FINALS: stories and poems

UNIT 6

The Blank Page

Isak Dinesen

By the ancient city gate sat an old coffee-brown, black-veiled woman who made her living by telling stories.
She said:
"You want a tale, sweet lady and gentleman? Indeed I have told many tales, one more than a thousand, since that time when I first let young men tell me, myself, tales of a red rose, two smooth lily buds, and four silky, supple, deadly entwining snakes. It was my mother's mother, the black-eyed dancer, the often-embraced, who in the end -- wrinkled like a winter apple and crouching beneath the mercy of the veil -- took upon herself to teach me the art of story-telling. Her own mother's mother had taught it to her, and both were better storytellers than I am. But that, by now, is of no consequence, since to the people they and I have become one, and I am most highly honoured because I have told stories for two hundred years."
Now if she is well paid and in good spirits, she will go on.
"With my grandmother," she said, "I went through a hard school. 'Be loyal to the story,' the old hag would say to me. 'Be eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story.' 'Why must I be that, Grandmother?' I asked her. 'Am I to furnish you with reasons, baggage?' she cried. 'And you mean to be a story-teller! Why, you are to become a story-teller, and I shall give you my reasons! Hear then: Where the story-teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Whether a small snotty lass understands it or not.'
"Who then," she continues, "tells a finer tale than any of us? Silence does. And where does one read a deeper tale than upon the most perfectly printed page of the most precious book? Upon the blank page. When a royal and gallant pen, in the moment of its highest inspiration, has written down its tale with the rarest ink of all -- where, then, may one read a still deeper, sweeter, merrier and more cruel tale than that? Upon the blank page."
The old beldame for a while says nothing, only giggles a little and munches with her toothless mouth.
"We," she says at last, "the old women who tell stories, we know the story of the blank page. But we are somewhat averse to telling it, for it might well, among the uninitiated, weaken our own credit. All the same, I am going to make an exception with you, my sweet and pretty lady and gentleman of the generous hearts. I shall tell it to you."


High up in the blue mountains of Portugal there stands an old convent for sisters of the Carmelite order, which is an illustrious and austere order. In ancient times the convent was rich, the sisters were all noble ladies, and miracles took place there. But during the centuries highborn ladies grew less keen on fasting and prayer, the great dowries flowed into the treasury of the convent, and today the few portionless and humble sisters live in but one wing of the vast crumbling structure, which looks as if it longed to become one with the gray rock itself. Yet they are still a blithe and active sisterhood. They take much pleasure in their holy meditations, and will busy themselves joyfully with that one particular task which did once, long, long ago, obtain for the convent a unique and strange privilege: they grow the finest flax and manufacture the most exquisite linen of Portugal.
The long field below the convent is plowed with gentle-eyed, milk-white bullocks, and the seed is skillfully sown out by labour-hardened virginal hands with mold under the nails. At the time when the flax field flowers, the whole valley becomes air-blue, the very colour of the apron which the blessed virgin put on to go out and collect eggs within St. Anne's poultry yard, the moment before the Archangel Gabriel in mighty wing-strokes lowered himself onto the threshold of the house, and while high, high up a dove, neck-feathers raised and wings vibrating, stood like a small clear silver star in the sky. During this month the villagers many miles round raise their eyes to the flax field and ask one another: "Has the convent been lifted into heaven? Or have our good little sisters succeeded in pulling down heaven to them?"
Later in due course the flax is pulled, scutched and hackled; thereafter the delicate thread is spun, and the linen woven, and at the very end the fabric is laid out on the grass to bleach, and is watered time after time, until one may believe that snow has fallen round the convent walls. All this work is gone through with precision and piety and with such sprinklings and litanies as are the secret of the convent. For these reasons the linen, baled high on the backs of small gray donkeys and sent out through the convent gate, downwards and ever downwards to the towns, is as flower-white, smooth and dainty as was my own little foot when fourteen years old, I had washed it in the brook to go to a dance in the village.
Diligence, dear Master and Mistress, is a good thing, and religion is a good thing, but the very first germ of a story will come from some mystical place outside the story itself. Thus does the linen of the Convento Velho draw its true virtue from the fact that the very first linseed was brought home from the Holy Land itself by a crusader.
In the Bible, people who can read may learn about the lands of Lecha and Maresha, where flax is grown. I myself cannot read, and have never seen this book of which so much is spoken. But my grandmother's grandmother as a little girl was the pet of an old Jewish rabbi and the learning she received from him has been kept and passed on in our family. So you will read, in the book of Joshua, of how Achsah the daughter of Caleb lighted from her ass and cried unto her father: "Give me a blessing! For thou hast now given me land; give me also the blessing of springs of water!" And he gave her the upper springs and the nether springs. And in the fields of Lecha and Maresha lived, later on, the families of them that wrought the finest linen of all. Our Portuguese crusader, whose own ancestors had once been great linen weavers of Tomar, as he rode through these same fields was struck by the quality of the flax and so tied a bag of seeds to the pommel of his saddle.
From this circumstance originated the first privilege of the convent, which was to procure bridal sheets for all the young princesses of the royal house.
I will inform you, dear lady and gentleman, that in the country of Portugal in very old and noble families a venerable custom has been observed. On the morning after the wedding of a daughter of the house, and before the morning had yet been handed over, the Chamberlain or High Steward from a balcony of the palace would hang out the sheet of the night and would solemnly proclaim: Virginem eam tenemus -- "we declare her to have been a virgin." Such a sheet was never afterwards washed or again lain on.
This time-honoured custom was nowhere more strictly upheld than within the royal house itself, and it has there subsisted till within living memory.
Now for many hundred years the convent in the mountains, in appreciation of the excellent quality of the linen delivered, has held its second high privilege: that of receiving back that central piece of the snow-white sheet which bore witness to the honour of a royal bride.
In the tall main wing of the convent, which overlooks an immense landscape of hills and valleys, there is a long gallery with a black-and-white marble floor. On the walls of the gallery, side by side, hangs a long row of heavy, gilt frames, each of them adorned with a coroneted plate of pure gold, on which is engraved the name of a princess: Donna Christina, Donna Ines, Donna Jacintha Lenora, Donna Maria. And each of these frames encloses a square cut from a royal wedding sheet.
Within the faded markings of the canvases people of some imagination and sensibility may read all the signs of the zodiac: the Scales, the Scorpion, the Lion, the Twins. Or they may there find pictures from their own world of ideas: a rose, a heart, a sword -- or even a heart pierced through with a sword.
In days of old it would occur that a long, stately, richly coloured procession wound its way through the stone-gray mountain scenery, upwards to the convent. Princesses of Portugal, who were now queens or queen dowagers of foreign countries, Archduchesses, or Electresses, with their splendid retinue, proceeded here on a pilgrimage which was by nature. both sacred and secretly gay. From the flax field upwards the road rises steeply; the royal lady would have to descend from her coach to be carried this last bit of the way in a palanquin presented to the convent for the very same purpose.
Later on, up to our own day, it has come to pass -- as it to pass when a sheet of paper is being burnt, that after all other sparks have run along the edge and died away, one last clear little spark will appear and hurry along after them -- that a very old highborn spinster undertakes the journey to Convento Velho. She has once, a long long time ago, been playmate, friend and maid-of-honour to a young princess of Portugal. As she makes her way to the convent she looks round to see the view widen to all sides. Within the building a sister conducts her to the gallery and to the plate bearing the name of the princess she has once served, and there takes leave of her, aware of her wish to be alone.
Slowly, slowly a row of recollections passes through the small, venerable, skull-like head under its mantilla of black lace, and it nods to them in amicable recognition. The loyal friend and confidante looks back upon the young bride's elevated married life with the elected royal consort. She takes stock of happy events and disappointments -- coronations and jubilees, court intrigues and wars, the birth of heirs to the throne, the alliances of younger generations of princes and princesses, the rise or decline of dynasties. The old lady will remember how once, from the markings on the canvas, omens were drawn; now she will be able to compare the fulfillment to the omen, sighing a little and smiling a little. Each separate canvas with its coroneted name-plate has a story to tell, and each has been set up in loyalty to the story.
But in the midst of the long row there hangs a canvas which differs from the others. The frame of it is as fine and as heavy as any, and as proudly as any carries the golden plate with the royal crown. But on this one plate no name is inscribed, and the linen within the frame is snow-white from corner to comer, a blank page.
I beg of you, you good people who want to hear stories told: look at this page, and recognize the wisdom of my grandmother and of all old story-telling women!
For with what eternal and unswerving loyalty has not this canvas been inserted in the row! The story-tellers themselves before it draw their veils over their faces and are dumb. Because the royal papa and mama who owned this canvas to be framed and hung up, had they not had the tradition of loyalty in their blood, might have left it out.
It is in front of this piece of pure white linen that the old princesses of Portugal -- worldly wise, dutiful, long-suffering queens, wives and mothers -- and their noble old playmates, bridesmaids and maids-of-honour have most often stood still.
It is in front of the blank page that old and young nuns, with the Mother Abbess herself, sink into deepest thought.

Michael’s Dream

Mark Doty


Michael writes to tell me his dream:
I was helping Randy out of bed,
supporting him on one side
with another friend on the other,

and as we stood him up, he stepped out
of the body I was holding and became
a shining body, brilliant light
held in the form I first knew him in.

