I do not know how long my exile lasted, but the whispered temptation returned one winter day, when the sky was veiled by gloomy, thick clouds and the mountain summits were shaken by a bombardment more ferocious than any I had ever heard in the desert. The herds fled and scattered. The flocks of Barbary sheep sought refuge in their mountains, and the herds of gazelles hid in the groves of palm trees. The thundering did not cease. The clouds started to shoot out terrifying bolts, and the heavens overhead were aflame with blinding fires. The herds grew increasingly alarmed and huddled together. I hid too. I had lost sight of my mother’s tail and sought refuge with a herd of gazelles in a grove. I had squeezed in among them beneath a low palm with bushy fronds when the sky was rocked by such a terrifying roll of thunder that it seemed as if it would crash down and collapse on the face of the earth. Then I observed a gap languishing in the heavenly conflagration. This fissure was ablaze with flames and stretched forth a fiery tongue to strike the tops of the tallest palms, and so the grove began to catch fire. Smoke was everywhere, but my terror-stricken clan stuck together and did not budge or flee. I heard the agony of the palms’ branches, which were caught by lapping fire, but did not catch their toasty scent until the top fronds began to fall on our miserable palm, which burst into flames as well.
The singular fragrance sparked the new prophecy in my heart and roused me, even though it seemed difficult, impossible even, to decipher the talisman. In my anxiety I began to shake. The whispered appeal apparently caused me so much pain that I rushed from the thicket into the fire. As the scorched smell in the air became more pungent, my sense of prophetic inspiration increased, but the prophecy itself did not pour forth. I shot off, racing across plains that were awash with the heaven’s deluge, not knowing whether I was galloping to flee from the conflagration or in search of a stratagem that would illuminate the prophetic message inside me. Yet I never doubted that it was a smell that had excited me: the scents of the fire, of a body being consumed by fire, of mystery, of a prophetic maxim, and of greed. A ravenous appetite, which I could not account for, swept through my body, affecting me like a lethal poison, and I ran as if deranged. My flight carried me far away. I reached the grassy valleys that lie to the north and found them flooded by the heavenly downpour. I lapped the flood water, hoping to extinguish the coal flaming in my belly, but the water, which was created to give life, not to exterminate it, did not douse the flames. I retraced my steps and, without meaning to, returned to the burning palm groves. The herd had cleared out of their hiding place and scattered across the adjacent plain. The thunderous bombardment had ceased, the downpour was checked, dwindling to scattered drops, and the cloud cover had begun to break up, but the fire in the grove burned on. As I approached the palms, that scent grew stronger. I struggled with dizziness. I was trying not to succumb to it, when I observed, beneath the palm’s burning trunk, a wretched, young ewe’s body consumed by flames. Smoke rose from what was left of her corpse. I took another step closer to poke this mound. A repulsive liquid like blood, purulence, or pus flowed out, escaping from the body. I took a stick and scraped charred lumps off her rump. The flesh had been blackened by flames, which had reduced it to bits and pieces, even as smoke continued to rise from some areas. When I plunged the stick into the creature’s thigh, the smoke subsided and the steamy scent wafted from it; the appetizing aroma of the scent that had driven me crazy. I began to tremble once more. So, without any premeditation, I stretched out my hand and feverishly pulled a chunk off the thigh. With my teeth, I tore into the flesh, which — although charred and saturated with blood and dirt — released an appetizing vapor. I savored it thoroughly, bit into the chunk, and began to chew it with the voracity of a sick man. The morsel dissolved in my mouth, and my saliva mixed with the blood, charred flesh, and mud. Then my limbs relaxed, my trembling ceased, and my fever lifted. Calm flowed through my body. Once I consumed the antidote, I heard a supernatural whisper, which was the catalyst for a weird sensation that was a forgotten prophecy.
The fog finally dispersed, and the vision’s details became clear. I saw a boy rolling between two full breasts before dropping into a dark abyss. I had to struggle even longer to make out the character of the abyss, which was that obscure ghost I today call “forgetfulness,” before I could perceive the cure — memory. It helped me remember my name.
After I recovered my name, the gloom lifted and the dream vision continued, starting with the rituals of childbirth and ending with the hunting knife I used to sever my father’s sway over me.
A new, profound sensation took hold of me. It rocked me, but I only recognized it much later as that murky enigma the tribes refer to as “happiness.” I did not then know that the spirit world, which grants happiness, normally refuses to grant it unalloyed. In my case, when I used the stick to poke at the ewe’s body roasted by the fire, I discovered, in part of the body buried under the heap, the twin, curved horns from the head of the creature that was a composite of a Barbary ram and a gazelle. Then I realized that I had poisoned my body with “evil,” since I had devoured my mother’s flesh, which had been molded together with my father’s.
3 Afternoon
THE CLOUDS LIFTED and the sky lost its distinguishing features, but the earth remained soaked from the downpour. I plunged into the mires in the valleys to rejoin the herds. I saw a knot of gazelles in the northern plains, but they shied away from me. I moved a few steps closer, but they looked alarmed, prepared to flee, and stamped the earth with their hooves. When I advanced still farther, they shot off all together, as if fleeing from a jackal. I rushed off too and caught up with them before I knew it, but the herd continued to flee and disappeared behind the hills that lead to the eastern ridges of sand. I raced after them for a long way. I gave chase, because the flight by this herd of my boon companions awakened in my heart an ugly feeling of abandonment. I choked on a bitterness that clouded my happiness by immediately bringing back my memory. I felt as ostracized, deserted, and banished as the day I fled from my tribe’s encampment. When I pondered the secret behind the gazelles’ rejection, I could think of nothing save my gluttony. Had the appetizing morsel constituted an act of civil disobedience grave enough to warrant my banishment? Was I destined to become an alien again because of this ill-omened slip? Had the gazelle clans welcomed me only because forgetfulness had allowed me to revert to a swaddling-clothes stage of animal metamorphosis and to morph into a gazelle or a Barbary sheep without my realizing it, and had this stage lasted until I devoured the morsel and thus freed myself from it by regaining my memory, only to have my shameful identity revealed to the herds, which then fled from me, horrified by my true nature? Was it reasonable for that era to end and for me to be denied forgiveness, just because I ate the flesh of a relative — not out of hunger but driven by the intoxication of something I later learned is called “greed”? All the same, I did not admit defeat.