The Weeping Woman by Zoe Valdes

Author:Zoe Valdes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2016-01-19T05:00:00+00:00

Free will and Surrealist dreams, April 2011

Los Pajares. Margarita and Jorge Camacho’s country home. Jorge is dressed in white, wearing a linen suit, impeccably white, just as he’d been when he introduced the Andalusian singer María Faraco, who sang boleros at a flamenco club in Almonte.

Yet I knew that Jorge was no longer with us. All that was left of him was his open hand waving us goodbye in a strange photocopied photograph that Margarita had shown to me. Jorge had only recently died.

Ricardo and I asked for some water. We had just gotten in after a long drive from Paris to Los Pajares, and we were tired and thirsty. Jorge told us of the marvelous oranges that Los Pajares produced. Suddenly, he invited us to go out, or go in, depending on how you view the angles in that dreamlike architectural limbo, through a doorway aglow with radiant light.

Jorge Camacho moved off and was slowly lost to sight, disappearing in the intense luminosity from that entrance, or exit.

I followed him, with my eyes at first, then ran after him. Ricardo stayed to talk with Margarita, who was squeezing juicy oranges in the kitchen.

Then, before my eyes, one of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen appeared: a grove full of splendid orange trees, the ground entirely covered with succulent, fleshy, fragrant oranges in hues ranging from golden red to bright yellow. Jorge was signaling me to follow him while he kept moving forward, slowly, through the grove. The sky was a sumptuous, brilliant blue; the sun looked like a grapefruit cut in half.

After a while, Jorge sat on the ground with his legs crossed, Zen-style; he peeled one of the oranges with his thick, twisted fingers, deformed by his brushes and dried out from turpentine, and started to suck on it as he delivered an Aristotelian discourse for me, linked it to fragments of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, and finished off with a description of the gorgeous face in Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine.

I was sleeping next to a horse, my arms around his lustrous, thick neck, my sweat-drenched face sunken into the animal’s mane. His name was Jade. We were lying down in the middle of a field; I was wearing riding pants and boots, a white long-sleeved blouse, and a long brown leather jacket. It was biting cold, the rising sun could barely warm the air, dew still dripped from the green grass. Jade sighed deeply, whinnied, and all at once leapt to his feet.

It took me a while to catch up. The two of us, the horse and I, are at the bank of a river.

It was a dream in the past tense that shifted suddenly to the present.

Jade drinks thirstily, stops, looks up at me, and I’d almost say he’s happy to see me.

He’s all I have in this world: this horse with his chestnut mane and coat. And this sense of absolute belonging, my human sense of ownership, makes me feel that he and I should soon undertake a long journey together.

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