In the middle of our conversation on the patio, Clara suddenly had a vacant, far-away look as if she had caught sight of something or someone at the side of the house.
She hurriedly got up and excused herself, leaving me to ponder the importance of all the things she had said.
I didn't see Clara again until the following morning at breakfast.
As we sat to eat our morning meal of shredded meat and rice, I told Clara that on my return trip from the cave yesterday, I had confirmed her statement that it was only a short distance from the house.
"Why did we really meander so much to get there, Clara?" I asked.
Clara burst out laughing. "I was trying to get you to take off your boots, so we passed by the stream," she replied.
"Why did I have to take off my boots? Was it because of my blister?"
"It wasn't your blister," Clara said emphatically. "I needed to poke very crucial points on the soles of your feet to awaken you from your lifelong lethargy. Otherwise, you would have never listened to me."
"Aren't you exaggerating, Clara? I would have listened to you even if you didn't poke my feet."
She shook her head and gave me a knowing smile. "All of us were brought up to live in a sort of limbo where nothing counts except petty, immediate gratifications," she said. "And women are the masters of that state.
"Not until we recapitulate can we overcome our upbringing. And talking about recapitulating ..." Clara noticed my pained expression and laughed.
"Do I have to go back to the cave, Clara?" I interrupted, anticipating what I thought she was going to tell me. "I'd much rather stay here with you. If you pose for me, I can make a few sketches of you, and then paint your portrait."
"No, thank you," she said, uninterested. "What I am going to do is give you some preliminary instructions on how to proceed with the recapitulation."
When we had finished eating, Clara handed me a writing pad and pencil. I thought she had changed her mind about my sketching her portrait.
But as she pushed the writing materials toward me, she said that I should begin making a list of all the people I had met, starting from the present and going back to my earliest memories.
"That's impossible!" I gasped. "How on earth am I going to remember everyone I've ever come into contact with from day one?"
Clara moved the plates aside to give me room to write.
"Difficult, true, but not impossible," she said. "It's a necessary part of the recapitulation. The list forms a matrix for the mind to hook on to."
She said that the initial stage of the recapitulation consists of two things.
The first is the list, the second is setting up the scene, and setting up the scene consists of visualizing all the details pertinent to the events that one is going to recall.
"Once you have all the elements in place, use the sweeping breath. The movement of your head is like a fan that stirs everything in that scene," she said:
"If you're remembering a room, for example, breathe in the walls, the ceiling, the furniture, the people you see.
And don't stop until you have absorbed every last bit of energy you left behind."
"How will I know when I've done that?" I asked. "Your body will tell you when you've had enough," she assured me:
"Remember, intend to inhale the energy that you left in the scene you're recapitulating, and intend to exhale the extraneous energy thrust into you by others."
Overwhelmed by the task of making the list and beginning to recapitulate, I couldn't think at all. A perverse and involuntary reaction of my mind was to go absolutely blank.
Then a deluge of thoughts flooded in, making it impossible for me to know where to start.
Clara explained that we must start the recapitulation by first focusing our attention on our past sexual activity.
"Why do you have to begin there?" I asked suspiciously.
"That's where the bulk of our energy is caught," Clara explained. "That's why we must free those memories first!"
"I don't think my sexual encounters were all that important."
"It doesn't matter. You could have been staring up at the ceiling bored to death, or seeing shooting stars or fireworks- someone still left his energy inside you and walked off with a ton of yours."
I was totally put off by her statement. To go back to my sexual experiences now seemed repugnant.
"It's bad enough," I said, "to relive my childhood memories, but I won't hash up what happened with men."
Clara looked at me with a raised eyebrow.
"Besides," I argued, "you'll probably expect me to confide in you. But really, Clara, I don't think what I did with men is anyone's business."
I thought I had made my point.
Clara resolutely shook her head and said, "Do you want those men you had to continue feeding from your energy? Do you want those men to get stronger as you get stronger? Do you want to be their source of energy for the rest of your life?
"No. I don't think you understand the importance of the sexual act or the scope of the recapitulation."
"You're right, Clara. I don't understand the reason for your bizarre request.
"And what's this business of men getting stronger because I'm their source of energy? I'm nobody's source or provider. I promise you that."
She smiled and said that she had made a mistake in forcing a confrontation of ideologies at this time. "Bear with me," she begged:
"This is a belief I have chosen to uphold. As you progress with your recapitulation, I will tell you about the origin of this belief.
"Suffice it to say that it is a critical part of the art I'm teaching you."
