Free Inez: A Novel by Carlos Fuentes Page A

gesture will be born something different, you will know that, but you will not know what to name it, perhaps if he helps you, you will come to give a name to what you are doing …
    You will feel hunger, and you will pick the small red fruit that will be growing in a nearby forest. But when you return to your
place on the edge of the cliff, it will be night, and you will lie down and sleep, as you will have done forever.
    Except that, this night, there will be ghosts in your sleep that you will never have dreamed of before. A voice will say to you: You will be again.
    When the sun rises, you will get up, agitated because you will fear you have lost him. What you will search for will be the presence of the man separated from you by the abyss.
    There he will be, raising his arm, waving.
    You will answer in the same way.
    But this time he will not shout. He will do the same as you in the afternoon.
    He will speak more softly, he will repeat ah-nel, ah-nel, pointing to you and then, with his finger pointing to his own chest, he will say with a new, gentle, unfamiliar strength, neh-el, neh-el …
    At first you will not know how to answer, you will feel that your voice will not be enough, you will repeat the moments by the sea, the contortions of your body, and he will only watch you, not imitating you, with a strange gesture of disapproval, distant or distanced; he will cross his arms, he will lift his voice, ah-nel, ah-nel, you will understand, you will stop dancing, you will repeat, in your voice, higher but also softer, the song of the birds, the sound of the sea, the swaying trees, the playful monkeys, the battling reindeer, the running river; the sounds will join together, strung together one after another like something that someone will wear around his neck, something, someone, you will be fem protector, fem forgotten, fem that must be found again.
    Ah-nel.
    That will be you.
    You will repeat it, and you will say, I will be me, he will say I am me.
    He will point to a path, but his voice will check yours with another voice closer to flesh than to earth, you will hear in the voice of the man— neh-el? —a call to the voice of the skin.
    A carnal song. A song. How will the word be said that now will not be just a cry?
    Song.
    Now it will not be just voice.
    You will say those words, and the shrieks will be left behind, the screeches, the bawls, the waves, the storms, the grains of sand.
    He— neh-el? —will climb down the rock, making an inviting gesture that you will imitate, making disconcerting cries that will orient you both, forgetting in your visible urgency to meet the gentle modulations of the names ah-nel and neh-el and, unable to avoid it, regressing to grunt, howl, and caw, but both feeling in the rapid trembling of your bodies that now, in order to come together more quickly, in order to meet, you both must move from where you are, and in the hurrying toward the encounter so desired now by both, there will be a return to earlier cries and gestures, but it will not matter, and in saying ah-nel and neh-el you will also have said eh-dé and eh-mé, and that will be the good part, but you also will have done something terrible, something forbidden: you will have given another moment to the moment you are living and are going to live, you have distorted time, you have opened a forbidden field to what you already lived before.
    This scene will send you back to the before and after you longed for. There you will re-create how first the reindeer will have paraded themselves, staking out territory beneath the steadily rising sun, prowling about the plain, gathering in large numbers, until combat erupts amid streaming sweat and salt-colored slaver and inflamed eyes and crashing antlers, and you
flat on the ground of the plain, longing for the protection of the trees, and the antlered beasts battling all day until there are only as many left as you can count on your hands, each the possessor of a section of the