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which layer I was resting, whether it was the cold grey upper leaf of dawn, or
the dark layer of night.
    Sabina’s face was suspended in the darkness of
the garden. From the eyes a simoun wind shriveled the
leaves and turned the earth over; all things which had run a vertical course
now turned in circles, round the face, around HER face. She stared with such an
ancient stare, heavy luxuriant centuries flickering in deep processions. From
her nacreous skin perfumes spiraled like incense. Every gesture she made
quickened the rhythm of the blood and aroused a beat chant like the beat of the
heart of the desert, a chant which was the sound of her feet treading down into
the blood the imprint of . The tee.
    A voice that had traversed the centuries, so
heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with
eternal resonance; a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries
that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.
    Her black cape hung like black hair from her
shoulders, half-draped, half-floating around her body. The web of her dress
moving always a moment before she moved, as if aware of her impulses, and
stirring long after she was still, like waves ebbing back to the sea. Her
sleeves dropped like a sigh and the hem of her dress danced round her feet.
    The steel necklace on her throat flashed like
summer lightning and the sound of the steel was like the clashing of swords… Le
pas d’acier … The steel of New York’s skeleton buried
in granite, buried standing up. Le pas d’acier …notes
hammered on the steel-stringed guitars of the gypsies, on the steel arms of
chairs dulled with her breath; steel mail curtains falling like the flail of
hail, steel bars and steel barrage cracking. Her necklace thrown around the
world’s neck, unmeltable . She carried it like a
trophy wrung of groaning machinery, to match the inhuman rhythm of her march.
    The leaf fall of her words, the stained glass
hues of her moods, the rust in her voice, the smoke in her mouth, her breath on
my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.
    Talk—half-talk, phrases that had no need to be
finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock
orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of
soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing
against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene,
woman within woman—like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within
another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into
fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole
again.
    The luminous mask of her face, waxy, immobile,
with eyes like sentinels. Watching my sybaritic walk, and I the sibilance of
her tongue. Deep into each other we turned our harlot eyes. She was an idol in Byzance , an idol dancing with legs parted; and I wrote with
pollen and honey. The soft secret yielding of woman I carved into men’s brains
with copper words; her image I tattooed in their eyes. They were consumed by
the fever of their entrails, the indissoluble poison of legends. If the torrent
failed to engulf them, or did they extricate themselves, I haunted their memory
with the tale they wished to forget. All that was swift and malevolent in woman
might be ruthlessly destroyed, but who would destroy the illusion on which I
laid her to sleep each night? We lived in Byzance .
Sabina and I, until our hearts bled from the precious stones on our foreheads,
our bodies tired of the weight of brocades, our nostrils burned with the smoke
of perfumes; and when we had passed into other centuries they enclosed us in
copper frames. Men recognized her always: the same effulgent face, the same
rust voice. And she and I, we recognized each other; I her face and she my
legend.
    Around my pulse she put a flat steel bracelet
and my pulse beat as she willed, losing its human cadence, thumping like a
savage in