45th Thread: Your dream’s visitors
You remember your grandmother, don’t you? In your body, a small person wanders, bakes her bread as you saw her do every day, heals wounds with her poultices, caresses the head of a sheep, mends a cloth, scratches her chin, she was always scratching there where a few weedy hairs grew! She said, in the forest, we were strong, in the forest we learned. It must be remembered. The men claim that in their seed, there is a tiny human being that grows once planted in the womb of women. You, you resemble me, just as the rings of half an onion look like the other half.
I just cut one, look, then throw it in the soup. How could you have looked like me in the seed of your father? Because he was destined to fertilize me? I don’t know, maybe it is so. But what is certain is that Grandmother is still in you when she is no longer alive in the world. Your Grandmother carries her grandmother in her liver, her stomach, her lungs, and her grandmother and so on, grandmothers after grandmothers. They are stronger than us poor women who live in the furious world of men, because they have the power of remembrance and of the spirits. Men can apply the force of their bodies and of their desires to the world, but not that of the spirits, because they do not carry their grandfathers inside.
When you dream, the women of the past come to visit you, sometimes in the form of a frog or a pear tree, or as an enchantress, of course. Be careful, because they like to lie and to play pranks, but most will entrust you with their secret treatments, recipes, formulas. They might even teach you to weave! Ugh, this pesky smoke follows me around just to sting my eyes! The visitors of your dreams know the future, the present, and the past that loops back. The world has always been the same, since we were driven out of paradise, since we were forbidden its golden apples. The peasants groan:
– The world is bad today because the young sin worse than us. The winters have turned colder, the summers hotter. Rain, moon and sun harm our crops instead of growing them. Plagues bury our children, barbarians settle on our lands, women don’t obey anymore.
The lords, on the other hand, coo whenever they get a chance:
– The world is better thanks to the teachings of the church, thanks to our laws, to the militias, the fortifications that we raise, thanks to us.
Our grandmothers say no, no, the world swings to the rhythm of the years and the centuries, with poems, wars, kingdoms that form and dissolve like clouds in the sky, but the pain remains the same, and the pleasure too, green and tender, that grows between our hands.
