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"I noticed the marks on your wrists today."
The handcuffs. She had put on several bracelets to disguise the marks, but the expert eye knows what to look for.
"Now, if your recent experiences are leading you to take that step, I won't stop you, but you should know that none of it has anything to do with real life."
"Take what step?"
"Into pain and pleasure, sadism and masochism. Call it what you like, but if you're sure that's the right path for you, I will be sad, I'll remember that feeling of desire, our meetings, our walk along the road to Santiago, your light. I will treasure the pen you gave me, and every time I light the fire, I will remember you. But I will never again come looking for you."
Maria felt afraid; she felt it was time to recant, to tell him the truth, to stop pretending that she knew more than he did.
"What I experienced recently--last night, in fac
t--was something I've never experienced before. And it frightens me to think that I could only find myself at the very limits of degradation."
It was becoming difficult to speak--her teeth were chattering and her feet were really hurting.
"My exhibition was held in a region called Kumano, and one of the people who came to see it was a woodcutter," Ralf went on, as if he hadn't heard what she had said. "He didn't like my pictures, but he was able to see, through the paintings, what I was experiencing and feeling. The following day, he came to my hotel and asked me if I was happy; if I was, I should continue doing what I liked. If I wasn't, I should go and spend a few days with him.
"He made me walk on stones, just as I am making you do today. He made me feel the cold. He forced me to understand the beauty of pain, except that the pain was imposed by nature, not by man. He called this shu-gen-do, a very ancient practice apparently.
"He told me that I was someone who wasn't afraid of pain, and that was good, because in order to master the soul, one must also learn to master the body. He told me, too, that I was using pain in the wrong way, and that was very bad.
"This uneducated woodcutter thought he knew me better than I did myself, and that annoyed me, but at the same time, I felt proud to think that my paintings were capable of expressing exactly what I was feeling."
Maria was aware of a sharp stone cutting into her foot, but she could barely feel it for the cold, her body was growing numb, and she could only just follow what Ralf Hart was saying. Why was it that in God's holy world men were only interested in showing her pain. Sacred pain, pain with pleasure, pain with explanations or without, but always pain, pain, pain...
Her cut foot stumbled on another stone; she smothered a cry and continued on. At first, she had managed to maintain her integrity, her self-control, what he called her "light." Now, though, she was walking very slowly, with both her stomach and her mind churning: she felt as if she were about to throw up. She considered stopping, because none of this made any sense, but she didn't.
And she didn't stop out of respect for herself; she could stand that barefoot walk as long as she had to, because it wouldn't last all her life. And suddenly another thought crossed her mind: what if she couldn't go to the Copacabana tomorrow night because she had injured her feet, or because of a fever brought on by the flu that would doubtless install itself in her overexposed body? She thought of the customers who would be expecting her, of Milan who so trusted her, of the money she wouldn't earn, of the farm, of her proud parents. But the suffering soon drove out all such thoughts, and she kept placing one foot in front of the other, longing for Ralf Hart to recognize the effort she was making and to tell her she could stop and put her shoes back on again.
He seemed entirely indifferent, distant, as if this were the only way of freeing her from something she didn't as yet really know about, something she found very seductive, but which would leave far deeper marks than any handcuffs. Although she knew he was trying to help her, and however hard she tried to go forward and show him the light of her willpower, the pain would not allow her any thoughts, noble or profane; it was just pain, filling everything, frightening her and forcing her to think that she did have limits and that she wasn't going to make it.
But she took one step.
And another.
The pain seemed about to invade her soul now and undermine her spiritually, because it's one thing to put on a bit of theater in a five-star hotel, naked, with vodka and caviar inside you and a whip between your legs, but it's quite another to be cold and barefoot, with stones lacerating your feet. She was disoriented, she couldn't think of a single thing to say to Ralf Hart; all that existed in her universe were those small, sharp stones that formed the path between the trees.
Then, just when she thought she was about to give up, she was filled by a strange feeling: she had reached her limit, and beyond it was an empty space, in which she seemed to float above herself, unaware of what she was feeling. Was this what the penitents had experienced? At the far extremity of pain, she had discovered a door into a different level of consciousness, and there was no room now for anything but implacable nature and her own invincible self.
Everything around her became a dream: the ill-lit garden, the dark lake, the man walking beside her, saying nothing, the occasional couple out for a stroll, who failed to notice that she was barefoot and having difficulty walking. She didn't know if it was the cold or the pain, but she suddenly lost all sense of her own body and entered a state in which there was no desire and no fear, only a mysterious--how could she describe it?--a mysterious peace. The pain barrier was not a barrier for her; she could go beyond it.
She thought of all the people enduring unasked-for suffering and there she was, bringing suffering upon herself, but that didn't matter anymore, she had crossed the frontiers of the body, and now there was only soul, "light," a kind of void, which someone, some day, called Paradise. There are certain sufferings which can only be forgotten once we have succeeded in floating above our own pain.
The next thing she knew, Ralf was picking her up and putting his jacket around her shoulders. She must have fainted from the cold, but she didn't care; she was happy, she hadn't been afraid--she had come through. She had not humbled herself before him.
The minutes became hours, she must have gone to sleep in his arms, because when she woke up, although it was still dark, she was in a room with a TV in one corner, and nothing else. White, empty.
Ralf appeared with a cup of hot chocolate.
"Good," he said. "You got to the place you needed to get to."
"I don't want hot chocolate, I want wine. And I want to go downstairs to our place by the fire, with books all around us."
She had said "our place." That wasn't what she had planned.
She looked at her feet; apart from a small cut, there were just a few red marks, which would disappear in a few hours' time. With some difficulty, she went downstairs, without really looking around her. She went and sat down on the rug by the fire--she had discovered that she always felt good there, as if that really was her "place" in the house.
