Carmelina is our storyteller. Without her, the rest of us don’t exist. Because we are her stories. Which means that to keep us alive, we must keep her alive. And inspired. And to do that, Benny and his Algerian co-conspirators – coincidentally named Juan and Geronimo – must torture her.
Only during their torture can she create. Pain motivates her to transcend. It forces her to make space between her physical reality and the one that she must conjure to move beyond it. The more intense the physical pain, the easier it is to make that space.
Carmelina isn’t the only one. All great artists need torture. Creation happens during the journey from darkness to lightness – from identification to transcendence. Great art is, after all, the observation that happens when we cease to identify and start to understand.
*****
Carmelina’s torturers left her hours ago. Yet she’s been deeply enmeshed in her writing at a desk in a library with an open window that exposes her to an ocean breeze. So she hasn’t noticed that the pain is gone. Abruptly she notices. And abruptly she returns.
Her eyelids are no longer stapled open. Water is no longer dripping on her forehead. Torturers are no longer shouting. And the stories have paused. She is unable to find that well of creativity from which to draw. Which is a pity. Because she is again alone with her own sagging shadow. And her own stale stench. And her own sullen story.
She screams for the torturers to return. Not because she finds torture pleasurable. But because it is painful. A pain that can make one story cease to exist while others take on lives of their own. Lives that don’t include prison walls. Or counted seconds. That pass. One. By one. By one.
*****
She can’t wait any longer. So she does the only thing that she can think to do: She digs her disfigured, dirtied fingernails into her arm. Deep. Deeper. Until blood begins to run. And she winces in pain. As she digs even deeper. And finally feels relief. From purgatory.
From the worst kind of torture – the torture of facing herself rather than her torturers. The inability to transcend. Or create. Or be. “Oh,” she shrieks, as she digs deeper still. Ripping apart her arm. And finally returning to the desk in the library overlooking the sea. And feeling the ocean breeze against her face as she presses quill to paper.
“Carmelina is our storyteller,” she writes. “Without her, the rest of us don’t exist. Because we are her stories. Which means that to keep us alive, we must keep her alive. And inspired.”
*****
As she writes, Benny, the torturer, returns to her cell. He doesn’t know what brought him back. He knows only that he had to return. When he sees Carmelina sprawled unconscious in a pool of blood, he removes his shirt and presses it to her damaged arm. “You can’t die!” he cries.
A tear drips onto Carmelina’s forehead, cascades through the crevices of her face, and reaches her lips. She tastes it. And opens her eyes. And Benny decides that there is no difference between her story and his own. And if he can stop the bleeding, he will plan her escape. To save her. And himself.
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