The noise of strong suction was not the noise of the sand finally sucking his legs down, but the breakfast contraption being violently sucked closed again, and on the rug lay the tiny box he hated, with a breakfast arranged like a mathematical calculation. He looked at it from the receding shores of his dream. He wanted to return to the dream. There was nothing left of it. An island there, a deserted island where many things had happened. He could see it receding. The sand must still be in his clothes. His legs buried. He looked at them. They were asleep. But no scar left where they had been sawed off.
“I never noticed,” said Lilith to the Voice, “that the sun comes into this room. I always felt it was a dark room, because of all the secrets.”
“Maybe it’s in you there are no more secrets.”
“I don’t know. Your understanding saved me from confusion and pain. I feel dependent on you. You have the vision. I get lost. You teach, you are humanly tender and protective. Do you really think a woman can find her way all alone, completely alone?”
“Not if she’s a real woman.”
“I must have become a real woman right here, for I feel the dependence now, and I don’t mind it. I like it.”
Then Lilith stopped because she saw he did not like what she was saying.
“Do you know the meaning of your own name?” asked the Voice. “It’s the unmated woman, the woman who cannot truly be married to any man, the one whom man can never possess altogether. Lilith, you remember, was born before Eve and made out of red earth, not of human substance. She could seduce and ensorcell but she could not melt into man and become one with him. She was not made of the same human substance.”
“Do you think I am altogether like the first Lilith?” she asked without looking at him.
“I don’t know. The way you talk about dependence does not mean love. It means the love for the Father, who is the symbol of God. You are seeking a father… How exactly do you think of me?”
But before she could answer his question the little man left his analyst’s chair and walked up to her. Lilith heard his breathing and felt he did not want to hear the answer.
What she read in his eyes was the immense pleading of a man, a man imprisoned inside a seer, calling out for the life in her, and at the very moment when every cell inside her body closed to the desire of the man she saw a mirage before her as clearly as men saw it in the desert, and this mirage was a figure taller than other men, a type of saviour, the man nearest to God, whose human face she could no longer see except for the immense hunger in the eyes. And she felt a kind of awe, which she recognized. Every time she was faced with a sacrifice of the self, with the demand of another, a hunger, a prayer, a n, there came this joy. It was like the joy of a prisoner who finds the bars of his cell suddenly broken down. The mirage took the place of all actual physical sensation. It was if all the walls, all the limitations, all the personal desires were transcended. It was not an ecstasy of the body, but a sudden break with the body, a liberation and a stepping into a new region. With the abandon came this joy as of a transcendent flight upward, breaking the chains of awareness. Abandon brought a drunkenness, the fever of generosity, the joy of self-forgetting. A joyous victim, a victim of the imperfections of the universe which it was in her power, for the moment, to redress, to alter. In her power, for the moment, to make all the gifts promised so long ago in the fairy tales of childhood. What had prevented the fairy tales from materializing was the lack of faith and the lack of love.
Human life at this moment seemed the unreal and miniature city, with too many boundaries, too many laws, and too many simplicities. Giving was the only flight in space permitted to whomever could abandon the human substance. Better to be made of red clay, as she was, for she would never die, and she would never die because of this joy that came in being more than one woman, and for the moment the woman the Voice wanted.
What would he demand of her?
While the Voice, who was no longer the Seer, talked, what she saw was the dark-skinned mythological crab, not quite a man, but an animal, with the cavernous, pre-historic sorrows of the monkey, the agedness of the turtle, the tenderness of the kangaroo, the facile humility of the dog.
In the Voice she felt the ugliness of tree roots, of the earth, and this terrific dark mute knowing of the animal, for though he was the one most aware of what happened inside others he was the one least aware of what happened in himself. It was too near. He could read the myth, and man’s dreams, but not in himself. The man had been denied. He was begging her to be made a person, a man. The man had been buried, had grown very old, withered, without having achieved his life on earth. That is what his eyes were asking for: a life on earth.
Lilith knew it was all based on a lie, and he could not be lied to. That is why he never lived: he had not learned to let himself be lied to. He will be another victim. I don’t know, I feel possessed and diabolical. I like the pleasure I give him.
It was a father I was looking for. And I found him. But he is a father who turns white with passion, who trembles with doubts and jealousies. He says that with me one travels so far away from reality that it is necessary to buy a return ticket. He is afraid of not being able to come back. I like him better serious than laughing; he doesn’t know how to laugh. His pranks are pranks of the mind, his humor is paradox, the reversal of ideas, the trickeries and trapeze stunts of ideas. He has not learned what I have learned—to not clutch at the perfume of flowers, to not touch the dew, to not tear all the curtains down, to let exaltation and breath rise, vanish. The perfume of the hours distilled only in silence, the heavy perfume of mysteries untouched by human fingers. Flesh touching flesh generates perfume. The friction of words generates only pain and division. To formulate without destroying, without tampering, without withering. An awe of the senses. Silence.
His understanding was infinite, like a sea, but Lilith was sailinon it alone. He was everywhere, immense, but not a man, because his understanding ended where the life of silence and mystery began.
He was walking at Lilith’s side now, in full daylight. His clothes hung about him as on a cross of wood. The clothes did not dress him, make him incarnate. His small hands made brusque gestures as if made of bones. Clothes take the shape of a man’s body, of his gestures. They bear the imprint of his character, his habits, his moods. The hat reveals if he is mellow and tolerant, if he is gay or lavish. Every line, fold, wrinkle, testifies to how he sits, to his tenderness or roughness, his sensuality or asceticism. The hat is moulded by the hand and is carried either with pride or insolence, with nonchalance or rigidity.
The Voice’s clothes did not fit him, were never a part of him. They were not moulded by his body, kneaded to his moods. Nothing that men wore seemed to be made for him. The tailors had not cut for his body, his body was not made for clothes. His hat stood stiffly detached from him. It seemed either too large or too small for him. Either his hats were formal and the face under it too lax, or the hat was humorous and nonchalant and his face tooserious and heavy. Or else he looked humiliated. In every detail his clothes were a misfit. The body was denied: it did not flow into the clothes, espouse them. There was a kind of blight upon his body; it was the idea made flesh, the idea always standing in the way of natural gestures, the idea upright and standing in the way of rhythm. His flesh was the color of death. He had died in the body and never been resurrected. It was heavy with melancholy, jealousy. The life of the mind had shrivelled the body too soon. It was a sad flesh tyrannized by the idea, drawn and quartered on a pattern, devoured by concepts. No matter how clear or divine the soul was, the flesh was dark and sad and muddied, like very ancient flesh exiled from joy and faith to the kingdom of thought.