This is what I imagine will happen,
The spirit’s release. Michael,
When we support our friends,
One of us on either side, our arms

under the man or woman’s arms,
what is it we’re holding? Vessel,
shadow, hurrying light? All those years
I made love to a man without thinking

how little his body had to do with me;
now, diminished, he’s never been so plainly
himself – remote and unguarded,
an otherness I can’t know

the first thing about. I said,
You need to drink more water
or you’re going to turn into
an old dry leaf. And he said,

Maybe I want to be an old leaf.
In the dream Randy’s leaping into
the future, and still here; Michael’s holding him
and releasing at once. Just as Steve’s

holding Jerry, though he’s already gone,
Marie holding John, gone, Maggie holding
her John, gone, Carlos and Darren
holding another Michael, gone,



and I’m holding Wally, who’s going.
Where isn’t the question,
though we think it is;
we don’t even know where the living are,

in this raddled and unraveling ‘here.”
What is the body? Rain on a window,
a clear movement over whose gaze?
Husk, leaf, little boat of paper

and wood to mark the speed of the stream?
Randy and Jerry, Michael and Wally
And John: lucky we don’t have to know
what something is in order to hold it.


Fish Bones, From Salt Fish

Larisa Lai


After my supposed murder by the salt fish merchant, my mother grew morose and melancholy. I was her favourite daughter. She had never much cared for my brother, in spite of the fact that he was her only son. For, you see, he was not a child of her womb, but of a concubine whom my father took ten years after I was born, just as my mother’s eyes were beginning to show their first dark shadows, her hair, its first pale strands.
It was a good time for silk, and my father’s business, like that of many of his neighbours, was booming. At ten years of age, I already played a big part in the family business. My small, nimble hands were of the type deemed perfect for the work of unraveling cocoons. We were not so well off that we could easily afford a concubine, but my father was something of a braggart, always wanting more than his neighbours, always wanting to prove himself superior. He also often made a fool of himself. In drinking games, he would often drink to excess trying to prove how well he could hold his liquor. In gambling games, he took risks beyond the call of common sense, because he never wanted to seem to be losing. Had he been any other man, he would have landed us in the poor house before we even had a chance, but my father was blessed with incredible reserves of luck, and as a result, never came to any serious harm, regardless of the extent of his foolhardiness.
But this is a fairy tale, and of course, he was a kind man, my father, and generous. I only want you to understand what his flaws were so that you will understand later why things turned out as they did.
So at the end of particularly good season, having sold reels and reels of well-spun silk to the foreigners at a good price, he had enough money in his pockets to buy a concubine. A wiser man would have put the money away for harder times to come, but my father was not a wise man.
He took the money and asked my mother to buy him a concubine. He looked her right in the eye. Perhaps he noticed the wrinkles beginning to form around it, perhaps he noticed the dark melancholy shadow beneath, perhaps he did not. He asked her and she did not flinch or weep or accuse. She took the money and went to the city. She came back with a beautiful young girl, fourteen years old, fair as the full moon and so slender her body seemed to sway in the wind like the bamboo that made a green living fence around the perimeter of the village.
She also came back with a story about how people in the city were coming down with a terrible coughing disease where pieces of lung were known to have sometimes come up in the phlegm. “Bad city air,” said my mother, “nothing to worry about.”
The girl’s name was Heavenly Peace, but she was so lovely we just called her Heavenly for short. My mother was always gracious and kind to her. If she felt the weight of her own years or the slightest twinge of jealousy, she never said so, but treated Heavenly with the kind of benevolent indifference that tradition required of a well-mannered First Wife.
When Heavenly became pregnant, my mother graciously congratulated her. If she felt a little tightening around her heart, she mentioned it to no one, although she did switch to a more expensive face powder that came all the way from the barbaric lands of the foreign devils who had set up shop in the city. Her mother, retired from her professional life as a village midwife and living with her son, sent it to her at her request. And if, in the meantime, Heavenly started to look a little more pale than normal, if her constitution seemed a little weaker than it had been when she arrived, my mother was not going to be so ungracious as to mention it.
My father, being a foolish man, spent more time than ever with Heavenly. Perhaps he did pay my mother less attention than he had before. I still believe he loved her deeply, but she would not have been amiss to doubt it.
Heavenly went into labour in the middle of a typhoon. The bamboo growing around the perimeter of the village swayed wildly in the wind, whistling the whole time. The chickens clucked and fussed in the henhouse. Our roof shook. Heavenly and my mother began setting out buckets in the front yard to catch the rain and that was when the cramps started. There would be no fetching the village mid-wife that night. Fortunately, mother had assisted her mother enough as a child that she knew what to do. She chased everyone but me out of Heavenly’s room and sent my sister to boil water. Heavenly shrieked and screamed and coughed. She was not yet fifteen years old and her thin body was less suited to this purpose that it might have been later. I, personally, was terrified. I had never seen so much blood in my life. My mother remained calm and cool throughout the whole thing. She instructed Heavenly to breathe deeply and eased a screaming red thing from between Heavenly’s legs. The moment my brother had fully emerged, Heavenly closed her eyes and fell back. My mother’s nose twitched as though with a suppressed sneeze. “It’s a girl!” she shouted, uncertainly at first, and then again, clearly, “It’s a girl!”
What brought my mother to utter such a lie, I can only imagine. My mother was not an unkind or vindictive person. It must have been an impulse, perhaps one that she regretted later, who is to say if she won’t?
When Heavenly woke and asked to hold the baby, my mother passed him over. But the moment Heavenly received him in her arms, she began to cough. At first, my mother thought it was nothing, but then Heavenly coughed louder and more deeply. She coughed and she couldn’t stop coughing. Up from the very bottom of her lungs she horked the thickest, greenest, foulest-smelling phlegm. My mother snatched the baby back. “You’re tubercular,” she said. “Safer to bring baby up on formula.”
Heavenly died the following spring, two weeks after her fifteenth birthday.
_______

My father figured out my mother’s charade soon enough. He did nothing to put an end to it, but rather humoured her, and the child too, who saw nothing amiss. But I knew that he was a brother and not a sister. I had seen the little knob he had where I had none, and I knew what that meant, at least in the reductive way that children understand what gender is. I knew also that I was not to speak about it, and so I didn’t.
That’s why I say my father must have really loved my mother. Her charade clearly went against his personal interests. All men in those days wanted at least one son, and it didn’t matter who gave it to him. If he wanted her son and was willing to wait, and willing to take the chance that there would be none, he must have really loved her.
They got along much better after Heavenly died. My father gambled and drank less, according to my mother’s wishes. Our silk business prospered, and my brother, in his frilly dresses, grew into a sweet little girl.
After a time, my father came down with the terrible lung disease that was decimating children and old people and the occasional able-bodied man or woman with a ferocity that defied reason. When the day of my supposed murder by the salt fish merchant arrived, it was more than his weakened system could take.
_____

