The woodsman was a short, stocky, thick-necked fellow; the straw-colored hair on his head, face, and chest was turning white. The fury of the search had shot blood into his blue eyes, and his body was covered in sweat, earth, and small leaves.
“Stop, Nathaniel. Forget this ridiculous dream, I beg you,” said his wife, who was following him like a shadow.
But he went on running through the forest, ricocheting off trees and shoving branches out of his way. From his dry throat came the wild, demonic whine of a dog on the trail of its prey. As he entered a clearing, he stumbled over the trunk of a tree he had chopped down the day before, but he pulled himself back upright out of sheer tenacity and continued his mad search.
“She must have sheltered here in the night,” he said to himself. “She couldn’t have swum the river or crossed the field, at least not if she was naked as I remember. She said she was. What was she doing? Where was she going?”
He regarded his wife’s approach with a mixture of anger and contempt. She was covered in a shoddy, dirt-colored dress. Her gray hair, tied loosely with a bow, might have given her an unreal air from far away, blending in with the bark of the trees. But no, she was on a blind mission as well, apparently bent on her own destruction. She seemed determined to force him to look at her ruined body. There was no way to stop her. Suddenly, she was standing right in front of her husband, superimposed over the image of the other woman, which still lingered in the man’s mind like a comet’s tail. “It’s like the mark left by a painting on the wall, when no one can remember what on earth the picture was,” he grumbled before spitting. “But thankfully she won’t talk. She’s not used to it, I broke her many years ago,” he said, sitting down on the fallen tree.
He stared at her, gasping for breath, and realized for a brief, amazed second that he was only now seeing her for what she was: an alien from a distant planet. He had never noticed how merciless the ravages of time had been upon her.
“Yes, Nathaniel, you know it’s true,” she said in a grandmotherly voice. Sitting down next to him, she placed a weightless hand on his knee. “It wasn’t a dream. You woke up early this morning doing unspeakable things, things that make me ashamed just to remember them. My God. But now the sun has come out, and you and I are here, wide awake, sitting on this tree you felled yesterday with the tools you use every day…”
It was the wrong thing to say. The stranger she was trying to mollify with soothing words and gestures stood up and walked over to his ax. He picked it up with both hands and faced the terrified, ancient child who was trying to restore his sanity. Yes, he shouted, his throat hoarse with the effort, she needed to learn once and for all that she would never be able to change his mind. She’d better remember that if she didn’t want him to chop her down on the spot and leave her rotting under the dry leaves on the forest floor. He resumed his search for the lost trail, muttering to himself. Every word he uttered in a futile effort to bring back the other woman plunged the person next to him deeper and deeper into a pit of despair: “Eve, Eve… I know now that your scent was different, under your arms and in your hair. Your accursed smell mixed with the crushed flowers sticking to your skin. You asked me to smell you, to remember it all with my dead, piggish nostrils. Then there was everything else: Your fingers on my chest. The names I can’t remember, the names that can never be male that you whispered in my ear in your secret voice. My darling bitch of youth, my sweet whore from another time…”
The woman stopped abruptly. She was being watched. Not in the usual way, she noticed immediately, when a connection forms between the person looking and the subject of their gaze, but as though through a one-way mirror. Finally, she spotted the little woman. She’d been placed in an absurd niche cut into a pole, a house without a door always facing in the same direction, as though the sun, moon, and flowers behind her didn’t exist. The Virgin appeared to acquiesce to her plight with a fixed smile, and the woman realized in terror that the face looking down at her was hers from another era. It was her own unmoving body that was stuck in place, forever facing a single direction. The woman turned away and headed out into the field.
And then the real danger began. The flat terrain and strengthening light made her a perfect target with no possibility of escape. Two men appeared in the distance sitting on top of a single horse. The encounter hardly came as a surprise to the woman—it was logical for them to be there—but it was very different for the men. Although they could barely make out the shape in the early morning light, they knew very well that there had never been a tree in the spot where one now appeared to be standing. They stopped to get a better look and saw that the tree seemed to have pulled up its roots and was now on the move. They rode forward. The tree began to grow lighter, as though caught in its own personal midsummer snowstorm. As the ghostly object and the men drew together, the number of words they were capable of uttering from their open, drooling mouths dwindled.
The two men were more or less identical twins. Both were medium-sized blonds with an embryonic gaze that gave them a stupid, uncooked air. Craning their necks to see better, riding closer and closer in the morning light, they made their grand discovery: a naked woman in the middle of the field! They sat stock-still, their necks stretched out as far as they could go. It wasn’t a ghost or a tree, but a real woman, with long, loose hair and arms down at her sides.
Of course, this was something that all men, when dying of boredom, mad with lust, tormented by adolescence or the like, have imagined happening to them at some point in their lives. A wonderful woman such as this springing up from the earth, or appearing in the bathroom, or in the window across the road, offering herself in apparent supplication, ready to satisfy their every bodily desire. But these circumstances were rather different; she dazzled the mind with her shocking reality, from her torso to her fingernails. Then, as they got even closer, they saw her impenetrable eyes, whose twinkling light spiraled down inside of her. She was tired, her body crisscrossed with cuts, but she looked so diaphanous against the dark earth, thought the yokels—or they would have if they had been capable of such eloquence—and so confident; defiant but tranquil.
She regarded them indulgently, instinctively understanding them in their stupidity. Although she wasn’t much older than they were, she could draw on the accumulated experience of countless previous incarnations.
“May I cross this field?” she asked humbly, more to jolt them out of their stupor than to really ask permission.
The tangibility of her voice, the first real proof that she was actually there, was too much. Their only answer was to jump nimbly off their horse, one to either side, and run off back along the furrow they had been plowing. They moved so fast that they left no footprints, as though they were running away from the devil himself.
The woman stood next to the horse, utterly alone. Situated between her and the fleeing twins, the animal soon came to stand for all of existence. She had never seen or felt a horse at such close quarters. Its straw-colored hair, musky, slightly rotten smell, and the dampness of its eyes and snout made it the absolute embodiment of life. She could see evidence of it throbbing throughout its body. In certain areas under the beast’s sweaty skin, the pulsing grew more impatient, but the horse stood there, unmoving, waiting for who knows what, entirely disconnected from this inner flow, as though they were two separate entities. She clumsily set it free, fumbling as if she were undressing a newborn baby for the first time. “Why do people find it so difficult to do these things? Why are they so hard to do?” she asked the horse repeatedly during the process. Then she saw the blood: a wound inflicted by the halter stood out brightly against its skin. A fly noticed it at the same time and buzzed over to sit next to the gash. Disgusted though she was by its interminable sucking, she didn’t look away. She knew the men were going to come back. They had gone in search of something with which to shore up their fear and locate their courage, something that might miraculously puff out their sunken chests. But not even the knowledge that she was running out of time could drag her eyes away from the wound, even when her fascination was accompanied by a fly and its desperate coupling. Of course, it would be far too generous to just hand herself over to them. The twins would describe her nakedness vividly and a crowd would come after her. But they weren’t yet aware of the ancient source of her confidence. Aggravated by the sun and the fly’s thirst, the cut seemed to have grown into a trench around her feet, blocking her way. Driven by an uncontrollable urge, she kissed it. She barely had any saliva left under her tongue, but she gathered enough to make a ritual offering—in any other situation it would have seemed entirely out of place. It was in the midst of this act that she remembered with a start the danger she was in.