'Field', 'Boundary', 'Friend', 'Lover'

Manueline nodded her head slowly, sadly and then stood and took him by the hand walking with him to the middle of the courtyard where she indicated he should wait. She went out the gate and there was silence for a while, then he heard her singing. BB found he could pick out individual words, not that he knew what they meant but rather the rhythm of the song gave him a structure in which to put the sounds so he could remember them and sing them himself.

Years later, he tried to translate the songs but never succeeded in capturing the original meter and rhyming pattern. He was never able to reproduce the word order and could only approximate the rhythms. He always remembered the first time he heard Manueline sing the Courtyard Song. It began

She enters by the gate
Her face all radiant light
And smiles for the courtyard state
The silence of the day
The fragrance of the night

She crosses to the hearth
Listening left, looking right,
Takes a cup and pours a draught
Lifts the cup to her lips
taking up the water

She looks to the houses,
The blessing of the guest
Looking through windows and doors
But all she finds is dust
The smells of days before

The song had many verses to it but that first day in the courtyard, Manueline only sang the first three. She carefully mimed the words; as she came through the gate, singing

She enters by the gate

Manueline points to the gate and then emphasizes the word "enters"; carefully mimicking the narrative of the song. She points to her face and smiles, she motions silence, and draws a deep breath closing her eyes for the night's fragrance. She crosses over towards the hearth, listening to the left and the women's room, a quiet thoughtful smile on her face, she looks right, through the open door into the men's room, crinkles up her nose and frowns.

Reaching the hearth, she draws a cup of water from the big pot. She lifts the cup to her lips. Manueline began to laugh at this point trying to sing and drink at the same time. She manages and then looks to the houses going to each of the four houses in turn, finding nobody there, looking through the windows and doors, singing a she does so. She smells in the men's room, again crinkling up her nose, she wipes dust from the windowsill and shows it to him as she sings.

Manueline went through the whole performance several times and then made him do it. She said his new name, "Wals", beckoning him to the gate, mouthing words at him, opening her eyes and laughing at him.

It was as it was when she offered him water for the first time, it was not that he did not know what to do; he was paralyzed by her presence, only moving when she prompted him. Eventually he took up the song, standing outside the gate looking up at the courtyard wall.

Even in just listening to the song, even though the song was in a language he did not understand, he could not help himself but made a counter melody. He did not sing it as she had sung but sang it as he would sing it were he singing it with Mab; singing it in the same high voice she heard when he took the pot from her the first time at the fountain. Manueline watched him as he came through the gate the first time, singing loud and high, not as high as she knew some women could sing, but loud with a quality to the overtones that was quite unlike any man or woman she had ever heard.

She could hear stirrings in the neighboring courtyards as people wondered at the strange voice in the middle of the day. They wondered at the melody they had never heard before but recognized from its structure and from the words strangely spoken, coming to their ears through the unfamiliar medium of a voice the like of which they had never experienced before. Manueline did not doubt that most of the village heard the voice and were similarly affected by it. She simply put all thought of them out of her mind as she gave all her attention to Wals and his voice, calling it out of him as she gave him the words to sing and showed him what they meant and what he should do.

Wals realized she was using the song both to teach him the language and at the same time teaching him to see how the customs of the place worked. She showed him how the blessing of the guest was done, touching the jaw just below the ear, feeling the great pulse there that carried life through the body. How the guest should respond, acknowledging the life of the hosts and how they nurtured the guest by including him in that life, allowing him to touch it in them.

She wrapped the words of the song around what they were doing, taking the interactions between them out of the ordinary stream of events that made up their lives. In the orbit of the song, it was possible for both of them to do and be things that ordinary circumstances would not allow.

She touched his jaw and felt his pulse. Feeling it strongly and for a long time so he became aware of it as well, feeling the pulse strong against the tips of her fingers. He felt her breath as she touched him, the movement of the air on his face redolent of the resonance of her body, giving him a sense of how she moved within herself, not just what he saw. He did the same for her; feeling the pulse under the skin at the point of her jaw. Holding the tips of his fingers there until he could feel his own heart beating with hers. At one point, she reached up and wrapped her fingers round his wrist, right up by the hand, never taking her eyes off him. He could now feel the pulse in his wrist wrapped in the soft pressure of her hand as well as her pulse under his finger tips, as well as the rhythm of his own heart.

He could feel the rhythms of their bodies echoing each other, taking time from each other, making time between them as they stood together in the over arching rhythm of the song that still rang in his mind as a counter melody to the rhythm that was created between them.

Wals couldn't understand it, didn't even know what it would mean to make sense of it. It was like the times when he sang with Mab. There was no rhyme or reason to it. There was no reason the countermelody worked in with the tune, it was just made that way. The rhythms between them together in the courtyard were the same. There was no rhyme or reason to them; they were just made that way.

