It happened many years ago. It is a story of a love that was not, that was left just like that. It is a sad story... and terrible - says the Sup sitting on one side, with his pipe in his lips. He lights it, and looking at the mountain, continues: "A man came from far away. He came, or he already was there. No one knows. It was back in other times long past and however that may be, in these lands people lived and died just the same, without hope and forgotten. No one knows if he was young or old, that man. Few are those who saw him the first times. It was like that because they say that this man was extremely ugly. Just to see him produced dread in men and revulsion in women. What was it that made him so unpleasant? I don't know, the concepts of beauty and ugliness change so much from one age to another and from one culture to another.. In this case, the people native to these lands avoided him, as did the foreigners who were the owners of land, men, and destinies. The indigenous people called him the Jolmash or Monkey-face; the foreigners called him the Animal.
The man went into the mountains, far from the gaze of all, and set to work there. He made himself a little house, next to one of the many caves that were there. He made the land produce, planted corn and wheat, and hunting animals in the forest gave him enough to get by. Every so often he went down to a stream near the settlements. There he had arranged, with one of the older members of the community, to get salt, sugar, or whatever else the man, the Jolmash, didn't obtain in the mountains. The Jolmash exchanged corn and animal skins for what he needed. The Jolmash arrived at the stream at the time when the evening began to darken and the shadows of the trees advanced night onto the earth. The old man was sick in his eyes and couldn't see well, so that, with the dusk and his illness, he couldn't make out the face of the man who caused so much revulsion in the clear light.
One evening the old man didn't arrive. The Jolmash thought that maybe he had mistaken the hour and arrived when the old man had already gone home. To make no mistake, the next time he made sure to arrive earlier. The sun still had some fingers to go before it wrapped itself in the mountains, when the Jolmash came near the stream. A murmur of laughter and voices grew as he approached. The Jolmash slowed his steps and came silently nearer. Among the branches and vines he made out the pool formed by the waters of the stream. A group of women were bathing and washing clothes. They were laughing. The Jolmash looked and stayed quiet. His heart became only his gaze, his eyes his voice. It was a while since the women had gone and the Jolmash stayed on, looking... Now the stars rained down on the fields as he returned to the mountains.
I don't know if it came from what he saw, or from what he thought he saw, whether the image that was engraved on his retina corresponded to reality or if it existed only in his desire, but the Jolmash fell in love or thought that he fell in love. And his love was not something idealized or platonic, it was quite earthy, and the call of the feelings that he bore was like a war drum, like a lightning that becomes fierce rain. Passion took his hand and the Jolmash began to write letters, love letters, lettered delirium that filled his hands.
And he wrote, for example, "Oh, lady of the wet glimmer! Desire becomes a proud leaping colt. Sword of a thousand mirrors is the yearning of my appetites for thy body, and in vain rips the double edge of the thousand pantings that fly on the wind. One grace, long sleeplessness! One grace I ask thee, lady, failed repose of my grey existence! Let me come to thy neck.
Allow that to thy ear climbs my clumsy longing. Let my desire tell thee, quiet, very quiet, that which my breast silences. Do not look, lady so not- mine, at the poor mess which adorns my face! Let thy ears become thy gaze; give up thy eyes to see the murmurs that walk within me, longing for thy within. Yes, I wish to enter. To walk thee, with sighs, the path that hands and lips and sex desire. Within the mouth, she wet and I thirsting, to enter with a kiss. On the double hill of thy breast to run lips and fingers, to awaken the cluster of moans that in it hide. To march to the south and to take prisoner thy waist in warm embrace, burning now the skin of the belly, brilliant sun announcing the night that below is born. To evade, diligent and skillful, the scissors on which thy grace goes and whose apex promises and denies. To give thee a tremor of cold heat and arrive, whole, to the moist stirring of desire. To secure the warmth of my palms in the double warmth of flesh and movement. One slow first step, a light trot next. After that the runaway ride of bodies and desire. To reach the sky, and then fall.
One grace, promised tiredness! One grace I ask thee, lady of the quiet sigh!
Let me come to thy neck! In it I am saved, far off I die.."
One night of storms,
like his passion burning his hands, a bolt of lightning burnt down the
little house of the Jolmash. Wet and shivering, he took refuge in the neighboring
cave. With a torch he lit his way in and found there little figures of
couples giving and receiving, the pleasure worked in stone and clay. There
was a spring, and little boxes that when opened, spoke of terrors and marvels
that had passed that and would come to be. The Jolmash now could not or
would not leave the cave. There, he felt the desire fill his hands once
more and wrote, weaving bridges to nowhere...
"A pirate am I now, lady of the longed-for port. Tomorrow, a soldier at war. Today, a pirate lost in trees and lands. The ship of desire unfolds its sails. A continual moaning, all tremor and wanting, leads the ship between monsters and storms. Lightning illuminates the flickering sea of desperation. A wet salt takes the command and the helm. Pure wind, word alone, I navigate seeking thee, among sighs and panting, seeking the precise place the body sends thee. Desire, lady of storms to come, is a knot hidden somewhere by thy skin. Find it I must, and muttering spells, untie it. Free then shall be thy longings, feminine swayings, and they will fill thy eyes and mouth, thy womb and innards. Free one moment only, as my hands already come to make them prisoners, to lead them out to sea in my embrace and with my body. A ship shall I be and restless sea, so that in thy body I enter. And there shall be no rest in so much storm, the bodies moved by so many capricious waves. One last and ferocious slap of salty desire hurls us to a beach where sleep arrives. A pirate am I now, lady of tender storm. Don't await my assault, come to it! Let the sea, the wind, and this stone become ship be witnesses! The cave of desire! The horizon clouds over with black wine, now we are arriving, now we go..."
So it happened, they
say. And they say that the Jolmash never again left the cave. No one knows
whether the woman to whom he wrote the letters existed in truth or was
a product of the cave, the Cave of Desire. What they say is that the Jolmash
still lives in it, and whoever comes close becomes sick with the same,
with desire...
