When I started writing LOVE LIES, I saw André as being swallowed up in a dark, surreal dream. (see page 11)
Arnfrid Beier, author of LOVE LIES: A Journal
We had reached the island. We went ashore – myself – myself – myself – myself – talking vividly. I could hear their excited voices behind me. They followed me closely, in my own footsteps.
The trees before us opened their branches. We entered. Some of them at once shifted their trunks into our way, pushing and harassing us from all sides, as if to prevent us from going any further.
The voices behind me had fallen silent. In the shimmering darkness ahead of us I could see a village. Grouped round the village-square were thatched bird cages, big enough to hold human beings.
We entered the village of cages.
“Monstrous!” The voices broke forth from an intolerable thought – I could hear them as distinctly now as the silence in the village.
The cages were filled with naked creatures whose bodies resembled human bodies, but they had long noses like those of certain jungle apes. They had long chins bent slightly upwards meeting with the tips of their noses. Their mouths were long-drawn slits reaching right up to their ears. Their eyes were rising suns that seemed to have been arrested on the horizon, and out of their ears grew long, felt-like tangles of hair. Their heads were bare and showed strange bumps and swellings, as if trapped thoughts were trying to make their way out through their skulls.
These creatures sat in their cages and looked at us with unseeing eyes. I went quite close to one cage, even took off my hat and shoes, but their faces showed no signs of recognition. Their expressions remained indifferent, and it seemed as if my presence was beyond their understanding.
At that moment a horse-drawn cart laden high with sheaves of corn pulled into the middle of the square. The man who had been handling the horses threw his whip to the ground, almost playfully, as if he had just come home from a picnic.
He was as unaware of the cages around him as he was of me. He kept looking about him aimlessly, even looked at me for a moment, or rather through me as one looks through glass, yet I was unable to catch a glimpse of his face – the thought of the creatures in the cages rippled my awareness of him.
People who were probably his farm hands and womenfolk clambered down the immense stack of sheaves. The men at once disappeared into the farmhouse, a large building, which I must have overlooked on first arriving at the village.
A searchlight, fixed somewhere under the vault of the jungle, was switched on flooding the whole scene with dazzling light and focusing on the women who were busy unharnessing the horses and unloading the cart.
They worked and worked and talked and talked and made me think that there was no end to it all.
I stood so close behind one of them that I could have touched her. I opened my mouth, ready to say something. Anything, even a little noise would have been enough if it could have brought her to an awareness of me.
When she turned round for a moment I was overjoyed.
“Leonora!”
My hands reached out to her.
“I didn’t know you were here, Leonora.”
But she turned back to her work leaving only an empty glance behind her, and I knew that it was something else that had made her turn round.
And they worked and talked among themselves incessantly. Even when they had finished their actual work they could not come to an end but continued with their movements of work on some invisible object, as if performing a sacred dance.
The voices behind me had been silent a long time, but now they raised a vivid tirade against me and handed me the weapon.
“Fire!” they shouted and in a breath all the women lay on their faces.
We had no time to lose and went straight into the farmhouse. We found the men playing a game of cards.
“Murderers!” we shouted as one.
They took no notice of us, laughed noisily, emptied their glasses and thumped their cards on the table.
“Now we’ve got you!” we shouted angrily.
Nothing disturbed them.
One of them put to his lips a reed pipe as if to make music with it. At the same time a voice behind me moaned in agony and I heard the heavy thud of a body on the ground. The body fell across my shadow. The sharp notes of the reed pipe were poisoned arrows darting about me.
“Murderers!” we shouted, mowed them down in a single blast and hurried out to free the caged species.
The voices behind me died one by one, entering the creatures that were streaming from their cages.
The searchlight was focused on myself now, pouring down with blinding force, and the creatures could see me for the first time. They were dancing up and down, gesticulating with their arms above their heads.
They waved to me with handkerchiefs, comics, newspapers and tattered telephone directories, as people wave when a sailing ship is about to put to sea. They came running and running, ever faster, to say goodbye, thousands and thousands of the creatures.
But the faster they came running, the greater the distance lapsed between them and me. The louder they shouted for me to hear them, the more incoherent echoed their words. The more frantically they moved their arms above their heads for me to keep sight of them, the more blurred became their features.
Alone in my boat, I sailed out on to the open sea.
Darkness fell…
