Rosa Chacel*

The Genie of the Night and the Genie of the Day

As I walked across the square on my way home – by which time night had fallen – I thought I spotted among the trees the Genie of the Night. Something resembling a black dove flew past, brushing my face, a black dove that kept fluttering around me, sometimes vanishing into the trees where the shadows were dense enough to mimic its black underbelly.

I barely felt that touch, yet it lingered on my cheek and made the muscles in my face contract. I probably looked as if I were smiling, and that’s certainly how it seemed to me: my smile had the introspective look of someone making a long-drawn-out confession.

The shadow cast by its presence was as warm and soft and elusive as the secret places among the folds of a piece of velvet, impenetrable to the eye.

I thought all this in the time it took me to cross the square, then I abandoned the idea, although the sensation did not abandon me.

Later, at home, I began hearing a voice coming in through the open window: a Gluck opera being broadcast on the radio. And again that soft something brushed my cheek, a breeze perhaps. I had left the door open. I was standing in front of the mirror, shaving foam on my face, when I again felt that something passing close by and carrying me off towards a memory. I felt as if I were back in the square; I relived the moment when I had followed with my eyes that shadow within the shadows; again I felt myself wrapped in that pitch-black velvet and saw a diamond necklace glittering around a black throat, or, rather, around the throat of a black dove. But this was no longer taking place in the square; my memory was following a new route, the voice of Armidefn1 had reached a brightly lit foyer with a flowing marble staircase, and had entered a dark room, at the far end of which glowed a living picture, a spacious square compartment, where the voice was strolling about, dragging behind it a majestic cloak of grief, the notes falling away, dropping like leaves in the gusting melody. The dark part of the room was full of a sound like a vast intake of breath, as if an enormous bird had fluffed up its feathers and was emerging out of the gloom at the back of the boxes and making its way over the ringlets, the bare shoulders, and bosoms resting on the balustrades. There it stopped, filling the room with its dark, all-embracing dominion, against which only Armide’s voice prevailed, shining out like a bright remembered light.

Suddenly, everything vanished: a bell was ringing insistently at the other end of the house. I picked up the phone and asked a question; a warm, cordial voice replied:

‘Yes, I’ll wait for you downstairs. Don’t be long.’

I hung up. I dialled a number and asked again; an even gentler voice responded:

‘Yes, I’m waiting. Don’t be long.’

Reality once more filled my thoughts and once more I became aware of minor details, such as what you need to put in your pockets, and which windows you have to close when you leave the house.

I went downstairs, and we glided off down the avenues; we skirted the squares, leaving behind us the solitary glitter of brilliant, sloping lawns; we drove around the outer edges of large country estates until we reached the most densely wooded of them all, behind whose railings were confined the most silent of cedars, the most lethargic of magnolias, and where the gates opened as we arrived and the sandy path crunched beneath the wheels of our car as we proceeded down the drive, its headlights feeling their way along the meandering bends and curves like the antennae of a beetle.

As on other occasions, we did not have long to wait, but, when she leapt into the car ahead of me, I could not immediately follow, because between her and me She appeared. I stood for a moment frozen, holding the door open as if for someone needing to accommodate a dress with a very long train. Respectfully, courteously, solemnly, I waited for her to enter, and the car was filled with the most enormous shadow: the deity with the black, feminine breast of a dove.

To the right, in the open spaces between villas and houses, groves of willows stretched along the muddy banks of the river, where pools glinted in the moonlight, and in silence, leaning one against the other, we sat braced – as if for a sudden joy to strike our hearts – for the small leaps made by the car as it bumped over the potholes in the road.

Then there was the orchestra under the pergola, the frosted glasses on the tables, and the rhythm twining about the familiar melody which we knew from beginning to end. Like poems learned as children, the peculiar rhythm traced its ups and downs in our memory, and we repeated it, travelled it lightly, slowly, crazily, as if it were a rhythm we need not name, the one that snakes and flows beneath our state of abandon, rocking us the way the waves rock seabirds.

There was also a moment – the orchestra succumbed to a sudden irritable burst of anger – when a hand rested on my shoulder and carried me off to the bar; there we drank our drinks, holding the stem of the glass with the tips of our fingers, while we hatched a plan that resembled a tersely shining road rising before us, brilliantly prosperous and easy.

And then, once more, the dancing and the frosted glasses; again the car and the willows passing by on the left, the railings surrounding the estate, and the crunch of gravel beneath the wheels.

