Women's Writing In Latin America by Sara Castro-klaren

Author:Sara Castro-klaren [Castro-klaren, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781000010152
Google: kh-eDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-15T04:52:42+00:00

Do Not Mistake Eternities

That man who at first didn't love me and who married me because I owned the house that I built myself and because people told him so many times that an industrious young woman should not be a widow, that man, Atalita, began to love me with a restless love. As if something told him that my absence would be the absence of the spring that made him move. In some obscure way, something told him that, because with him words came out vague and misshapen. You can imagine, a few were good enough for everything. With him words had no shape. He lived in a world that seemed shapeless, soft and vegetal, without words to outline a skeleton. And he mistrusted me.

I was already full of the eternity revealed by the mountains. I pursued it through him.

Because of him I set out to become a reserved, efficient lady. I rose precisely at the same time, forgot the chaos of mountains and stars, kept the impeccable perfection of my hair and a persistent lavender fragrance. My dedication to falsehood knew no truce.

Falsehood smoothed the sharp edges; piercing eternity found a soft sheath. Day by day the years did my living for me, falsely.

I too must have forgotten words. Until I heard them again, so different, so coarse.

That morning, summer woke me up with its air alive with insects and the sun about to shine. It was barely light. From my room, separated from his by the grape arbor, I understood the haste of the nocturnal flowers to hold their perfume before the coming of light. "Evening primroses" they call them, and they profit from the dark to tell what they are: ladies of the night. In the darkness I should have gone out to tell my name, the only real one.

I made a mistake, you see, eternity is not clear, it does not resemble what is repeated, nor does it have the fragrance of lavender. I made a mistake.

I went out of my room. Looking at his, I felt the usual weight all along my veins, already narrowing as if garlands bound them. Love. Love that weighed like pregnancy, perfected by falsehood, error, and renunciation. I walked the courtyards of the darkened house. Not fear, but something like it took hold of me, a brutal cold, and my heart paralyzed.

In the house next door, the one with jasmines and spiritualist pictures, the one belonging to the very old woman and her niece, someone was talking. And the voice came over the low wall bidding good-bye—with such words!—to that vulgar woman next door. And at his age.

There was no need to spy. Eudoro did not omit anything from his story when he found me leaning on the wall, neither the laughter nor the mocking account of my virtues.

I was not prepared for the dizziness. I fall and I fall in a strange void, hacked away from eternity. But isn't there a spot to grasp? Yes, there is! Atala. In her there is something delirious, criminal, phantasmagoric, everything I falsely renounced.

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