eyes of the heart toward an unfathomable inner life.
The women lie side by side, legs entwined and each with an arm under the other’s neck like sleepy reflex arcs. Suddenly Cybil Noland can stand no more of this new silence that has come and imposed itself on top of the first, which had been a silence tacitly agreed between them like a stylized modesty, an elegant discretion, a kind of meditative state capable of shutting out the sounds of civilization and creating a fictional time favourable to the appearance of each one’s essential face.
Cybil Noland had brought the woman up to her room thinking of what she called each woman’s essential face in her own destiny. Each time she had sex with a woman, this was what put heart into her desire. She was ready for anything, any kind of caress, any and all sexual scenarios, aware that you can never foresee exactly when, or for how long, an orgasm will recompose the lines of the mouth and chin, make the eyelids droop, dilate the pupils or keep the eyes shining. Most often the face would describe its own aura of ecstasy, beginning with the light filtering through the enigmatic slit between the eyelids when they hover half-closed halfway between life and pleasure. Then would come the split second that changed the iris into the shape of a crescent moon, before the white of the eye, whiter than the soul, proliferated multiples of the word imagery deep in her thoughts. This was how a woman who moments earlier had been a total stranger became a loved one capable of changing the course of time for the better.
All, thought Cybil Noland, so that the essential face that shows what women are really capable of may be seen, vulnerable and radiant, infinitely human, desperately disturbing. But for this to happen, the whole sea would have to flood into her mouth, and the wind flatten her hair to her skull, and fire ignite from fire, and she would have to consider everything very carefully at the speed of life and wait for the woman to possess her own silence, out of breath and beyond words in the midst of her present. In the well of her pleasure the woman would have to find her own space, a place of choice.
So when the air conditioner stopped, Cybil Noland felt she had been robbed of the rare and singular silence that had brought her so close to La Sixtine. As if she had suddenly realized that while the words heat me vast2 were ringing with their thousand possibilities and her delicate tongue was separating the lips of La Sixtine’s sex, civilization had nevertheless continued its headlong course.
Now the new silence is crowding the silence that accompanies one’s most private thoughts. While groping for a comparison to explain this new silence, suddenly Cybil Noland can stand no more of it and wants to speak, will speak, but the woman comes close and reclines on top of her and with her warm belly and hair tickling Cybil’s nose, and breasts brushing over Cybil’s mouth, seems determined to turn Cybil’s body into an object of pure erotic pleasure.
You’d say she was going. To say. Yes, she murmurs inarticulate sounds in Cybil’s ear, rhythms, senseless words, catches her breath, plays on it momentarily, ‘That good?’ she breathes. ‘That better?’ Then over Cybil’s body strews images and succulent words that burst in the mouth like berries. Now her sounds caress like violins. The names of constellations come suddenly to Cybil’s mind: Draco the Dragon, Coma Berenices, Cassiopaeia, and Lyra for the Northern Hemisphere; Sculptor, Tucana, Apus the Bird of Paradise, Ara the Altar for the Southern. Then the whole sea spreads through her and La Sixtine relaxes her hold.
You’d say she was going to tell a story. Something with the word joyous in the sentence to go with her nakedness there in the middle of the room. Once she’s in the shower the water runs hard. She sings. When she lifts her tongue the sounds crowd up from under, full of vim. Joyously her voice spews out, zigzags from one word to another, cheerily penetrating Cybil Noland’s consciousness as she lies half asleep in the spacious bed.
‘I’ll tell you a story,’ La Sixtine said, opening the window before getting in the shower. The window opens onto a fire escape. The curtain moves gently. Cybil Noland watches the movements of the fish, seaweed, and coral in the curtain’s design. Life is a backdrop against which thoughts and memories overlap. Life moves ever so slightly, goes through static stages, skews off, brings its humanism to the midst of armed cities like a provocation, a paradox that makes you smile. In spite of yourself. The dark fish throw a shadow over the pinks and whites of the coral, Cybil Noland thinks before riding off again, a deep-sea wanderer aboard great incunabula.
The power’s back on. The air conditioner’s working. In the corridor, the chambermaids are bustling back and forth again.
When she got out of the shower La Sixtine turned on the radio. A sombre voice entered the room, spreading a smell of war and filth. The voice waded its way through ‘today the authorities’ and ‘many bodies in front of the cathedral, some horribly mutilated. Fetuses were seen hanging from the gutted bellies of their mothers. In places the snow seemed coated with blood. Old women, open-mouthed and staring toward the cold infinity of the region leading to the sea, spoke of human limbs scattered about the ground. Other witnesses talked of hearing the cries of children although no children have been found. At present the authorities are unable to say what group the dead belong to since from their clothing one cannot tell whether they are from the north-east or the east-north.’
One after another the sentences fall to the room’s pink carpet. Cybil Noland watches from the spacious bed. La Sixtine sits on the edge of the bed with a towel about her hips and seems to be breathing with difficulty. Then, as if tired of trying to find her breath, she turns and curls her body into Cybil’s trembling nakedness. Her head weighs heavily. Her body is heavy. The present is a body. The body is a live, pure present that goes on forever between the electrical thrum of the air conditioner and the voice from the radio.
Cybil Noland thinks about the morning she spent in a Covent Garden café. Her head that morning was full of a woman who wants to write a novel. This woman lacks vocabulary to describe the volcano of violence erupting in cities. She is sitting in a large kitchen. While she spoons sugar into her teacup with a little silver spoon, her hair brushes over the sugar bowl. She is young and resolute, in contrast with the fact that she is still in pyjamas at this late morning hour. There is a dictionary on the table. With one hand she holds the silver spoon and with the other absentmindedly turns the pages of the dictionary. She gets up and goes to the window, where for a minute she leans on the sill. From here she can see the approaches to Hyde Park, the texture of the day and the fine rain of this weather that penetrates the very core of one. She gazes into the distance. At the far side of herself, she ponders a fictional life. She observes so meticulously that the pondering fits her head and thoughts like a helmet. A book by Samuel Beckett lies on the table. The sugar bowl looks like a volcano. The woman lives alone, surrounded by ferns and a wealth of other plants to which she will put no names so that in their green anonymity they will create a fine, rich tropical forest for her. The rain falls slowly. She lights a cigarette. Why would she write this violent book? She has no special gift for it, or vocabulary or experience. She puts a hand on the dictionary and draws it close. The hand stays resting on the cover as though she’s about to take an oath. With the other hand she writes a list of violent words, words that turn one’s stomach, turn one’s head to suffering, to people and their progeny who thirst for vengeance. Beyond the window Hyde Park glows, adding to its mystery, offering its trees and green lawns as so many hypotheses that liven vertigo in contemplation of the future. Truth will never come without worry, nor will the illusion of truth. The woman pours herself another cup of tea. Her father’s oak-panelled library is filled with women’s books. Her father’s books are stacked in the north corner of the kitchen. They stand there like three Towers of Babel. Three towers of leather-bound volumes showing their gold-leafed spines.
The
