16
PARTISAN REVIEW
that their god is the true god, and that one must obey. They are my
masters, they are ignorant of pity and, like masters, they want to be
alone, to progress alone, to rule alone, because they alone had the
daring to build in the salt and the sands a cold torrid city. And
I. ...
What a jumble when the heat rises, I'm sweating, they never
do, now the shade itself is heating up, I feel the sun on the stone
above me, it's striking, striking like a hammer on all the stones and
it's the music, the vast music of noon, air and stones vibrating over
hundreds of kilometers,
gra,
I hear the silence as I did once before.
Yes, it was the same silence, years ago, that greeted me when the
guards led me to them, in the sunlight, in the center of the square,
whence the concentric terraces rose gradually toward the lid of hard
blue sky sitting on the edge of the basin. There I was, thrown on my
knees in the hollow of that white shield, my eyes corroded by the
swords of salt and fire issuing from all the walls, pale with fatigue,
my ear bleeding from the blow given by my
gu~de
and they, tall
and black, looked at me without saying a word. The day was at
its mid-course. Under the blows of the iron sun, the sky resounded
at length, a sheet of white-hot tin, it was the same silence and they
stared at me, time passed, they kept on staring at me, and I couldn't
face their stares, I panted more and more violently, eventually I
wept, and suddenly they turned their backs on me in silence and
all together went off in the same direction. On my knees, all I could
see, in the red and black sandals, was their feet sparkling with salt
as they raised the long black gowns, the tip rising somewhat, the
heel striking the ground lightly, and when the square was empty I
was dragged to the House of the Fetish.
Squatting as I am today in the shelter of the rock and the
fire above my head pierces the rock's thickness, I spent several days
within the dark of the House of the Fetish, somewhat higher than
the others, surrounded by a wall of salt, but without windows, full
of a sparkling night. Several days, and I was given a basin of brack–
ish water and some grain that was thrown before me the way
chickens are fed, I picked it up. By day the door remained closed
and yet the darkness became less oppressive, as if the irresistible sun
managed to flow through the masses of salt. No lamp, but by feeling
my way along the walls I touched garlands of dried palms decorating
the walls and, at the end, a small door, coarsely fitted, of which I
