The Monkey Grammarian by Octavio Paz Read Free Book Online Page A

even though it was composed of mere shadows, the bower formed by its interweaving bodies was impenetrable.
     
    Black clusters hanging from a ragged rock that is indistinct yet powerfully masculine, suddenly cracking asunder like an idol split apart with an axe: bifurcations, ramifications, disintegrations, coagulations, dismemberments, fusions. An inexhaustible flow of shadows and forms in which the same elements kept appearing— their bodies, their garments, the few objects and pieces of furniture in the room—combined each time in a different way, although, as in a poem, there were repetitions, rhymes, analogies, figures that appeared and reappeared with more or less the regularity of a surging sea: beds of lava, flying scissors, violins dangling from a noose, vessels full of seething letters of the alphabet, eruptions of triangles, pitched battles between rectangles and hexagons, thousands of dead victims of the London plague transmuted into clouds on which the Virgin ascends changed into the thousands of naked bodies locked in embrace of one of the colossal orgies of Harmony dreamed of by Fourier turned into the towering flames that devour the corpse of Sardanapalus, seagoing mountains, civilizations drowned in a drop of theological ink, screw propellers planted on the Mount of Calvary, conflagrations, conflagrations, the wind perpetually amid the flames, the wind that stirs up the ashes and scatters them.
     
    Splendor leans back on the mat and with her two hands presses her breasts together but in such a way as to leave, down below, a narrow opening into which her companion, obeying the young woman’s gesture of invitation, introduces his rod. The man is kneeling and Splendor’s body lies outstretched beneath the arch of his legs, her torso half erect in order to facilitate her partner’s thrusts. After a few vigorous assaults the rod traverses the channel formed by the young woman’s breasts and reappears in the shadowy zone of her throat, very close to her mouth. She endeavors in vain to caress the head of the member with her tongue: its position prevents her from doing so. With a gesture that is swift but not violent, the man pushes upward and forward, making her breasts bound apart, and his rod emerges from between them like a swimmer returning to the surface, in reach now of Splendor’s lips. She wets it with her tongue, draws it toward her, and guides it into the red grotto. The man’s balls swell. A great splash. Concentric circles cover the surface of the pool. The clapper of the submerged bell tolls solemnly.
     

     
    Hanumn devouring the Sun and being followed by Indra. Al-war, Rajasthan.
     
    On the wall the body of the man is a bridge suspended over a motionless river: Splendor’s body. As the crackling of the fire on the hearth diminishes, the shadow of the man kneeling above the young woman increases in size until it covers the entire wall. The conjoining of the shadows precipitates the discharge. Sudden whiteness. An endless fall in a pitch-black cave. Afterwards he discovers himself lying beside her, in a half-shadow on the shore of the world: farther beyond are the other worlds, that of the objects and the pieces of furniture in the room and the other world of the wall, barely illuminated by the faint glow of the dying embers. After a time the man rises to his feet and stirs up the fire. His shadow is enormous and flutters all about the room. He returns to Splendor’s side and watches the reflections of the fire glide over her body. Garments of light, garments of water: her nakedness is more naked. He can now see her and grasp the whole of her. Before he had glimpsed only bits and pieces of her: a thigh, an elbow, the palm of a hand, a foot, a knee, an ear nestling in a lock of damp hair, an eye between eyelashes, the softness of backs of knees and insides of thighs reaching up as far as the dark zone rough to the touch, the wet black thicket between his fingers, the tongue between the teeth