A Confederate General from Big Sur by Richard Brautigan

Author:Richard Brautigan [Brautigan, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd

In the Midst of Life

I HAD MET Elizabeth only a couple of times, but I had been very impressed. She was beautiful and worked in Los Angeles three months out of the year. She hired somebody, usually a Mexican woman, to come to Big Sur and watch her children. Then she performed a fantastic change and did it with great skill.

At Big Sur she lived in a rough three-room shack with four children that were all reflections of herself as if she had hung mirrors on them. She wore her hair long and loose about her shoulders and on her feet she wore sandals and on her body she wore a rough shapeless dress and lived a life of physical and spiritual contemplation.

She had her garden and her canning and chopping wood and sewing and she did all the things that women have always done when there is not a man about the house and they live in the lonely reaches of the world, raising the children as best they can. She was very gentle and read a lot.

She lived this life for nine months out of the year, like some strange pregnancy, and then she hired somebody to watch her children, and she went to Los Angeles and made the physical and spiritual transformation into a hundred dollar call girl who specialized in providing exotic pleasure for men who wanted a beautiful woman to put out with some weird action.

She did all the things that the men wanted her to do. They gave her the hundred dollars and sometimes more because she was very comfortable and did not make them feel self-conscious about what they wanted, not unless the men wanted to be made uncomfortable, of course, and then she would do this relentlessly and sometimes they paid her extra for making them feel so uncomfortable.

She was a highly paid technician who worked three months out of the year, saving her money. Then she went back to Big Sur and let her hair hang long and naturally about her neck and shoulders, and she lived a life of physical and spiritual contemplation and could not stand to kill a living thing.

She was a vegetarian. Eggs were her only vice. There were rattlesnakes around where her children played, but she would do nothing about it.

Her oldest child was eleven and her youngest six, and the rattlesnakes were in abundance. The snakes came and went like mice, but her children remained unaltered by them.

Her husband had been killed in Korea. That’s all that anybody knew about him. She came to Big Sur after his death. She didn’t care to talk about it.

We drove up to her place. It was about twelve miles away, and then off the highway a few miles up an obscure canyon. You had to watch carefully. It was easy to miss her road. Our maximum speed on the highway was twenty miles an hour. When we reached her place we stopped the truck and Lee Mellon got out and I got off.

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