I reached out and took that sonorously beating, bloody, dripping heart in my hand. I held it with repulsion, wishing only to return it immediately to its owner — but the phantom moaned with fury, his wounded mouth filled with green spittle, and he howled these words: “Demand what you wilclass="underline" power, riches, glory: they are yours; they belong to he who dares take my heart.”
I replied simply: “I want nothing. Here. I return your heart to you.”
The creature, who had only eyes, mouth, and tongue, shouted again and his shouts drowned out the sound of his pounding ribs. “Then it is true!” he shouted. “You are the one who rejects all temptation; today you rejected the gifts of the jeweled bird and now you reject mine. What is it you wish?”
I stood silent, the creature’s heart in my hand. I looked with cold disdain at this forest tempter. The only thing I possessed was my desire; I would not deliver it in exchange for his heart. For I well knew the law of this land was to reply to an offering with another of greater value: what but my desire could I offer the phantom of the forest in exchange for his heart?
When his ribs, like the shutters of a window, again opened, I returned his heart and I asked the one nocturnal question to which I had a right. “Take your heart. And in exchange, tell me now: why did the inhabitants of the town beside the river kill themselves?”
I feared, Sire, I was wasting another question, and that I would hear the answer I had myself proposed: that they had gone mad when they realized they had lost their memory. I did not fear that answer; it would, at least, reaffirm my reason. But the creature with the glowing eyes raised two hands as smooth as his face (hands without fingernails or lines of fortune or love or life), and pressed those hands against his beating rib cage and said: “They sacrificed themselves for you…”
And the phantom began to laugh monstrously. “They sacrificed themselves for you…” Howling with laughter, the horrendous forest apparition repeated: “Sacrificed themselves for you … sacrificed themselves for you…” And with every burst of laughter, his body shrank; the creature hid his face between his hands, and howled: “Fear me, brother, fear me; I am your pursuing shadow; I am the voice you heard last night over your shoulder; I am…”
Suddenly the creature stood tall, looked straight into my eyes. I was looking at myself. The phantom of the forest had my face, my body; he was my exact double, my twin, my mirror.
DAY OF THE SMOKING MIRROR
I say exact, but I am inexact, Sire. For my double was my double in everything except color. My eyes were blue, his were black. My hair was the color of wheat, his the color of a horse’s mane. My skin, in spite of the time spent in these lands, was pale and quick to burn, to blister and peel to a pale rose color. My twin’s was burnished copper. But he was my twin in every other way: size, build, features, and bearing. Now I can recall the differences. That night I was impressed only by the similarity.
I was not master of my hours there. Much time must have passed between the night of the horrendous nocturnal apparition and my next memory of my voyage. The ancient of the temple and the goddess of the butterflies had warned me; I would recall only five days, those saved from the days of my destiny in this land. Now, before opening my eyes again, I could have dreamed: “One day, ten, five more, how many days had passed since that night the phantom offered me his heart and I offered him my wish in exchange?”
I did not know, and that was an advantage the new world held over me; it knew all my steps across its face, even those I actually would never forget because they were not a part of my memory. But if this was my weakness, perhaps that of the new world was having to assume the memory and responsibility for all my acts. I may have done a great deal, Sire, I may have done very little, but I did something between that night and this dawn. But if I were dreaming this dawn, I was consoled by reason: “Yesterday, only yesterday, you escaped from the well of death, following a night of superhuman labor and wakefulness; you were led to the pyramid of the Fat Prince; you rejected the power and the glory offered by the bejeweled bird; you left behind you the chalky plain; you walked through the forests of tall trees; you encountered the phantom, your dark double. You must have slept deeply, as you have never slept before. There is no body, no matter how young, that can bear so much. Your sleep has been so deep that it seems as if it were the longest of your life; no, more than that; it seems longer even than your life. But the truth is that you slept last night and you awakened today. That is all.”
My eyes contradicted my reason. I awakened suddenly, eagerly, breathing rapidly, as one awakens from a nightmare, and I saw a transformed landscape. There was nothing here to recall the warm, florid lands of the coast. It was cold, and my ripped and torn clothing served me badly. It was difficult to breathe; the air was thin and elusive. The luxuriant vegetation of the new world had died, and in its place reigned a no less luxuriant desolation. I was surrounded by a landscape of rock; tumultuous yellow and red stone, at once symmetrical and capricious in its naked shapes of knife and saw, altar and table, cloud and constellation of shattered stone, tall, smooth, sharply outlined cathedrals of sheer rock pierced by twisted thickets and dwarfed gray trees; rock crowned by enormous green-thorned candelabra never before seen by the eye of man, like cathedral organs, tall and dry and armed to defend themselves against any touch, although who would dare touch so forbidding a plant, queen of this petrous desert, whose coarse, prickly habit declared her majestic desire to live isolated in this sterile domain: a hermit plant, a stylite unto herself, O Very Christian Sire who hears me today, both pillar and penitent.
At the foot of this rocky mountain lay a valley of dust so restless and silent that at first I did not notice any life within its reaches, except for the movement of the veils of dry, white whirling dirt, swift and hostile; an icy wind was blowing; and it rent the veils of dust; before me, before my bed of rocks, rose the volcano. I had arrived. I gave thanks. Here my lover was to meet me. I looked around. At my feet was the spider’s thread.
Jubilant, I picked it up. Following it, I descended from my harsh eyrie. I no longer thought whether much or a little time had passed between my most recent recollection and this new morning, between my passage through the burning coastlands and my arrival in this cold region. Guided by the spider I descended to the plain, and holding to its thread I moved through the restless dust of the plain, and like the plain I felt crushed by the closeness of the sky and sun which at this height were almost on top of me, and I remembered how distant they had seemed on the coast. I did not understand; terrible was the heat on the beaches I first trod in this new world, and I thought then that nowhere did the blazing sun burn so close to us. Now, I remembered how high and distant it had seemed on the coast and in the jungle; and on this plain of rock and dust, beside the volcano, so nearby, its blaze was lessened. A transparent Host, the sun burned less the nearer I was to it. I realized this, to the astonishment of my body, only at that instant. And as I walked forward I discovered that the dust was also smoke.
In one hand I held the guiding thread. With the other, I tried to fan away the dust and smoke that almost prevented my seeing or breathing. I stretched out my hand before me, Sire, as blind men do, even when someone leads them. And my hand disappeared in that thick haze. My fingers touched other bodies, a swiftly moving line of human bodies hidden by the dust and smoke of this silent dawn at the foot of the volcano. Silence. Footsteps. I drew back a hand throbbing with fear and touched my chest, my face, my sex, for I needed to assure myself of my own existence; and when I knew it was I, that I was there, alive, only then did my sensations begin to float away from reality; and reality insinuated itself, Sire, with such cunning that I believed my sensations were reality. For while I was telling myself I had come into a world of dust, the reality was that the dust was smoke; and while I believed myself to be surrounded by silence, evil and cunning were the murmuring reality on this plain at the foot of the volcano.