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arrogant, but
gently serene. No streaks of lightning in his ice-blue eyes, but a soft early
morning glow.
    And Sabina knew that when he would want fever
he would call her.

    Whenever she felt lost in the endless deserts
of insomnia she would take up the labyrinthian thread
of her life again from the beginning to see if she could find at what moment
the paths had become confus friend afont >
    Tonight she remembered the moon-baths, as if
this had marked the beginning of her life instead of the parents, school,
birthplace. As if they had determined the course of her life rather than
inheritance or imitation of the parents. In the moon-baths, perhaps, lay the
secret motivation of her acts.
    At sixteen Sabina took moon-baths, first of all
because everyone else took sun-baths, and second, she admitted, because she had
been told it was dangerous. The effect of moon-baths was unknown, but it was
intimated that it might be the opposite of the sun’s effect.
    The first time she exposed herself she was
frightened. What would the consequences be? There were many taboos against
gazing at the moon, many old legends about the evil effects of falling asleep
in moonlight. She knew that the insane found the full moon acutely disturbing,
that some of them regressed to animal habits of howling at the moon. She knew
that in astrology the moon ruled the night life of the unconscious, invisible
to consciousness.
    But then she had always preferred the night to
the day.
    Moonlight fell directly over her bed in the
summer. She lay naked in it for hours before falling asleep, wondering what its
rays would do to her skin, her hair, her eyes, and then deeper, to her
feelings.
    By this ritual it seemed to her that her skin
acquired a different glow, a night glow, an artificial luminousness which
showed its fullest effulgence only at night, in artificial light.
    People noticed it and asked her what was
happening. Some suggested she was using drugs.
    It accentuated her love of mystery. She
meditated on this planet which kept half of itself in darkness. She felt
related to it because it was the planet of lovers. Her attraction for it, her
desire to bathe in its rays, explained her repulsion for home, husband and
children. She began to imagine she knew the life which took place on the moon.
Homeless, childless, free lovers, not even tied to each other.
    The moon-baths crystallized many of Sabina’s
desires and orientations. Up to that moment she had only experienced a simple
rebellion against the lives which surrounded her, but now she began to see the
forms and colors of other lives, realms much deeper and stranger and remote to
be discovered, and that her denial of ordinary life had a purpose: to send her
off like a rocket into other forms of existence. Rebellion was merely the
electric friction accumulating a charge of power that would launch her into
space.
    She understood why it angered her when people
spoke of life as one life. She became certain of myriad lives within herself.
Her sense of time altered. She felt acutely and with grief the shortness of
life’s physical span. Death was terrifyingly near, and the journey towards it,
vertiginous; but only when she considered the lives around her, accepting their
time tables, clocks, measurements. Everything they did constricted time. They
spoke of one birth, one childhood, one adolescence, one romance, one marriage,
one maturity, one aging, one death, and then transmitted the monotonous cycle
to their children. But Sabina, activated by the moon-rays, felt germinating in
her the power to extend time in the ramification of myriad lives and loves, to
expand the journey to infinity, taking immense and luxurious detours as the
courtesan depositor of multiple desires. The seeds of many lives, places, of
many women in herself were fecundated by the moon-rays because they came from
that limitless night life which we usually perceive only in our dreams,
containing roots reaching for all the magnificences of the