Requiem for a Nun

REQUIEM FOR A NUN 323

there of connubial matriarchy, but fatal instead with all insatiate and

deathless sterility; spouseless, barren, and undescended; not even

demanding more than that: simply requiring it, requiring all-Lilith's lost

and insatiable face drawing the substance-the will and hope and dream and

imagination-of all men (you too: yourself and the host too) into that one

bright fragile net and snare; not even to be caught, over-flung, by one

single unerring cast of it, but drawn to watch in patient and thronging

turn the very weaving of the strangling golden strands-drawing the two of

you from almost a hundred years away in your turn-yourself the stranger,

the outlander with a B.A. or (perhaps even) M.A. from Harvard or

Northwestern or Stanford, passing through Jefferson by chance or accident

on the way to somewhere else, and the host who in three generations has

never been out of Yoknapatawpha further than a few prolonged Saturday

nights in Memphis or New Orleans, who has heard of Jenny Lind, not because

he has heard of Mark Twain and Mark Twain spoke well of her, but for the

same reason that Mark Twain spoke well of her: not that she sang songs,

but that she sang them in the old West in the old days, and the man

sanctioned by public affirmation to wear a pistol openly in his belt is

an inevictable part of the Missouri and the Yoknapatawpha dream too, but

never of Duse or Bernhardt or Maximilian of Mexico, let alone whether the

Emperor of Mexico even ever had a wife or not (saying-the host-: 'You

mean, she was one of them? maybe even that emperor's wifeT and you: 'Why

not? Wasn't she a Jefferson girl?)'-to stand, in this hot strange little

room furious with frying fat, among the roster and chronicle, the

deathless murmur of the sublime and deathless names and the deathless

faces, the faces omnivorous and insatiable and forever incontent:

demon-nun and angel-witch; empress, siren, Erinys: Mistinguette, too,

invincible possessed of a half-century more of years than the mere three

score or so she bragged and boasted, for you to choose among, which one

she was-not might have been, nor even could have been, but was: so vast,

so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away

the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and

dream-then gone, you are outside again, in the hot noon sun: late; you

have already wasted too much time: to unfumble among the road signs and

filling stations to get back onto a highway you know, back into the United

States; not that it matters, since you know again now that there is no

time: no space: no distance: a fragile and workless scratching almost

depthless in a sheet of old barely transparent glass, and (all you had to

do was look