Read Online The Book of Heaven: A Novel by Patricia Storace - Free Book Online
Authors: Patricia Storace
Tags: Religión
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knowable, whereas what she was experiencing passed beyond the horizon of birth and death; it was like the eternal life the prophets spoke of. A gesture, a kiss, a task, a sentence had a golden elemental endlessness, like the scenes in the murals painted in the island houses.
The water lapped against the wharf at night, and she dreamed that it was whispering to her. It subsided, but immediately had more to say, as lovers do, in the way of Souraya and Am. Another murmuring overrode the water’s, repeating her name softly, again and again. She answered peacefully, and before she was fully awake was ripped from her bed and dragged across the floor toward her veranda, a piece of cloth stuffed in her mouth, almost choking her. She turned her head and saw Am stabbed by one man. Two others, with a frenzied childlike joy in the act of desecration, were pissing on the murals that covered the walls. “Idol worshippers,” one of them spat at her portrait. Then mesh after mesh was wound around her, fishnets, and she was carried like cargo onto her own boat.
She could not remember how long they sailed; when they landed, she was taken up by two of them, and carried ashore. Through the thick webs of fishnet they had wound around her when they seized her, she could sense the light and movement of flames. They laid their catch down roughly near what she guessed must be a campfire. She heard its hissing and the cracking sound of the heat breaking fuel apart, and then a confusion of footsteps.
Someone knelt over her; she could feel the motion of a knife working, cutting through the upper rope that bound the fishnet over her head and around her neck. It moved too swiftly for its handler, and she felt it eat a small bit of the skin beneath her right ear, a minor gourmandise, but it got a sip of her blood. The fishnet was rolled back, and she was blinded for a moment by the broad curved knife blade glittering in the firelight in Adon’s hand. “I heard the voice of God,” he said. His face was ecstatic. “And then it was revealed to me how I would bring you back to my side. Praise God for our success.”
He freed Souraya from her nets, then brought a plate of food for her, and tenderly fed her with his own hands. As she ate exhaustedly, she saw a wonder, tears coursing down his face, like a steep and barren cliff flowing miraculously with milk. The men who had abducted her were shocked by his remorseful gratitude. They had held her comfort of no regard on the journey to their rendezvous, and kept her bound, thinking they were delivering a body that would soon be a corpse to its vengeful owner.
In the morning, Adon paid off the iconoclast mercenaries he had hired to seize his wife. She overheard the accounts they gave of their struggle to escape the island with her. They did not know themselves whether Am had lived or died. Souraya quietly tormented herself with both possibilities. She was unable to measure which one gave her more pain.
Adon spoke almost passionately to the soldiers of his gratitude for their perfect execution of his plan. He lavished them with a supply of food for their journey, and paid them the previously agreed sum for their services. Despite the extra expenses of her rescue, her husband had not failed to make a handsome profit from the price he received for Souraya’s sale, not excluding Am’s gifts of jewelry, which he confiscated from her, to free her from shame.
The journey back to Adon’s settlement was tragic to her beyond mourning, despite his extraordinary display of solicitude. He could not bear to let her out of his sight; he watched over her with a sour, impassioned adoration. But there was a privacy in her tragedy. She had become invisible to her iconoclast husband. Her love, even her loss of it, gave her an independence, a continuity of a life of freedom, a possession of remembered words, images, and experience over which her husband had no power.
This, she concluded, must be one reason marriages of
The water lapped against the wharf at night, and she dreamed that it was whispering to her. It subsided, but immediately had more to say, as lovers do, in the way of Souraya and Am. Another murmuring overrode the water’s, repeating her name softly, again and again. She answered peacefully, and before she was fully awake was ripped from her bed and dragged across the floor toward her veranda, a piece of cloth stuffed in her mouth, almost choking her. She turned her head and saw Am stabbed by one man. Two others, with a frenzied childlike joy in the act of desecration, were pissing on the murals that covered the walls. “Idol worshippers,” one of them spat at her portrait. Then mesh after mesh was wound around her, fishnets, and she was carried like cargo onto her own boat.
She could not remember how long they sailed; when they landed, she was taken up by two of them, and carried ashore. Through the thick webs of fishnet they had wound around her when they seized her, she could sense the light and movement of flames. They laid their catch down roughly near what she guessed must be a campfire. She heard its hissing and the cracking sound of the heat breaking fuel apart, and then a confusion of footsteps.
Someone knelt over her; she could feel the motion of a knife working, cutting through the upper rope that bound the fishnet over her head and around her neck. It moved too swiftly for its handler, and she felt it eat a small bit of the skin beneath her right ear, a minor gourmandise, but it got a sip of her blood. The fishnet was rolled back, and she was blinded for a moment by the broad curved knife blade glittering in the firelight in Adon’s hand. “I heard the voice of God,” he said. His face was ecstatic. “And then it was revealed to me how I would bring you back to my side. Praise God for our success.”
He freed Souraya from her nets, then brought a plate of food for her, and tenderly fed her with his own hands. As she ate exhaustedly, she saw a wonder, tears coursing down his face, like a steep and barren cliff flowing miraculously with milk. The men who had abducted her were shocked by his remorseful gratitude. They had held her comfort of no regard on the journey to their rendezvous, and kept her bound, thinking they were delivering a body that would soon be a corpse to its vengeful owner.
In the morning, Adon paid off the iconoclast mercenaries he had hired to seize his wife. She overheard the accounts they gave of their struggle to escape the island with her. They did not know themselves whether Am had lived or died. Souraya quietly tormented herself with both possibilities. She was unable to measure which one gave her more pain.
Adon spoke almost passionately to the soldiers of his gratitude for their perfect execution of his plan. He lavished them with a supply of food for their journey, and paid them the previously agreed sum for their services. Despite the extra expenses of her rescue, her husband had not failed to make a handsome profit from the price he received for Souraya’s sale, not excluding Am’s gifts of jewelry, which he confiscated from her, to free her from shame.
The journey back to Adon’s settlement was tragic to her beyond mourning, despite his extraordinary display of solicitude. He could not bear to let her out of his sight; he watched over her with a sour, impassioned adoration. But there was a privacy in her tragedy. She had become invisible to her iconoclast husband. Her love, even her loss of it, gave her an independence, a continuity of a life of freedom, a possession of remembered words, images, and experience over which her husband had no power.
This, she concluded, must be one reason marriages of
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