In the Castle of My Skin (Penguin Modern Classics) by George Lamming

Author:George Lamming
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

Seven

When night fell it was as though the darkness had dropped from the sky. At four o’clock the sun appearing to move towards the sea shone from the west with a scarlet brilliance and the white marl roads gleamed. The wind had gone away and the trees were steady. At this hour the village had seemed unreally still. Sky, trees, wind, clouds: all these things which earlier had seemed immediate were now remote and inactive. There were no clouds at all and the sky deeply curved looked hard and solid. The sun bleeding its light over the land seemed to hang on to the sky as though it were a foreign and unwanted body. The trees resembled the lamp-posts in their carriage, upright, steady and stupid, and the houses scotched on the groundsels of limestone, neutral and resigned. At one corner in the shade of the mahogany trees an old woman sat behind a tray of oranges, plums and nuts. The tray was placed on a bench the shape and size of the one she sat on. She wore a white head tie and a blue apron. She was asleep, her head drooping forward, the chin lazily closeted in the sink of the neck, and her lips hanging loose and slack. A small boy nestled near her, stole a plum from the tray and stuffed his mouth before dropping his head in a nod to the ground. The old woman half-opened her eyes, scratched her ears and mumbled something to the boy. He didn’t answer. She passed her hand along his head and closed her eyes again. The boy waited, then looked up and lifted a banana from the stem. Then he stuffed his pockets with more plums and nuts, not more on the whole than a penny’s worth. He quickly rearranged the bananas, shuffled the plums and nuts into a new heap and sat down quietly. Another glance at the old woman and soon he had circled the trees and was out of sight. No one noticed. The old woman slept, and in her sleep on the wooden bench she was like the houses, old and weary and remote.

But out of these bodies which seemed lifeless there had grown others that at other times turned the air into a battle front of flashing light. The high wall which ran through a great part of the village, separating one set of tenants from another, bore bits of bottle along the top, and the light from the green edges seemed to cut through the air. Also many of the houses were roofed with galvanized sheets of iron, and the reflected light seemed to rebound from these into the light that leapt from the broken bottles along the high wall. In the distance the trees seemed steady as before, but nearer one noticed that the branches wavered slightly, and occasionally the leaves were disturbed. At four o’clock the air was a blinding shimmer, the village an unbounded arena where the light contended. At five o’clock there was only shade.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.