Someone has pricked my arm gently with a pin. No, it’s not a pinprick. It’s a needle of light entering the room. Is it really the middle of the night? I slip out of bed cautiously, so as not to disturb my lap-dog Alanis. Walk to the window, open the curtain and drown for a moment in silver spray. ‘Moonbathing’ Aurelio used to call it: ‘Stand under a creamy fountain and you realise you’re alive.’ Or did the moon tell me that?
The lunar light is so exceptional I wonder if the sun isn’t shining through the moon. Suddenly I feel completely awake, days away from sleep. Draping a shawl about my shoulders, I climb up to my roof-garden to take a closer look at the night. Seville is experiencing a cold snap, but I’m still warm from bed.
I sit in an iron chair and pull my shawl around me. I can’t help but look straight up at the moon. A crescent-shaped shadow has covered the edge of the sphere. I’ve seen nothing like this before; I know of no explanation for the abnormality.
A breeze is blowing and the wavy sea of nearby palm fronds is tickling my legs. Beneath my flannel nightdress my nipples are tingling. A cat is moving across the roof of an adjoining house. It’s my own cat Maio, who found his way back to me last month by good fortune, after they closed the citadel of balance. The cat jumps down from a ledge, slinks up beside me and rubs its fur against my bare legs. It’s a silver cat, I’m thinking, but when I lean down to pat it, I notice the fur is ginger-brown. The cat’s soft fur rubbing back and forth across my calves arouses me too.
Murmuring voices drift across the terraces. Through the screen of palm fronds, I observe my neighbours sitting at a table and drinking what smells like freshly ground coffee. I wonder if they’re celebrating an anniversary to be sitting outside in the cold. I’m grateful to be hidden from them by an awning as well as the plants. I’m glad to have their company, but I don’t really want them to know I’m up here at such an ungodly hour.
Bats fly past on the way to the Alcázar gardens, their wings tinted pink in the curdled moonlight. Are they bats, or some other flying creatures? I watch their spectral path north. The gingerbread tower looms in the distance. The Giralda’s more than just a silhouette tonight. Flickering candlelight emanates from the minaret. What could be going on up there?
Time passes. I shift further back in my chair and focus on the moon again. It’s definitely waning at a very rapid pace. Slowly and with mathematical precision the left side of the moon is being drained of its translucent whiteness.
I imagine the moon signalling to me, trying to warn me, ‘I’m predicting a coming plague, a biblical flood, the long-expected Turkish invasion…‘
As dire possibilities drift through my mind the moon keeps receding, leaving only a dull russet husk behind.
If the moon dies, what will happen to the earth? Only a pencil-thin curve of brightness remains. ‘Oh, you poor sick thing!’ I whisper in fascination.
I pull my knees up to my chest to keep warm and suck on the tassel-ends of my shawl. I often suck on a sleeve or on the edge of a face towel in private, for comfort. I keep an eye on my neighbours. They’re watching the night sky too, and judging from their intermittent laughter, they’re not alarmed by what they’re seeing. If they’re not worrying, neither should I.
As I concentrate on the ailing moon my ears become finely tuned. Perfectly tuned, I’ll think later on, trying to explain it. I can hear speaking nearby, but it isn’t coming from the adjacent balcony. A word-capsule transported on the wind. In the breeze I can make out a man’s voice speaking a tongue I don’t know. He’s saying, over and over, a word that sounds like kleipsis or even ekleipsis, but I don’t know what this means. Then I hear Enrique Rastro, but he sounds far away, whereas the first voice is close beside me. Enrique is saying ‘abandonment’ as though translating. Then I hear both voices. Enrique’s faintly echoing, and the foreign one that is close: ‘The attachment is no longer yours.’