Later still, the avenues, the glitter of those brilliant, sloping lawns and, finally, from afar, sleep. I wanted to hear the lulling silence in the room, but the buzzing in my ears got in the way; the presence in my blood of the alcohol of reality could not be quelled. The memory of words and of concrete ideas kept bubbling up their turbid gases like a storm refusing to move off. And, at the same time, a gentle breeze was wafting in through the window, its velvet tail brushing my brow as if the peace and deep blackness of the night, the body of that happy deity, were preparing me to rest beneath its dark, watchful eye.

I heard something pecking at the windowpane. A few brief, sharp, intermittent taps, as if the wind were banging some hard object against the glass. I half-opened my eyes and saw a yellow light, full and ripe. Then I realized what it was that was pecking at the window.

The Genie of the Day was perched on the balustrade of the roof terrace, impatient and ‘as bald as an eagle’. Its talons scraped against the concrete, scratching the skull of the house.

The yellow light pushed its way pitilessly into the room, as violently as the water emerging snorting from the two taps. It, too, seemed to splash out when it collided with other shining objects, not illuminating but, rather, obfuscating them. Things remained hidden and as if numbed by the rapidly accelerating brightness.

The day, as predictable as an unchanging alphabet, was revealing itself to be strangely and elusively impregnable, and, rising up from the street, came the sound of a remnant of anxiety, the clatter of iron wheels, approaching and growing louder as it approached, then slowly moving off, only to approach again and again move off.

The horror of plunging into that rushing current of jarring activity prevented me from remembering logically and in an orderly fashion the series of duties awaiting me. I didn’t want to have to face any real difficulties because I knew they were not entirely insoluble: I preferred to believe I was under threat by that power beating its yellow wings, against which the only possible defence was invincible apathy and denial. In vain, I tried to take refuge in sleep; in the house, though, activity had awoken like a creature with metallic wings furiously issuing its morning call. I picked up the phone and asked a question: it was that same impersonal voice waiting for me, the one that was supposed to give me an answer. It said:

‘No, not today. Today is impossible.’

I hung up and went over to the door. I had to begin, I had to remember that the first duty of the day would have to be something as painful as writing a letter or filling in an accounts ledger. Before I could make a decision, though, the phone rang again. I picked it up: the voice was personal, unmistakable, and it poured into my ear like an endless flood into which flowed all the waters from every mountain stream. I listened. The clear flow of that voice was filling me with clarity about everything; the kind of blinding clarity that provokes mirages, that dazzles and sets the outlines of objects trembling. I tried in vain to change the course of that flood, to deny or rectify something. In vain. Inhuman and deaf to my pleas, the cataract continued to flow until it had reached its full height. And so it was: it had arrived.

I don’t know how I made it from my house to the office, but, once there, I opened drawers and filing cabinets with their respective keys; I sorted out files, I corrected the work of draughtsmen and typists. Meanwhile, the flood had reached my throat, with, bobbing about in it, fragments of what I had said which writhed about like bits of dissected snake.

In the midst of my transactions and calculations, in the midst of my columns, always keeping a rigorous eye out for any dastardly errors, I continued to converse with my colleagues, insisting on certain futile details, repeating statements that had gone unheard, and I could not erase the resentment planted in me by that story which hinted at a betrayal by a woman who was not my lover. No, she wasn’t. I swore to myself that she wasn’t, at the same time asking myself: is anyone else? Beneath the light falling on that piece of paper, how could I possibly remember what I might have experienced in other, at the time, unimaginable regions? I could not help feeling somewhat embittered, but I continued to converse, I continued drafting or adding up numbers, I continued answering the questions put to me by my assistants: a brusque ‘No’, a violent ‘No’, filled by a blind, desperate desire always to say ‘No’.

Until the time came to return the papers to their files, to close drawers and filing cabinets, go out into the street and stand stock-still on the pavement.

After a few minutes of immobility, I tried to consign these thoughts to oblivion, but my feet were caught fast in shifting sand dunes. The avenue, as searingly hot as a desert, could devour anyone who tried to cross. Standing there, petrified with indecision, stood many men prepared to sell their souls to the devil, to commit any crime they were asked to commit. Others had reached the café terraces, where they were sitting before a drink that might wash a little kindness into their veins. I, though, was incapable of joining them: the floodwaters rising up in my throat were about to overflow, they were growing with the light, and the light had reached its highest point.

Over the summit hovered a voracious power, and above those other men wings were unfurled that cast no shadows.