Armonía Somers - The Naked Woman

“No, of course not. He was dreaming, you see. Dreaming of the… well, you know, the woman they met in the field.”

“You can dream of anything, God help us. Then He comes and erases it from your mind with a swipe of His finger.”

“But it seems that when his brother finally managed to shake him awake, the boy was upset. He didn’t want to be shaken out of this particular dream. Or at least that’s what it sounded like from what he was mumbling when he attacked his brother: ‘I’ll kill you. I’ll smash your face in, you thief. You want her for yourself, don’t you? But I saw her first, she’s mine. I’ll crush you like a spider in the straw.’”

The man providing the account had gone into the barn to fetch some fodder and found them rolling around at each other’s throats. Like a pair of scrapping dogs, the only thing that could separate them was a bucket of water.

The old woman knelt down on a pew. For a moment it looked as though she were going to faint, but then she could be heard praying rapidly.

“Save them, my God, save them from the clutches of the pale demon who knows how to slip into people’s dreams…”

“In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. The earth was a void filled with mist. Only the spirit of God moved over the waters…” the priest began, ascending to the pulpit, though it was still too soon after the stories that had been spreading throughout the congregation for them to pay much attention to the impersonal realms of Genesis.

After these words, apparently uttered as a prelude to something, there was a lengthy silence. The congregation was used to these lapses. They saw them as the mental deficiency of a poor public speaker, a fault they forgave in return for the many debts they racked up during confession. Even though they were so lacking in God’s grace, he generously tended to their humble needs, which were now expressing themselves physically (but not uncomfortably: they could cough, clear their throats, and shuffle around; their minds might even wander a little). Suddenly, the priest snapped out of his meditative trance. He always came back changed and squinting, his face paler, as if the anxiety that had taken hold had sapped his strength.

Calmer now, either because the pause had done him good or for more mysterious reasons, he repeated the introduction, building the great frieze of the Old Testament in his head. He began with the lack of color, the black at the beginning of the myth, the empty, formless earth. The void. And then the spirit spreading massively across the water. Color did not yet exist, there was no color to liven things up. But he had to use one, at least, to conceive and define the painting inside of him. Should he beg the indulgence of these people and ask them how? A terrible idea. Only God, stained from His belly to His ears by His many aborted attempts at the universal canvas, would be able to understand him. He settled on a color for the spirit floating across the water, but as yet that color was formless. He needed to come up with a form, but he had nothing for reference, nothing like it had come before… Enough. He knew exactly how long they were willing to put up with his pauses; he had them on an auditory leash.

“And on the first day, God said: Let there be light, and there was. And God saw that it was good. And He split the darkness. He called the light day and the darkness night…”

Now it was a round fruit, half shadow, half light, an extremely thin plane splitting the two. The air of those first days was saturated with miasma, but the shift toward geometry was promising. Light and shadow make everything possible —he thought, almost smiling at the revelation— form, color, scale . But what was his congregation thinking about? A vision of the collective imagination passed before his eyes. He saw the Naked Woman from his dream run into the first day, reveling in the light like a fish in water. He needed to get control of his sermon before it was too late. But the premature mother-of-pearl that he’d accidentally begun to squeeze over the landscape before the sea had been created continued to flow.

“On the second day, God said: Let there be a firmament across the waters to separate them. And thus the sky was made. And on the third day, He said: Let the waters under the sky withdraw to create the arid and the dry. And thus the land and the sea were created. And it was good. God saw that it was good, says Scripture. And then He said: Let there be green grass and fruiting plants and seeds…”

The green of the first giants—the color was more important than the form—an abstract green, the green of creation, one of God’s great wonders. What an enchanting revelation. He then had an idea, both clean and morbid, the two poles between which his life was always torn. His victory lay in the middle, where neither held sway. He could just leave. Abandon the villagers as they stared open-mouthed, as though he had vanished into thin air. Then he, too, could join the search for the Naked Woman; he would leave no stone unturned, would find her lying unconscious on the ground and revive her with a kiss. The two of them would set out on an exhilarating flight, running free on the trail of a long-lost legend. “Where shall we go?” she’d ask suddenly, panting beneath her Madonna hair. And he would tell her that he had just discovered an ancient color, the oldest in the world, that he wanted to paint her in front of such a powerful backdrop, chaste and naked just as she was, with her shapely legs, flat primitive feet, and belly large enough to give birth to stars. Yes, exactly like that, much as she might laugh. God always to the fore, creating more and more days, and they running madly, obsessively back through time, to the first divine verdure trodden by the first woman in the world, contradicting God and Scripture alike…

“On the fourth day,” he went on somewhat reluctantly, fighting back a yawn at everything that had been created thus far, “there were lights in the sky to distinguish day from night and to mark time. On the fifth day, there were reptiles in the water and birds flying over the earth and under the firmament of the sky. And on the sixth day, God said: Let there be living animals of every kind, domestic animals and wild beasts across the earth…”

A disingenuous thought came to him, that perhaps he held the course of history in his hands. He even seemed to be providing a decent interpretation of the bearded, monotonous voice of the Bible.

“And on that sixth day, He saw that, as everything He had done was good, He must invent man in his own likeness and image, to take charge of everything that moves and lives, which He had created on the earth and under the sky. And so on the sixth day, God created man…”

Once again the sin of silence, but there was nothing for it. God was lost in the depths of His thoughts, in the immense task of manifesting, organizing, and anticipating the succession of his creatures. Back then, only the lovely form of Adam existed, wandering around naked and sad among the trees. The priest could see his innocent legs, still stumbling around clumsily, yet to find their feet. He thought about how difficult it had always been, artistically speaking, to depict a man who is not yet a man, especially when he symbolized the entire species that would sprout forth from between those pure thighs. And it was even harder to conceive of his sadness, the first sadness of the world. Was Adam happy and free? How could he be? He had been forbidden something. It was the first thing to be denied to man, but more would follow, right down to the insignificant, slack-jawed descendants in his congregation, all of whom were so blinkered and in denial about their urges. Except for him, of course. He was on his own, a village priest, ranged against God and His pitiable creations, with a long-haired woman standing next to him, waiting to be painted against a newborn green backdrop.