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said. Still he seemed to be listening for something else. “What are you listening for now?” I said.
    ‘“The olive trees whisper,” he said. “I always listen. You are the one who is Orpheus.”
    ‘“I’ve just told you that.”
    ‘“Not just your name,” he said. “You’re going to do it, you’re going to be Orpheus.”
    ‘“What else can I be?”
    ‘“You are the story of yourself,” he said. With his finger he traced figures in the air.
    ‘“What’s that you’re doing?” I said.
    ‘“Your name. You are the story of Orpheus.”
    ‘“How can I be a story? I’m a man, a live person.”
    ‘“You’re a story.”
    ‘“Not a story,” I said. I began to run.
    ‘Behind me, even when I was far away, I heard him say quietly, “You’re a story,” and I wished I hadn’t told him my name.’ The head fell silent, I held it in my hands and waited.
    ‘What happened next?’ I said after a reasonable interval.
    ‘My story is not a sequence of events like knots on a string,’ said the head; ‘I could have started with the loss of Eurydice and ended with the killing of the tortoise - all of it happens at once and it goes on happening; all of it is happening now and any part of it contains the whole of it, the pictures needn’t be looked at in any particular order.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘Because the thing is simply what it is. Hold a pomegranate in your hand and tell me where is the beginning of it and where is the end. The name of this pomegranate is Loss: the loss of Eurydice was in me before I ever met her and the loss of me was in her the same.’
    ‘Tell me what happened next.’
    ‘After the making of the lyre there is a long empty space before I became the Orpheus who was said to charm wild beasts and move trees and stones. I assume that I very slowly taught myself to play the instrument, that I made up little songs, nothing special. Probably I sang and begged my way from place to place. When I try to think of myself in that time I think of an emptiness carrying the emptiness that had been the tortoise. There is no story of me for that time - what I had been was gone and what I was to be had not yet come.
    ‘The next thing I know about is a morning, a dawn, the dawn mist rising from the river. I was sleeping off a drunk, I woke up not knowing who I was nor where I was. Something was looking at me from behind the mist, the strangeness that is Hermes, the strangeness that makes everything here and gone at the same time. The light changed and it was afternoon. The flight of the kingfisher opened in the air over the river a blue-green iridescent stillness in which a dragonfly, immense and transparent, repeated itself with every wingstroke. Therewas a drowsiness, a droning in the golden afternoon, a vibration in my mind or in the air, an ineffably sweet, honeyed sound that was seductive and demanding, a music not of any instrument. It enveloped and overwhelmed me, I felt myself surrendering to it, dying sweetly of it while the strangeness watched me from behind the blue-green stillness, from behind the dragonfly and the gold of the afternoon.
    ‘The air itself seemed honeyed, and it was in that fragrance that I first heard her voice, the voice of the woman who became my story. I heard her weeping in the leafy shade while the dragonflies printed themselves gigantically on the transparent stillness over the river.
    ‘There rose in my throat a terrible ache and in that moment the world became me and I became the world-child who knows nothing and believes whatever it is told; I was the world-child whose innocence binds the world together, whose innocence betrayed will unfasten the world. Oh yes, I thought, and as I listened to the weeping of the unseen woman in that golden, golden afternoon I became the tortoise I had killed. I felt my own cruel knife enter me, felt my life spurting out, felt my still quivering body being dug out of my shell. In an explosion of brilliant colours I suffered the