Chapter IX: Book III: Becoming (3)

"Nothing changes here below; nothing can possibly change: love goes on from age to age, death was and will be, life is forever the same, and man is always man." To express this the word "eternal" has been invented.

I do not know. I came, I, a woman, and like every other creature, I too began by loving. Life was _not_ the same, I swear it was not the same. Life had a different taste, I shouldered it differently, and my death, while resembling other deaths, does not exist by the same idea.

I am; everything is changed.

And even if I had never lived, other women are ready to change the earth. You can't tell yet what the women of my generation are capable of. They themselves don't know altogether.

The memory of what they have always been told weighs upon them. Man is a fierce, greedy lover. With bloodshot eyes like a blind man, he has fallen upon the feverish couch where lies the vanquished enemy. He has brought his boiling sap, and between his clasped arms a great tenderness. When he has risen from the couch, he has been sad, his eyes have been wasted, his tenderness worn out. And he has said: "This is woman."

This has lasted long. I do not know if there hasn't been some reason for it. I simply say I live. I am honest, exact, I have muscles of steel, I like people to say what is, I am loyal, willing, I earn my living, and I am inured to suffering. What truth does one fail to recognize when it shows its face?

I think. I want. I know.

It has taken me a long time to take in the humble things I now know. I commenced with very little; my youth passed in chaos, I had to suffer very much. So it is not chance, random truths that I follow. I do not set limits to them. Even my death will not disprove them. Thus, a few scattered fragments hover. I snatched and caught them in moments of alert intelligence, I held them fast with my willing heart, I gripped them between clenched teeth to keep from losing them.

* * * * *

The wind rises on the right. Is it not the wind that has extinguished those dots of gold, the houses, without deepening the dark of the town?

I see the wind, it is blowing near. And here, immobile, upright in my heavy rectitude, I share with the wind the moments which are driving it on. One by one. I fly with them, one by one.

I go where they are going, even elsewhere, and my death perhaps is far from reaching its limits. It has been on the way a long time, it will stop when I am completely tired out, when there will be nothing more for me to do, when my breath will not be an indispensable breath. Then that will be all. They say it is hard to die. Does that mean that the world holds something more tragic than life?

The wind has swollen the whole sky. The sky is ready to drop down from on high--ah, let the sky fall! The wind pins itself to my face. It has become so violent that I cross my arms on my breast to brave it. The infinite future, as though it too were swollen, approaches the houses.

How can I tell what the future holds? No use searching the violet depths of the horizon or breathing in the whole of the sky. The times to come are beyond my reach. They give no sign.

There, below, all I see is my own existence. But how I see it! Flashing, assiduous, full of free spaces, brooding, crimson in my veins, paling slightly at the horizon, departing in the starless wind, and returning in haste to my limbs.

The woof of the night has changed color again.

Can it be that what I am is a promise of something that should be?

* * * * *

The wind blows stronger.

No, it is not for nothing that to-night I am drawing a deeper breath than on all other nights, a breath stronger than my strength, rising up over my life.

Night passes, as pure as a summoning voice.

Then it must be, Lord, that soon, perhaps at dawn, you must go further than your journey and, in flashes of your being, reach heights higher than everything you have said, live to the last drop of your blood, live more than life?

Here I am.

THE END

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