The Virgin (Part II)

'uulgatos taceo' dixit 'pastoris amores
Daphnidis Idaei, quem nymphae paelicis ira
contulit in saxum (tantus dolor urit amantes);
nec loquor ut quondam naturae iure nouato
ambiguus fuerit modo uir, modo femina Sithon.
te quoque, nunc adamas, quondam fidissime paruo,
Celmi, Ioui largoque satos Curetas ab imbri
et Crocon in qaruos uersum cum Similace flores
praetereo dulcique animos nouitate tenebo...

Magdalena, when she finished with the story, experienced the bizzare sensation of a heatwave, which originated in her heart and spread with a nauseating pulse through her limbs, over and over. She wasn't too amenable to this new sensation, and suddenly began to dream again of the ocean, who's waves were cool, but awfully far away. She thought of death, of life, and of the things which might be in between.

The feeling passed, and Magdalena got the sense that she should be having a revelation. Rather, she realized that she had been sitting in the sun for a long time, with no water, and only a mealy mango to keep her going. Deciding that this was the source of her recent turmoil, she headed towards the tin and leather shed, and her father.

The evil ghost they both knew as boredom had enveloped Zvi as well, and Magdalena found him vacant on a rocking chair, in the shade of a makeshift porch. Though a tender hearted and loving man, Zvi had a broken liver which caused him to have a rather taciturn nature, as he was concerned about the effects conversation could have on his health. If he became overly excited, he reasoned, his bile might get stirred up and cause his body's toxins to intermingle in disasterous ways. So he mostly kept to himself, in the rocking chair. Magdalena wondered what he mused about, if anything, but didn't want to upset his liver by asking.

Thus she was left to her own devices when contemplating this potential revelation brought on by Lizaveta's story. She would have asked her mother Lili about it, if she weren't out looking for flowers. Magdalena went inside her dark, almost cool home and lay down on the cot which served as her bed, in the corner. Her mind drifted to the possibilites of miracles, and how they were granted. She decided that they came not from Zeus or some omniscient diety, but from the force of human will to believe in them. The ability to believe things into existance may be the only thing that has ever made anything happen. Zvi believed in love, back when his liver worked, and he found Lili on an ice floe in the Arctic Circle. Lili believed flowers should burst from window boxes in the arid interior of Portugal, and so they did.

Magdalena believed she needed a friend. Someone or something to love, which would be her companion and bastion from boredom in return. She just wasn't sure where this mysterious entity would come from, although the ache in her heart and belly, felt from the time of the quasi-revelation to the present moment, was brewing a plan of its own.