He deserted her.
He left her in the wilderness and bolted, roaming through the wastelands. Whenever he remembered what she had done, he collapsed and vomited till he almost threw up his guts, which had gone without food for days. His need for food led him to consume grass and drink from mud puddles. Although he had resolved he would never return to her, a disruptive whispering crept into his breast, urging him to go back. It was an odd kind of whisper; not one he could label. Only after he had groveled in his desert for several more days was he able to assign to it that strangest of all titles: compassion, alias mercy or the duty that binds the heart of anyone who has one. So he went back.
He returned to find her kneeling like some evil spirit at the tent’s entrance. She stared at him with the antipathy of a sorceress and the eye of a she-owl but said nothing. He sensed that it had been a mistake to return but realized as well that duty’s call inevitably leads to pain, even though it relieves the heart. Since her presence near him felt like a life-threatening lasso around his neck, he decided to liberate himself.
One day he approached her and began: “Do you remember any family member to whom I can take you?”
She replied gruffly, “I have no family. You know that.”
“There’s not some distant relation somewhere?”
When she shook her head no, he felt the lasso tightening but did not despair. “Tell me what I should do with you.”
“Just do what any man who takes responsibility for a woman does: he settles down with her on the land.”
“A nomad has no fixed abode . . . as you know.”
“But I’m not a nomad. I’m a woman. I’m a female. I’m a mother. I can’t live if I don’t settle down. I want to have a fixed abode. I should have a home: is this true or false?”
He gazed curiously at her face. “How can you claim to be a mother when not long ago you strangled an infant you plucked from your own belly?”
“I strangled him because I know I can bring him back.”
“Bring him back?”
“Yes; I shall bring him back, since it is the earth that has swallowed his remains.”
“I see you’re speaking with the certainty of a priestess.”
“I am woman. I am the feminine. I am the mother. I am the earth. I am the goddess Tanit, whose soul was born from her soul and who created the entire desert from her flesh.”
“Amazing!”
“Your tragedy is that you’ve never known me.”
“I really don’t know you.”
“I am your destiny.”
“My destiny?”
“Woman is man’s destiny. Have you forgotten the Law’s teachings that stipulate her protection when hastening along narrow desert paths?”
“I’ve never heard a maxim like this attributed to the Law.”
“Who can claim to know all the teachings of the Law?”
She gazed off across the vacant land, which was flooded by dusk’s jagged shadows. She looked exactly like a true priestess reciting a novel prophecy when she declared: “Like the desert, the Law has no beginning and no end.”