The Zahir Page 0,49

strongest survived, but they were all men. And without women, men cannot continue to perpetuate the species.

"Then someone, seeing what was happening in a neighboring tribe, decided to avoid the same thing happening in his. He invented a story according to which the gods forbade men to make love indiscriminately with any of the women in a tribe. They could only make love with one or, at most, two. Some men were impotent, some women were sterile, some members of the tribe, for perfectly natural reasons, thus had no children at all, but no one was allowed to change partners.

"They all believed the story because the person who told it to them was speaking in the name of the gods. He must have been different in some way: he perhaps had a deformity, an illness that caused convulsions, or some special gift, something, at any rate, that marked him out from the others, because that is how the first leaders emerged. In a few years, the tribe grew stronger, with just the right number of men needed to feed everyone, with enough women capable of reproducing and enough children to replace the hunters and reproducers. Do you know what gives a woman most pleasure within marriage?"

"Sex."

"No, making food. Watching her man eat. That is a woman's moment of glory, because she spends all day thinking about supper. And the reason must lie in that story hidden in the past - in hunger, the threat of extinction, and the path to survival."

"Do you regret not having had any children?"

"It didn't happen, did it? How can I regret something that didn't happen?"

"Do you think that would have changed our marriage?"

"How can I possibly know? I look at my friends, both male and female. Are they any happier because they have children? Some are, some aren't. And if they are happy with their children that doesn't make their relationship either better or worse. They still think they have the right to control each other. They still think that the promise to live happily ever after must be kept, even at the cost of daily unhappiness."

"War isn't good for you, Esther. It brings you into contact with a very different reality from the one we experience here. I know I'll die one day, but that just makes me live each day as if it were a miracle. It doesn't make me think obsessively about love, happiness, sex, food, and marriage."

"War doesn't leave me time to think. I simply am, full stop. Whenever it occurs to me that, at any moment, I could be hit by a stray bullet, I just think: 'Good, at least I don't have to worry about what will happen to my child.' But I think too: 'What a shame, I'm going to die and nothing will be left of me. I am only capable of losing a life, not bringing a life into the world.'"

"Do you think there's something wrong with our relationship? I only ask because I get the feeling sometimes that you want to tell me something, but that you keep stopping yourself."

"Yes, there is something wrong. We feel obliged to be happy together. You think you owe me everything that you are, and I feel privileged to have a man like you at my side."

"I have a wife whom I love, but I don't always remember that and find myself asking: 'What's wrong with me?'"

"It's good that you're able to recognize that, but I don't think there's anything wrong with you, or with me, because I ask myself the same question. What's wrong is the way in which we show our love now. If we were to accept that this creates problems, we could live with those problems and be happy. It would be a constant battle, but it would at least keep us active, alive and cheerful, with many universes to conquer; the trouble is we're heading toward a point where things are becoming too comfortable, where love stops creating problems and confrontations and becomes instead merely a solution."

"What's wrong with that?"

"Everything. I can no longer feel the energy of love, what people call passion, flowing through my flesh and through my soul."

"But something is left."

"Left? Does every marriage have to end like this, with passion giving way to something people call 'a mature relationship'? I need you. I miss you. Sometimes I'm jealous. I like thinking about what to give you for supper, even though sometimes you don't even notice what you're eating. But there's