I beg your pardon. I thought you wanted to let go. Yes, lean on me as hard as you want to. And don’t say a word. I believe, in fact, that we’ve just crossed over to the other side.

“I don’t recognize the path anymore, and it winds around a hill we’ve never seen. Behind it, there’s an unfamiliar town. Do you like mountains? The town sits on the slopes of this mountain. The sky is absolutely blue. It’s ridiculous to say so, but that’s how it is. High up, right where the moon rises, the frozen peaks—they’re as sharp as wolves’ teeth—are whistling in the wind. Listen! I agree. It’s difficult to believe it’s the wind that’s making that sound. That whistling doesn’t remind us of anything. We’ve never heard the wind sounding like that before, have we? The trees over there, the hedges, the fields, none of this reminds us of any trees or fields we’ve already seen. No, none of it has any connection with our memories, and our memories are fading away. We’ve never seen anything like what we’re seeing now, together. And so, it’s completely natural that the life we’ve lived up until now is fading fast.

“But as we’ve been moving along, the mountains have circled around the sky. Now they’ve closed up again, behind us. They’re the Negro mammies. Oh, these mammies have been around a lot longer than the ones you see in Provincetown, puffed up in silks like balloons, with their tubular white head cloths, busy looking after the young gentlemen. No, these Negro mammies are stark naked, and they’re playing this way so they can slowly gather their little ones in their arms. Oh, for them it’s the greatest game in the world!

“They have a word that means ‘nevermore,’ and that’s what they call the game. If you think about it, it’s really clever. It wraps the fulfillment of all human desires into one single desire, and it does this so well, it must have come down to us from the beginning of time. It has to have been the first, great, mournful game that Adam and Eve played on the first beach where they landed after they left the earthly Paradise. You won’t rid me of the notion that it’s the ocean waves that teach this to the Negro mammies, during the afternoons when the water turns the pages of the big blue book, over and over, one after the other, at the water’s edge.

“The black child is standing there, in front of his crouching mother. She reaches out her arms, and then she doesn’t move. It looks like she’s motionless, just the way it looked like the mountains were motionless a moment ago. But, imperceptibly, her arms move forward and wrap around the child. He waits, all atremble. He’s afraid, and he’s full of joy, which makes him ticklish. At one and the same time, he has the desire to take off and . . . oh, the desire that it should happen! That what should happen? All of it. . . . He doesn’t know. And he waits there, standing still, while his swollen heart beats with all its might inside his chest.