“The Rings of Saturn”

From the Monsoon Collection by Ninotchka Rosca

University of Queensland Press, 1983

For Luis:

In the life of every man there are periods that are both departures and
reunions, separations and reconciliations. Each of these phases is an
attempt to transcend our solitude and is followed by an immersion in
strange environments.

Octavio Paz

The Rings of Saturn

(for L.R.T.)

WHEN HE died, a respectful country gave him a funeral befitting a citizen rare indeed. His body
was sealed in a black mausoleum created by Hernando, his colleague – that equally venerable old
man whose hair and beard were powdered with marble dust. Hernando had taken the trouble of
leaving his hermitage to supervise the construction of his friend’s final home. After days and
nights of relentless work, the monument of folding angel’s wings embracing a marble needle
topped by an eternal flame was finished. All said the entire mausoleum was symbolic of that
divine illumination kindled by the dead one, through his sunny paintings, among a people so
bereft of divinity.
His formal entombment was preceded by a three-day wake in the country’s most elegant
cultural home. His silver casket lay nearly drowned by flowers – banks and banks of flowers
with the black-bordered cards of official mourning. These were the hushed farewell of those who
wielded power and yet bowed before the old man’s strength. For seventy-six hours the hidden
amplifiers sang with the voices of grief-maddened angels. It was here where Hernando made his
own farewells to his friend. His eyes were moist, though not with sadness but with the dust of his
art’s raw material which had lodged in his hair, his beard, and the creases of his face and hands.
Those watching in the galleries felt that the sculptor was telling his painter friend to bide his
time. The same fate would be upon Hernando very soon.
Among those who watched the casket in its magnificence was the family of the deceased; his
wife, so stooped it was incredible she could still recognize faces; his children, all grown-up now
and each with a family of his own; and the grandchildren, neat and proper in their mourning
clothes. The galleries’ eyes sought out Vino among them – Vino, his grandfather’s favourite,
who had grown up in the tree-choked gentle decay of the artist’s house. He was seven years old,
and his nervous disposition was evident in his wide eyes, his petulant mouth, and the frail
structure of his bones. He had an almost unhealthy openness to his surroundings, each sound,
each interruption seeming to send him into trembling irritation. Everyone watched Vino,
knowing he walked in his grandfather’s shadow, for already he had manifested his own genius,
having mastered the piano to a degree even a professional might envy.
Vino was chosen to ignite the eternal flame at his grandfather’s tomb, after the funeral march.
The hearse was drawn by four black horses wearing plumes. Officialdom had decreed that its
regrets should be public. Thus, everything was arranged so as to present a spectacle few would
forget. The four horses, the gleaming black hearse, the line of vehicles stretching to the horizon –
all was designed to imprint among the beholder the importance of the man who had just left the
world.
Vino performed his role in this elaborate ceremony, amidst the screams of children tortured by
the sun. He did not weep. But in that moment when the fire sprang from the iron saucer at his
touch, a scene composed of a balmy afternoon in his grandfather’s house flashed through his
mind. He understood. He alone of all those gathered around the mausoleum, and even beyond
that, to the cemetery gates where the crowd peered through iron bars, understood.
It was a food day – one of those benign November days when the winter solstice was nearing
and the nights were stretching to crowd out the days. Vino was nearly seven. He had awakened
that morning to a feeling of dread, an awareness of something not quite ordinary. Because his
young mind could not translate the emotion into concrete images, he spent the hours with
mounting irritation. All the musical scores in on his piano seemed dry and boring; the ease with
which his fingers anticipated each turn of phrase, each fall of note, vexed him deeply. He
stopped. There were black gaps in his brain, and he allowed himself to contemplate one of them.
The chasm blotted out the world. Its cold reached Vino, but he felt no fear. In a little while, the
blackness was punctured by pricks of light. Tiny, sharp lights. He knew they were stars.
A car entering the yard aroused him. He discovered he had scribbled something on the
margins of the music sheet before him. They were music notes – short phrases here and there,
strange but familiar. Flushed with excitement, he ran off a passage on the piano. It beauty shook
his bones. He was about to go on when his aunt and her three children burst into the rom. The
noise disheartened Vino. Putting down the sheet, he greeted his aunt and his cousins. The latter
drew him into their games – hop-skip, marbles, Indians and cowboys.
At lunch he marveled at his cousins’ appetite. The food tasted like paper to him. His
grandfather did not make an appearance. His grandmother, making excuses for the old man,
prepared a tray of sandwiches and tea to be taken to the studio. Vino found himself trailing the
maid up the wooden stairs to the room where no one was allowed when the artist was working.
He followed in haphazard manner, straying away and staring at the photographs on the walls,
looping back again. The maid knocked on the studio door, then left the tray on the floor. Vino
waited.