My brother was still a young child the year of my self-orchestrated murder. He had a slight build and wonderfully fair, pale skin like his mother. I remember people pinching his cheeks and commenting on it when we went to the market together. It always made me furious, being of the dark-skinned persuasion myself. If they didn’t think he was a girl, I might not have felt the nip of competition keenly as I did, but my knowing he was a fake made their compliments all the more maddening.
After I was gone, my brother took over many of my chores. Not the marketing – he was still too young for that. But he began to feed the chickens and chop vegetables and carry water.
One day shortly after his thirteenth birthday, he went to the river for water. He dipped his buckets in, one after the other. As he was hooking them to his pole, he saw flash of red out of the corner of his eye. When he looked more closely he saw a little fish with red fins and golden eyes not more than two inches long staring up at him from the bottom of one of the buckets. He took it home and dropped it into the fish pond by the entrance to his alleyway, and took the water into the house where our middle sister stood beside the stove chopping vegetables. She gave him a bowl of rice and told him to eat quickly and then go cute firewood. He ate half the bowl and stuffed the rest into his pockets. On his way to the woodpile, he stopped by the pond and sprinkled the rice on the spot where he had left the fish.
And so the days passed. My brother shared all of his meagre meals with the pretty fish and worked harder and grew thinner and paler than ever. In contrast, the fish got bigger and bigger. Its fins grew longer and redder. Its eyes grew more golden and bright. When my brother was sad, he would go to the side of the pond and call to the fish, and the fish would come to the bank and gaze at him from just beneath the water with its brilliant golden eyes.
If my mother watched him sometimes, she never let on. My brother looked so much like the dead concubine it was hard for my mother to truly love him as her own. Perhaps she felt odd about continuing to dress him in girls’ clothes, especially now that her husband was dead and there was no chance of another male heir. But she continued the charade, perhaps out of spite, perhaps out of habit. Besides, she and my brother were hardly close enough to talk freely about such intimate matters. And he looked so much like the concubine. But sometimes when she looked at my brother from a certain angle or in a certain mood, it seemed as though my father were peering out at her from behind the veil of Heavenly’s face. Then my mother would grow melancholy and reproachful, or else she would fly into a fury of frustration at having lost her husband so early, because of another woman who didn’t even want him for herself, but rather as carrion for death.
It was a strange relationship that developed between them. When he looked to her for love and affection, as a needy child will, she could not bear the sight of him. But when he was not conscious of her gaze, her eyes followed him like a greedy dog, jealously watching the concubine and waiting for my father’s ghost to show itself in the child’s mouth or eyebrows.
This was how she first noticed the fish. My brother often dawdled at the pond after finishing his day’s chores, and there he would lose himself in the fish’s golden eyes as he poured out his loneliness and confusion. It was those moments when our father’s genes seemed to manifest most fully. Through my brother’s eyes the old man seemed to gaze out with a sad kind of longing that my mother found particularly heart-wrenching. When she realized the object of that gaze was not her but some weird little fish, it was all she could do not to weep with jealousy and longing. She shook with emotion in her little hiding place in the mulberry hedge from which she had taken to spying on my brother. All those years of carefully practiced grace had finally gotten the better of her, and now jealousy and discontent leaked from her soul like a slow poison. To make matters worse, she had an ulcer.
One day when my brother was out cutting firewood, my mother went to the spot beside the pond where he usually waited for the fish. She sprinkled a little rice into the water. The fish didn’t come. She tried this on a number of occasions without and luck.
Determined to outdo the little fish, my mother went to the market. She bought yards and yards of Indian cotton, the kind of stuff of which the British were so fond. Out came the scissors, the brightly coloured threads, and needles sharp enough to poke your eye out. My mother cut and sewed, snipped and tucked, darted and hemmed until she held in her hands a perfect little Victorian maiden’s dress with all her anxiety and strange wishes sewn neatly and mercilessly into the seams.
Well! My brother was so shocked he nearly fell down when she gave it to him. “If you’re going to be a girl, you may as well be well-dressed,” said my mother. My brother, who had secret penchant for things Western, shimmied out of his pants and high-collared blouse and put the thing on. He sashayed to the well for water.
As soon as he was gone, my mother snatched up his old clothes and donned them herself. She went to the pond and called to the fish as she had seen my brother do. The fish came to the surface. It was more than three feet long and its bright scales shimmered under the water. It looked up at her with intelligent eyes. My mother drew a needle sharp lance from behind her back and speared the fish through the belly with a single thrust. She tossed it up onto the bank where I fell with a splat! The fish was dead.
She trussed it up and nonchalantly threw it over her shoulder. She took it to my sister and asked her to steam it. Such a heavenly aroma wafted out of the kitchen half an hour later. My sister was an excellent cook.
On his way back from the well, my brother stopped by the pond to show his dress to the little fish. He stood beside the pond and called to her. He called and called until his voice grew hoarse and a little deeper than usual. He called and he waited until my sister came looking for him. “Time to eat,” she said. “Fish.”

A look of horror flooded over my brother’s face.
My sister had set the table neatly, with lots of little vegetable dishes surrounding the big central platter. In the platter lay the fish, in a puddle of soy sauce and steaming juices, its eyes cooked white and its little body sprinkled decoratively with shredded ginger, green onions and dried banana flowers. My brother burst into girlish tears.
“What’s wrong?” said my mother. “You sick?”
“Where did you get the fish?” said my brother.
“Found it in the pond. Wasn’t doing us any good in there so I caught it and took it home. You like fish don’t you?”
My brother began to wail again and would not stop until long after mother and sister had devoured the fish, claimed it dense and succulent, cleaned up, and gone to bed. When the moon rose full and white, he tumbled into a troubled sleep and began to dream.
In the dream, he saw the fish again, wavering under water. “Take my bones and polish them,” said the fish, “Hide them. Whenever you want something, all you need to do is ask.”
My brother was not particularly superstitious by nature. He woke to the crow of the noisy rooster more angry than sad. In the night, his feelings toward my mother had turned from apologetic inadequacy to the fury of injustice. “No more Mr. Meek and Mild,” he swore, “From now on I must defend myself.” He polished the bones and hid them behind a loose brick in the wall. He turned his mind inward and began to plot his revenge.
Once, while he was out feeding the chickens, on the other side of the wall in which the bones were hidden, he found himself craving sweets. My brother had a sweet tooth, but his craving was seldom satisfied. My mother was frugal, and almost never brought such things into the house. And when she did, they were unlikely to be intended for my brother. After feeding the chickens, he went to the river for water. When he returned, out of breath, with buckets sloshing, he found a pot of black sesame pudding bubbling on the stove. He was sure it was the magic fishbones that had fulfilled his wish. He slopped some into a bowl, slurped it back joyously and washed the bowl clean just before his mother returned with a package of real French coffee and a box of date and nut candy. “Out of my way, mui mui,” said my mother. “Go help your sister sell eggs.”
The chickens had been laying furiously for the last week or so, as though theiry little avian gonads were spiraling out of control. Omelets, custard and egg drop soup: They couldn’t eat them fast enough, and so our sister had taken to selling them on the corner. My brother went out obediently as though to join her, but as soon as our mother had closed the door, he slipped around the side of the house and set up a few old crates by the kitchen window. From there, he clearly observed the arrival of the old go-between and the whispered deal-making between the two women. As soon as he got the gist of the conversation, my brother climbed off the boxes and ran to his sister, who still had fourteen eggs rolling shamelessly about on her red cloth. “Ma’s going to marry you to an ugly old man,” he told her. “The go-between’s in the house right now. All that’s left is for him to take a look at you in the new blue suit you’re making, and if he likes what he sees, then off you go.”
Mid-Autumn Festival arrived. People made or bought paper lanterns for their children, dress in their finest clothes and went down to the river to look at the moon and one another’s little packages of candlelight, softened and tinted by the many-coloured stuff of the lanterns. My sister and mother were planning to go down to the river. My mother told my brother to mind the house. “You’re so morose,” said my mother, “you won’t have a good time anyway. Why not stay at home and make sure we don’t get robbed?”
My brother protested, but his scene was hijacked by my sister, who claimed she couldn’t find the blue suit she had just finished making for the occasion. My mother flew into a panicked fury, and finally had to lend an old suit of her own to my sister, one that was just a little too worn, and on which the stitching and embroidery were less fine than the delicate lines and figures that had poured from my sister’s hands. They left the house late. My mother’s eyes were creased with worry and fury, her movements agitated. My sister followed meekly behind her, ashamed of her error and worried about the viewing which was to come. Let’s be gracious and just say that they left, feathers flying, looking less than their best.
As soon as they were gone, my brother retired to his room. He pulled the loose brick from the wall. The fish bones tumbled out, and after them, a little heap of blue fabric. This was a long time ago. Who knows how my sister’s blue suit got there? Perhaps, terrified of her impending fate, she had hidden the suit behind the brick with the intention of disappointing the ugly old man. Perhaps my brother, fed up with his daily persecution, had stolen the suit in revenge for all the slights he had borne at my mother’s hands. Perhaps the fish bones had something to do with it. What does it matter?
Point is, my brother had the suit. He was a sucker for good fabric. The oily softness of the silk and the fineness of our sister’s stitching sent him into raptures. He slipped out of his work clothes and into the liquid smoothness of the suit. He braided and pinned his hair. If, on account of his advanced adolescence, his skin was less clear than it had been in earlier years, what of it? He scooped up the fish bones and returned them to their place in the crevice brushing his fingers against soft as he did so. He reached into the hole and drew out a pair of the daintiest embroidered shoes. These he placed on his wondrously tiny feet, and, stopping to buy a lantern from a paper artisan selling them on the corner, made his way down to the river.
Well! My mother and sister noticed him right away, dressed as he was in my sister’s beautiful suit. But try as they might to approach and scold him, they seemed unable to push through the crowds without losing sight of him. He recognized the young man his mother had selected for my sister – not an ugly old codger at all, but the handsome son of a well-to-do merchant family; a step up in the world, some might say. My brother smiled at the man demurely and then cast his eyes quickly downward. The man looked pleased. He tried to approach more closely, but my brother eluded him as deftly as he had my mother and sister.
He couldn’t avoid both parties the whole night. There arrived an unfortunate moment just around midnight when he found himself standing between them on the path. Tall river weeds blocked his way to the water and to the village on the other side of the path. Both parties approached him, each with its own eager reasons. My brother panicked. He leapt into the river weeds in the direction, fortunately, of the village, accidentally tripping over a rock and losing a dainty shoe on his way up. He didn’t stop to retrieve it. He dashed through the reeds and bushes and hurled along the embankments between the rice paddies, using mulberry bushes for cover as much as he could. He scrambled into the house, squirmed out of my sister’s suit, stuffed it back into the chink in the wall and replaced the brick. He put on the tattered suit he had been wearing earlier that day, went down to the kitchen, settled into a chair beside the stove and pretended to sleep.
When my mother and sister came home, there he was fast asleep beside the stove, looking as though he had never left. They searched the house for the suit and found nothing. No sign of a single, dainty slipped either. Puzzled and irritated, they went to bed.
The following morning, my brother’s tired eyes and rough, pimply skin made doubt further that they had actually seen him the night before. While they could have easily fed each other’s certainty about what they had seen, this time they only reinforced each other’s doubt.
“I don’t think it was him we saw,” said one.
“I thought I did,” said the other, “but now I’m not so sure.”
_____