"If it's as important as you claim, Clara, perhaps you'd better tell me about it now," I said. "Before we go any further with the recapitulation, I'd like to know what I'm getting into."
"All right, if you insist," she said, nodding.
She poured some camomile tea into our mugs and added a spoonful of honey to hers.
In the authoritative voice of a teacher enlightening a neophyte, she explained that women, more so than men, are the true supporters of the social order, and that to fulfill this role, they have been reared uniformly the world over to be at the service of men.
"It makes no difference whether women are bought right off the slave block, or they are courted and loved," she stressed. "Their fundamental purpose and fate is still the same: to nourish, shelter and serve men."
Clara looked at me, I believed, to assess if I was following her argument.
I thought I was, but my gut reaction was that her entire premise seemed wrong.
"That may be true in some cases," I said, "but I don't think you can make such sweeping generalizations to include all women."
Clara disagreed vehemently. "The diabolical part of women's servile position is that it doesn't appear to be merely a social prescription," she said, "but a fundamental biological imperative."
"Wait a minute, Clara," I protested. "How did you arrive at that?"
She explained that every species has a biological imperative to perpetuate itself, and that nature has provided tools in order to ensure that the merging of female and male energies takes place in the most efficient way.
She said that in the human realm, although the primary function of sexual intercourse is procreation, it also has a secondary and covert function, which is to ensure a continual flow of energy from women to men.
Clara put such a stress on the word 'men' that I had to ask, "Why do you say it as if it were a one-way street? Isn't the sexual act an even exchange of energy between male and female?"
"No," she said emphatically. "Men leave specific energy lines inside the body of women. They are like luminous tapeworms that move inside the womb, sipping up energy."
"That sounds positively sinister," I said, humoring her.
She continued her exposition in utter seriousness. "The energy lines are put there for an even more sinister reason," she said, ignoring my nervous laughter, "which is to ensure that a steady supply of energy reaches the man who deposited them.
"Those lines of energy, established through sexual intercourse, collect and steal energy from the female body to benefit the male who left them there."
Clara was so adamant in what she was saying that I couldn't joke about it but had to take her seriously.
As I listened, I felt my nervous smile turn into a snarl.
"Not that I accept for a minute what you're saying, Clara," I said, "but just out of curiosity, how in the world did you arrive at such a preposterous notion? Did someone tell you about this?"
"Yes, my teacher told me about it.
"At first, I didn't believe him either," she admitted, "but he also taught me the art of freedom, and that means that I learned to see the flow of energy.
"Now I know he was accurate in his assessments, because I can see the worm-like filaments in women's bodies for myself. You, for example, have a number of them, all of them still active."
"Let's say that's true, Clara," I said uneasily. "Just for the sake of argument, let me ask you why should this be possible? Isn't this one-way energy flow unfair to women?"
"The whole world is unfair to women!" she exclaimed. "But that's not the point."
"What is the point, Clara? I know I'm missing it."
"Nature's imperative is to perpetuate our species," she explained. "In order to ensure that this continues to take place, women have to carry an excessive burden at their basic energy level, and that means a flow of energy that taxes women."
"But you still haven't explained why this should be so," I said, already becoming swayed by the force of her convictions.
"Women are the foundation for perpetuating the human species," Clara replied. "The bulk of the energy comes from them, not only to gestate, give birth and nourish their offspring, but also for ensuring that the male plays his part in this whole process."
Clara explained that ideally this process ensures that a woman feeds her man energetically through the filaments he left inside her body, so that the man becomes mysteriously dependent on her at an ethereal level.
This is expressed in the overt behavior of the man returning to the same woman again and again to maintain his source of sustenance.
That way, Clara said, nature ensures that men, in addition to their immediate drive for sexual gratification, set up more permanent bonds with women.
"These energy fibers left in women's wombs also become merged with the energy makeup of the offspring, should conception take place," Clara elaborated:
"It may be the rudiments of family ties, for the energy from the father merges with that of the fetus, and enables the man to sense that the child is his own.
"These are some of the facts of life a girl's mother never tells her.
"Women are reared to be easily seduced by men, without the slightest idea of the consequences of sexual intercourse in terms of the energy drainage it produces in them. This is my point and this is what is not fair."
As I listened to Clara talk, I had to agree that some of what she said made sense to me at a deep bodily level.
She urged me not just to agree or disagree with her, but to think this through and evaluate what she had said in a courageous, unprejudiced and intelligent manner.
"It's bad enough that one man leaves energy lines inside a woman's body," Clara went on, "although that is necessary for having offspring and ensuring their survival.
