Memoirs of a Patagonian

12. A body

— So, son, where is your sail in the wind?

It was old Lisette — but without a smile, still anxious about her sailor from nowhere, her vagabond without harbour or heading.

— Your Sweet is here, that's certain — but one sails as two in order to…

— To what? That is what I don't know.

— One comes to know by sailing — one tack and then another. One comes to know at the end; it is the wind calling you to its harbour…

Vicki looked at that smile which no longer smiled.

— Or else you stay sitting in your dreams of nothing.

— My dreams are burning — that is all I know. It hurts; it is this aching of nothing that calls me. It is as if your belly had not yet brought me into the world.

— But I love you, you little fool! that is not for nothing. And your Sweet too.

— Well yes! But there is still something calling me — from where, from I know not what coast — it is this I-know-not-what tormenting me like a surf, like the ektara of my Sweet who no longer knows her shipwreck or from which island. So I walk and I listen. And it is silence. And it burns.

Old Lisette remained silent. But her silence spoke love all the same.

*

And the years, or the ages, passed, and a small nothing-fire burned on still — risen from all the shipwrecks to listen once more to one ektara string trembling at the bottom of his heart like the very spring of what makes a being, a world, and all the worlds to come.

There was no longer life or death in that small one, no longer a shipwreck — there was a body risen from the same rock as all the rocks of the world and all the wombs that made and will make a small fire of nothing filled with the same thirst of what murmurs and beats beneath that rock. And that silence itself dug and dug in the hole of sorrow — that nameless cry that had made a body in the world.

It began there.

Afterward — centuries later — other Patagonians on other shores had made heavens and hells and sordid business to earn their lives of identical nothings and their posterity of an equally null anteriority, under their concrete pavements and their science forever re-beginning to embellish an old grief never exorcised.

A body — it began there, but nobody knew what was beginning within, because it always ended the same, on the same note.

Perhaps there was a last missing note.

Page 24