Later in the afternoon there was a knock on the door. Two of the merchant’s servants appeared, looking sheepishly apologetic. “Sorry to bother you, auntie,” they said. “Yours is the only house in the village we haven’t searched. The merchant’s son has fallen in love with the owner of this slipper.” One of them drew the impossibly tiny shoe from his pocket.
“Hmmph!” said my mother. “Thinks he can get out of his contract with me so easily, does he?! I didn’t bring this girl up to be humiliated so! What do you think she is, a lump of cow dung to be discarded at will?!” She pushed my sister forward.
“If the shoe fits…” one of the merchant’s servants said, and then instantly regretted the double entendre. The other held out the shoe.
My sister strained and pushed, squeezed and shoved, but to no avail. There was no way her big flat peasant foot was going to fit into that shoe!
“We know you have another daughter,” said one of the servants. “Your neighbour told us.”
“There’s no way the shoe will fit her clumsy foot,” said my mother.
But of course she was wrong. Remember, my brother was the child of a very shapely concubine. Not only did the shoe fit his foot, but he drew another out of his pocket to match it. The servants swept him up and lowered him gently into a red sedan chaired. They put a veil over his pimply face, then hoisted the chair into the air and carted him away.
What was my brother intending? Did he actually plan to marry the merchant’s son? Just how liberated you think China was in those days? I hate to say it, but my brother was a man’s man after all, or should I be more clear? A manly man, a he-man, a het-man. This might be a fairy tale, but my brother was no fairy. The minute he was presented to the merchant’s son, he dropped his silken pants and shook a prodigious prong in his admirer’s face. Then he turned, shed the rest of his clothes, wiggled his bare, pimply butt at his would-be in-laws, and took off in the direction of his mother’s house. On her doorstep he announced the arrival of his esteemed surname’s next patriarch. Buck naked and too obviously a man, he stepped over the threshold and refused to don women’s clothes ever again.
You’d think someone who had lived the greater part of their life as a woman would have more sympathy toward the gentler sex. Not a chance! “Nothing gentle about them,” said my brother. From then on he laid down the law and ruled the house with and iron fist.


The River Merchant’s Wife

Li Po


While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

UNIT 7

UNIT 7


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
UNIT 7
Dividing Lines: The Ideology of Difference

Telephone Conversation

by Wole Soyinka




The price seemed reasonable, location

Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived

Off premises. Nothing remained

But self-confession. "Madam," I warned,

"I hate a wasted journey--I am African."

Silence. Silenced transmission of

Pressurized good-breeding. Voice, when it came,

Lipstick coated, long gold-rolled

Cigarette-holder pipped. Caught I was foully.

"HOW DARK?" . . . I had not misheard . . . "ARE YOU LIGHT

OR VERY DARK?" Button B, Button A.* Stench

Of rancid breath of public hide-and-speak.

Red booth. Red pillar box. Red double-tiered

Omnibus squelching tar. It was real! Shamed

By ill-mannered silence, surrender

Pushed dumbfounded to beg simplification.

Considerate she was, varying the emphasis--

"ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?" Revelation came.

"You mean--like plain or milk chocolate?"

Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light

Impersonality. Rapidly, wave-length adjusted,

I chose. "West African sepia"--and as afterthought,

"Down in my passport." Silence for spectroscopic

Flight of fancy, till truthfulness clanged her accent

Hard on the mouthpiece. "WHAT'S THAT?" conceding

"DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT IS." "Like brunette."

"THAT'S DARK, ISN'T IT?" "Not altogether.

Facially, I am brunette, but, madam, you should see

The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet

Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused--

Foolishly, madam--by sitting down, has turned

My bottom raven black--One moment, madam!"--sensing

Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap

About my ears--"Madam," I pleaded, "wouldn't you rather

See for yourself?"

At the Portagee's
Alex La Guma




"You can have the one in the green," Banjo said.

"She's got pimples."

"But she's got most knobs, too. Don't I say?"

"Well, all right, then."

"You better talk to them when we go over," Banjo reckoned.

"you talk to them."

"What's the matter with you?" I asked. "Haven't you picked up a goose yet?"

"You talk to them, man."

We were sitting at a table in this cafe. Banjo had just finished a plate of steak and chips, and I had an egg roll. Now we were finishing the coffee. There were other people in the cafe, too, and the tow girls sat opposite each other at a table in one of the booths down the side of the room. There were empty Coca Cola bottles on the table between them, and one of the girls was looking at herself in a small mirror. The one in green.

There was a smell of cooking in the room, you know, oil and fried bacon and boiled vegetables and coffee. The ceiling was hung with streamers of fly popper.

"What are you going to say to them?" Banjo asked.

"I don't know. What must I say?"

"Ask them if they'd like a cold drink," Banjo reckoned.

"They just had coke," I told him, looking across at the girls.

"You think we'll strike luck?"

"I don't know! You think every goose is going to give you that?"

"Don't you want?" he grinned.

While I was thinking of how to go about it, a man came into the cafe. He was thin and dirty and wore an old navy-blue suit that was shiny with wear and grease. His face was covered with a two-day beard. He hesitated for a moment, just aside the doorway, and then came over to us. Banjo was watching the girls.

When the man came up he was just like this: "Say, old pal, spare a sixpence for a bite, man" He looked tired and his eyes were bloodshot, the eyelids rimmed with red. The cuffs of his jacket were torn and the threads dangled over his wrists.

"Who you bumming from?" Banjo asked, looking up. "From whom do you bum?"

"Leave him alone," I said. "What's a sixpence?" I felt in my pockets and found a sixpence among my change and handed it to the man.

He said, "Thanks, old pal," not looking at Banjo. "God bless you, old pal," He nodded at me and then went to another table and sat down.

"You rich" Banjo reckoned to me. "Lord Bleary Muck."

"Ach, never mind, man."

We looked at the girls again. One of them looked our way and I smiled at her. She looked away and said something to her friend. The other girl looked across at us.

"There's our chance," Banjo muttered, trying to look as if he wasn't interested.

Some people brushed past our table on their way out of the cafe. Outside the sun was going down. The man in the navy-blue suit sat stiffly at his table waiting to be served.

"Come on," Banjo pleaded. "Let's go over man."

"Okay," I said. "Okay."

I got up and he did the same and went over to the girls. Banjo kept behind me, and I could hear my heart beating with embarrassment. The girl's didn't look at us.

"Hello," I said. "Can we sit here?"

They kept looking away, but smiled faintly. The one in the green was watching the other, and this one said, "Well, it's not our cafe, and there's no reserved seats."

"Thanks miss."

I winked at Banjo and slipped beside the girl in the green dress and sat down beside her friend.

"You like a cold drink?" Banjo asked.

They looked at each other again and the girl next to Banjo said, "well, we just had some cokes."

"You can have another," I said.

"Do you want?" she asked the one in the green.

"Alright"

"You get them," I told Banjo.

"Okay."

While Banjo was getting the drinks over at the counter I told the girls our names. The one in the green was Hilda, and her friend was Dolores.

"That's a nice name," I said to the other one called Dolores. "Spanish mos."

When Banjo came back with the bottles of mineral water I told him, "This is Hilda and Dolores."

"That's fine," he reckoned and smiled at them. "You can call me Banjo."

"His name is Edward Isaacs," I told them. "But we just call him Banjo."

"Does he play the banjo?" Hilda asked.

"I never heard him yet," I replied, laughing at them. "He can play the fool all right."

We sipped the drinks through the straws. While we were talking,

I heard somebody saying, "You can't get a sixpence food here, you fool," and it was the fat Portagee who owned the cafe talking at the tired-looking man in the navy-blue suit. The Portagee was standing by his table and looking across. He was very fat and wearing a greasy apron around his belly, and his face was red and sweaty. The waiter who worked their stood nearby.

The man in the tattered navy-blue suit looked at the Portagee and said clearly, "I only wanted a sixpence fish."

"No sixpence fish." the Portagee said. "You better get out."

He reached out to take the man by the shoulder, but the man moved back in his chair and said, "Don't touch me, I have done nothing wrong."

"Get out loafer."

"All right, man," the man said and got up. "There's no need to get angry. I'' go." He spoke with contempt, looking at the Portagee and he turned about and walked out of the cafe, holding himself straight. Some people in the place laughed.

"There goes your sixpence," Banjo said.

"The poor man," Hilda said. "That Greek could have but given him a sixpence fish."

Banjo began to narrate: "I heard of a juba that went to a posh cafe in town but he never bought anything. He was one of those cheap johns, see? He took his own sandwiches with him, and when the waiter come round he ask for a glass of water. Then when the waiter comes back with the water, this juba look around and says, "And why isn't the band playing?"

They didn't smile or say anything and Banjo grinned at me. Then he asked, "You want to hear the juke-box?"

"Yes," Dolores said. "Play beyond the reef. They got the record in the machine."

"Okay"

Banjo got up again and went over the big juke-box and shoved a sixpence into the slot. The record dropped and the arm swung onto it, and we were listening to Bing.

"He sings real awake," Hilda said, giggling a little.

"I like Tony Martin," Banjo reckoned.

We didn't say anything for awhile, listening to the voice from the juke-box.....where the sea is dark and cold...... shoving past the other sounds in the cafe. Banjo was singing, too, softly, trying to sound like Crosby, with the bub-bub-bub-boos thrown in. I put a hand under the table on Hilda's thigh. She didn't move or say anything and i kept my hand there, feeling the long, smooth, curve flesh under the dress.

"You girls doing anything tonight?" I asked.

