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

and the lips, a body more felt than seen, a body made of pieces of a body, regions of wetness or dryness, open or bosky areas, mounds or clefts, never the body, only its parts, each part a momentary totality in turn immediately split apart, a body segmented, quartered, carved up, chunks of ear ankle groin neck breast fingernail, each piece a sign of the body of bodies, each part whole and entire, each sign an image that appears and burns until it consumes itself, each image a chain of vibrations, each vibration the perception of a sensation that dies away, millions of bodies in each vibration, millions of universes in each body, a rain of universes on the body of Splendor which is not a body but the river of signs of her body, a current of vibrations of sensations of perceptions of images of sensations of vibrations, a fall from whiteness to blackness, blackness to whiteness, whiteness to whiteness, black waves in the pink tunnel, a white fall in the black cleft, never the body but instead bodies that divide, excision and proliferation and dissipation, plethora and abolition, parts that split into parts, signs of the totality that endlessly divides, a chain of perceptions of sensations of the total body that fades away to nothingness.
     
    Almost timidly he caresses the body of Splendor with the palm of his hand, from the hollow of the throat to the feet. Splendor returns the caress with the same sense of astonishment and recognition: her eyes and hands also discover, on contemplating it and touching it, a body that before this moment she had glimpsed and felt only as a disconnected series of momentary visions and sensations, a configuration of perceptions destroyed almost the instant it took shape. A body that had disappeared in her body and that at the very instant of that disappearance had caused her own to disappear: a current of vibrations that are dissipated in the perception of their own dissipation, a perception which is itself a dispersion of all perception but which for that very reason, because it is the perception of disappearance at the very moment it disappears, goes back upstream against the current, and following the path of dissolutions, recreates forms and universes until it again manifests itself in a body: this body of a man that her eyes gaze upon.
     
    On the wall, Splendor is an undulation, the reclining form of sleeping hills and valleys. Activated by the fire whose flames leap up again and agitate the shadows, this mass of repose and sleep begins to stir again. The man speaks, accompanying his words with nods and gestures. On being reflected on the wall, these movements create a pantomime, a feast and a ritual in which a victim is quartered and the parts of the body scattered in a space that continually changes form and direction, like the stanzas of a poem that a voice unfolds on the moving page of the air. The flames leap higher and the wall becomes violently agitated, like a grove of trees lashed by the wind. Splendor’s body is racked, torn apart, divided into one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten parts—until it finally vanishes altogether. The room is inundated with light. The man rises to his feet and paces back and forth, hunching over slightly and seemingly talking to himself. His stooping shadow appears to be searching about on the surface of the wall—smooth, flickering, and completely blank: empty water—for the remains of the woman who has disappeared.
     

     
    A sdhu of Galta (photograph by Eusebio Rojas).
     

12
     
    On the wall of the terrace the heroic feats of Hanumn in Lanka are now only a tempest of lines and strokes that intermingle with the purplish damp stains in a confused jumble. A few yards farther on, the stretch of wall ends in a pile of debris. Through the wide breach the surrounding countryside of Galta can be seen: straight ahead, bare forbidding hills that little by little fade away into a parched, yellowish expanse of flat ground, a desolate