The Passion Of New Eve by Angela Carter

Author:Angela Carter [CARTER, ANGELA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2015-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

Nine

The cold winds of solitude blew about her house: solitude and melancholy, said Tristessa, that is a woman’s life. I went towards you as towards my own face in a magnetic mirror, but when, in accordance with all the laws of physics, you came towards me, I did not feel a sense of homecoming, only the forlorn premonition of loss.

I exhibited all the symptoms of panic when I met you – pallor, shallow breathing, a prickle of cold sweat. It was like finding myself on the brink of an abyss but the giddiness that seized me and shook me and would not let me go sprang from a cause I did not understand, then – that the abyss on which you opened was that of my self, Tristessa.

You were an illusion in a void. You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my own emptiness with marvellous, imaginary things as long as, just so long as, the movie lasted, and then all would vanish. This world had never been sufficient for you; to go beyond the boundaries of flesh had been your occupation and so you had become nothing, a wraith that left only traces of a silver powder on the hands that clutched helplessly at your perpetual vanishings.

The whirring helicopter hovered over a crag where eagles nested. Below us, the wan fingers of the dying moon polished the heaped glass hoops of her home and made them shine as if the house possessed its own, cold light, like the emissions of those fish who live at the bottom of the sea and talk to one another in a language of submarine luminescence we find so mysterious only because it is perfectly transparent. The harem squeaked and gibbered at the spectacle as down we plummeted, to land inside the high wall with which she surrounded herself, in a park full of trees beside a dark, thickly scummed swimming pool as long and as wide as a little lake. It must have been fed by some subterranean spring, for its waters had the sullen look of unimaginable depth; very high above it quivered the taut strut of a diving board.

So the helicopter touched down on a fractured terrace where weeds reared up through the cracks in the concrete. But this terrace, although it was deserted, was not uninhabited. Grand transparencies lodged there – swollen, tear-shaped forms of solid glass with dimples and navels and blind depressions in their sides, the abortions of expressive surfaces. Some were as tall as I and weeds and creepers had anchored them to the ground; others had tumbled on their sides and shattered when they hit the concrete. But, though they were of all kinds of sizes and each one subtly different from the other, all were, more or less, the shape of tears and had been scattered plentifully, as in a passion of grief, all around the margins of the deep, black reach of desert-locked water.

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