...
She further explained that in order to accomplish a dream of that nature, women need to have an iron discipline.
She leaned toward me and in a confidential whisper, as though she didn't want the others to overhear her, said, "By iron discipline I don't mean any kind of strenuous routine, but rather that women have to break the routine of what is expected of them.
"And they have to do it in their youth," she stressed, "And most important, with their strength intact. Often, when women are old enough to be done with the business of being women, they decide it's time to concern themselves with nonworldly or other-worldly thoughts and activities. Little do they know or want to believe that hardly ever do such women succeed."
She gently slapped my stomach, as if she were playing on a drum. "The secret of a woman's strength is her womb."
Esperanza nodded emphatically, as if she had actually heard the silly question that popped into my mind: "Her womb?"
"Women," she continued, "must begin by burning their matrix. They cannot be the fertile ground that has to be seeded by men following the command of God himself."
Still watching me closely, she smiled and asked, "Are you religious by any chance?"
I shook my head. I couldn't speak. My throat was so constricted I could scarcely breathe.
I was dumbstruck with fear and amazement, not so much by what she was saying, but by her change: If asked, I wouldn't have been able to tell when she changed, but all of a sudden her face was young and radiant: Inner life seemed to have been fired up in her.
"That's good!" Esperanza exclaimed. "This way you don't have to struggle against beliefs," she pointed out. "They are very hard to overcome. "I was reared a devout Catholic. I nearly died when I had to examine my attitude toward religion." She sighed.
Her voice, turning wistful, became soft as she added, "But that was nothing compared to the battle I had to wage before I became a bona fide dreamer."
I waited expectantly, hardly breathing, while a quite pleasurable sensation spread like a mild electrical current through my entire body. I anticipated a tale of a gruesome battle between herself and terrifying creatures. I could barely disguise my disappointment when she revealed that she had to battle herself.
"In order to be a dreamer, I had to vanquish the self," Esperanza explained. "Nothing, but nothing, is as hard as that. We women are the most wretched prisoners of the self. The self is our cage. Our cage is made out of commands and expectations poured on us from the moment we are born. You know how it is. If the first born child is a boy, there is a celebration. If it's a girl, there is a shrug of the shoulders and the statement, 'It's all right. I still will love her and do anything for her.'"
Out of respect for the old woman, I didn't laugh out loud. Never in my life had I heard statements of that sort. I considered myself an independent woman, but obviously, in light of what Esperanza was saying, I was no better off than any other woman.
And contrary to the manner in which I would have normally reacted to such an idea, I agreed with her.
I had always been made aware that the precondition of my being a woman was to be dependent. I was taught that a woman was indeed fortunate if she could be desirable so men would do things for her. I was told that it was demeaning to my womanhood to
endeavor to do anything myself if that thing could be given to me. It was drilled into me that a woman's place is in the home with her husband and her children.
"Like you, I was reared by an authoritarian yet lenient father," Esperanza went on: "I thought, like yourself, that I was free. For me to understand the sorcerers' way- that freedom didn't mean to be myself - nearly killed me. To be myself was to assert my womanhood. And to do that took all my time, effort, and energy. The sorcerers, on the contrary, understand freedom as the capacity to do the impossible, the unexpected - to dream a dream that has no basis, no reality in everyday life."
Her voice again became but a whisper as she added, "The knowledge of sorcerers is what is exciting and new. Imagination is what a woman needs to change the self and become a dreamer."
Esperanza said that if she had not succeeded in vanquishing the self, she would have only led a woman's normal life; the life her parents had designed for her; a life of defeat and humiliation; a life devoid of all mystery; a life that had been programmed by custom and tradition.
Esperanza pinched my arm.
I cried put in pain.
"You'd better pay attention," she reprimanded me. "I am," I mumbled defensively, rubbing my arm: I had been certain that no one would notice my waning interest.
"You won't be tricked or enticed into the sorcerer's world," she warned me. "You have to choose, knowing what awaits you."
The fluctuations of my mood were astonishing to me because they were quite irrational. I should have been afraid. Yet I was calm, as if my being there were the most natural thing in the world.
"The secret of a woman's strength is her womb," Esperanza said and slapped my stomach once more.
She said that women dream with their wombs, or rather, from their wombs. The fact that they have wombs makes them perfect dreamers. Before I had even finished the thought 'why is the womb so important?' Esperanza answered me.
"The womb is the center of our creative energy," she explained, "to the point that, if there would be no more males in the world, women could continue to reproduce. And the world would then be populated by the female of the human species only."
She added that women reproducing unilaterally could only reproduce clones of themselves.
I was genuinely surprised at this specific piece of knowledge.
I couldn't help interrupting Esperanza to tell her that I had read about parthenogenetic and asexual reproduction in a biology class. She shrugged her shoulders and went on with her explanation. "Women, having then the ability and the organs for reproducing life, have also the ability to produce dreams with those same organs," she said.
Seeing the doubt in my eyes, she warned me,
"Don't trouble yourself wondering how it is done. The explanation is very simple, and because it's simple, it's the most difficult thing to understand. I still have trouble myself.
So in a true woman's fashion, I act: I dream and leave the explanations to men."
...
Being in dreaming,
Florinda Donner Grau
Post je objavljen 09.07.2015. u 14:14 sati.