While he was speaking, night fell, and I returned home, taking my time as I walked along the streets, everything asleep. I thought about the blacksmith’s son. One day he told me he could feel when desire wafted through the village. Desire weighed on his chest, the same heaviness and troubled spirit in his blood as when a storm was brewing. I stopped in front of doors, and in the darkness I could make out the large black smudges left by so many hanging birds. One night, as I lay in bed listening to the flow of the river, I felt it was true; I was like a river with the earth below and air above. The true river had stopped, and I was the one who flowed farther and farther away, all alone in the center, trees on both sides. Then the prisoner spoke to me of desire.
Not the desire of children, who want everything, he said. All the women in the village have long hair. Here he stopped that first day. He stopped at the beginning. When he’d finished explaining, I couldn’t see his face, only the shadow of his head, like the night above the cemetery of the uncemented dead, when I could see only the shadow of my stepmother’s hair. All of them have long hair until. and when they desire a man, if her husband realizes it, if he realizes, he said, then he begins to stroke his wife. He does everything she wishes. Everything. And while he’s doing everything she wishes, one day he takes her, sits her on his lap, and places his lips against her neck. But first he takes her hair and gently moves it away from her neck, brushing her hair aside; some strands slip away, fall, and he picks them up again until no hair remains on her neck. Then he places his lips on her neck and tells his wife to say the name. The name. He asks and asks. The wife won’t tell, doesn’t tell him. No. Some of them almost die. Finally, some wives, drowsy from the gentle kisses and the soothing feeling on their hairless skin, tell their husbands. The prisoner spoke softly, so softly I had to move closer in order to hear, and I realized I was doing the same thing as the blacksmith’s son: with the first two fingers on one hand I was spreading the fingers on the other, almost tearing the skin at the joints. He told me they’d killed my father’s desire after my mother turned ugly, when she screamed the loudest at the newlyweds, before he brought my stepmother home. He said they’d killed my father’s desire, and that of many in the village. The village was full of them, and when they’ve killed your desire, they look at you tenderly, all happy, as if you were a child. A man and a woman, he said, walk past each other on the street and look at each other. It’s the birth of desire. When desire is killed in old men they seem more dead than others. When the husband has forced out the name, he makes his wife lie on the bed and has the other man brought to him, makes him lie next to his wife, and stands at the foot of the bed watching. If the wife has given the other man’s name, he can’t refuse to obey the woman’s husband. They can look at each other but they can’t speak. It depends on the kind of woman: some won’t look, others won’t stop looking, and, as time elapses, her husband at the foot of the bed becomes more and more of a man. And the two who are lying down become less and less man and woman with each passing moment, till finally the day arrives when the woman covers her face with her hands and screams. This is how they kill desire, bit by bit, if need be. The longest phase lasts an afternoon. If the woman doesn’t scream, there’s another afternoon. Sometimes this lasts for months, if the husband encounters strong desire. When the woman screams, desire flees from the hearts of the man and woman. I had it. It was born, I don’t know how. I did everything I could so they wouldn’t notice. I didn’t look. But they discover it in your eyes. Don’t look. They guessed it in the woman, and I knew she wouldn’t be able to bear it and would reveal my name right away. I could feel it stretched out in bed, ill all over. I don’t know how, but I could feel the weight of her hair as it slipped between her husband’s fingers, again and again. It was worse than listening to the river flow, day and night, worse than neighing. Worse than everything. It was as if every strand of hair that his hand brushed away was strangling me, each hair one day of my life, a fleeting day, while I lay still and salt water streamed from my body, out of my pores. Look at all the men in the village whose desire has been killed; they have eyes like horses that don’t know when they’re living and when they’re slaughtered. They are the ones who stand in front of the others when they come to gaze at me. They’re like me.