"But to have the energy lines of ten or twenty men inside her feeding off her luminosity is more than anyone can bear. No wonder women can never lift up their heads."
"Can a woman get rid of those lines?" I asked, more and more convinced that there was some truth to what Clara was saying.
"A woman carries those luminous worms for seven years," Clara said, "after which time they disappear or fade out.
"But the wretched part is that when the seven years are about to be up, the whole army of worms, from the very first man a woman had to the very last one, all become agitated at once so that the woman is driven to have sexual intercourse again.
Then all the worms spring to life stronger than ever to feed off the woman's luminous energy for another seven years. It really is a never-ending cycle."
"What if the woman is celibate?" I asked. "Do the worms just die out?"
"Yes, if she can resist having sex for seven years.
"But it's nearly impossible for a woman to remain celibate like that in our day and age, unless she becomes a nun, or has money to support herself.
"And even then she still would need a totally different rationale."
"Why is that, Clara?"
"Because not only is it a biological imperative that women have sexual intercourse, but it is also a social mandate."
Clara gave me then a most confusing and distressing example.
She said that since we are unable to see the flow of energy, we may be needlessly perpetuating patterns of behavior or emotional interpretations associated with this unseen flow of energy.
For instance, for society to demand that women marry or at least offer themselves to men is wrong, as it is wrong for women to feel unfulfilled unless they have a man's semen inside them.
It is true that a man's energy lines give women purpose; make them fulfill their biological destinies of feeding men and their offspring.
But human beings are intelligent enough to demand of themselves more than merely the fulfillment of the reproduction imperative.
She said that, for example, to evolve is an equal if not a greater imperative than to reproduce; and that, in this case, evolving entails the awakening of women to their true role in the energetic scheme of reproduction.
She then turned her argument to the personal level and said that I had been reared, like every other woman, by a mother who regarded as her primary function raising me to find a suitable husband so I would not have the stigma of being a spinster.
I was really bred, like an animal, to have sex, no matter what my mother chose to call it.
"You, like every other woman, have been tricked and forced into submission," Clara said. "And the sad part is that you're trapped in this pattern, even if you don't intend to procreate."
Her statements were so distressing that I laughed out of sheer nervousness.
Clara wasn't fazed at all.
"Perhaps all this is true, Clara," I said, trying not to sound condescending. "But in my case, how can remembering the past change anything? Isn't it all water under the bridge?"
"I can only tell you that to wake up, you must break a vicious circle," she countered, her green eyes assessing me curiously.
I reiterated that I didn't believe in her theories about diabolic biological imperatives or vampirelike males leeching off women's energy, and argued that just sitting in a cave remembering isn't going to change anything.
"There are certain things I just don't want to think about ever again," I snapped and banged my fist on the kitchen table.
I stood up ready to leave and told her that I didn't want to hear any more about the recapitulation, the list of names, or any biological imperatives.
"Let's make a deal," Clara said, with the air of a merchant getting ready to cheat a customer. "You're a fair person; you like to be honorable. So I'll propose that we reach an agreement."
"What kind of an agreement?" I asked with mounting anxiety.
She tore off a sheet from the writing pad and handed it to me. "I want you to write and sign a promissory voucher stating that you're going to try the recapitulation exercise for one month only.
If, after a month, you don't notice any increase in energy, or any improvement in how you feel toward yourself or toward life in general, you will be free to go back home, wherever home is.
If this turns out to be the case, you can simply write off the entire experience as the bizarre request of an eccentric woman."
I sat down again to calm myself. As I took a few sips of tea, the thought struck me that it was the least I could do after all the trouble Clara had gone to for me.
Besides, it was apparent that she wasn't going to let me off the hook that easily.
I could always go through the motions of recapitulating my memories: After all, who is to know if, in the cave, I did the visualization and breathing, or if I just daydreamed or took a nap?
"It's only one month," she said sincerely. "You won't be signing your life away. Believe me, I'm really trying to help you."
"I know that," I said. "But why would you bother doing all this for me? Why me, Clara?"
"There is a reason," she replied, "but it's so farfetched that I can't spring it on you now.
"The only thing I can tell you is that by helping you, I'm fulfilling a worthy purpose; paying off a debt.
"Would you accept my repaying a debt as a reason?"
Clara looked at me so hopefully that I picked up the pencil and wrote the voucher, deliberately fussing over the wording so that there would be no confusion about the one-month time frame.
She bargained with me for not including in that month the time it took me to draw up the list of names. I agreed and made an addendum to that effect.
Then, in spite of my better judgement, I signed it.