Armonía Somers - The Naked Woman

“The Lord had planted a garden of delights,” he went on dreamily, “and there He placed the man whom He had shaped from the clay of the earth and brought to life with the breath of the Holy Spirit. He put him there and told him to guard and cultivate His paradise and eat the fruit of the trees, except for one that He picked out especially. But God could see that this wasn’t working. He, Himself alone, my beloved children, must have understood that complete solitude can only be withstood by God Almighty. And so then He said: Let us give company to this complex individual who has no peer among the birds of the air or the beasts of the earth. And that was when the dream of man occurred, in accordance with divine thought. While the first man was asleep, God removed a bone from his flesh to create a woman, and left this woman for the man to find when he woke up…”

Here, as usual, there was a brief pause. The relief was palpable.

“The woman was naked, of course, naked in her purity and innocence, and the man was naked and pure as well,” added the priest, in a slightly more judgmental voice.

There was a sharp, collective intake of breath—nudity had been invoked. This was why they had come. They didn’t give a damn about the first couple, though admittedly they had been led along by the tale like children listening to a familiar story, unwilling to put up with even minor variations to the plot. But now an unclothed woman had been named, and it didn’t matter who it was. Everyone hoped that the priest would just shut up so they could deal with the issue in their own way. But this time their mental urging failed and the voice went on unperturbed.

“God had called upon Adam to name all the beasts of the earth and birds of the sky, and choose one of them to keep him company. But after giving each their own name, he rejected them all. Then, upon waking, still half asleep, he saw among trees that still dripped a dark, primitive green, a shape that was alike but not his own, a skin that was his skin but different, a shadow, also both the same and different, seeking out his own…”

Then suddenly the priest plunged back into his old pit of silence, leaving them to their own devices once more. But he continued inwardly like a man possessed. Desire, the delightful possibilities of contact, did not yet exist. So pure, abstract, beauty must have reigned. Because love and its sinful echo did not yet exist, they were just naked, ignorant bodies newly born of the fire of God like a pair of unique ceramics. How could they be painted when even the great Michelangelo used models that had already been compromised by an event as yet unknown to the freshly forged air?

“And so, my dear children,” he went on, to his listeners’ surprise. “As you know, as you’ve heard many times: both the man and the woman were naked and they felt no embarrassment or shame at their state. But the serpent tempted the woman to eat the fruit of the tree. And she succumbed and tempted her partner. And as soon as they had both eaten, they felt as though their eyes had been opened— Eritis sicut dei . And they saw what they had never seen before: their primitive nudity. And so they covered themselves with leaves. And then, feeling even more ashamed, they hid from God behind some trees, and explained their shame from there.”

It was inevitable. The speaker had to abandon his lyrical tone at some point. They all anticipated the move, so much so that they were now waiting for one of his signature gestures, the ceremonial casting away of an apple core. But they were desperately hoping that it wouldn’t happen. They would have been able to stand the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, so long as he didn’t address the issue head on. They cherished the pale, curvy subject they were keeping aloft with bated breath, afraid that if it were brought down to earth it would be lost.

“Oh, I know,” the priest went on in a nonchalant tone, as though he were just another member of the congregation. He hadn’t yet thrown away the core. “You’ve been browbeaten with the story of lost innocence for some time. Books and men of God have been repeating it in different ways for so long that it has become nothing more than a fairy tale. Woman, as you know, was punished with the pain of childbirth and man with the sweat he would have to shed over the earth to make it bear fruit. And is that it? you say. Eve—life, that is—and Adam were thrown out of paradise. So, you ask again, is that everything for today?”

But suddenly he threw the core far away and the wretch’s artificial tone cracked. An irritable force had been building in his deceptively weak breast, the same breast that had recovered in the mountains and in so doing was condemned to abstinence by binding contract. “That story has been repeated over and over again,” he shouted suddenly. “Is original sin an old story? No, a thousand times no.” What did they think the river in which they had been splashing around consisted of ? He had shown them its source, but only from downstream. And it had borne them pitilessly to their present horror, dragging them into the ancient swamp where they now found themselves. Not even his familiar hacking cough could compete with the power of his admonitions. Yes, they had been sullying their pure inheritance, the bread of life, with sinful thoughts, he told them bitterly. They didn’t care whether the cow went thirsty over the course of the long day or whether the haphazardly drawn milk was spilt, they were playing fast and loose with the livelihood of their children and the good of the village. Furrows were left unploughed, the cheese uncurdled, and the butter was melting in the sun. Grace could scarcely be heard at the table.

The bread and wine were flavorless, wolfed down to gain time for something else. Of course: the villagers needed to find someone, to bring her to justice. But they were acting on nothing more than the twins’ dubious eye-witness account. And no one, not the sheriff, the priest, nor anyone else, had been consulted about their activities over the past feverish day and long, dirty night.

The priest left them to muse on this for a minute or two, their shoulders hunched and ears burning. This respite, he thought, would be one of the last. A few more acts and he’d have unmasked them completely.

“No one has asked this of you,” he continued, “because the woman does not and has never existed. At least not for anyone who is not as clean as she. She exists only for those who are worthy of touching her. Which is to say that she does not exist at all. Yes, don’t make those worried faces on my account, I haven’t gone mad. Eve, as I explained to you, was thrown out of paradise because of the fruit. But wherefore all this shame and fear of the eye of God with its clear waters and fathomless beauty? That, as strange as it may seem, is what I ask you today. She has returned, that is all. Because she now knows that God wanted her to eat the fruit. The Naked Woman is passing through the village, seeking to appeal her judgment. And she mocks you and your poor feminine other halves, you who are so primly attired but incapable of eternal love. Oh, she is more than a woman, and she may well dazzle us with her game, but what is the point of trying to share the scent of this rose, the first flesh rose to walk the earth, with the likes of you?”

The priest’s last words were smothered in a wave of coughing and creaking joints. But not his poetry, which remained suspended in the air like a trapeze artist over a safety net. For the first time, she, the woman, had been mentioned and named. She was initially linked to biblical myth, then hell in a manner bordering on heresy. Now she could be seen in thousands of different forms, depending on the image each carried inside of them. Her shape had been as vague as a sliver of the moon in the daylight, but no longer. Given form by the priest’s words, and what words they were, the femme fatale hardened in each of the incarnations of her spell, bathing them in the breath of truth, perfuming their faces with her hair, scratching every palm with her nails.