Seven Veils of Seth (17 page)

“Ha, ha. . . . Don't women adore poetry as much as men?”

“Woman loves poetry with her tongue. Man loves poetry with his heart. Woman sings the verses with her voice, but man bleeds verses from his heart. For this reason, women love poets more than all other men. If given a choice between a poet, a warrior, and a wealthy man, a woman would choose the poet, without any hesitation.”

“Not so fast. Take it easy. I know women who would choose the wealthy man without any hesitation, if given the choice.”

“I expected you to say this, because you're a man. Man's misfortune is that he cannot tell the difference between a woman and the shadow of a woman.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Just as we should not attribute the descriptive term ‘man' to a person simply on the basis of attire, we similarly should not describe a person as a woman based only on clothing, since both women and men are often disguised in the other gender's body.”

She chanted a song and he began to tremble. She sang softly, as if crooning to herself. In her lament he detected the call of the eternal yearning that imprisons lost time in the flask of existence and that recovers the lost space that one never reaches by wandering. He reeled. He repeated the refrain after her as he swayed to the right and left. He asked melodiously, “What's the secret of poetry do you suppose?”

She too sang her response: “The secret of poetry is that it enables us to know.”

“Know what?”

“To know what we shouldn't.”

“For us to know what we ought to know is deliverance. For us to know what we shouldn't is punishment.”

“Poetry is punishment. Poetry's not poetry unless it is punishment.”

He kept swaying as she started to sing again. The stillness was humbled. The full moon listened. The bones of dead ancestors shook in hillside graves. The water nymphs who had slipped into the earth's veins to feed the spring trilled. He chanted too: “I used to think that the secret of the passion for poetry was beauty.”

“Like you, I used to think that hankering for a spatial Waw was the secret of poetry. Then I thought that the craving for the temporal Waw was the secret of my passion for poetry. Next I realized that the place Waw is not one we can locate in space and that the Waw era is not one we can bring back in time. Poetry, Mr. Stranger, is a punishment because it teaches us what we ought not to know.”

“It teaches us the truth?”

“Yes indeed. The truth is what we ought not to know, not what we ought to know. Woe and woe again to anyone who knows the truth.”

“Is this why poetry is so inhumane?”

“Contrary to the claims of critics, poetry's lack of humanity is not related to beauty's inhumanity. Poetry is inhumane because the truth is.”

“Oh! How cruel truth's inhumanity feels to a man's heart. What impact does its cruelty have on a woman's?”

“The redeeming grace is that the only woman who suffers this punishment from poetry is one with a man's heart, not a woman's.”

Her tongue poured forth poetry. She sang stanzas from past generations' epics for which she retained the ancient tunes. She proceeded far down the path of melody, the path of lament, into the vast expanses of longing, into the sacred cloister of the truth. Then everything else disappeared, leaving in the desert only the song.

At some stage in this journey he decided to disclose his secret to her: “Do you know? My name's Isan or Gnosis too.”

“My name's Tamanokalt. I'm a jinni, one of the water nymphs.”

“Gnosis, as you know, is my veil. Gnosis is one of my most important names.”

The fourth was Tahala, who said that she was suffering from anxiety and had found no cure. She also said that she could even forgo the trust if only he would find her a cure for her depression, since she realized that having children would not provide deliverance to a person plagued by anxiety. She cowered inside her wrap like a hedgehog as a wave of sorrow overcame her. She burst into tears – like a person lamenting on suddenly being confounded by a calamity.

He waited until the attack had calmed and then asked her point blank: “Is Tahala the name you were given when you were born or is it a nickname the world has assigned you?”

Holding back her tears – like a child who has lost a doll – she replied, “It's said that I didn't stop crying for the first seven days after I was born. People took that as a sign they should call me Tahala.”

He observed her with interest, trying to discern the expression of her eyes in the dark, but she immediately averted her face in fright and shouted: “He's following me! Here he is now, standing behind you.”

He turned, but all he could see was the mouth of the vault. So he asked, “Who is following you?”

She pulled her wrap over her face before replying: “The demon!”

“Is he a demon from the spirit world?”

She nodded yes. Then he exclaimed in a defiant tone: “Ha, ha. . . . No demon from the spirit world will dare hide from me.”

“He threatens me with his hateful fingers, tipped with blue nails.”

“Know that to the demon master, every demon of the spirit world is nothing but a shadow.”

“But he's hideous! He's more hideous than a scarecrow.”

“Forget him; tell me whether this specter is responsible for your tears.”

“I don't know.”

“When did the demon first appear in your world?”

“I don't remember.”

“Has he ever harmed you?”

