They're Cows, We're Pigs by Carmen Boullosa

Author:Carmen Boullosa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 1991-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

thREE

After the murder of Pineau, my first impulse was to get away from Tortuga. Although through him I had learned to love it, the place now repulsed me as the land that was sheltering his murderers. There was not time enough to bring this first impulse to pass. A second one erupted immediately, and more forcefully: not to abandon Tortuga until I found out whose hand it was that held the knife which killed Pineau, the hand that poisoned le Nègre Miel slowly with that substance I was not familiar with and which brought on his melancholy, his loss of interest in living, his desire to give in, and finally his death: a poison on which, if I were to baptize it, I would lay the name of “desolation.” I began by suspecting that Pineau’s purchase of me may well have been, yes, because I was the book written by le Nègre Miel, but especially because of one page that had tempted Pineau’s heart so much that he contradicted his principles with regard to slavery; yet now I did not think le Nègre Miel’s wisdom was the reason for it, since Pineau had roundly refused to make use of his arts and would look on with reprehension in his eyes whenever I picked up some herb—but because of a page that Smeeks himself was unaware of. Could it be that le Nègre Miel had not written it? If that were the case, it might well be connected somehow with The House in Port Royal, since he had also kept silent about all that. Then I was assaulted by wild fantasies which featured menstrual blood in some strange way, but I frightened them off, knowing they were absurd, and I became aware of not being able to think clearly, of being unable to tie up the loose ends, of being totally at a loss, of not comprehending, once again, that Smeeks understood nothing at all about any of this. Who had killed them? For what reason had they been killed?

Passing in review the people they both would visit frequently, searching for coincidences, yet was I unable to come up with anything other than the afternoons when le Nègre Miel and Pineau absented themselves from me in order to attend the Society’s meetings, wherever it was they met. Certain that the answer would lie there, on those afternoons when I was not with them, those afternoons which were forbidden me, I had gone to Jamaica to have a word with Isabelle.

I never did get to talk to her. I stayed drunk for several days and do not recall whether I went to The House even once to sleep it off or whether I slept at all or ate or anything else that happened to me, because I lost all consciousness of myself; and when I regained it I was signing a paper with a name that was not mine, had never been mine, and on which I had let fall a drop of my blood.

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.