I am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy

Author:Fleur Jaeggy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary Fiction;literary fiction;short stories;translation;translated fiction;modernism;women’s literary fiction;rite of passage;family;brother;sister;H.D.;Imagist;H.D. Imagiste;Ezra Pound;Elena Ferrante;Days of Abandonment;My Brilliant Friend;Neapolitan novels;Djuna Barnes;Nightwood;Ryder;Claire Louise Bennett;Pond;Clarice Lispector;Hour of the Star;Switzerland;Swiss;Italian;Italy;Calasso;Calvino;Brodsky;Bachmann;Thomas Bernhard;S. S. Proleterka;Sweet Days of Discipline;Last Vanities;These Possible Lives;Gothic;Thomas De Quincey;John Keats;Marcel Schwob;Tim Parks;I beati anni del castigo;Premio Bagutta;Premio Speciale Rapallo;Adelphi Edizioni;Sono il fratello di XX;Franco Battiato;Carlotta Wieck;New Directions;Susan Sontag
Publisher: And Other Stories Publishing
Published: 2017-04-06T15:04:13+00:00

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‌Adelaide

Adelaide sits in the kitchen. A mug of beer, a dirty plate. She hasn’t turned on the light, it’s almost dark and the tap drips. ‘Enough.’ For a moment the drip stops. It’s strange, thinks Adelaide, how things sometimes pay attention to you. There was also a gust of wind that caused the shutters to bang and she said enough. And they stopped. But in the kitchen there was a great bustle. Voices, yes, voices she recognised very well, they were hers. But they didn’t come out of her mouth. She was thinking of her baby. In the crib. Grown too big to stay in the crib, but he started to cry as soon as she put him in the cot with bars. In the crib the baby wound his legs around as though they were elastic, then he joined his hands as though he were praying. Was he praying? That was what she’d asked the priest. Who refused to baptise him. Why do you deny my son baptism? I, said the priest, looking odious and cautious, am not denying the little one baptism, but I deny the mother her wish to baptise her son. The mother swallowed more beer. She was remembering her parents, her sister who had just died, her sister’s shouts Get him out of here, the priest who had slunk into her room to give her extreme unction. Well, in her family they had always dealt with priests. One way or the other. They, the priests, always preceded deaths. As though they lay in wait. It’s not easy to go peacefully. To not be molested. But now she remembers well how the man in the cassock had said no. No, I cannot baptise your son. And you dip your filthy fingers into the holy water, thought the mother. You’ll kneel before me so that I might punish you with a whip. That is what the mother thought about day and night. Punishing him. And in the meantime she imagined various punishments. Poison. A car crash. Fire. Arson. And the simple and sound pistol shot. But then maybe one day they would indict her. And she could already see herself in a cell, in prison, in a corner, tied like a dog to a leash, a rope around her neck. And she was asking for water. She was terribly thirsty. The food in the bowl, she vomited it. Scarce light through the window with bars. There was nothing to see. Even the sky seemed dimmed. And then she could see less and less. She had said that she had problems with her sight. And they, the jailers, the doctors, the chaplains had laughed. They were all laughing in the prison. She could hear them laughing even when they were serious. Her breasts had lengthened and she no longer understood anything about her body. Which appealed to Herbert, had appealed. To Janis, and very few others, since she was a rather chaste and temperamental woman. She whimpers now. She would like her whimpers to rise up to heaven.

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