AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Just as we’re leaving the square, but don’t ask me to explain any further. There are eight women, you see, and one of them says something to me that I can’t hear. In the last twenty years, I’ve met four of those women, but none could take me as far as the end of the story. You’re the fifth of those women. This journey didn’t happen by chance, and given that God doesn’t play dice with the Universe, I now know why that story about the fire lit on a mountain made you come in search of me, although I only understood this when we entered the Aleph together.”
“I need a cigarette. Can you explain more clearly? I thought you wanted to be with me.”
We sit up in bed and light a cigarette each.
“I wish I could be clearer and tell you everything, starting from the point where I read the letter, which is always the first thing to appear. After that, I hear the voice of my Superior telling me that the eight women are waiting for us. And I know that at the end, one of the women says something to me, but I can’t tell whether it’s a blessing or a curse.”
“So you’re talking about past lives, about a letter in a past life?”
That’s all I need her to understand, just as long as she doesn’t ask me to explain which life I’m talking about.
“Everything happens here in the present. We condemn or save ourselves here and now, all the time. We’re constantly changing sides, jumping from one carriage to the next, from one parallel world into another. You have to believe that.”
“I do. I think I know what you’re talking about.”
A train passes, heading in the opposite direction. The lit windows flash rapidly past; we hear the noise, feel the blast of air. The carriage rocks even more than usual.
“What I need to do now is to go over to the other side, which is in this same ‘train’ called time and space. It’s not hard to do. You simply have to imagine a ring of gold moving up and down your body, slowly at first, and then gradually gaining speed. It worked incredibly well when we were in Novosibirsk together. That’s why I’d like to repeat the experience. You embraced me and I embraced you, and the ring sent me almost effortlessly back into the past.”
“Is that all it takes? You just have to imagine a ring?”
My eyes are fixed on the computer on the little table in my berth. I get up and bring it over to the bed.
“We think that a computer is full of photos and images that provide a real window on the world, but the fact is that behind what we see on the screen, there is nothing but a succession of zeros and ones, what programmers call binary language.
“We have a need to create a visible reality around us; in fact, if we hadn’t done that, we humans would never have survived our predators. We invented something called ‘memory,’ just like in a computer. Memory protects us from danger, allows us to live as social beings, to find food, grow, and pass everything we’ve learned on to the next generation, but it’s not the main matter of life.”
I replace the computer on the table and come back to the bed.
“The ring of fire is merely a trick to free us from memory. I read something about it somewhere once. I can’t remember the author’s name now, but he said that it’s what we do unconsciously every night when we dream: we enter our recent or remote past. We wake up thinking that we’ve dreamed the most ridiculous things while we slept, but that’s not true. We’ve visited another dimension, where things don’t happen exactly as they do here. We think it’s all nonsense, because when we wake up, we’re immediately back in a world organized by memory, which is our way of understanding the present. What we saw in our dreams is rapidly forgotten.”
“Is it really that easy to go back to a past life or enter a different dimension?”
“It is when we dream or when we deliberately provoke that state, but provoking such states isn’t really advisable. Once the ring has a grip on your body, your soul floats off into a kind of no-man’s-land. If it doesn’t know where it’s going, it will fall into a deep sleep, and then it can be carried off into areas where it won’t be welcome, and then it will either learn nothing or bring past problems into the present.”
We finish our cigarettes. I put the ashtray down on the chair that serves as my bedside table and ask her to embrace me again. Her heart is beating even faster.
“Am I one of those eight women?”
“Yes. All the people with whom we’ve had problems in the past keep reappearing in our lives, in what mystics call the Wheel of Time. We become more aware of this with each new incarnation, and those conflicts are gradually resolved. When everyone’s conflicts everywhere cease to exist, then the human race will enter a new phase.”
“So did we cause these conflicts in the past just so that we could resolve them later on?”
“No, the conflicts were necessary for humanity to be able to evolve in a way and a direction that still remain a mystery to us. Imagine a time when we were all part of a kind of biological soup that covered the planet. Cells reproduced in the same way for millions of years, then one of them changed. At that point, billions of other cells said, ‘That’s not right; that cell’s in conflict with the rest of us.’
“Meanwhile, that mutation made the other cells beside it change, too. ‘Mistake’ followed upon ‘mistake,’ and out of that soup came amoebas, fish, animals, and men. Conflict was essential to evolution.”
She lights another cigarette. “But why do we need to resolve those conflicts now?”
“Because the Universe, God’s heart, contracts and expands. The motto of the alchemists was Solve et coagula, which means ‘separate and bring together.’ Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.
“This afternoon, you and my editor quarreled. Thanks to that confrontation, you were each able to reveal a light that the other was unaware of. You separated and came together again, and we all benefited from that. Things could have turned out quite differently: a confrontation with no positive results. In that case, the matter would have proved less illuminating or would have had to be resolved later. It couldn’t remain unresolved, because the energy of hatred between the two of you would have infected the whole carriage. And this carriage, you see, is a metaphor for life.”
She’s not much interested in these theories. “Begin, then. I’ll go with you.”
“No, you won’t. You may be holding me in your arms, but you don’t know where I’m going. Don’t do it. Promise me you won’t imagine the ring. Even if I don’t find a complete solution, I promise I’ll tell you where I met you before. I don’t know that it was the first time this happened in all my past lives, but it’s the only one I’m sure of.”
She doesn’t answer.