Coming quickly after this lunar parable a scroll-size image of Enrique Rastro appears. He’s walking along a country road, pulling a horse by a leather lead. The road is unmade and Enrique and the horse are hobbling along. The horse is most resistant. Then without warning, the horse and man tumble into a ditch, one after the other. The horse clambers out and gallops away, disappearing into a field of tall wheat. When the horse emerges from the wheat, it’s bearing two riders, but the riders have their backs to me and I can’t be sure who they are. I feel the female rider to be myself, but the male rider isn’t identifiable. Then the horse and its riders, and the scroll floating before me on which the picture is painted, all disappear.
I hope Enrique is all right. It’s not propitious to fall in a ditch. I look to the moon for help, but it doesn’t send another scroll-picture. Perhaps it feels as bereft as I do.
‘Thank you, moon,’ I say solemnly. Something has been abandoned. Not just the dependable lunar presence. Something in myself. I feel elated for a moment, then tearful; I hear my heart throbbing in my breasts and further down in my womb and sexual organs.
Later there’s cheering from the adjacent balcony. I open my eyes, look at the sky, and understand. A crescent moon of brilliant intensity has awoken on the gutted sphere; our celestial neighbour is coming back into existence.
The word-capsule and floating image may have been full of instructional meaning, but I’m too attached to the past to care about the imminent future. The man galloping away with me on the horse? Well, it didn’t look like him, but it would have to be Enrique, wouldn’t it? No-one else matters.
I wait on the balcony for a full revival. I see a shooting star, then another. It’s all happening in the sky over Seville tonight. The nape of my neck is damp, my extremities are freezing. I ease up from the chair and climb back down the ladder, my feet so numb I can’t feel the steps. In my bedchamber I search out some stockings and pull them on my feet, and also on my hands. ‘I’m webbed,’ my teeth chatter, as I clamber under the covers.
Alanis sighs mournfully and shifts position at the end of the bed. Lays his head upon my tingling foot.
I’m waxing and waning in my dreams. Drunk on crepuscular cradle-sleep; the memory of a mother’s rocking and cooing, and a green horse slinging itself through a tangerine sky.
Verdant foliage, sunshine stroking my face under a canopy of leaves. I bask in the warmth. Enrique and I have been walking in the garden when we make the discovery.
‘We must look for the body,’ I tell Enrique, as we stand together at the neck of the empty womb-tomb.
‘Someone has stolen Him away,’ I say. ‘Naked,’ I add, pointing at the fluttery, grave clothes lying on the stony ground.
People always think I’m stupid for stating the obvious. Enrique merely smiles.
‘Let’s look for the stone first, Paula,’ he suggests, hand on my elbow, guiding me. We turn together, to chase a stone.
I’m wondering about that huge sacred stone. Not the body it sheltered, entombed or risen, but the stone itself, and how it came to be made that way: smooth, round, monolithic. Imagine a giant stone on the loose. As high as a man and thrice as wide. Smooth as an egg, round as an orange. Enrique and I are after that stone which does not want to be found. The stone is searching for a slope to make a quick escape.
‘Look!’ We both see it at the same time. The almighty stone is on the other side of the garden. It’s moving away from us. The ground throbs with our pursuit; the stone picks up its pace. The race from the tomb! We’re off. And so is the stone which has the Easter valley in its sights.
Enrique has taken my hand and we’re running towards the renegade stone. We can’t quite catch it. Now we’re standing at the top of the hill, watching the stone rolling down a valley covered in sparkling ice. A crackling, cracking sound as the massive object shatters ice. We can’t follow the stone down the hill. It’s too steep and slippery. We don’t dare.
At the bottom, the stone comes to a standstill, glows white and luminescent. The tombstone, an icy full moon. Enrique’s hand turns to slush, loses its grip on mine. The cold is burning holes in my cheeks. I can’t wake from the nightmare, as hard as I try. When the pain gets too much, my body decides for me.
I wake to the familiar winter sound of Prospera snapping kindling for the morning fire. I lift my cheek from the pillow and there she is, squatting in front of the hearth, cracking bits of wood between her strong, supple fists.