"I don't think so," Hilda reckoned, looking at Dolores for confirmation.

"No," the girl called Dolores said. She had a dark, smooth skin and her lipstick was smeared a little. There were small plastic flowers attached to the lobes of her ears and her hair was black and shiny with oil.

"Let's go to the Emperor," Banjo said.

"What's playing?" Dolores asked.

“An Alan Ladd piece," Banjo said. "Real awake. You want to go?"

"Okay. But we don't want you spend your money on us."

Banjo laughed and said, "Don't worry about us. Were in the chips. Don't I say pal?"

"You telling me," I said.

"Where are you working?" Hilda asked.

"He works in a factory." I told her. "I'm a messenger."

"My father is also a messenger," Hilda said. "He worked forty years for the firm. Now he's head messenger. Last year they gave him a silver tray with his name out on it, and 'For service-some-thing."

"For services rendered." I said.

"You clever," Hilda said smiling at me.

"He went to high school," Banjo told her.

"My ma put the tray on the sideboard," Hilda said.

"Well," Dolores announced, "We got to go home and get ourselves right for the bio."

"Where are we going to get you?" Banjo asked.

"Get us outside the Emperor. Half past-seven."

"I think that's okay."

"We better go now," Hilda said.

I gave her thigh a squeeze to take the place of a kiss and we all got up. Dolores said thanks for the cold drinks and we went to the door of the cafe with them. Hilda was tall and not too bad, and the pimples didn't matter much. The fat Portagee was behind the counter doing something, and he did not look up as we went out.



Swaddling Clothes

Yukio Mishima

He was always busy, Toshiko's husband. Even tonight he had to dash off to an appointment, leaving her to go home alone by taxi. But what else could a woman expect when she married an actor - an attractive one? No doubt she has been foolish to hope that he would spend the evening with her. And yet she must have known how she dreaded going back to their house, unhomely with his Western-style furniture and with the bloodstains still showing on the floor.

Toshiko had been oversensitive since girlhood: that was her nature. As the result of constant worrying, she never put on weight, and now, an adult woman, she looked more then a transparent picture than a creature of flesh and blood. Her delicacy of spirit was evident to her most casual acquaintance.

Earlier that evening, when she joined her husband at a night club, she had been shocked to find him entertaining with an account of “the incident.” Sitting there in his American-style suit, puffing at a cigarette he had seemed to her almost a stranger.

“It's a fantastic story,” he was saying, gesturing flamboyantly as if in an attempt to outweigh the attractions of the dance band.

“Here this new nurse for our baby arrives from the employment agency, and the very first thing I noticed about her was her stomach. It's enormous - as if she had a pillow stuck under her kimono! No wonder, I thought, for I soon saw that she could eat more than the rest of us put together. She polished off the content of our rice bin like that…” He snapped his fingers. “Gastric dilation - that's how she explained her - and her appetite. Well, the day before yesterday we heard groans and moans coming from the nursery. We rushed in and found her squatting on the floor, holding her stomach in her two hands, and moaning like a cow. Next to her baby lies his cot, scared out of his wits and crying at the top of his lings. A pretty scene, I can tell you!”

“So the cat was out of the bag?” suggested one of her friends, a film actor like Toshiko's husband.

“Indeed it was! And it gave me the shock of my life. You see, I'd completely swallow that whole story about 'gastric dilation.' Well, I didn't waste any time. I rescued our good rug from the floor and spread a blanket for her to lie on. The whole time the girl was yelling like a stuck pig. By the time the doctor from the maternity clinic arrived, the baby had already been born. But our sitting room was a pretty shambles!”

“Oh, that I'm sure of!” said another of their friends, and the whole company burst into laughter.

Toshiko was dumbfounded to hear her husband discussing the horrifying happening as though it were no more than an amusing incident which they chanced to have witnessed. She shut her eyes for a moment and all at once she saw the new born baby lying before her: on the parquet floor the infant lay, and his frail body was wrapped in bloodstained newspapers.

Toshiko was sure that the doctor had done the whole thing out of spite. As if to emphasize his scorn for his mother who had given birth to a bastard under such sordid conditions, he had told his assistants to wrap her baby in some loose newspapers, rather that proper swaddling. This callous treatment of the new born baby had offended Toshiko. Overcoming her disgust at the entire scene, she had fetched a brand-new flannel from her cupboard and, having swaddled the baby in it, had laid him carefully in an armchair.

This had all taken place in the evening after her husband had left the house. Toshiko had told him nothing of it, fearing that he would think her over soft, over sentimental; yet the scene had engraved itself deeply in her mind. Tonight she eats quietly thinking back on it, while the jazz orchestra brayed and her husband chatted cheerfully with his friends. She knew that she would never forget the sight of the baby, wrapped in stained newspaper and lying on the floor - it was a scene fit for a butcher shop. Toshiko, whose own life has been spent in a solid comfort, poignantly felt the wretchedness of the illegitimate baby.

I am the only person to have witnessed its shame, the though occurred to her. The mother never saw her child lying there in its newspaper wrappings, and the baby of course didn't know. I alone should preserve that terrible scene in my memory. When the baby grows up and wants to find out about his birth, there will be no one to tell him, so long as I preserve silence. How strange that I should have this feeling of guilt! After all, it was I who took him up from the floor, swathed him properly in flannel, and laid him down to sleep in the armchair.

They left the night club and Toshiko stepped into the taxi that her husband has called for her. “Take this lady to Ushigome,” he told the driver and shut the door from the outside. Toshiko gazed through the window at her husband's smiling face and noticed his strong, white teeth. Then she leaned back on her seat, oppressed by the knowledge that their life together was in some way too easy, too painless. It would have been difficult for her to put her thoughts into words. Through the rear window of the mirror of the taxi she took a last look at her husband. He was striding along the street toward his Nash car, and soon the back of his rather garish tweed coat had blended with the figures of the passers-by.

The taxi drove off, passed down the street dotted with bars and then by a theatre, in front of which the throngs of the people jostled each other on the pavement. Although the performance had only just ended, the lights had already been turned out and in the half-dark outside it was depressingly obvious that the cherry blossoms decorating the front of the theatre were merely scraps of white paper.

Even if that baby should grow old of ignorance of the secret of his birth, he can never become a respectable citizen, reflected Toshiko, pursuing the same trail of thoughts. Those soiled newspapers swaddling clothes will be the symbol of his entire life. But why should I keep worrying about him so much? Is it because I feel uneasy about the future of my own child? Sat twenty years from now, when our boy will have grown to a fine, carefully educated young man, one day by a quirk of fate he meets that other boy, who then will also turn twenty. And say that the other boy, who has been sin against, savagely stabs him with a knife.

It was a warm, overcast April night, but thoughts of the future made Toshiko feel cold and miserable. She shivered on the back seat of the car.

No, when the time comes I shall take my son's pace, she told herself suddenly Twenty years from now I shall be forty-three. I shall go to that young man and tell him straight out about everything - about his newspaper swaddling clothes, and about I went and wrapped him in flannel.

The taxi ran along the dark wide road that was boarded by the park and the Imperial palace moat. In the distance Toshiko noticed the pinprick of light which cam from the blocks of tall office buildings.

Twenty years from now, that child will be in utter misery - he will be living a desolate, hopeless, poverty-stricken existence - a lonely rat. What else could happen to a baby who had such a birth? He'll be wondering through the streets by himself, loathing his mother.

No doubt Toshiko drive a certain satisfaction from her somber thoughts: she tortured herself with them without cease. The taxi approached Hanzomon and drove past the compound of the British Embassy. At that point the famous rows of cherry trees were spread out before Toshiko in all their purity. On the spur of the moment, she decided to go and smell view the blossoms by herself in the dark night. It was a strange decision for a timid and unadventurous woman, but then she was in a strange state of mind and she dreaded the return home. That evening all sorts of unsettling fancies had burst open in her mind.

She crossed the wide street - a slim, solitary figure in the darkness. As a rule when she walked in the traffic, Toshiko used to cling fearfully to her companion, but tonight she darted alone in the cars and a moment later had reached the long narrow park that borders the palace moat. Chidorigafuchi, it is called - the Abyss of the Thousand Birds.

Tonight, the whole park had become a grove of blossoming cherry trees. Under the calm cloudy sky, the blossoms formed a mass of solid whiteness. The paper lanterns that hung from the wires between the trees had been put out; in their place electric light bulbs, red, yellow, and green, shone dully beneath the blossoms. It was well past ten o'clock and most of the flower-viewers had gone home. As the occasional passers-by strolled through the park, they would automatically kick aside the empty bottles and crush the waste paper beneath their feet.

Newspapers, thought Toshiko, her mind going back again to those happenings. Bloodstained newspapers. If a man was ever to hear of that piteous birth and know that it was he who had lain there, it would ruin his entire life. To think that I, a perfect stranger, should from now on had to keep such a secret - the secret of a man's whole existence.

Lost in these thoughts, Toshiko walked on through the park. Most of the people staying there were quiet couple; no one paid her any attention. She noticed two people sitting on a stone bench beside the moat, not looking at the blossoms, but gazing silently at the water. Pitch black it was, and swathed in heavy shadows. Beyond the moat, the somber forest of the Imperial palace blocked her view. The trees reached to form a dark mass against the sky. Toshiko walked slowly along the path beneath the blossoms hanging heavily overhead.

