The Monkey Grammarian by Octavio Paz Read Free Book Online

scratches and pleasing purple bruises that resembled jewels…. Some of these girls savored the lips and tongues of their female companions, who returned their kisses as though they were those of their master; their senses awakened though their spirits slumbered, they made love to each other, or lying by themselves, they clung with arms bedecked with jewels to a heap of their own garments, or beneath the dominion of wine and desire, some reclined against the belly of a companion or between her thighs, and others rested their head on the shoulder of a neighbor or hid their face between her breasts, and thus they coupled together, each with another, like the branches of a single tree. These slender women intertwined like flowering vines at the season when they cover the trunks of the trees and open their corollas to the March winds. These women twined together and wound their arms and legs about each other till they formed an intricate sylvan grove.
(Sundara Kund
, IX)
     

11
     
    The transfiguration of their games and embraces into a meaningless ceremony filled them at once with fear and pleasure. On the one hand, the spectacle fascinated them and even excited their lust: that pair of giant lovers were themselves; on the other hand, the feeling of excitement that overcame them on seeing themselves as images of fire was allied with a feeling of anxiety, summed up in a question more apprehensive than incredulous: were they indeed themselves? On seeing those insubstantial forms silently appear and disappear, circle round each other, fuse and split apart, grope at each other and tear each other into bits that vanished and a moment later reappeared in order to form another chimerical body, it seemed to them that they were witnessing not the projection of their own actions and movements but a fantastic spectacle with no relation whatsoever to the reality that they were living at that moment. The ambiguous staging of an endless procession, made up of a succession of incoherent scenes of adoration and profanation, the climax of which was a sacrifice followed by the resurrection of the victim: yet another avid apparition that opened another scene different from the one that had just taken place, but possessed of the same insane logic. The wall showed them the metamorphosis of the transports of their bodies into a barbarous, enigmatic, scarcely human fable. Their actions were transformed into a dance of specters, this world reborn in the other world: reborn and disfigured: a cortege of bloodless, lifeless hallucinations.
     
    The bodies that are stripped naked beneath the gaze of the other and their own, the caresses that knot them together and unknot them, the net of sensations that traps them and unites them as it disunites them from the world, the momentary bodies that two bodies form in their eagerness to be a single body—all this was transformed into a weft of symbols and hieroglyphs. They were unable to read them: immersed in the passionate reality of their bodies, they perceived only fragments of that other passion depicted on the wall. But even if they had paid close attention to the procession of silhouettes as it passed by, they would not have been able to interpret it. Despite having scarcely seen the cortege of shadows, they nonetheless knew that each one of their gestures and positions was inscribed on the wall, transfigured into a tangled jumble of scorpions or birds, hands or fish, discs or cones, transitory, shifting signs. Each movement engendered an enigmatic form, and each form intertwined with another and yet another. Coils of enigmas which in turn intertwined with others and coupled like the branches of a grove of trees or the tendrils of a creeping vine. In the flickering light of the fire the outlines of the shadows followed one upon the other, linked together in a chain. And just as they did not know the meaning of that theater of signs and yet were not unaware of its dark, passionate theme, so they knew that