One day our beautiful dream of togetherness was tested. I had been out hunting deer. I felt a sharp pain in my leg as if something had bitten me. I began to feel ill and I managed to get back home I don’t know how, but my wife was waiting for me there and when she saw me she looked terribly afraid. I hadn’t brought back anything except fear in the look in my face and her face reflected it. I could see immediately that she thought I was a dead man who had come back to her.
That night I entered into a delirium. I began to see things that I had forgotten. I saw my father, I saw my sister. I saw my mother. My father was God himself. He appeared briefly in the guise of a punisher. He had a belt and I felt afraid. Then I saw his anger, I saw it as an animal a wild animal but one which had been caught and was about to be slaughtered. Then my mother appeared in the dream, she was soft, but she turned her face away and I couldn’t make out, she was hiding something. What was she hiding? She was now the beast, but it was impossible to see her as she hid her face keeping it turned. My father disappeared in that dream and I wished to see him and I searched but I could not find him.
When I woke there was pain and there was confusion. But most of all I felt lost, I felt like a lost child, like a newly made orphan. “Where is my home? Where are my parents? Where is my father?”
My wife was afraid for me, I could see it in her eyes. She had seen me before and she had thought that I was strong and independent and that I was a hero, and I was. But here I was lying in a sweat. I was weak as hell, there was no food and I was probably poisoned by something. I was meant to give her the protection, but here I was lying in what appeared to me to be death itself.
Had I been in a dream? I had been in a delirious dream of love and romanticism had been the thing which I had followed throughout life. What I needed now was not romance, not the image of beauty and divine soul connection.
“Here, have this. It’s porridge. It will make you feel stronger, you must eat my darling.”
My wife now spoon fed me as I was unable to move. I was unable to communicate with her. I was as if deaf, dumb and blind I was beyond useless, but there she was at my side with the spoon with comfort, with soft words and no criticism, and no panic. This woman, although afraid at first, took action. She pulled herself together and cooked up the porridge, she put sugar and butter on it and it was beautiful and hot and delicious. After a few hours I was able to communicate.
“My love, they hurt me.” I said.
“Yes, it was a snake. But I have sucked out as much of the poison as I could.”
“My love, this world is evil. Are you good or evil?”
She looked at me for a minute. I had lost my mind. She was my wife and nothing would make her want to hurt me. Nothing. It wouldn’t matter if I had come back with lost limbs, and it wouldn’t have mattered if I had come back with another woman to share our bed with, she would have gladly shared it because she knew that we were one and nothing on earth could destroy our love. As it was I came back poisoned. I had been poisoned with a snake and now I was babbling about good and evil.
“My mother is evil. She didn’t kill my father but she took vengeance against him like a wild beast and she abandoned me out here in this forest and stole my memories.” I spoke these words as if they were a confession, and she was my confessor.
“And your father? Is he alive or dead?”
“I loved my father as he loved me. He gave me life and was the prop on which I stood. But he didn’t understand the way of the world. He was too optimistic. He was naïve, he didn’t understand the reality.”
I carried on. But now this anger welled up in me, it was frightening. I carried on about my father, I don’t remember what I said, but I was mourning his loss, and as I understood it my mother had done something unspeakably evil to him. She had hurt me too, in hurting him she had hurt me. I became angry and filled with hatred at the thought of my mother hiding her face with a quiet smile, like an unspeakable beast, an evil like no other, and my own mother. I frightened my dear wife. She started to cry, and at this I began to weep.
“I’m sorry my love.”
I begged her to come close to me, and I embraced her and she lay on top of me and I held on to her. I had doubted her. I had asked whether she was good or evil, I had thrown a spear of doubt into our love, the poison swirling through my heart through my veins. The truth is that I love her, I loved her because she was without guile, without calculation, she understood my mind and anticipated my needs. And now I was weak I was a sick man, sick in body and recovering, but in mind I was just at the precipice. I was falling into something great and evil, and if she couldn’t save me then no-one could. My weakness was like paralysis. But I was not dying and I recovered in body.
“Now is the only time that counts.” She spoke to me.
“It doesn’t matter about your parents, they are gone, they are no more. They committed evil, both of them, they both were responsible and they both left you. But they don’t matter, they aren’t you. I love you and I am here, and I have no lies in me and you must trust me.”
These words were true, she did love me, and she proved it. I stopped speaking to her. I was unable to talk the next day. She asked me a question and I didn’t look at her and I didn’t speak. But she didn’t get angry with me. She didn’t persist with her questioning, she merely went about caring for me and loving me. The following day I was still unable to speak but she did not sulk, and she didn’t do anything to upset me. She came close to me, she put her hand in mine and looked in my eyes, but she wasn’t weak this time, she didn’t cry, she showed strength and it was a beautiful womanly inner strength. It was a strength that said that she was my wife and that I was her man, I was her possession and that she would not lose me, but she would not get angry with me either for lack of communication. In truth weeks passed and I couldn’t speak, and I did the things I had to do in life with apathy and little enthusiasm. When I did things for her, I tried hard, but my life was dead. In the day I lived in my mind, the images which had disturbed me continued to do so, and I mulled them over in my thoughts and dwelled on them and I tried to forget like she had said but they would not leave me. My evil did not leave my mind, but my woman remained, and continued with pleasantness and joy even though a cloud of darkness now held me captive. If she had left me, or if she had reacted badly, I don’t know what I would have done. In truth the months that passed were a form of hell in which I descended into, with her, my love looking down into it not descending but waiting patiently and calling me, and not giving up.