On a stone bench, slightly apart from the others, she noticed a pale object - not, as she had first imagined, a pile of cherry blossoms, nor a garment forgotten by one of the visitors to the park. Only when she came closer did she see that it was a human form lying on the bench. Was it, she wondered, one of those miserable drunks often to be seen sleeping in public places? Obviously not, for the body had been systematically covered with newspapers, and it was the whiteness of those papers that had attracted Toshiko's attention. Standing by the bench, she gazed at the sleeping figure.

It was a man in a brown jersey, who lay there curled up on layers of newspapers, other newspapers covering him. No doubt this has become her normal night now that spring had arrived. Toshiko gazed down at the man's dirty, unkempt hair, which in places had become hopelessly matted. As she observes the sleeping figure in its newspapers, she was inevitably reminded of the baby who had lain on the floor in its wretched, swaddling clothes. The shoulder of the man's jersey rose and fell in the darkness in time with his breathing.

It seemed to Toshiko that all her fears and premonitions had suddenly taken concrete form. In the darkness, the man's pale forehead stood out, and it was a young forehead, though carved with the wrinkles of long poverty and hardship. His khaki trousers had been slightly pulled up; on his sock less feet he wore a pair of battered gym shoes. She could not see her face and suddenly had an overmastering desire to get one glimpse of it.

She went to the head of the head and looked down. The man's head was half-buried in his arms, but Toshiko could see that he was surprisingly young. She noticed the thick eyebrows and the fine bridge of her nose. His slightly open mouth was alive with youth.

But Toshiko had approached too close. In the silent night, the newspaper bedding rustled, and abruptly the man opened his eyes. Seeing the young woman standing directly beside him, he raised himself with a jerk, and his eyes lit up. A second later, a powerful hand reached out and seized Toshiko by her slender wrist.

She did not feel in the least afraid and made no effort to free herself. In a flash, the thought had struck her, ah, so the twenty years have already gone by! The forest of the Imperial Palace was pitch dark and utterly silent.




Nightsong: City

Dennis Brutus


Sleep well, my love, sleep well:

The harbor lights glaze over restless docks,

Police cars cockroach through the tunnel streets

From the shanties creaking iron-sheets

Violence like a bug-infested is tossed

And fear is immanent as sound in the wind-swung bell

The long day's anger pants from sand and rocks;

But for this breathing night at least,

My land, my love, sleep well.

The sound begin again;

The siren in the night

The thunder at the door

The shriek of nerves in pain.

Then the keening crescendo

Of faces split by pain

The wordless, endless wail

Only the unfree know.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
UNIT 8

Chignon

Chi Chun
When Mother was young, she would weave her tresses in to a long thick braid. During the day she wound it in to a shell-like spiral and piled it high on the back of her head. Evenings she undid it and let it hang down her back. When I slept I would snuggle up close to Mother's shoulder and playfully wrap my fingers around the tip of her braid. My nose was continuously assailed by whiffs of "Twin Sister" hair oil mingled with the smell of her hair. Though the odor was rather unpleasant, it was part of the security I felt in lying by Mother's side, and I would fall quickly off to sleep.

Once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, Mother would thoroughly wash her hair. According to rural custom, hair could never be washed on ordinary days as the dirty water would flow down to where the king of the underworld would store it up to make one drink after death. Only if the hair was washed on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month could the dirty water pass harmlessly out to the Eastern Sea.

So on that day, all the women in the village let their hair hang loose to dry over their shoulders. Some of the women with flowering hair were as beautiful as vineyard fairies, others as hideous as monsters. Take my fifth uncle's wife for example-a squat, withered old hag. On her nearly-bald head she used black ash to draw in square hairline, and then painted her scalp pitch black. Thus when shampooing her hair, the charcoal was completely washed away, and out shone the half-bald, shiny crown of her head, fringed with thin wisps of hair fluttering down her back. She would hobble to and fro helping my mother fix dinner. I never dared glance her way.

But Mother's raven hair was like a length of satin falling over her shoulders. When a breeze blew, locks of shorter hair would sometimes sweep against her soft white cheeks. She would squint, gather the hair in her hand, and smooth it back, but soon another puff of wind would pass by. Mother was near-sighted, and when she narrowed her eyes in a squint, she was remarkably beautiful. I thought, if only Father were at home to see Mother's glossy black hair, he certainly would go out and buy a pair of sparkling diamond hair clips for her to wear. Mother probably would have worn them a while, then, embarrassed, have taken them out. That pair of diamond clips would then become part of my headdress when I played bride.

Father returned home soon afterward, bringing not the diamond clips, but a concubine. Her skin was white and delicate, her head of soft cloud-like hair even blacker, shinier than Mother's. The hair on her temples seemed like folded cicada wings half-concealing her ears. Her hair, brushed back and knotted in a horizontal "S" chignon, covered the back of her head like a huge bat. She presented Mother with a pair of emerald earrings, but Mother just let me play with them, though. I thought she was probably saving them because they were too nice.

After the family moved to Hangchow, Mother didn't have to work in the kitchen anymore. Frequently Father would want her to come out and entertain guests. Her sever hairstyle really seemed out of place, so Father insisted that she change. Mother asked her friend Aunt Chang to style an "Abalone Fish" for her. At that time, the "Abalone Fish" was the style old ladies wore. Mother had just turned thirty, yet she wanted to look like an old lady. When the concubine saw it, she would only smirk, while Father would constantly wrinkle his brow. Once when we were alone, I quietly implored, "Mother, why don't you also do your hair into an 'S' twist and wear the emerald earrings that Auntie gave you?" Mother replied solemnly, "Your mother is a country woman, unsuited for that kind of modern fashion. How can I wear such fancy earrings?"

When "Auntie" washed her hair, she would never select the seventh day or the seventh lunar month. Within one month she washed her hair many times. After washing, a maidservant standing to one side would lightly swing a large pink feather fan to and fro. Her soft hair would float out making me feel light and dizzy. Father would sit on a sandalwood lounge chair puffing away on his water pipe. He often turned around to look at her and his eyes sparkled with laughter. "Auntie" dressed her hair with "Three Flowers" oil, and the perfume floated in all directions. Then she sat straight up facing the mirror, and entwined a glossy "S" chignon around her head. I stood to one side, entranced. She handed me a bottle of the "Three Flower" oil and asked me to take it to Mother. But Mother just put it in the back of the closet saying, "The smell of this new hair oil turns my stomach."

Mother couldn't always trouble Aunt Chang, so she styled a taut “Abalone Fish" herself. It turned out about the same as her first twist. Father didn't like it; even I thought it was awful.

At that time, "Auntie" had already hired a Mrs. Liu to dress her hair. Mrs. Liu wore a huge red bamboo pin in her hair and puffed and panted as her large duck feet carried her short plump body along. She came every morning at ten to fashion all different kinds of coiffures for "Auntie"-the "Phoenix," "Feather Fan," "Entwined Heart Twist," "Shallow Tail," etc. She was always changing the style. The coiffures accentuated "Auntie's" delicate skin and willowy waist, which more and more drew delightful smiles from Father. Mrs. Liu advised Mother, "Madam, why don't you dress your hair a little more fashionably?" But Mother, shaking her head, pursed her thick lips, and walked away without saying a word.

Soon afterward Aunt Chang brought a regular hair dresser, a Mrs. Chen, to Mother. She was older than Mrs. Liu, and had a huge flat yellowish face with two protruding shiny gold teeth. At a glance one could tell she was the kind of woman who liked to gossip. She would ramble on about people from old Mr. Chao's elder daughter-in-law down to General Li's third concubine, all while dressing Mother's hair. Mother sat wilted on her chair, not uttering a single word, but I listened with great relish. Sometimes Mrs. Liu and Mrs. Chen came together. Mother and the concubine would sit back to back in front of the breeze way and have their hair dressed. One could hear "Auntie" and Mrs. Liu talking and laughing; on our side. Mother just sat resting with her eyes closed. Mrs. Chen brushed and combed with less and less vigor, and soon quit altogether. I distinctly heard her tell Mrs. Liu, "This antique of a country hick-she still wants her hair combed and dressed." I was so angry that I cried, but didn't dare tell Mother.

From then on, I stood on a low stool and brushed Mother's hair into the simplest "Abalone Fish." I would stand on tiptoe and watch Mother in the mirror. Her face was already not as plump and radiant as when we lived in the country and she hurried about in the kitchen. Her eyes fixed on the mirror, she gazed at herself absent-mindedly, never again squinting and smiling. I gather Mother's hair a lock at a time and brushed, but I already knew that one little yellow willow comb couldn't brush away Mother's heartsickness-because from the other side of the breezeway came floating across the occasional tinkling sound of Father's and "Auntie's" laughter.

After I grew up I left home to pursue my studies. When I returned home for summer and winter vacations, I would sometimes dress Mother's hair. I gathered her hair together in the palm of my hand and felt it becoming sparser and sparser. I remembered back in my childhood when on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month I saw Mother's soft raven tresses flowing over her shoulders, her face filled with joy, and I couldn't help but feel heartbroken. When Mother saw me return home, her distressed look occasionally gave way to smiles. No matter what, the happiest time was when Mother and daughter were together.

