(a second story for Rita)
The little girl didn’t say a word. Not a single vowel left her mouth, her lips only concerned themselves with sounds that didn’t even add up to two or four. Was her language hers alone, a personal dialect of unrelayable and unreliable quality? No matter how much they applied themselves, the parents couldn’t coax any understanding from their little daughter. When she remembered the words, she forgot the thought. When she constructed an argument, she lost her power of language. It wasn’t because she was mute. She spoke in a language that doesn’t currently exist among human beings. There were those who thought she sang. It must be said that she had an enchantingly beautiful voice. Even without understanding anything, people were gripped by her intonation. And it was so touching that some folk never failed to cry.
He father dedicated his affection and his affliction to her. One night, he took her little hands in his and begged, certain that he was talking to himself:
—Speak to me, daughter!
His eyes started to leak. The little girl kissed his tear. She savoured that salty water and said:
—Sea …
Her father was flabbergasted, both aurally and orally. Had she spoken? He leaped up and shook his daughter’s shoulders.
—You see, you can speak, she can speak, she can speak! he shouted for all to hear.
—She said sea! She said sea! her father repeated from room to room.
The family rushed forwards and leaned over her. But she emitted no further comprehensible sound.
Her father didn’t give up. He thought and thought and came up with a plan. He took his daughter to where she could see the sea, and where there was even sea beyond the sea. If that had been the only word she had ever articulated in her life, then it was the sea that would reveal the reason for her inability.
The little girl reached that expanse of blue and her heart shrank. She sat down on the sand, her knees interfering with the vista. And tears interfering with her knees. Was the world that she had wanted infinite, after all so small? There she remained, imitating a stone, with neither sound nor tone. Her father asked her to come back, they needed to return, for the tide was coming in menacingly.
—Come on, daughter!
But the girl was so still you would never have known she was sitting there. She was like an eagle that neither rises nor falls: it merely disappears from the ground. All the land is contained in the eye of an eagle. And the bird’s retina is transformed into the vastest sky. The girl’s father stood in awe, bedazzled: why does my daughter remind me of an eagle?
—Let’s go, daughter! Otherwise the waves will swallow us up.
Her father circled her, blaming himself for the girl’s state. He danced, sang, leaped up and down. Anything to distract her. Then he decided to take direct action: putting his hands under her armpits, he pulled her. But he’d never felt such a weight before. Had the girl put down roots or become the tip of a rock?
He gave up, exhausted, and sat down next to her. Does he who knows stop talking while he who doesn’t know keeps quiet? The sea filled the night with silence, the waves already seemed to be breaking on the man’s shocked heart. At that point, he had an idea: the only way of saving his daughter was to tell her a story! And so, there and then he made one up:
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who asked her father to go and get the moon for her. Her father got in his boat and rowed out far away. When he reached the line of the horizon, he stood on the tips of his dreams in order to reach the sky. Very carefully, he took hold of the star with both hands. The planet was as light as a ball of air.
When he gave that fruit a tug in order to pluck it from the sky, he heard a world-shattering pop. The moon sparked into a thousand shooting stars. The sea grew choppy and the boat sank, swallowed up into the abyss. The beach was bathed in silver, the strand covered in flakes of moonlight. The little girl started walking in the opposite of all directions, over there and beyond, gathering up those lunar shards. She looked at the horizon and called:
—Father!
Then a deep crevasse opened, a wound from the very birth of the world. From the lips of this scar, blood flowed. Was the water bleeding? Or was the blood turning to water? And that’s what happened. Once upon a time.
At this point, her father lost his voice and he was silent. The story had lost its thread inside his head. Or was it the chill of the waters now covering his feet and his daughter’s legs? At that instant, he cried in despair:
—It’s now or never.
The girl suddenly got to her feet and walked into the waves. Her father followed, anxious. He saw his daughter pointing at the sea. Then he caught sight of a deep crack stretching the entire width of the ocean. Her father was alarmed at the unexpected fracture, a grotesque mirror of the story he had just invented. Fear struck him in the pit of the stomach. Were they both going to get washed into that abyss?
—Daughter, come back. Please turn back, daughter …
Instead of retreating, the girl waded further into the sea. Then she stopped and brushed her hand over the water. The liquid wound immediately closed. And the sea merged together and became one again. The girl turned and walked back, taking her father’s hand and leading him back home. Up above, the moon recomposed itself.
—See, Father? I finished your story!
And the two of them, bathed in moonlight, disappeared into the room which they had never left.