The leader arrived to find the diviner waiting for him. They exchanged enigmatic glances by the light of the full moon. Then they set off for a walk in the open countryside as if by prior arrangement. They didn’t speak. They did not speak till they were separated from the tumult of the masses and were certain that the desert had lent an ear and begun to listen.
The diviner began, “Didn’t I tell you he’d return?”
“Yes. He disappeared that day as if he was from the Spirit World and returned today as if he was from the Spirit World.”
“You don’t realize, Master, that he has been waiting. …”
“Waiting?”
“Yes. He waited for the dirt to claim its share of the dirt’s gift.”
“The truth is that I don’t understand.”
“He waited till the dirt had eaten the flesh, leaving him the bones.”
“What will the wretch do with the bones now they have moldered?”
The diviner didn’t reply. He didn’t stop. He didn’t roll a stone with his sandal. He kept walking forward as if he had decided to cross the desert on foot, to migrate, to dispense with everything.
Then he said, “He’ll make talismans from them. A talisman for his neck, one for his veil’s pleat, one for his left wrist, one for his right wrist, and one for the pommel of his saddle. The talisman is a symbol, and the symbol is the lover’s language.”
“Did you say ‘symbol’?”
Unconsciously the diviner hastened his steps. The diviner knew that the desert is a temptation. The diviner knew that the desert entices people. The diviner knew that going into the desert is a voyage, because the naked continent does not accommodate people who come for sightseeing. Because the only law it recognizes is travel. He outpaced the leader by some distance.
Panting, he said, “The lover knows better than anyone else the misery of destiny, Master. He knows he will never obtain anything, so what matters to him is the symbol. The talisman is the only symbol, Master.”
The leader quickened his pace as well. He hastened at a speed inappropriate for a leader, inappropriate for a sage, but didn’t feel comfortable calling to ask the diviner to slow down.
The diviner pulled farther away and the distance between them increased, but the leader stumbled stubbornly after him.
In a strange voice he raved, “The symbol. What’s important is the symbol.”
He studied the horizon, which was flooded by light like daytime. When he realized that the diviner was far ahead of him, he said aloud to himself, “‘We must dispense with things that we love more than we should.’ How cruel this is; how beautiful this is!”
He repeated the phrase in the wasteland. Then he heard it again like an echo of a mysterious call.
______________
Author’s Note. Successive generations have affirmed that these events took place before the tribe became sedentary, before the leader’s tomb became a peg that tied them to the earth. Even so, some narrators feel that this tale could have occurred in any age and that we may find it playing out in the dwellings of any tribe headed by a leader who is assisted by a diviner.
V THE SUCCESSOR
He is like a witness, isolated from everyone, but observes the play surreptitiously.
1
They came that day too.
They came the way they had always come; Emmamma led the way, grasping his polished staff. The diviner walked beside him as he usually did. They came swathed in flowing, lustrous garments accented by bands of blue cloth — the mark of special occasions — one above the veil and the second over the shoulders. They came as they were wont to come whenever the specter of an important affair hovered over the tribe. They came as they were wont to come when the awe-inspiring drum, which was decorated with designs of the ancients, was struck in the leader’s tent, when they had contacted each other, assembled, and come in response to the leader’s appeal. They came today again while fear circulated and fright was on the prowl in the settlement. Then young warriors, old codgers, women, and children emerged from their dwellings and stood humbly by the entrances to their tents as if waiting for something dreadful to happen or expecting an earthquake. People who have savored a sedentary life and have yielded to the land’s temptation also grow accustomed to viewing the noble blue-clad council, which looks black from a distance, as a council of crows and a threat to their sedentary life: a convulsion, a blotting out of indolence, an end to muddling through, and the beginning of every futile deed.
They came today as well, and their arrival frightened the tribe, even though it varied today from those over the past decades. It was different because these elders had before always visited an inhabited residence; today they found the leader’s tent vacant.