When I was studying in Shanghai, Mother wrote to say she had rheumatism and couldn't lift her arms. Even the simplest twist came out all wrong so she just cut her sparse locks off. I clutched her letter in my hands, and as I sat bathed in desolate moonlight beside the dormitory window, I cried in loneliness. The late autumn night breeze blew over me and I felt cold. I draped the soft sweater that Mother had knit for me over my shoulders and warmth crept over me from head to toe. But Mother was old now; I couldn't always be at her side. She has cut off her thinning hair, but how could she trim away a heart full of sorrows?

Soon afterward, "Auntie" came to Shanghai on business and brought me a picture of Mother, I hadn't seen her for three years-her hair had already turned silvery white. Saddened, I stared dumbly at the picture, yet had no way of pouring out my feelings to "Auntie," who stood before me. Almost as if sympathizing with my thoughts of Mother, she rambled on and on about Mother's present condition, saying her heart was weak and she was troubled again with rheumatism, so she was not as strong as before. I bowed my head and listened in silence, thinking that it was she who had made my mother unhappy all her life. But I didn't hate her anymore, not even a little bit, because since Father's death, Mother and "Auntie" had unpredictably become friends in their mutual suffering. Mother had stopped thing her long ago.

I looked at her closely. She wore a gray padded cloth gown, with a white flower tucked in her hair. Her nape no longer was draped with the rich and versatile "Phoenix" or "Entwined Heart" twists of days past, but was covered by a very simple "Banana Roll." She didn't apply makeup, and appeared sad and lonely. I couldn't help feeling unlimited pity for her, because she wasn't a woman like Mother, contenting herself with a tranquil life. Having followed Father close to twenty years, she had enjoyed honor and wealth, but once her support was gone, her feeling of emptiness and loss was even greater than Mother's.

After coming to Taiwan, "Auntie" became my only relative, and we lived together for many years. In the breezeway of our Japanese-style house I watched her sit by the window brushing her hair. She occasionally pounded her shoulder blade with her fist saying, "My hands are really stiff. I'm truly old now." Old-she too was old. Her black hair, like a silken cloud in those days, had now gradually thinned out, only a wisp remained, and that was speckled with gray. I remembered the days of their rivalry in Hang chow, when she and Mother sat back to back in the corridor, having their hair coiffure, not exchanging a word. In a flash all that was past. In the human world, what then is love and hate? Old decrepit "Auntie" had finally started on a vague journey in an unknown direction. Her life at this time was lonelier than anyone else's.

Startled, I stared at her, and remembering her lovely horizontal "S" chignon, said, "Let me brush it into a new style, all right?" But she gave a nervous little laugh saying, "What do I still want to wear fancy styles for? That's for you young people."

Can I stay forever young? What she had said is already more than ten years past. I'm far from being young anymore, already callous and wooden toward love, hate, greed, and foolishness in this world. The days with Mother slip farther and farther behind me. "Auntie's ashes," too, are deposited in a lonely temple somewhere. What, after all, is eternal in this world, and what is worth being serious about?



Ah Mah

Shirley Geok-Lin Lim


Grandmother was smaller than

Me at eight. Had she

Been child forever?

Helpless, hopeless, chin sharp

As a knuckle, fan face

Hardly half-opened, not a scrap

Of fat anywhere: she tottered

In black silk, leaning on

Handmaids on two tortured

Fins. At sixty, his sons all

Married, grandfather bought her.

Soochow flower song girl.

Every bone in her feet

Had been broken, bound tighter

Than any neighbor’s sweet

Daughter’s. ten toes and instep

Curled inwards, yellow petals

Of chrysanthemum, wrapped

In gold cloth. he bought the young

Face, small knobby breasts

He swore he’d not dress in sarong

Of maternity. Each night

He held her feet in his palms

Like lotus in the tight

Hollow of celestial lakes.

In his calloused flesh, her

Weightless soles, cool and slack.

Clenched in his stranger’s lever.



Mexican Masks

Octavio Paz




The Mexican, whether young or old, criollo or mestizo, general or laborer or lawyer, seems to me to be a person who shuts himself away to protect himself: his face is a mask and so is his smile. In his harsh solitude, which is both barbed and courteous, everything serves him as a defense: silence and words, politeness and disdain, irony and resignation. He is jealous of his own privacy and that of others, and he is afraid even to glance at his neighbor, because a mere glance can trigger the rage of these electrically charged spirits. He passes through life like a man who has been flayed; everything can hurt him, including words and the very suspicion of words. His language is full of reticences, of metaphors and allusions, of unfinished phrases, while his silence is full of tints, folds, thunderheads, sudden rainbows, indecipherable threats. Even in a quarrel he prefers veiled expressions to outright insults: “A word to the wise is sufficient.” He builds a wall of indifference and remoteness between reality and himself, a wall that is no less impenetrable for being invisible. The Mexican is always remote, from the world and from other people. And also from himself.

The speech of our people reflects the extent to which we protect ourselves from the outside world: the ideal of manliness is never to “crack,” never to back down. Those who “open themselves up” are cowards. Unlike other people, we believe that opening oneself up is a weakness or a betrayal. The Mexican can bend, can bow humbly, can even stoop, but he cannot back down, that is, he cannot allow the outside world to penetrate his privacy. The man who backs down is not to be trusted, is a traitor or a person of doubtful loyalty; he babbles secrets and is incapable of confronting a dangerous situation. Women are inferior beings because, in submitting, they open themselves up. Their inferiority is constitutional and resides in their sex, their submissiveness, which is a wound that never heals.

Hermeticism is one of the several recourses of our suspicion and distrust. It shows that we instinctively regard the world around us to be dangerous. This reaction is justifiable if one considers what our history has been and the kind of society we have created. The harshness and hostility of our environment, and the hidden, indefinable threat that is always afloat in the air, oblige us to close ourselves in, like those plants that survive by storing up liquid within their spiny exteriors. But this attitude, legitimate enough in its origins, has become a mechanism that functions automatically. Our response to sympathy and tenderness is reserve, since we cannot tell whether those feelings are genuine or simulated. In addition, our masculine integrity is as much endangered by kindness as it is by hostility. Any opening in our defenses is a lessening of our manliness.

Our relationships with other men are always tinged with suspicion. Every time a Mexican confides in a friend or acquaintance, every time he opens himself up, it is an abdication. He dreads that the person in whom he has confided will scorn him. Therefore confidences result in dishonor, and they are as dangerous for the person to whom theya re made as they are for the person who makes them. We do not drown ourselves, like Narcissus, in the pool that reflects us; we try to stop it up instead. Our anger is prompted not only by the fear of being used by our confidants – that fear is common to everyone – but also by the shame of having renounced our solitude. To confide in others is to disposses oneself; when we have confided in someone who is not worthy of it, we say, “I sold myself to So-and-so.” That is, we have “cracked,” have let someone into our fortress. The distance between one man and another, which creates mutual respect and mutual security, has disappeared. We are at the mercy of the intruder. What is worse, we have actually abdicated.

All these expressions reveal that the Mexican views life as combat. This attitude does not make him any different from anyone else in the modern world. For other people, however, the manly ideal consists in an open and aggressive fondness for combat, whereas we emphasize defensiveness, the readiness to repel any attack. The Mexican macho, -- the male – is a hermetic being, closed up in himself, capable of guarding both himself and whatever has been confided to him. Manliness is judged according to one’s invulnerability to enemy arms or the impacts of the outside world. Stoicism is the most exalted of our military and political attributes. Our history is full of expressions and incidents that demonstrate the indifference of our heroes toward suffering or danger. We are taught from childhood to accept defeat with dignity, a conception that is certainly not ignoble. And if we are not all good stoics like Juarez and Cuauhtemoc, at least we can be resigned and patient and long-suffering. Resignation is one of our most popular virtues. We admire fortitude in the face of adversity more than the most brilliant triumph.

This predominance of the closed over the open manifests itself not only as impassivity and distrust, irony and suspicion, but also as love for Form. Form surrounds and sets bounds to our privacy, limiting its excesses, curbing its explosions, isolating and preserving it. Both our Spanish and Indian heritages have influenced our fondness for ceremony, formulas, and order. A superficial examination of our history might suggest otherwise, but actually the Mexican aspires to create an orderly world regulated by clearly stated principles. The turbulence and rancor of our political struggles prove that juridical ideas play an important role in our public life, and his formalities are very apt to become formulas. This is not difficult to understand. Order – juridical, social, religious or artistic – brings security and stability, and a person has only to adjust to the models and principles that regulate life; he can express himself without resorting to the perpetual inventiveness demanded by a free society. Perhaps our traditionalism, which is one of the constants of our national character, giving coherence to our people and our history, results from our professed love for Form.

The ritual complications of our courtesy, the persistence of classical Humanism, our fondness for closed poetic forms (the sonnet and the decima, for example), our love for geometry in the decorative arts and for design and composition in paining, the poverty of our Romantic art compared with the excellence of our Baroque art, the formalism of our political institutions, and, finally, our dangerous inclination toward formalism, whether social, moral or bureaucratic, are further expressions of that tendency in our character. The Mexican not only does not open himself up to the outside world, he also refuses to emerge from himself, to “let himself go.”