Manueline was wearing a garment made of a single, large piece of cloth wrapped around her body just under the armpits and above her breasts. She reached over, touched Wals on the shoulder and turned away from him. She climbed up to the platform on the left of the gate, partly unwrapping the cloth as she did so. She opened it wide, so he could see the full width of the cloth before she wrapped it round herself again, tucking the fabric into itself, making a dip in the cloth across her body as she tucked the top layer under the lower one. The cloth was not completely opaque, there was a strong sense of what lay beyond it, especially when there was just the one layer of material between him and the light.

As Manueline held the cloth outstretched by her arms, Wals had a powerful sense of her beyond the cloth. What she was under the cloth; the shape and sense of her body; her hips as they led up into the dip of her body below the ribs and led down to her thighs; the one leg raised, stepping up to the platform, the other stretched up, pushing her off the ground; that foot pointed as she stepped up from the floor of the courtyard wrapping the cloth around herself again. She wrapped the cloth around her ribs and the broadening strength of her back and shoulders as the ribs molded into her shoulder blades and the muscles of her upper back and neck. The bare skin above the cloth rippled and moved as she held the fabric.

Wals felt her briefly out in the air around him, he felt the reflection of her skin as she stepped up nakedly onto the platform leaving him lost again in the courtyard below. She turned to him and smiled as she tucked the fabric back in place. She beckoned to him speaking the words for 'dust', 'windows', 'doors', 'looking to the right'.

Wals nodded his head understanding what she wanted him to do and he turned back to the courtyard and began to clean and dust. Sweeping the ground, wiping down the doors and around the windows, cleaning in the men's room, fetching water and swabbing the floor, airing the beds, all the things he had seen Mab do and had helped her to do in the years they lived together.

There was a deep satisfaction for him in repeating what he had done for Mab. It carried him back to what he was with her in the forest, in the hut, up on the side of the hill, living all those years with Mab as he grew and came to know the world around him and learnt to sing.

Manueline and Wals continued in the same pattern for several days. He would sweep and clean around the courtyard, doing odd jobs given to him by Manueline and, in the evening, occasionally, by one of the other two women. The men continued to ignore him. Manueline continued to teach him the language. He learnt a great deal in three days. He began to pick out the contours of the words finding he could at least follow the structure of a sentence.

He realized there were some similarities between the language he used with Mab and the language of the village; many of the words around spinning and weaving being particularly close; as were the words for the body and the functions of the body such as speaking and listening. Wals also began to realize, there was so much he had never talked to Mab about, that his vocabulary was simply deficient. He rapidly reached a point where most of the words he knew he could translate in some way; his problem was that most of the words used by Manueline referred to things he had never heard of like 'street', 'field', 'boundary', 'friend', 'lover' or 'enemy'.

He found the words of aggression and opposition particularly strange. Manueline tried to explain to him the relationship between him and the men who shouted at him but Wals could not understand. Concepts such as resentment, jealousy, ridicule were simply outside his experience.

He understood that he felt uncomfortable when the men shouted at him. He even felt threatened and recognized that he needed to be ready to respond to whatever came from the men. He had no words to name what it was that they carried within them, as he had never encountered anything like it in his dealings with Mab and the creatures of the forest.

He asked Manueline, pointing to the men's room, making a pantomime out of shouting and grimacing in imitation of the men. Incongruously he did it at first with a broad smile on his face and only succeeded in making Manueline laugh. He liked to see and hear her laugh. The way her shoulders shook and the way the softness round her upper body and her hips and thighs moved with the amused rhythm of her breath.

He got quite carried away grimacing and leaping around, shouting odd phrases he could remember the men saying. Manueline had to sit on the edge of the women's platform; she was so weak with laughter, tears running down her face. Eventually she couldn't stand it anymore and insisted he stop.

She understood he was asking her something and indicated he should try again; saying the words, having him say them back to her. Wals made a huge effort and controlled his face, aping the men again, but briefly, this time. He stopped, stood still a moment and made an interrogative gesture with his shoulders, eyes and eyebrows.

Manueline gave him a string of words, none of which he could quite catch. Then she just laughed again, walked over to the men's room, sticking her head and upper body out towards the door, her hips acting as a counter balance sticking out away from it. Still in that position, she turned to him and frowned, crinkling up her nose, just as she had done when singing the courtyard song to him for the first time, only more so.

Wals laughed, understanding her derision for the men. He was both comforted by it and disturbed by it. Not sure of where it left him, not sure of how she would relate to the men. He was afraid she would go up to the room with the balcony, rap her knuckles on the wood and summon the men out of the men's room, leaving him alone and lost in the courtyard below.

Some instinct told him that she saw him differently and would never summon him that way. She would never crinkle up her nose at him but she would never rap her knuckles for him either. She would never summon him and then dismiss him in the middle of the night. The loneliness of the courtyard crept into him; it left him feeling distant and saddened even in the bright stillness of the middle of the day.

To follow this thread in the story go to: Unevenness Foretold

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