My Life with the Wave
by Octavio Paz
Translated by Eliot Weinberger
Octavio Paz / Ma vie avec la vague (A short story in French)
When I left that sea, a wave moved ahead of the
others. She was tall and light. In spite of the shouts of the others who grabbed
her by her floating clothes, she clutched my arm and went off with me leaping.
I didn’t want to say anything to her, because it hurt me to shame her in front
of her friends. Besides, the furious stares of the elders paralyzed me. When we
got to town, I explained to her that it was impossible, that life in the city
was not what she had been able to imagine with the ingenuity of a wave that had
never left the sea. She watched me gravely: “No, your decision is made. You
can’t go back.” I tried sweetness, hardness, irony. She cried, screamed,
hugged, threatened. I had to apologize.
The next day my troubles began. How
could we get on the train without being seen by the conductor, the passengers,
the police? Certainly the rules say nothing in respect to the transport of waves
on the railroad, but this same reserve was an indication of the severity with
which our act would be judged. After much thought I arrived at the station an
hour before departure, took my seat, and, when no one was looking, emptied the
water tank for the passengers; then, carefully, poured in my friend.
The first incident came about when
the children of a nearby couple declared their noisy thirst. I stopped them and
promised them refreshments and lemonade. They were at the point of accepting
when another thirsty passenger approached. I was about to invite her also, but
the stare of her companion stopped me. The lady took a paper cup, approached
the tank, and turned the faucet. Her cup was barely half full when I leaped
between the woman and my friend. She looked at me astonished. While I apologized,
one of the children turned the faucet again. I closed it violently. The lady
brought the cup to her lips:
“Agh, this water is salty.”
The boy echoed her. Various
passengers rose. The husband called the conductor:
“This man put salt in the water.”
The conductor called the Inspector:
“So you put substances in the
water?”
The Inspector in turn called the
police:
“So you poisoned the water?”
The police in turn called the
Captain:
“So you’re the poisoner?”
The captain called three agents. The
agents took me to an empty car amid the stares and whispers of the passengers.
At the next station they to me off and pushed and dragged me to the jail. For
days no one spoke to me, except during the long interrogations. When I
explained my story no one believed me, not even the jailer, who shook his head,
saying: “The case is grave, truly grave. You didn’t want to poison the
children?” One day they brought me before the Magistrate.
“Your case is difficult,” he
repeated. I will assign you to the Penal Judge.”
A year passed. Finally they judged
me. As there were no victims, my sentence was light. After a short time, my day
of liberty arrived. The Chief of the Prison called me in:
“Well, now you’re free. You were
lucky. Lucky there were no victims. But don’t do it again, because the next
time won’t be so short.”
And he stared at me with the same grave stare
with which everyone watched me.
The same afternoon I took the train
and after hours of uncomfortable traveling arrived in Mexico City. I took a cab
home. At the door of my apartment I heard laughter and singing. I felt a pain
in my chest, like the smack of a wave of surprise when surprise smacks us
across the chest: my friend was there, singing and laughing as always.
“How did you get back?”
“Simple: in the train. Someone,
after making sure that I was only salt water, poured me in the engine. It was a
rough trip: soon I was a white plume of vapor, soon I fell in a fine rain on the
machine. I thinned out a lot. I lost many drops.”
Her presence changed my life. The
house of dark corridors and dusty furniture was filled with air, with sun, with
sounds and green and blue reflections, a numerous and happy populace of reverberations
and echoes. How many waves is one wave, and how it can make a beach or a rock
or jetty out of a wall, a chest, a forehead that it crowns with foam! Even the
abandoned corners, the abject corners of dust and debris were touched by her
light hands. Everything began to laugh and everywhere shined with teeth. The
sun entered the old rooms with pleasure and stayed in my house for hours,
abandoning the other houses, the district, the city, the country. And some
nights, very late, the scandalized stars watched it sneak from my house.
Love was a game, a perpetual
creation. All was beach, sand, a bed of sheets that were always fresh. If I
embraced her, she swelled with pride, incredibly tall, like the liquid stalk of
a poplar; and soon that thinness flowered into a fountain of white feathers,
into a plume of smiles that fell over my head and back and covered me with
whiteness. Or she stretched out in front of me, infinite as the horizon, until
I too became horizon and silence. Full and sinuous, it enveloped me like music
or some giant lips. Her present was a going and coming of caresses, of murmurs,
of kisses. Entered in her waters, I was drenched to the socks and in a wink of
an eye I found myself up above, at the height of vertigo, mysteriously
suspended, to fall like a stone and feel myself gently deposited on the
dryness, like a feather. Nothing is comparable to sleeping in those waters, to
wake pounded by a thousand happy light lashes, by a thousand assaults that
withdrew laughing.
