The Night of Power

Description

What matters is the truth. Now that I am old, I have all the serenity to live. I will speak through words and time. I feel somewhat burdened. This is not due to the weight of the years, but to the weight of all that was left unsaid, all that I kept silent and hidden. I did not know that a memory filled with all kinds of silences and fragmented glances could become a bag of sand, making it difficult to walk. I spent a long time reaching you, good people! The arena is still circular, like folly. And nothing has changed. Neither the sky nor the people. I am happy to be here at last. You are my salvation, the light of my eyes. My wrinkles are beautiful and numerous. Those that appear on my forehead are the marks and trials of truth. They are the harmony of time. And those that appear on the backs of my hands are the lines of destiny. Look at them, how they intersect, how they point to the paths of fate, tracing a star after it has fallen into the water of a lake.

Herein lies the story of my life: every wrinkle of a century, a path through a winter’s night, a clear spring, a cry from the fog, a meeting in a forest, a rift, a graveyard, a scorching sun. Here, on the back of my left hand, this wrinkle is a scar, for death once paused and extended to me a kind of long staff. Perhaps to save me. And I turned my back on it. Everything is simple, provided we don’t attempt to divert the river’s course. My story is neither grand nor tragic. It is simply strange, having overcome all forms of violence to deserve affection and to deserve to become an enigma. I have walked the desert, traversed the night, and grown accustomed to pain. I have experienced “the pure ferocity of happy days,” these days when everything seems idyllic. Good people, what I will tell you is like the truth: I have lied. I have loved and I have betrayed. I traversed lands and centuries, often in exile, alone among the lonely… But since my life is not a mere tale, I was careful to set the record straight and reveal to you the secret kept hidden beneath a black stone in a high-walled house within a seven-doored, enclosed alley. It is a novel of difficult yet tender learning, a powerful and decisive exploration of the happiness of a young woman possessed by a completely newfound freedom. A beautiful ode to the honor of a woman who finds within herself the proof of her independent existence within a society ruled by men, even if the price is isolation.