Ancient Tillage by Raduan Nassar

Author:Raduan Nassar
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2017-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

19

“ana, pedro, it was Ana, my hunger was for Ana,” I suddenly exploded in a peak, expelling in one isolated, violent jet the hardened core of my ripe, pestilent boil, “Ana was my illness, she was my insanity, my air, my splinter and chill, my breath, the impertinent insistence in my testicles,” I yelled with my mouth wide open, exposing the texture of my raving tongue, ignoring the guardian hidden between my teeth, spattering clots of blood, releasing the nauseating words that had been forever locked away in silence, “I was the crazed brother, the raving brother, the vile-smelling brother, I was the one with the slime of so many slugs and the devil’s slobber coating my skin, ticks in my pores, confused ants in my armpits, and profuse fruit flies celebrating my filthy body; go get it quickly, Pedro, hurry up and bring me the washtub in which we bathed as children, the warm water, the ash soap and scratchy sponge, the white, fluffy towel; wrap me up inside, wrap me up in your arms, dry my tormented hair, then run your earnest hand down the back of my neck, hurry and fulfil this tender ritual, it is up to you, Pedro, you opened our mother first, you were the one toasted as the hallowed eldest,” I said, foaming and in pain, slipping lasciviously on strange saliva, yet even having fallen into possessed wrath, I was still able to see my brother covering his face with his hands, terrified by the impact of my fury, it was impossible to figure out the cracks in his burnt-brick face, impossible to read the expression of his mouth, to determine which stone spark was, perhaps, shattering his eyes; it was clear he was probing for support, was definitely in search of solid, hard ground, and I could even hear his cries for help, but seeing him in such a profoundly startling, still position (it was my father), it also occurred to me that he might have withdrawn as an exercise in patience, that there in the dark he might be consulting the elders’ texts, the noble, ancestral pages, leafing through in search of serenity, but in the current of my trance the blending together of his pain and respect for the writings of the ancients no longer mattered, I had to scream out furiously that there was more wisdom in my madness than in all of Father’s wisdom, that my illness suited me better than the health of the family suited them, that my remedies had never been written about in textbooks, but that there was another medicine (mine!), and except for mine, I acknowledged no other science, and that everything was merely a question of perspective, and only my point of view held any meaning whatsoever, and that it was the apposite prerogative of gluttons to test the virtue of patience with other people’s hunger, and I said everything spasmodically and obsessively in a verbal rage, and wreaking havoc, I overturned

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