But never did I reach the center of
her being. Never did I touch the nakedness of pain and of death. Perhaps it
does not exist in waves, that secret site that renders a woman vulnerable and mortal,
that electric button where all interlocks, twitches, and straightens out to
then swoon. Her sensibility, like that of women, spread in ripples, only they
weren’t concentric ripples, but rather eccentric, spreading each time farther,
until they touched other galaxies. To love her was to extend to remote contacts,
to vibrate with far-off stars we never suspected. But her center … no, she had
no center, just emptiness as in a whirlwind, that sucked me in and smothered
me.
Stretched out side by side, we
exchanged confidences, whispers, smiles, Curled up, she fell on my chest and
there unfolded like a vegetation of murmurs. She sang in my ear, a little
snail. She became humble and transparent, clutching my feet like a small animal,
calm water. She was so clear I could read all of her thoughts. Certain nights
her skin was covered with phosphorescence and to embrace her was to embrace a
piece of night tattooed with fire. But she also became black and bitter. At unexpected
hours she roared, moaned, twisted. Her groans woke the neighbors. Upon hearing
her, the sea wind would scratch at the door of the house or rave in a loud
voice on the roof. Cloudy days irritated her; she broke furniture, said bad words,
covered me with insults and green and gray foam. She spit, cried, swore,
prophesied. Subject to the moon, to the stars, to the influence of the light of
other worlds, she changed her moods and appearance in a way that I thought
fantastic, but it was as fatal as the tide.
She began to miss solitude. The
house was full of snails and conches, of small sailboats that in her fury she
had shipwrecked (together with the others, laden with images, that each night
left my forehead and sank in her ferocious or pleasant whirlwinds). How many
little treasures were lost in that time! But my boats and the silent song of
the snails was not enough. I had to install in the house a colony of fish. I
confess that it was not without jealousy that I watched them swimming in my
friend, caressing her breasts, sleeping between her legs, adorning her hair
with light flashes of color.
Among all those fish there were a
few particularly repulsive and ferocious ones, little tigers from the aquarium,
with large fixed eyes and jagged and bloodthirsty mouths. I don’t know by what aberration
my friend delighted in playing with them, shamelessly showing them a preference
whose significance I preferred to ignore. She passed long hours confined with
those horrible creatures. One day I couldn’t stand it any more; I threw open the
door and launched after them. Agile and ghostly they escaped my hands while she laughed and pounded
me until I fell. I thought I was drowning. And when I was at the point of death,
and purple, she deposited me on the bank and began to kiss me, saying I don’t
know what things. I felt very weak, fatigued, and humiliated. And at the same
time her voluptuousness made me close my eyes, because her voice was sweet and
she spoke to me of the delicious death of the drowned. When I recovered, I
began to fear and hate her.
I had neglected my affairs. Now I
began to visit friends and renew old and dear relations. I met an old
girlfriend. Making her swear to keep my secret, I told her of my life with the
wave. Nothing moves women so much as the possibility of saving a man. My
redeemer employed all of her arts, but what could a woman, master of a limited
number of souls and bodies, do in front of my friend who was always changing—and
always identical to herself in her incessant metamorphoses.
Winter came. The sky turned gray.
Fog fell on the city Frozen drizzle rained. My friend cried every night. During
the day she isolated herself, quiet and sinister, stuttering a single syllable,
like an old woman who grumbles in a corner. She became cold; to sleep with her
was to shiver all night and to feel freeze, little by little, the blood, the
bones, the thoughts. She turned deep, impenetrable, restless. I left frequently
and my absences were each time more prolonged. She, in her corner howled loudly
with teeth like steel and a corrosive tongue she gnawed the walls, crumbled
them. She passed the nights in mourning, reproaching me. She had nightmares,
deliriums of the sun, of warm beaches. She dreamt of the pole and of changing
into a great block of ice, sailing beneath black skies in nights long as
months. She insulted me. She cursed and laughed; filled the house with guffaws
and phantoms. She called up the monsters of the depths, blind ones, quick ones,
blunt. Charged with electricity she carbonized all she touched; full of acid,
she dissolved whatever she brushed against. Her sweet embraces became knotty
cords that strangled me. And her body, greenish and elastic, was an implacable
whip that lashed, lashed, lashed. I fled. The horrible fish laughed with
ferocious smiles.
There in the mountains, among the
tall pines and precipices, I breathed the cold thin air like a thought of
liberty. At the end of a month I returned. I had decided. It had been so cold
that over the marble of the chimney, next to the extinct fire, I found a statue
of ice. I was unmoved by her weary beauty I put her in a big canvas sack and
went out to the streets with the sleeper on my shoulders. In a restaurant in
the outskirts I sold her to a waiter friend who immediately, began to chop her
into little pieces, which he carefully deposited in the buckets here bottles are chilled.
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