THE MAKER

He had never lingered over the pleasures of remembering. Impressions washed quickly over him, fleeting and vivid; the vermilion glaze of a potter, the firmament crowded with stars which were also gods, the moon, from which a lion had fallen, the smoothness of marble under gentle, feeling finger tips, the savor of boar's meat, which he loved to tear at with fierce, white teeth, a word of the Phoenician language, the black shadow thrown by a lance on the yellow sand, closeness of the sea or of women, the heavy wine whose harshness balanced the taste of honey, could, one and all, define the whole range of his spirit. Terror he knew, but at the same time rage and courage, and once he was the first to scale a wall held by the enemy. Eager, curious, off-hand, without any other principle than satisfaction and its subsequent indifference, he traveled over the varying countries of the earth, and saw, on this or that coast line, the cities and palaces of men. In the teeming markets or at the foot of a mountain with a hazy summit, where centaurs might easily have lived, he had listened to involved tales, accepting them as he accepted reality itself, not questioning whether they were truths or fabrications.

Gradually, the universe in all its beauty was abandoning him; an obstinate mistiness obscured the lines in his hand, the sky was losing its population of stars, the earth under his feet was uncertain. Everything withdrew and became confused. When he realized that he was going blind, he wept; stoic resignation had not yet been invented, and Hector might flee without disgrace. “Now,” he felt, “I shall not see the sky full of mythological visions, nor that face which the years will be transforming.” Days and nights passed over his despairing flesh, but one morning he awoke, saw (free of shadows) the obscure things surrounding him, and felt inexplicably, as one might recognize music or a voice, that all this had happened to him before, and that he had faced it fearfully, but at the same time with joy, hope, and curiosity. Then he went deep into his memory, which seemed bottomless, and managed from that dizzying descent to retrieve the lost remembrance which shone like a coin in moonlight, perhaps because he had never faced it except possibly in a dream.

The memory was as follows: another youth had insulted him, and he had gone to his father and told him the story. His father let him talk, appearing neither to listen nor to understand; and then he took down from the wall a bronze dagger, handsome and charged with power, which the boy had secretly coveted. Now he held it in his hands, and the astonishment of possessing it wiped out the hurt he had suffered, but the voice of his father was saying “Let someone know you are a man,” and there was a firmness in his voice. Night obscured the paths. Clasping the dagger, which he felt to be endowed with magic power, he descended the sharp slope surrounding the house and ran to the sea's edge, imagining himself Ajax and Perseus, and peopling the sea-smelling dark with wounds and battles. The precise flavor of that moment was what he was looking for now; the rest did not matter to him—the insults of the quarrel, the cumbersome fight, the return with the blood-stained blade.

Another memory, also involving night and an expectation of adventure, sprang up from that one. A woman, the first which the gods had offered him, had waited for him in the shade of a hypogeum, and he searched for her through corridors like webs of stone, and on slopes steeped in shadows. Why did these memories keep coming back to him, coming back like a simple prefiguration of the present?

With the final darkness, he understood. In that night of his mortal eyes, into which he was now descending, both love and peril awaited him, Ares and Aphrodite, because now he was anticipating (because he was approaching closer) a hint of glory and of hexameters, a sense of men defending a temple which the gods would not save and of black ships searching at sea for a well-loved island, an inkling of the Odysseys and Iliads which he was destined to create and leave behind, resounding in the concavity of the human memory. We know these things; but not the things he felt as he descended into the ultimate darkness.

—Translated by ALASTAIR REID