Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World by Sabina Berman

Author:Sabina Berman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Carpenter ants had shredded the Jerusalem Bible with their sharp teeth and were transporting it letter by letter to the crater of the anthill, where they joined the whirl of 7 other lines of ants who were transporting little pieces of very green leaves, before disappearing into the sand.

* * *

Some of the only happy things that happened during those years, which my aunt Isabelle referred to as the Years of No and Never: Nunutsi made the acquaintance of a tabby cat but rather than get pregnant she ran off to who knows where. The Jews who survived the Holocaust never showed up on dock 4 to see the black tuna corpses. And we never saw the secretary of fisheries again, until 5 years later when Mazatlán awoke to the photo of his coiffed white hair and his perfect smile plastered on every lamppost.

He was the PRI candidate running for president of Mexico, and the Mazatlán paper came out the same day with the headline:

Failing Mazatlán: Assured Political Victory

In those days in which everything failed, that prediction failed as well. The PRI lost the presidency for the first time in 70 years.

Luckily, long before then we found out why the sale of our stress-free, dolphin-safe tuna had failed. That happened 2 years after we caught them, when Mr. Gould stuck out his index finger and rang the doorbell of my aunt’s mansion.

* * *

Gorda took her standard 5 minutes to go answer the door.

Mr. Gould said he had come looking for Miss Different Abilities, and Gorda thought long and hard, squinting, before responding that yes, she lived there, but no, she wasn’t home right then.

Then I’ll wait for her inside, Mr. Gould said with such authority that it didn’t even occur to Gorda to argue, and she stood aside to let him in.

Mr. Gould took off his red baseball cap in the middle of the living room with the marble checkerboard floor, and, holding it in his hands, he approached a drawing in a black wood frame, my pencil sketch of Huntington’s slaughterhouse. He looked at it from up close, his nose right up against it, then stepped back to take it in in its entirety, and then examined it from up close again.

Next he stopped before another, equally large, framed piece—an oil painting of a nude woman surrounded by penises, done in different shades of orange—and leaned in to read the little plaque on the frame that read: Woman Threatened by Red Snappers, and Gorda blushed and told him that Señora Isabelle’s new boyfriend—a Zapotec Indian—had painted it.

Finally Gould went and made himself comfortable on the best sofa—the red velvet 1—and sat staring at the fly-killing lamp, which I had hung from the ceiling.

3 flies alighted on the bluish spiral tube, fried themselves to a crisp with a buzzing sound, and fell straight down into the nickel-plated tray of cool water awaiting them on the floor.

Gould said:

Excellent.

He was about 70 years old, his oval head perfectly bald like an

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.