The immortal Emmamma stopped at the tent’s entrance to release a long moan of sorrow, to emit a savage groan of farewell, the groan of a dying man, the distressing groan that ends the life of many people, a groan elders that day heard as a lethal lament. Tears flowed from their eyes, and their hearts bled grievously. The venerable elder swayed like someone in an ecstatic trance. So the diviner supported him on one side and Imaswan on the other.
The aged man rapped the tent pole at the entrance with his burnished stick and shouted, “How many times, House, have we entered to find you inhabited? Today we come and find you vacant?”
He released a moan of lament once more. Imaswan protested, “Noble Grandfather, this isn’t appropriate!”
Emmamma wiped the tears from his eyes and from his eyelids, which were lined with rugged wrinkles where tears collected. He retorted, “This is appropriate; this isn’t appropriate! This is done; this isn’t done! Is this all we know how to say in the tribe’s language? Haven’t we killed the leader himself with such talk? When he tried to convince us that a poet is ill-suited to serve as leader, didn’t we tell him, ‘This isn’t appropriate’? Didn’t we tell him when his heart went pit-a-pat long ago and he wanted to marry the poet, ‘This isn’t appropriate’? When he wanted to help us and thought we should tarry in a bountiful land, which has nourished and sheltered us, didn’t we say, ‘This isn’t appropriate’? So why shouldn’t we admit that we’re the ones who killed him with a dagger called ‘This isn’t appropriate’?”
The diviner said, “It would be better for my master to preside over the council and thus honor the master of the house, because the leader will continue to fret uncomfortably in his new home and won’t rest until we finish choosing a successor for the master of this house.”
Everyone murmured his agreement. The diviner seated the venerable elder near the tent pole at the center of the assembly and sat down beside him to his right. The venerable elder swayed again and said, “We have sought refuge with you from iniquity, and you have kept us safe. We have appealed to you for judgment, and you have treated us fairly. We have relied on you, and you have fed us. House, where has your master gone? Where has our master vanished?”
He tried to trace some characters on the ground but found he was shaking too hard. He thrust both hands in the dirt (the way sorcerers do when they fear some evil) and sighed. This wasn’t merely a sigh; it was another moan, a deep groan that poets use to express painful sorrow and that a sage uses to extinguish anguish: “Hi … yi … yi … yi … yeh.” Then everyone repeated this moan after him. The noble elders repeated it as if responding to a mysterious call. This emerged from their chests like the groan of a dying person taking his last breath.
2
The sorrow did not dissipate and, beneath the ashes, the glowing ember of pain did not die out. The elders’ sense of decorum, however, did not prevent them from yielding to their sorrows for a long time. They substituted for the story of parting the narrative of memorable deeds and replaced chanting with panegyric. They said he had not merely been a leader; he had been a brother to every member of the tribe. They said he had lived like an orphan, lacking family and relatives. To their amazement they hadn’t realized, until they lost him, that he had lost his mother and father, his brother and sister, and his friend and consort. They said he had been born alone, had lived alone, and had left the life of the tribe alone. They said he was the only leader in the tribe’s history not to have privileged his own opinion, not to have rejected a request from the council, and not to have made a decision without recourse to it. They said in the tribe’s history he was the only leader who from the beginning had dedicated his life to the tribe. Even so, the council had been stingy with him about everything, refusing to back down and grant his least request. They commented that his parents had been too stingy to grant him a sister who might have given birth to a nephew to serve as his successor and that they, the council members, had been too stingy to grant him a wife to bear a son to serve as his heir when he lacked a sister’s son. They concluded by acknowledging that their misfortune on losing him would be all the greater because they wouldn’t be able to find a suitable replacement for his eminence. Emmamma swayed once more; this venerable elder almost led them back to the land they had fled. Then the diviner intervened and told them they should sacrifice an animal on behalf of the deceased man’s soul. This suggestion pleased them. They joyously expressed their approval, and the slaves rushed to bring a black goat to the awe-inspiring tomb.