even evildoers and unkind people, she had thought as a child, and still thought, were harmless and peaceable when they slept, and not only for the moment, but for the entire period of sleep; by making use of their sleep, and in consideration of their sleep, one could certainly discover them as peace-loving, well-intentioned, indeed childlike folk.
Sleepers, she imagined, embodied their true being. And the true being of every individual, she had always thought, and still thought today, was good! This goodness came to light in a sleeper and could be studied. That was an area of study that had not yet been “exploited,” something like “dormant capital.” This notion, that all people, yes, all, when asleep became childlike and were good, and in the process embodied and even prefigured the best of all possible worlds, had perhaps been, she thought, one of the keys to her power over others: in the confrontations, indeed struggles, with even her presumably most ferocious adversaries, she had pictured them as sleepers, and that had at least contributed to turning one opponent or another into a partner and accomplice.
The author countered by asking how it happened, then, that she had incurred so much hostility, and he added that in his eyes, becoming “childlike” in sleep, and in general, did not at all mean being a good person, or an unsuspecting person, or a pure person, at least not in his experience of “contemporary children”; and then he told her that at one time he had had an opinion of sleepers not so different from her own. But over the years he had noticed, and specifically in himself, that in sleep the momentary surges of hate he experienced while awake, likewise the outbursts of anger and hostility, had not fallen silent as in his earlier years but had erupted even more forcefully.
And by now, he said, evil raged in him even more furiously at night, while he was sleeping, than during the day, when he had tried-and-true techniques for shooing it away whenever it showed its face: lacking any such technique as a sleeper — no matter how much he practiced before closing his eyes — he sometimes roared and bared his teeth, or did so at least in his dreams, all night long at someone he did not know, or darted into a crowd of strangers brandishing a knife, thus embodying only the worst of all possible worlds and in the end feeling nothing but relief at waking up. “It seems to me that today we sleepers are to be feared. Steer clear of sleepers, even those who seem peaceful and quiet! You no sooner bend over them than they will jump up and stab you.”
She was keeping watch. Was she keeping watch? She sat up. She stood up. She walked up and down inside the main tent. Not a sound from the Sierra. Even the tributaries of the río Tormes had fallen silent, as if switched off, or as if they no longer reached her ears.
In her early days back there in the riverport city, at night she had heard every train, no matter how distant, and every steamer’s whistle blowing at night — and after a few months, after a few years, nothing.
So she had been in the innermost reaches of the Sierra that long already? Eyes wide open, for true dreaming! (“Avoid the word ‘true,’” she dictated to the author, “instead use ‘comprehensive.’”) So eyes wide open for comprehensive dreaming. It was the last hour of the night, and as so often she had the notion that a final decision was about to be made, something good or something terrible, a decision affecting not her alone but indeed the entire planet. It was also the hour when the earth always became most perceptible to her as a planet, a newborn one — dependent on its solar system and yet alone in the universe, as alone as anything can be, vulnerable, perilously vulnerable: precisely in this hour it would tip, not, as usual, toward day but into so-called eternal night. Decision? Turning point? Eyes open. Among the constellations of the northern hemisphere — Orion, the Pleiades, the Great Bear — the Southern Cross, actually not visible in these parts, inserted itself, as if gently slipped in.
That snake, no longer than her forearm, as narrow as her little finger, patterned in yellow and black like a salamander, which she had encountered during one of her previous crossings of the Sierra de Gredos, when she stumbled yet again in the trackless wilderness without being able to brake herself, at this moment slithered away in a leisurely fashion — no raising of its head or darting of its tongue at her — and, as she tumbled downhill, let her slide by in the scree, stepped aside (“Can one say of a snake that it stepped?”) ahead of her, leisurely and gracefully.
Poisonous though it was, the snake had not frightened her when she fell toward it: that moment with the viper had even been a helpful one during that crazy hike through the Sierra: with the help of the snake she had achieved equanimity where previously she had been almost too cocksure, also hasty and not always mindful while walking or beating her way forward, and from the viper moment on, she maintained her composure, step after step, even if later she briefly lost her footing time and again. She had borrowed from her snake the rhythm she needed to wend her way out of the rocky maze, which, when one found oneself in it, sometimes seemed to offer no escape. And long after the crossing she drew on or called up the image of the snake to stay on top of certain situations, or simply to remain focused and to follow through on something, intensely and calmly, not allowing herself to be deflected from her course, yet concentrating entirely on the moment, on the now, now, now …