Draining the Sea by Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Author:Micheline Aharonian Marcom [Marcom, Micheline Aharonian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2008-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

THE SOLDIER has learnt (beatings blood) to be an obedient soldier, and he does not inquire: (Can a poor man interrupt the course of the gods?): beyond the now of things, the war of things. He has learned on his trek up into the mountains; he has drunk the blood of the small bitch which he carried on his back and the bloods of the bitches of his compatriots also; he has swallowed his own excrement, their communal vomit and bile; and he has been trained in a new religion, an apocryphal priest now as he does it for the patria, for the preservation of capital and state.

She is before him, and she has a look of terror in her black eyes which, although difficult to describe here among the folios, is not ever difficult to ascertain—the priests can see it in a moment; and it makes them happy, like too much sugar makes small children happy. [Here are the gods.] He looks at her distended belly and perhaps he thinks the Spanish sentences of his trainers about the communist scourge and the subversivos, apostates, gavûrs in an old language which he doesn’t speak (which you didn’t speak either, Mother: it was your parents’ foreign tongue: Turkish for the secrets from their Armenian children; the enemy’s tongue);—the soldier’s own Kaqchikel is becoming a scar in his mind, a childhood memory; (Remember, the Lieutenant says to them in Spanish, We’ll fuck you recruits like dogs if we want to, and when we want it. You have balls? Are you men? Speak your Indian tongues and we’ll remove them with knives; we’re more happy to do it.) and meantime the president himself, General Ríos Montt, is speaking at the press conference in Tegucigalpa, and steak and crab with lime sauce for lunch, and another president, mine Mr Reagan, touches his head and heart faithfully, unwrinkles his pant leg with his unsmooth hand.

—One of the fundamental aspects of the new government philosophy is respect for human rights. Incorrect information published abroad, and which the Guatemalan government lacks the funds to refute effectively, has led to a wide-spread belief among foreigners that it is carrying out massacres of the Indian farmers.

But the woman (your neighbor). She is eight months pregnant and she is beautiful—she has the sublime look of the pregnant lady and she terrifies him of course (and me also—my own wife of years ago) to look into the god’s face one is also terrified, the sublime always kicks you back in the teeth, the groin—; he has a hard-on while he does it. Takes his machete and pulls it across her belly as she looks at him with a different kind of horror now—she screams at him in her language which he doesn’t speak or understand—it is your soft Ixil, Marta—and he pulls the babe out with his hands, a bloody and perfectly formed boy who doesn’t know shame or death or bad things, and then the soldier, as if

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.