The beautiful woman, who was joyfully overwhelmed by the treasure, dismissed any misgivings, however. When sad, we accept advice; when joyful, we tend to ignore prophetic counsel. With the mirror the beautiful woman achieved a beauty greater than she had ever imagined before. With this beauty, the woman was able to gain control of the community of men. By controlling the male population, the woman gained control over the world. Then she lolled around by herself while she sang, “Who am I?” A mysterious voice in her heart would respond, “You are the mirror.” She would ask, “What is the mirror?” Her double — speaking inside her — would answer, “The mirror is a woman.” She would ask, “What is a woman?” The voice would reply, “The woman in the mirror is a belle.” With childish waywardness, she would ask, “What is a belle?” Her double would respond, “A belle is the desert. The belle is the world.”
The belle finished her recitation of her epic about the belle who discovered her truth in the mirror and then, panting, flung herself down beside him. The jenny master was reeling from his admiration for the poetry’s beauty. They swayed together by the light of the inscrutable, full moon, chanting couplets. He took the belle in his arms and departed with this sorrowful song for the land of Longing. She too repeated the refrain. When she expressed her astonishment at his ability to repeat stanzas of a long ode he had only just heard for the first time, the strategist felt compelled to confess the truth to her. He said, “No secret can be hidden from the secret’s master.” The folk epic she had sung could not have become a proverbial tale for the minds of generations unless someone had composed it. “In ancient times, desert creatures normally searched far, far away for their true reality and ignored, while gasping for a distant mirage, the small jug in which was concealed the amulet for everyone. Indeed, future generations did not merely ignore the jug, they even recklessly threw stones at it or piled dirt over it in cemeteries.”
He said as well that he did not wish to tell her the story of his struggle with these generations but preferred to disclose to her, instead, the moral of the story of the mirror. “You, my beauty, don’t know that Mirror is one of my names, since I am a mirror for everything. I am the mirror that does not show people their faces but reflects their souls. Anyone evil sees evil in my face. Anyone good, sees good in my face.”
6 The Amulet
Tafarat was the first to decide to reveal her true nature to him via a question: “Is a woman who does not bear offspring really a woman?”
They had met by appointment on a night when the moon turned full. Stillness prevailed over the empty plain. The descendants of the water nymphs sat in a circle around the tomb’s entrance. Tamanokalt hummed a tune before responding to her sister’s question: “Of course not. A woman who doesn’t bear children isn’t really a woman.”
Tafarat objected, “But she’s not a man, either.” At this point he decided to intervene in their discussion for the first time: “A woman who does not bear children is neither a woman nor a man.”
A laugh escaped from Taddikat. Tamanokalt resumed crooning the mournful tune.
Temarit inquired maliciously, “A woman who isn’t a woman or a man: What type of creature is she?”
Tahala asked disapprovingly, “Is this a riddle?”
Tamanokalt continued crooning the ancient song of longing. For a time, the strategist of every generation repeated her refrains. When none of the water nymphs’ offspring took up the words of the song, the spirit world’s messenger decided to take charge himself. He started by solving the talismanic riddle: “A woman who does not consider herself a man will never carry a man in her belly as an embryo.”
Tahala continued her attack: “Is this another riddle?”
He intoned the song for a time. He rendered the tune as if the secret was to be found in the melody, not in the physical world. Before the tune carried him too far away, however, he let go of it and said, “A woman who has lost the man inside her is exactly like a man who has lost touch with the woman inside him.”
More than one tongue asked, “Tell us, master of gnosis, about the man who has lost touch with the woman inside him. Tell us, master of intuition, about the woman who has lost touch with the man inside her.”
He stopped humming the song altogether to respond to the question. “Do you water nymphs know why a man throws himself into the arms of a woman?”
They waited for him to continue, and so he added, “A man does that when he has lost track of the woman inside him, for a man feels an unbearable hunger when he misses the woman inside him, not the man.”
Tafarat said, “I never imagined that a man could carry a woman in his belly.”
“Woman, too, does not enter a man’s bedchamber until she loses from inside her the treasure called man.”
“I’ve always assumed a woman carries only a woman in her belly.”
“In her belly a woman carries an embryo that could be a man or a woman. In her heart, however, a woman carries only a man. In a woman’s embrace, a man searches for the woman he has lost from his heart. In the arms of a man, a woman searches for the man she has lost from her heart.”
Tafarat marveled: “Did our master search in our arms for a woman he had lost?”
Without any hesitation, he replied, “Certainly. Had I not been searching within you for my lost woman, I would not have granted you those amulets from my loins.”
“Did you say amulets?”
“I gave you my offspring. My offspring are my names. My names are my amulets. My amulets are seeds for journeys, not the kernels of a sedentary life.”
“Have we returned to talk about the law of travel?”
“Every discourse leads to a discussion of the law of travel in the customary law of the Messenger of Travel. Had your covey not been six in number you would not have been able to dominate men.”
More than one voice asked, “What does our master mean?”
“I mean that the spirit world has inserted into your descendents as a talisman the number six. In the arithmetic of the spirit world this is an unlucky number and over the course of time an evil omen for the nation.”
Stillness prevailed. In the sky, a cloud stormed the moon, blocking it from sight.
Tamuli shouted, “We inherited six as a lucky number from our grandmothers.”
“Your lucky number is the secret of your lost coordinate.”
Silence returned. Then Temarit asked, “Does our bevy have a lost coordinate?”
“According to the law of sorcery, six is a dangerous number until we add another unit. So where’s the seventh beauty for the bevy of water nymphs, I wonder?”
Tahala stammered, “We’ve never thought to ask that question.”
“Because. . because the seventh of you is an unknown coordinate; because the seventh of you is a man; because the seventh of you could not be a man, unless I were he.”
More than one tongue exclaimed, “You?”
“I am your secret. I am your amulet. I am your lost name. I am your lost coordinate. I am the one who searched in your embrace to find himself there. I am the one in whom you searched for your unrecognized man so you could discover in his embrace your lost truth. I am the seventh coordinate.”
“Is Seventh Coordinate our master’s seventh name?”
“This is something I cannot disclose.”
They expressed their disapproval in unison: “But you told us about the names and sowed your names inside us.”