Minutes passed, but nothing stirred in the room. Vino felt the door with his fingertips. It
opened; he thrust a foot across the door still tentatively. It was a spacious room, two giant
windows taking up one wall and looking out the garden. Through these, sunlight poured and
vanquished every spot of shadow in the room. Vino saw his grandfather. The old man was at
work. He stood in the center of the room, ringed with easels with half-finished paintings, studies
clipped to wooden frames, old drawings, a few finished oils – dear and familiar friends, it would
seem, from the way they had been arranged. The scene reminded Vino of a picture of
Stonehenge the old man had shown him once.
As he worked on the canvass before him, the old man’s face was that of a stranger. The cheeks
had hollowed, the eyes were hawk’s eyes. From the restless lips came, from time to time, little
groans. Vino thought his grandfather was wrenching something bitter from within him. Only his
hands were indifferent to the struggle. They moved with certainty from palette to canvass, from
canvass to palette, wielding brushes the way Vino would control the string of a soaring kite.
Vino found himself a stool and sat down wondering at the sounds of the old man was
producing. Hours passed. The sunlight relinquished its hold on the room’s walls and crept nearer
the floor. The old man began to feel the waning light. His unfocused eyes slipped from the
canvass, in little jerks of returning consciousness. Painful as the trance had been, the return to
awareness was even more bitter. After each impact of the external world, the old man would
retreat, but reality drew him forward without mercy. The expression of battle fell from his face.
At last, when he returned to Vino, there was only the grandfather where the Stonehenge warlock
had stood.
“Your tea’s outside,” Vino said.
The old man wiped his hands on a piece of cloth.
“It must be cold by now,” he murmured.
Nevertheless, he took the tea tray and ate the tale sandwiches, drank the brew. Vino, having
transferred to a seat near the table, propped his chin up with his tiny fists.
“Why aren’t you out playing?” the old man asked. “Now is the time to play, with a cool sun in
the garden. You need all the light you can get. You’re not very strong.”
The boy felt he old man’s hand on his shoulder.
“The music taxes, doesn’t it?”
Vino saw their reflection on the panes of the window. The light had cast some magic over
them, so that, despite the freshness of his cheeks and the withered flesh of the old man’s face,
Vino thought they were twins. In the world of light, they were twins.
“Grandfather,” he asked the face in the glass, “why are you so different?”
The old man was startled. Vino flushed. He had not meant to ask that question. But having
asked it, he could not be sure if the face he had addressed was his grandfather’s.
The old man did not laugh. He munched at the last piece of bread, took a sip of the tea, and
studied his grandson. At last he said: “If I tell you, will you keep it a secret?”
Vino nodded.
The old man grew thoughtful. Vino waited and tried to make himself resemble the other
fourteen grandchildren of the old man. He felt he wasn’t doing it well.
“Remember, you promise not to tell,” the old man said. “The truth is your grandfather’s not an
earthling. He’s not of the earth.”
“Not from Laguna?”
The old man laughed.
“No, no. Laguna was where I was born. But before that, I was somewhere else. Maybe tonight,
if you looked at the sky, you would see it. The most beautiful planet in the solar system.”
“Venus?”
“No. people only say that because they have never been out there, among the planets. Venus is
not the most beautiful planet. It’s Saturn with its rings. Your grandfather came from Saturn.”
The rings of Saturn, the old man went on, were many. They had Saturnian names,
corresponding roughly to the earth words for beauty, justice, and truth. The Saturnians who had
constructed the rings were an ancient and immortal race, so ancient in fact they had witnessed
four or five expansions of the universe. They had lived in the core of the universal egg once, and
again, at another time, they had lived at the universe’s rim, delighting at the speed of the
galaxies. They could do this because they had no bodies but were merely defined tongues of
energy.
For this aeon, they had built their world on the planet Saturn. The rings they had constructed
provided them with their food. Vibrating is space, the rings released bursts of energy which the
Saturnians absorbed. The molecular trembling of the rings could b heard – a sustained concert.
“Sweeter than Chopin, more complex than Bach, more beautiful than any piece you will ever
play,” the grandfather said.
 Sometimes the music would thin out into a single note so pure that the Saturnians would
swoon, relinquishing their senses to disintegrate in that divine fire. When the rings met was a
cataract of sound so passionate that shapes and forms were born of it. These drifted to the
planet’s surface and metamorphosed into that world’s flora and fauna. But they were brittle and
lived brief lives, their bodies evaporating into ambrosia, which formed the planet’s rarefied
atmosphere.
“When you’re older and in school, you will be told of the food of the gods. You alone will
know that this ambrosia comes from Saturn. Remember, it is a secret.”
“But grandfather, how did you get here?”
“Patience,” the old man said, “the story’s not over yet.”
This was the way the Saturnians lived: they lived for the perfection of the rings which they
nourished and which nourished them. They would join the rings’ music through the cycle of
