She was lying, colorless, overcome with sleep, on the colorless sand. I sat down nearby. It was the season – as I know now – when the ultraviolet era was approaching its end on our planet; a way of life about to finish was displaying its supreme peak of beauty. Nothing so beautiful had ever run over the Earth, as the creature I had before my eyes.
Ayl opened her eyes. She saw me. At first I believe she couldn't distinguish me – as had happened to me, with her – from the rest of that sandy world; then she seemed to recognize in me the unknown presence that had pursued her and she was frightened. But in the end she became aware of our common substance and there was a half-timid, half-smiling palpitation in the look she gave me, which caused me to emit a silent whimper of happiness.
I started conversing, all in gestures. "Sand. Not-sand," I said, first pointing to our surroundings, then to the two of us.
She nodded yes, she had understood.
"Rock. Not-rock," I said, to continue that line of reasoning. It was a period in which we didn't have many concepts at our disposaclass="underline" to indicate what we two were, for example, what we had in common and what was different, was not an easy undertaking.
"I. You-not-I." I tried to explain, with gestures.
She was irked.
"Yes. You-like-me, but only so much," I corrected myself.
She was a bit reassured, but still suspicious.
"I, you, together, run run," I tried to say.
She burst out laughing and ran off.
We ran along the crest of the volcanoes. In the noon grayness Ayl's flying hair and the tongues of flame that rose from the craters were mingled in a wan, identical fluttering of wings.
"Fire. Hair," I said to her. "Fire same hair."
She seemed convinced.
"Not beautiful?" I asked.
"Beautiful," she answered.
The Sun was already sinking into a whitish sunset. On a crag of opaque rocks, the rays, striking sidelong, made some of the rocks shine.
"Stones there not same. Beautiful, eh?" I said.
"No," she answered, and looked away.
"Stones there beautiful, eh?" I insisted, pointing to the shiny gray of the stones.
"No." She refused to look.
"To you, I, stones there!" I offered her.
"No. Stones here!" Ayl answered and grasped a handful of the opaque ones. But I had already run ahead.
I came back with the glistening stones I had collected, but I had to force her to take them.
"Beautiful!" I tried to persuade her.
"No!" she protested, but she looked at them; removed now from the Sun's reflections, they were opaque like the other stones; and only then did she say: "Beautiful!"
Night fell, the first I had spent not embracing a rock, and perhaps for this reason it seemed cruelly shorter to me. The light tended at every moment to erase Ayl, to cast a doubt on her presence, but the darkness restored my certainty she was there.
The day returned, to paint the Earth with gray; and my gaze moved around and didn't see her. I let out a mute cry: "Ayl! Why have you run off?" But she was in front of me and was looking for me, too; she couldn't see me and silently shouted: "Qfwfq! Where are you?" Until our eyesight darkened, examining that sooty luminosity and recognizing the outline of an eyebrow, an elbow, a thigh.
Then I wanted to shower Ayl with presents, but nothing seemed to me worthy of her. I hunted for everything that was in some way detached from the uniform surface of the world, everything marked by a speckling, a stain. But I was soon forced to realize that Ayl and I had different tastes, if not downright opposite ones: I was seeking a new world beyond the pallid patina that imprisoned everything, I examined every sign, every crack (to tell the truth something was beginning to change: in certain points the colorlessness seemed shot through with variegated flashes); instead, Ayl was a happy inhabitant of the silence that reigns where all vibration is excluded; for her anything that looked likely to break the absolute visual neutrality was a harsh discord; beauty began for her only where the grayness had extinguished even the remotest desire to be anything other than gray.
How could we understand each other? No thing in the world that lay before our eyes was sufficient to express what we felt for each other, but while I was in a fury to wrest unknown vibrations from things, she wanted to reduce everything to the colorless beyond of their ultimate substance.
A meteorite crossed the sky, its trajectory passing in front of the Sun; its fluid and fiery envelope for an instant acted as a filter to the Sun's rays, and all of a sudden the world was immersed in a light never seen before. Purple chasms gaped at the foot of orange cliffs, and my violet hands pointed to the flaming green meteor while a thought for which words did not yet exist tried to burst from my throat:
"This for you! From me this for you, yes, yes, beautiful!"
At the same time I wheeled around, eager to see the new way Ayl would surely shine in the general transfiguration; but I didn't see her: as if in that sudden shattering of the colorless glaze, she had found a way to hide herself, to slip off among the crevices in the mosaic.
"Ayl! Don't be frightened, Ayl! Show yourself and look!"
But already the meteorite's arc had moved away from the Sun, and the Earth was reconquered by its perennial gray, now even grayer to my dazzled eyes, and indistinct, and opaque, and there was no Ayl.
She had really disappeared. I sought her through a long throbbing of days and nights. It was the era when the world was testing the forms it was later to assume: it tested them with the material it had available, even if it wasn't the most suitable, since it was understood that there was nothing definitive about the trials. Trees of smoke-colored lava stretched out twisted branches from which hung thin leaves of slate. Butterflies of ash flying over clay meadows hovered above opaque crystal daisies. Ayl might be the colorless shadow swinging from a branch of the colorless forest or bending to pick gray mushrooms under gray clumps of bushes. A hundred times I thought I glimpsed her and a hundred times I thought I lost her again. From the wastelands I moved to the inhabited localities. At that time, sensing the changes that would take place, obscure builders were shaping premature images of a remote, possible future. I crossed a piled-up metropolis of stones; I went through a mountain pierced with passageways like an anchorites' retreat; I reached a port that opened upon a sea of mud; I entered a garden where, from sandy beds, tall menhirs rose into the sky.
The gray stone of the menhirs was covered with a pattern of barely indicated gray veins. I stopped. In the center of this park, Ayl was playing with her female companions. They were tossing a quartz ball into the air and catching it.
Someone threw it too hard, the ball came within my reach, and I caught it. The others scattered to look for it; when I saw Ayl alone, I threw the ball into the air and caught it again. Ayl ran over; hiding, I threw the quartz ball, drawing Ayl farther and farther away. Finally I showed myself; she scolded me, then laughed; and so we went on, playing, through strange regions.
At that time the strata of the planet were laboriously trying to establish an equilibrium through a series of earthquakes. Every now and then the ground was shaken by one, and between Ayl and me crevasses opened across which we threw the quartz ball back and forth. These chasms gave the elements compressed in the heart of the Earth an avenue of escape, and now we saw outcroppings of rock emerge, or fluid clouds, or boiling jets spurt up.