Read Sexing the Cherry for Free Online

game with me and I went and pulled her to the window.
    'Come and see this steeple of radishes.'
    She was silent. I noticed how pale her face was, and that her eyes were unnaturally bright. I leaned over to point out anything that might please her but the words stuck to the roof of my mouth. She was gazing down. I followed her gaze, down and further down. We were at the top of a sheer-built tower. The stone cylinder fell without relief to a platform of bitter rocks smashed by foaming waves. The coastline winding away was desolate of living things. No hut or sheepfold broke the line of tangled rosemary bushes. There was nothing but the wind and the slate-blue sea.
    She pulled away from me and went to sit down on the bed.
    With my back to the window I asked her what it was that kept her here.
    'It is myself,' she said. 'Only myself.'
    It was then I realized the room had no door.
    'Is there anything for me to eat?' I asked her.
    She smiled, leaned under the bed and pulled out two rats by their tails.
    She laughed, and walked towards me, the rats in each hand. Her eyes were clouding over, her eyes were disappearing. I could smell her breath like cheese in muslin.
    I did not think of my life; I somersaulted out of the window and landed straight in the pile of radishes.
    The woman in the leather apron hit me over the head, but someone behind her, pulling her off, took me by the shoulders and urged me to tell him where I had come from so suddenly.
    'From the tower,' I said, pointing upwards.
    The market stopped its bustle and all fell to the ground and made the sign of the cross. The purveyor of Holy Relics hung a set of martyrs' teeth round his neck and sprinkled me with the dust of St Anthony.
    The story was a terrible one.
    A young girl caught incestuously with her sister was condemned to build her own death tower. To prolong her life she built it as high as she could, winding round and round with the stones in an endless stairway. When there were no stones left she sealed the room and the village, driven mad by her death cries, evacuated to a far-off spot where no one could hear her. Many years later the tower had been demolished by a foreigner who had built the house I saw in its place. Slowly the village had returned, but not the foreigner, nor anyone else, could live in the house. At night the cries were too loud.
    The villagers were kind to me, and I helped them through the day with their stalls of exotic fruit and speckled fish, and at night the men filled their pipes and sat on the sea wall and asked me where I had come from, and why.
    I did not tell them the strange means of my arrival, but I explained the destination of my heart.
    The world is full of dancers,' said one, blowing the smoke in circles round my head.
    'And you have seen this one only by night,' said another.
    'And escaping down a wall,' said his wife, who was scraping crabmeat into a pot.
    The philosopher of the village warned me that love is better ignored than explored, for it is easier to track a barnacle goose than to follow the trajectories of the heart.
    There followed a discourse on love, some of which I will reveal to you.
    On the one side there were those who claimed that love, if it be allowed at all, must be kept tame by marriage vows and family ties so that its fiery heat warms the hearth but does not burn down the house.
    On the other there were those who believed that only passion freed the soul from its mud-hut, and that only by loosing the heart like a coursing hare and following it until sundown could a man or woman sleep quietly at night.
    The school of heaviness, who would tie down love, took as their examples those passages of ancient literature which promise that those driven by desire, the lightest of things, suffer under weights they cannot bear. Weights far more terrible than to accept from the start that passion must spend its life in chains.
    What of the woman who finds herself turning into a lotus tree as she flees her ardent lover?