growth and disintegration. They would be born of the music, grow with it, and dissolve with its
dissolution and be born again. Now and then, a storm in the sun would pour radiation upon the
rings, causing them to tremble mightily. A cascade of sound would then fall upon the planet,
causing the flora and fauna to shudder and set up an answering music. This would be a time for
celebration. The Saturnians, maddened by the sound, would flit back and forth between the
planet and the rings. For a few, the ecstasy would be too much. They would shoot up through
space, achieving, as rockets do, escape velocity.
“No somewhere between Saturn and Earth is a force field,” the old man continued. “The
interlocking net of energy is invisible. This net obeys the law of corporeality. Many times,
through the aeons, a Saturnian in his light has struck the net. Imagine it: sparks flying, little fires
flaring, much like the fuse box when there’s short circuit.”
The poor Saturnian would then discover this was one net he could not escape. The only way to
disentangle himself and return to his planet was to go through the earth’s law – the law of
corporeality. So, the Saturnian was born upon the earth, assumed a body and an identity, and
went through the earth pattern of life and death.
“Often, they don’t even remember they’re Saturnians,” the grandfather said sadly.
Once on earth, the Saturnian was driven by the impulse of his race. He fought to re-create the
rings of Saturn. If he had fed from the outer rings, he struggled to bring beauty to the world; if he
had fed from the middle rings, then he worked for justice; and if his food had come from the
inner rings, he tried to find the truth. It wasn’t easy; first, because the Saturnian had to use gross
earthly materials for his labour, and second, because another law governed existence on this
planet – the law of contradictoriness.
The latter simply meant that there was, for everything, an opposite. Thus, the makers of beauty
would never discover than an equal number of men labored to create the unbeautiful. Those from
the middle rings suffered even more, for on earth, justice can only be fashioned from flesh and
blood. They died in myriads, a few in fame but many in obscurity – and they died abrupt,
saddening deaths. Those from the inner rings, on the other hand, discovered Lie, the companion
of truth and far more powerful.
Even those who managed to survive and live long lives were burdened by an increasing
sorrow. Some received acclaim, but they received it from those who, in countless ways, negated
the Saturnian’s work. They received accolades from those who brought the ugly to earth, who set
into motion the processes of torture and agony, who denied the world justice and caused many a
century of pain among humans. The Saturnian could only flinch in helplessness, knowing that
those who praised him were his enemies.
 “Isn’t there something on earth for Saturnians?” the boy asked.
The old man smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Something new. Affection. Or even love.”
Unfortunately, the same temporal laws governed this emotion. The Saturnian who grew
addicted to love’s vibration found to his discomfiture that passion faded with reality’s heat. He
would try to disintegrate with the vibrations and almost always found release in death.
“You’ve heard of people like this. They jump from buildings, throw themselves into rivers, or
sip poison like coffee.”
“Why do they have to do that?”
“They have to – rather than accept that things do lose their magic in this world.”
“So many big words,” the boy sighed. “I don’t understand. Do we really have to live such
terrible lives?”
The old man smiled. “Yes,” he said, “especially when Saturnians reach my age knowing that
so many things will be left undone.”
Sometimes, the ones of Saturn, watching the plight of their fellow divines, would choose from
among themselves a sacrifice. They would send off the chosen one, into the net of corporeality
and to earth. This was the only consolation they could offer the trapped one – the consolation
that, when he was gone, someone would be there to continue his work. It was a great and
humbling sacrifice: to abandon the perfection of the rings of Saturn was the highest expression of
love for one’s fellow divine.
“That’s why Saturnians my age always stoop a little,” the grandfather said, taking the boy’s
hand. “We try to look into other people’s eyes, searching for the consoling one. Very rarely we
discover him among our own family – a son, a daughter, a niece of nephew… or a grandson…”
Vino knew the story was ended. He looked at his grandfather in silence. But the intimations of
great knowledge the old man’s words evoked refused to congeal in his mind. After a while he
smiled. That the old man had entrusted him with a secret was enough for the moment.
As if guessing his thoughts, the grandfather broke the silence: “Mind now, guard the secret
well.”
He rose and escorted Vino to the door, telling him to resume his practice on the piano, for at
dusk, whenever Vino played, the music soared to the man’s window and brought him great
happiness.
Had there been Saturnians in the cemetery crowd that day, they would have noticed the
shudder that shook the boy’s bird-bones – that boy perched so high upon the monument. The
shudder ran from his fingertips to the thin, fire-tipped pole which struck the black saucer atop the
marble needle. A tongue of flame shot out and completed the pinnacle. Vino, turning around,
found the crowd stating at him. He felt in his own dry eyes a glitter of horror. All the world, it
deemed, lay spread at his feet, waiting to engulf him.