WHO ARE YOU?
Weary waves caress your bare feet. Gulls skim across the water and you can believe it is their tranquilizing chatter that awakens you. You can also imagine that the warmth of the sand where you lie is that of your own body, that it had awaited you, was held for you alone: the darkest convolution and the most recent wound in your consciousness tell you you have been here before. You touch your burning throat and raise your head from the sand.
First you look close around you: the flotsam of many disasters returns a different gaze, sterile and opaque; only a green bottle, buried in the damp sand and, like you, licked by the sea, shines with something that your hunger and thirst would like to identify as a life of its own. A sealed bottle that may contain something to drink; you realize that the shine you attribute to the bottle originates only in your starving gaze; you pick up the bottle, you turn it, shake it, but it contains no liquid, only something like a twisted whitish root, some repulsive tail, perhaps a twist of tightly rolled paper; weakly, you toss the bottle back into the waves, and again look about you, this time into the distance.
The sun is beginning to set behind the dunes. But on the skyline you perceive a long row of figures passing between you and the sun. Dark outlines, silhouette after silhouette, plodding slowly and silently. Little clouds of dust raised in their passing whirl and disintegrate in the light of the setting sun.
You hear — perhaps you hear — a wordless hymn, guttural and somber. The marchers move with lowered heads as if each of them, even those who are unencumbered, even those who are riding, were carrying a heavy burden. You cannot count them; the procession stretches, uninterrupted, from one extreme of the dunes to the other. Clearly, what you hear is a persistent, rhythmic drumming. You raise your arms and beckon. You shout, and more than greeting, your Salve implores help. But no sound leaves your throat. You stand and brush the sand from your body, you run toward the dunes; your feet sink in deep soft sand, you progress with difficulty, you will never be able to make the climb, it seemed so close from the beach, so easy to gain …
Sand cascades onto your head, choking you, blinding you, deafening you; you breathe sand. And yet you can see the insects working their hidden tunnels in the dunes, insects that at your stumbling, desperate step skitter like grains of gold in a sieve; filled with gratitude, you are alert to the marvels of the earth; the earth lives, even in the tunnels of the most despicable insects. You do not know how you came here. But an instinct that has been awakened with movement tells you you have been saved and that you should be thankful. Someone shouts to you from the heights of the dune; a dark arm waves to you; a rope strikes your forehead; you hold on with all your strength, and open-mouthed, eyes tightly closed, you are dragged up through the sand. You are exhausted. At the top of the incline, arms seize you and try to pull you to your feet. Each time, you fall again beside the halberds the soldiers have left lying in the sand. Your legs are numb. The procession has halted because of you. The soldiers grumble reprovingly. They hear the sound of a penetrating voice and hesitate no longer. They leave you lying there on the ground, your dry, sand-caked tongue protruding from your mouth, and the caravan renews its route to the rhythm of the drummer.
You watch the figures pass, blurred, reverberating, spectraclass="underline" fatigue blinds your eyes. Behind the troop of halberdiers follow two officials on horseback, and behind them, many people riding mules laden with coffers and large kettles, wineskins, and strings of onion and pimento. The muleteers drive their animals, whistling through toothless gums, and a garlic sweat glistens on their scarred and barely healed cheeks. You watch the passing parade: barefoot women balancing clay jugs upon their heads; men in straw hats carrying long poles on which are impaled the heads of wild boars; a party of huntsmen leading suspicious dogs; men in hempen sandals, two by two, supporting poles upon their shoulders from which hang spoiled partridges and worm-infested hares; modest palanquins bearing women with protruding eyes and women with deep-set eyes, women with rosy cheeks and women with parchment-dry skin, all breathless from the heat, all fanning themselves with their hands, and even the dry-skinned ones trying to dry with handkerchiefs the perspiration streaming down their faces toward paper-and-parchment-stiff wimples fastened beneath their chins; more elaborate palanquins occupied by men of wise aspect whose eyeglasses slip down their noses or are suspended from black ribbons, men with salt-and-pepper beards and with holes in their slippers; hooded monks intoning the lugubrious hymn you heard from the beach, at last you can decipher the words — Deus fidelium animarum adesto supplicationibus nostris et de animae famulae tuae Joannae Reginae — their shoulders bearing the weight of palanquins carrying priests oppressed by heat and by their own humors of urine and incense; then two skittish horses drawing a leather carriage with closed curtains, and behind that, pulled by six slow-paced horses and accompanied by another guard of halberdiers, the great funeral coach, black and severe, like a vulture on wheels. And inside the coach, bolted to the floor, the coffin, also black, its glass carapace capturing the light of the setting sun like the glittering shells of the insects that live in the sandbanks. You saw them. I want you to hear my story. Listen. Listen and I will see for you.
Behind the funeral coach follows a tortuous, writhing retinue of beggars, contrite, sobbing, swathed in dark rags, their mangy, scabrous hands offering empty soup bowls to the dying sun; at times the most daring run ahead to beg a scrap of the rotten meat and are rewarded with kicks. But they are free to come and go, run ahead, fall behind. Not so another throng encircled by a crossbow-armed guard, painfully dragging themselves forward, women dressed in long, torn silks, hiding their faces behind a bent arm or behind cupped hands, dark men with dark gazes, painfully choking back scraps of a song caught in taut throats, other men with tangled beards and long dirty hair, dressed in rags, in pain, attempting to hide the round yellow patches sewn over their hearts, and in the midst of this multitude, staring at the heavens, a monk humming they must be converted by the eventide, they will hunger like dogs, they will surround the city …
And behind the beggars and the captives marches a page dressed all in black and beating on a black velvet-covered drum a slow deliberate rhythm like the sound of the feet and wheels and iron-shod hoofs upon the sand. Black breeches, black leather shoes, black gloves holding black drumsticks: only the page’s face is alight, like a golden grape in the midst of so much blackness. Firm, fine skin — you are sure; once you have seen the page you truly see again, your sight no longer clouded by obscuring sound — upturned nose, gray eyes, tattooed lips. He is staring directly ahead. The leather tips of the drumsticks define (or only recapture) the solemn chant floating above the procession, Joannae Reginae, nostrae refrigerii sedem, quietis beatitudinem, luminis claritatem, the overall chant of the procession that competes with and drowns out the secret chant the monk hums amid the captives … they will hunger like dogs, they must be converted by the eventide.
You have so feared that someone would ask “Who are you,” knowing you cannot answer, that now you do not dare, for fear of another’s fear, to ask the same question of the page with the tattooed lips marching to the muted rhythm of the drum. At first, kneeling there in the sand, the sea behind your back, you felt confused, and you watched until the caravan passed you by; then quickly you arose, the long line is disappearing in a cloud of dust, creating the illusion (accentuated by the long, moribund shadows) of a distance that belies time; for a moment, you think you might never again recapture — are you still dreaming on the beach? have you dreamed of another shipwreck, death by drowning, burial in the sea? — the company of that long parade, at once funereal and festive, with its onions, halberds, horses, palanquins, beggars, Arab and Hebrew captives, palanquins, hymns, coffin and drummer.