Pandora - By Anne Rice Page 0,34

walls with my fists and crying with my teeth clenched, and whirling. There was no Mother Isis.

There were no gods. Philosophers were fools! Poets sang lies.

I sobbed and tore at my hair; I tore at my dress as naturally as if it had been a newborn custom. I knocked over chairs and tables.

At times I felt a huge exhilaration, a freedom from all falsehoods and conventions, all means by which a soul or body can be held hostage!

And then the awesome nature of this freedom spread itself out around me as if the house did not exist, as if the darkness knew no walls.

Three nights and days I spent in this agony.

I forgot to eat food. I forgot to drink water.

I never lighted a lamp. The moon nearing her fullness gave enough light to this meaningless labyrinth of little painted chambers.

Sleep was gone from me forever.

My heart beat fast. My limbs clenched, then slackened, only to clench again.

At times, I lay on the moist good Earth of the courtyard, for my Father, because no one had laid his body on the moist good Earth, as it should have been done, right after his death and before any funeral.

I knew suddenly why this disgrace was so important, his body rent with wounds and not placed on the Earth. I knew the gravity of this omission as few have ever known the meaning of anything. It was of the utmost importance because it did not matter at all!

Live, Lydia.

I looked at the small leafy trees of the garden. I felt a strange gratitude that I had opened human eyes in this darkness on Earth long enough to see such things.

I quoted Lucretius:

“That which comes from Heaven ascends to Heaven”?

Madness!

Alas, as I said, I wandered, crawled, wept and cried for three nights and days.

4

INALLY, one morning, when the sun came spilling down through the open roof, I looked at the objects in the room and I realized I didn’t know what they were, or what they’d been made for. I didn’t know their common names. I was removed from their definitions. I didn’t even know this place.

I sat up and realized I was looking at the Lararium, the shrine of the household gods.

This was the dining room of course, and those were the couches, and there the glorious conjugal bed!

The Lararium was a high three-sided shrine, a little temple with three pediments, and inside stood figures of old household gods. No one in this profane city had even taken them away with the dead woman.

The flowers were dead. The fire had simply gone out. No one had quenched it with wine, as should have been done.

On hands and knees I crawled in my torn dress around the garden of the peristyle, gathering flowers for these gods. I found the wood and made their sacred fire.

I stared at them. I stared for hours. It seemed I would never move again.

Night fell. “Don’t sleep,” I whispered. “Keep watch with the night! They wait for you by dark, those Egyptians! The moon, look, it’s almost full, only a night or so from being full.”

But the worst of my agony had passed and I was exhausted, and sleep rose to embrace me. Sleep rose as if to say, “Care no more.”

The dream came.

I saw men in gilded robes. “You will be taken now in the sanctum.” But what’s there? I didn’t want to see. “Our Mother, our beloved Mother of Sorrows,” said the Priest. The paintings on the walls were rows upon rows of Egyptians in profile, and words made of pictures. Myrrh burned in this place.

“Come,” said those who held me. “All the impurities have gone from you now, and you will partake of the sacred Fount.”

I could hear a woman crying and moaning. I peeped into the great room before I entered it. There they were, the King and the Queen on their thrones, the King still and staring as in the last dream, and the Queen struggling against her golden fetters. She wore the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. And pleated linen. Her hair was not a wig but real plaits. She cried and her white cheeks were stained in red. Red stained her necklace and her breasts. She looked soiled and ignominious.

“My Mother, my goddess,” I said. “But this is an abomination.”

I forced myself to wake.

I sat up and I laid my hand on the Lararium, and looked at the spiderwebs in the trees of the garden, made visible by the climbing