Imnajdra & The 50 Questions by Mario Cordina

Imnajdra & The 50 Questions
by Mario Cordina

1

She led me through a gate, to various terraced fields with rubble walls that had belonged to her family for centuries, fields that her family had tried to tame for centuries. “Here is a lucky charm, which we always carry when we go down .” It was a soiled bag with something inside, but I was not to open it. It took me some time clambering down to the sea’s edge, and the ball of the sun was already rolling on the water. I had come to watch a spectacle, the sunset dipping beyond the horizon of the bluest Mediterranean sea. Surprisingly I glimpsed a little girl wading by the rocks. She was fair, still unshaped, unclothed.

“Hey, it will get dark soon, you should be going home, mama is probably wondering where you are .” She came closer. “Where is your mother ?”

"There," she said pointing to the cliff from which I had just come.
“Good, I’ll take you home .” She smiled.
“I would love to, but you see I cannot . I came to see her but .....” She was sobbing. I put my arms around her in sympathy. Suddenly she dug her nails into my skin and the blood seeped out, but I felt no pain. My blood was all over her. She stood bathed in blood and water . She bent down and from a point in the centre drew a spiral in the earth, as the water and blood mingled, colouring the earth .

Meanwhile the sun was sinking fast . She looked up at me, but her face had changed from that of an adolescent girl to a beautiful woman, her body too had changed. “There is a womb, the child cuts itself free from the womb to create new life. You dip one hand into the water, one hand into the blood and eat the flesh of the land, meat and crop. You live till one day you return to the womb, to be one with the mother that gave you birth. This is the circle of life. But the circle has been broken.” The sun fell at that instant and she was gone.

2

There is another side to the story of the wading girl that I met close to the sea . She left me in pitch darkness, for the sun had fallen . I noticed that the bag which I had held in my hand had dropped to the ground beneath my feet. The bag had opened and I discovered that a stone had rolled out of it. I shook the bag but there was nothing else inside. The stone was a normal half spherical piece of limestone, not unlike the ones you find all over the island. However, in the moonlight it started to glow, and traced on it was what looked like the half spiral which the girl had drawn in the soil with water and blood and on closer inspection it seemed as if this was only half of the original stone.

All the time I was stumbling up the fields to the tip of the cliff, the stone serving as some kind of light . I stopped at a clearing for no real reason, and at that moment the moon shone on the grass . The stones underneath the weeds did not look like the rubble walls that surrounded the fields. I traced this collection of stones for such they now seemed to be. They went round in a circle.

I was now standing in the centre, and there, now would you believe it, I found another glowing stone, I thought that it would fit the one that I already held in my hand. It did. I put them together and shouted like mad. “ The circle is not broken, I have put the circle together.” Then I waited, and waited. She did not come back, nothing happened. I was angry and threw the stones away.

3

At the gate my worried host waited for me. She saw the nail marks in my skin . She did not ask for the bag. She would not touch me. She closed the gate, and not even waiting for my unvoiced thanks sped homeward. I was left alone with my car in the distance. I looked at the moon’s lonely trail on the ripples of the sea below. It was time to go home. I looked at the spot where the ring of stones had stood. It was not visible from the top. I looked at the watch, I had a plane in three hours and had no idea how to kill the time. I was born here, I had lived here, I had left here. I had come back home, but home was not the same place anymore. A plane in three hours.

I wanted to know more about the ring of stones below, about the broken circle, but I had to go. What a fool I had been to think that I could put two stones together and start a circle that had been torn beyond repair by the centuries that stood between me and the wading girl. There is no return home. The womb waits empty, covered by weeds and ruined, like the octopus that sees no reason to live after giving birth.