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Authors: Patricia Storace
Tags: Religión
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choice were held so dangerous. The imperfections of the husband were the conditions of marriage; the imperfections of the beloved, by contrast, seemed flowing and mutable, like the verses of an ongoing song. In love, one experienced the beloved, and through him, oneself; but this knowledge destroyed one’s subjection to him. Love, then, destroyed innocence. Love, then, was knowledge.
So she lived through the return, indifferent to the cities and settlements they passed through, uninterested in the details of their trading, taciturn during the hospitalities. She felt a pang when Adon financed a purchase of seed and medicines with seven of Am’s jewels, but no more than that. The hand that fitted the rings to her fingers and clasped the brilliants around her throat had made them precious. Without it, they were toys. For her, treasure could be nothing but her lover’s child, its small face and hands swept inside her by the current of their caresses.
She was shaken by a bitter amusement when she saw the primitive greed and admiration the ornaments excited. Cities and wars were paid for by colored rocks, by the luminous secretions of shellfish, by a subterranean dung of gold. These had no more real value than if military power were based on an inexhaustible supply of toy soldiers. She inwardly mocked the gravity with which the negotiators examined and debated the qualities of the colored rocks, the intensity of the blue, green, and red reflections, for which they would exchange food. Love had made her unfit to live in this world.
They arrived at a famous city she had once desired to see. Now her desire had been fulfilled after it had died. God has many ways to grant our prayers.
This city was built entirely underground in a labyrinth of crystalline salt caves. Visitors could only hope to find their way in and out with the help of expert local guides who led them along sinuous paths, mounted on their special breed of sightless ponies, who shied at nothing. Another relay of guides poled them through a coil of canals. The air of the place was shocking, pure, saline, solid as water—it was if one were breathing as one had before birth, inside the mother.
They were received in a hall built around a great dammed pool of water; the walls and ceiling of the room sparkled with flecks of salt and mica, and a chandelier carved of salt illuminated the room like fireworks. The celebrated acoustics of these underground rooms were unique, producing a sound that seemed to come at once from all directions. Specially trained choirs, during the ceremonies of greeting, sang choral music in parts so that the music moved around the hall, now seeming to pour from above and below them, or most spectacularly, in an effect that made their hearts race, from within the chambers of the listener’s own skulls.
They called themselves the Salt of the Earth. Salt was their wealth: the king’s musicians played instruments whose strings were encrusted with salt. Salt fell shimmering from the capillary strings, as the song makers’ fingers played over them, revealing the music woven inside its tense chrysalis. Even their banquet dishes were of whole fishes, animals, and roots baked in domes of salt. The women of this tribe decorated their faces and skin with mica, salt, and sugar crystals, so their very features, brows, cheekbones, foreheads, chins, seemed a kind of jewelry, their flesh sparkling ore.
It was there that Adon sold her again, for a substantial tonnage of salt. This time he sold her with studied calculation, and a much more assured presentation of her as a beloved sister, with whom such a parting was reluctant but inevitable. He was implacably confident that her loss was temporary, despite watching her escorted disappearance through a maze of glittering tunnels. To him now even the tunnels were a part of the ruse God inspired in him; they were an extension of the tunnels in his own soul. The insatiable divinity of invincibility possessed
So she lived through the return, indifferent to the cities and settlements they passed through, uninterested in the details of their trading, taciturn during the hospitalities. She felt a pang when Adon financed a purchase of seed and medicines with seven of Am’s jewels, but no more than that. The hand that fitted the rings to her fingers and clasped the brilliants around her throat had made them precious. Without it, they were toys. For her, treasure could be nothing but her lover’s child, its small face and hands swept inside her by the current of their caresses.
She was shaken by a bitter amusement when she saw the primitive greed and admiration the ornaments excited. Cities and wars were paid for by colored rocks, by the luminous secretions of shellfish, by a subterranean dung of gold. These had no more real value than if military power were based on an inexhaustible supply of toy soldiers. She inwardly mocked the gravity with which the negotiators examined and debated the qualities of the colored rocks, the intensity of the blue, green, and red reflections, for which they would exchange food. Love had made her unfit to live in this world.
They arrived at a famous city she had once desired to see. Now her desire had been fulfilled after it had died. God has many ways to grant our prayers.
This city was built entirely underground in a labyrinth of crystalline salt caves. Visitors could only hope to find their way in and out with the help of expert local guides who led them along sinuous paths, mounted on their special breed of sightless ponies, who shied at nothing. Another relay of guides poled them through a coil of canals. The air of the place was shocking, pure, saline, solid as water—it was if one were breathing as one had before birth, inside the mother.
They were received in a hall built around a great dammed pool of water; the walls and ceiling of the room sparkled with flecks of salt and mica, and a chandelier carved of salt illuminated the room like fireworks. The celebrated acoustics of these underground rooms were unique, producing a sound that seemed to come at once from all directions. Specially trained choirs, during the ceremonies of greeting, sang choral music in parts so that the music moved around the hall, now seeming to pour from above and below them, or most spectacularly, in an effect that made their hearts race, from within the chambers of the listener’s own skulls.
They called themselves the Salt of the Earth. Salt was their wealth: the king’s musicians played instruments whose strings were encrusted with salt. Salt fell shimmering from the capillary strings, as the song makers’ fingers played over them, revealing the music woven inside its tense chrysalis. Even their banquet dishes were of whole fishes, animals, and roots baked in domes of salt. The women of this tribe decorated their faces and skin with mica, salt, and sugar crystals, so their very features, brows, cheekbones, foreheads, chins, seemed a kind of jewelry, their flesh sparkling ore.
It was there that Adon sold her again, for a substantial tonnage of salt. This time he sold her with studied calculation, and a much more assured presentation of her as a beloved sister, with whom such a parting was reluctant but inevitable. He was implacably confident that her loss was temporary, despite watching her escorted disappearance through a maze of glittering tunnels. To him now even the tunnels were a part of the ruse God inspired in him; they were an extension of the tunnels in his own soul. The insatiable divinity of invincibility possessed
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