“He likes to stick out his ugly tongue at me. A viper emerges from inside him, not a tongue.”

“Has he ever joined you in bed?”

“I don't know!”

“I wager you found his tongue entertaining.”

“Entertaining?”

“Haven't you learned – over the course of time – to enjoy the sight of the viper he harbors?”

She was silent for a long time before she stammered in a faint whisper, “I don't know.”

“Haven't you ever grasped the secret of the tongue?” “What's that?”

“The tongue is a viper concealed in the mouth and the viper is a tongue scurrying across the desert.”

“I don't understand.”

“Haven't you consulted the sorcerers?”

“The sorceress said. . . .”

She hesitated, and so he encouraged her to confess: “What did the sorceress say?”

“The sorceress said that I would only find a cure from the demon in a man's embrace.”

“Ha, ha. . . . The sorceress was right.”

“What?”

“I mean I'll liberate you from the demon once and for all.”

“Really?”

“I'll pluck him from your world the way a thorn is plucked from the foot.”

Then he added as he crept toward her and took her in his arms: “Don't you know, water girl, that Spirit World Demon is one of my names? But he's a demon who frightens only to entertain and who does evil only to do good.”

When Taddikat came in search of her amulet, she decided to tell him her story: “I've inherited a curse from my ancestors.”

“Who among us has not inherited a curse from the ancestors?”

“My great-grandmother was the fifth of the seven maidens.”

“This is a story of nomadic wandering.”

“After wandering away from the hamlets, the miserable women were overcome by hunger.”

“The bevy of naughty girls might have perished of thirst had they not happened upon the spring.”

“They found water but had no way to feed themselves.”

“This is the law of things: We never obtain exactly what we desire. If things are in order one day; the next they start to fall apart.”

“It's my great-grandmother who confided to the other six naughty girls how to trap Wannes, the brother of the seventh woman, Tannes.”

“Oh! Conspiracy is the worst thing the intellect has ever dreamed up.”

“When they were alone, she whispered to the others that they should entrap their companion with a gift. So they gave her the remaining dates to keep her beloved brother Wannes alive.”

“Malice is an offense the spirit world detests.”

“The period of wandering lasted for a long time, and hunger turned to temporary insanity that drove the six wayward young women to demand that Tannes slay her brother Wannes in return for the gift of dates she had received from them.”

“Charity is worse than a contract. What we obtain today from luck's hand we hand back tomorrow as an offering to luck.”

“The only recourse the poor woman had to save her beloved brother was to repay the debt by slicing from her own thigh some flesh she gave them to redeem her wretched brother Wannes' blood.”

“We pay a huge price for a gift that comes with strings attached.”

“Tannes cursed them before she left to roam the desert, and the spirit world honored her cry.”

“An innocent person's curse ensures a punishment that may be delayed but will not be ignored.”

“A prophetic oracle announced that the curse will afflict descendants of the fifth member of the bevy of naughty girls down to the seventieth generation.”

“For children to inherit the sins of their parents is a blind exercise of will.”

“I've always seen myself as a redemptive sacrifice the fates have demanded to ransom my ancestors.”

“The best medicine for a disease is a disease. The only relief from a curse is with a curse, and Curse is one of my names.”

The sixth woman composed fulsome verses in praise of mirrors.

She too arrived on a night when the moon turned full.

She announced that her name was Temarit before she recited the couplets of the ode to him. At first she declaimed the verses and then she added a melody and sang them. Into her verses, the cunning woman inserted a lesson, which was disguised as a tale that was both eloquent and witty. She related a folktale about the idiotic maiden who continually brooded about her true nature without ever finding an answer for her questions in her desert world. Then the ignoble Mola Mola bird led her one day to a pond where for the first time she saw her own face mirrored by the water's surface. Starting at noon, the beautiful woman contemplated her beauty in the mirror that day for a very, very long time and smiled a lot. She repeatedly inclined her body, leaned over the water, and greedily gazed at the vision. She saw a vision in that vision. In her double, which was floating on the water, she beheld a prophecy. When she deciphered the prophecy, inspiration flooded her heart. As inspiration flooded her heart, she understood something. She learned something she had not previously known. She learned what she ought not to have learned. She learned her secret. She learned woman's secret: woman's sovereignty. When she understood this truth, she realized her error.

The beautiful woman was trembling when she returned from her outing. She returned with a treasure that would put the desert world at her beck and call. She experienced what later generations called happiness, even though an obstinate suspicion whispered to her that she should be on guard, because danger may lurk anywhere in a pile and possession is a punishable offense according to the desert's law.

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.”

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.”