Sometimes Form chokes us. During the past century the liberals tried vainly to force the realities of the country into the strait jacket of the Constitution of 1857. The results were the dictatorship of Porifirio Diaz and the Revolution of 1910. In a certain sense the history of Mexico, like that of every Mexican, is a struggle between the forms and formulas that have been imposed on us and the explosions with which our individuality avenges itself. Form has rarely been an original creation, an equilibrium arrived at through our instincts and desires rather than at their expense. On the contrary, our moral and juridical forms often conflict with our nature, preventing us from expressing ourselves and frustrating our true wishes.

Our devotion to Form, even when empty, can be seen throughout the history of Mexican art from pre-Conquest times to the present. Antonio Castro Leal, in his excellent study of Juan Ruiz de Alarcon, shows how our reserved attitude toward Romanticism – which by definition is expansive and open – revealed itself as early as the seventeenth century, that is, before we were even aware of ourselves as a nation. Alarcon’s contemporaries were right in accusing him of being an interloper, although they were referring more to his physical characteristics that to the singularity of his work. In effect, the most typical portions of his plays deny the values expressed by his Spanish contemporaries. And his negation contains in brief what Mexico has always opposed to Spain. His plays were an answer to Spanish vitality, which was affirmative and splendid in that epoch, expressing itself in great Yes! to history and the passions. Lope de Vega exalted love, heroism, the superhuman, the incredible; Alarcon favored other virtues, more subtle and bourgeois: dignity, courtesy, a melancholy stoicism, a smiling modesty. Lope was very little interested in moral problems: he loved action, like all his contemporaries. Later, Calderon showed the same contempt for psychology. Moral conflicts and the hesitations and changes of the human soul were only metaphors in a theological drama whose two personae were Original Sin and Divine Grace. In Alarcon’s most representative plays, on the other hand, Heaven counts for little, as little as the passionate wind that sweeps away Lope’s characters. The Mexican tells us that human beings are a mixture, that good and evil are subtly blended in their souls. He uses analysis rather than synthesis: the hero becomes a problem. In several of his comedies he takes up the question of lying. To what extent does a liar really lie? Is he really trying to deceive others? Is he not the first victim of his deceit, and the first to be deceived? The liar lies to himself, because he is afraid of himself. By discussing the problem of authenticity, Alarcon anticipated one of the constant themes of Mexican thinking, later taken up by Rodolfo Usigli in his play The Gesticulator.

Neither passion nor Grace triumph in Alarcon’s world. Everything is subordinated to reason, or to reasonableness, and his archetypes are those of a morality that smiles and forgives. When he replaces the vital, Romantic values of Lope with the abstract values of a universal and reasonable morality, is he not evading us, tricking us? His negation, like that of his homeland, does not affirm our individuality vis-à-vis that of the Spaniards. The values that Alarcon postulates belong to all men and are a Greco-Roman inheritance as well as a prophecy of the bourgeois code. They do not express our nature or resolve our conflicts: they are Forms we have neither created nor suffered, are mere masks. Only in our own day have we been able to answer the Spanish Yes with a Mexican Yes rather than with an intellectual affirmation containing nothing of our individual selves. The Revolution, by discovering popular art, originated modern Mexican painting, and by discovering the Mexican language it created a new poetry.

While the Mexican tries to create closed worlds in his politics and in the arts, he wants modesty, prudence, and a ceremonious reserve to rule over his everyday life. Modesty results from shame at one’s own or another’s nakedness, and with us it is an almost physical reflex. Nothing could be further from this attitude than that fear of the body which is characteristic of North American life. We are not afraid or ashamed of our bodies; we accept them as completely natural and we live physically with considerable gusto. It is the opposite of Puritanism. The body exists, and gives weight and shape to our existence. It causes us pain and it gives us pleasure; it is not a suit of clothes we are in the habit of wearing, not something apart from us: we are our bodies. But we are frightened by other people’s glances, because the body reveals rather than hides our private selves. Therefore our modesty is a defense, like our courtesy’s Great Wall of China or like the fences of organ-pipe cactus that separate the huts of our country people. This explains why prudence is the virtue we most admire in women, just as reserve is in men. Women too should defend their privacy.

No doubt an element of masculine vanity, the vanity of the “senor,” of the lord or chieftain (it is an inheritance from both our Indian and Spanish ancestors), enters into our conception of feminine modesty. Like almost all other people, the Mexican considers woman to be an instrument, sometimes of masculine desires, sometimes of the ends assigned to her by morality, society and law. It mist be admitted that she has never been asked to consent to these ends and that she participates in their realization only passively, as a “repository” for certain values. Whether as prostitute, goddess, grande dame or mistress, woman transmits or preserves – but does not believe in – the values and energies entrusted to her by nature or society. In a world made in man’s image, woman is only a reflection of masculine will and desire. When passive, she becomes a goddess, a beloved one, a being who embodies the ancient, stable elements of the universe: the earth, motherhood, virginity. When active, she is always function and means, a receptacle and a channel. Womanhood, unlike manhood, is never an end in itself.

In other countries these functions are realized in public, often with something of a flair. There are countries that revere prostitutes or virgins, and countries that worship mothers; the grande dame is praised and respected almost everywhere. In contrast, we prefer these graces and virtues to be hidden. Woman should be secretive. She should confront the world with and impassive smile. She should be “decent” in the face of erotic excitements and “long suffering” in the face of adversity. In either event her response is neither instinctive nor personal: it conforms to a general model, and it is the defensive and passive aspects of this model, as in the case of the macho, that are emphasized, in a gamut ranging from modesty and “decency” to stoicism, resignation and impassivity.

Our Spanish-Arabic inheritance is only a partial explanation of this conduct. The Spanish attitude toward women is very simple. It is expressed quite brutally and concisely in these two sayings: “A woman’s place is in the home, with a broken leg” and “Between a female saint and a male saint, a wall of mortared stone.” Woman is a domesticated wild animal, lecherous and sinful from birth, who must be subdued with a stick and guided by the “reins of religion.” Therefore Spaniards consider other women – especially those of a race or religion different from their own – to be easy game. The Mexican considers woman to be a dark, secret and passive being. He does not attribute evil instincts to her; he even pretends that she does not have any. Or, to put it more exactly, her instincts are not her own but those of the species, because she is an incarnation of the life force, which is essentially impersonal. Thus it is impossible for her to have a personal, private life, for if she were to be herself – if she were to be mistress of her own wishes, passions or whims – she would be unfaithful to herself. The Mexican, heir to the great pre-Columbian religions based on nature, is a good deal more pagan than the Spaniard, and does not condemn the natural world. Sexual love is not tinged with grief and horror in Mexico as it is in Spain. Instincts themselves are not dangerous; the danger lies ion any personal, individual expression of them. And this brings us back to the idea of passivity: woman is never herself, whether lying stretched out or standing up straight, whether naked or fully clothed. She is an undifferentiated manifestation of life, a channel for the universal appetite. In this sense she has no desires of her own.

North Americans also claim that instincts and desires do not exist, but the basis of their pretense is different from ours, even the opposite of it. The North American hides or denies certain parts of his body and, more often, of his psyche: they are immoral, ergo they do not exist. By denying them he inhibits his spontaneity. The Mexican woman quite simply has no will of her own. Her body is asleep and only comes really alive when someone awakens her. She is an answer rather than a question, a vibrant and easily worked material that is shaped by the imagination and sensuality of the male. In other countries women are active, attempting to attract men through the agility of their minds or the seductivity of their bodies, but the Mexican woman has a sort of hieratic calm, a tranquility made up of both hope and contempt. The man circles around her, courts her, sings to her, sets his horse (or his imagination) to performing caracoles for her pleasure. Meanwhile she remains behind the veil of her modesty and immobility. She is an idol, and like all idols she is mistress of magnetic forces whose efficacy increases as their source of transmission become more and more passive and secretive. There is a cosmic analogy here: woman does not seek, she attracts, and the center of attraction is her hidden, passive sexuality. It is a secret and immobile sun.

The falsity of this conception is obvious enough when one considers the Mexican woman’s sensitivity and restlessness, but at least it does not turn her into an object, a mere thing. She is a symbol, like all women, of the stability and continuity of the race. In addition to her cosmic significance she has an important social role, which is to see to it that law and order, piety and tenderness are predominant in everyday life. We will not allow anyone to be disrespectful to women, and although this is doubtless a universal notion, the Mexican carries it to its ultimate consequences. Thanks to woman, many of the asperities of “man-to-man” relationships are softened. Of course we should ask the Mexican woman for her own opinion, because this “respect” is often a hypocritical way of subjecting her and preventing her from expressing herself. Perhaps she would usually prefer to be treated with less “respect” (which anyway is granted to her only in public) and with greater freedom and truthfulness; that is, to be treated as a human being rather than as a symbol or function. But how can we agree to let her express herself when our whole way of life is a mask designed to hide our intimate feelings?

Despite her modesty and the vigilance of society, woman is always vulnerable. Her social situation – as the repository of honor, in the Spanish sense – and the misfortune of her “open” anatomy expose her to all kinds of dangers, against which neither personal morality nor masculine protection is sufficient. She is submissive and open by nature. But, through a compensation-mechanism that is easily explained, her natural frailty is made a virtue and the myth of the “long-suffering Mexican woman” is created. The idol – always vulnerable, always vulnerable, always in process of transforming itself into a human being – becomes a victim, but a victim hardened and insensible to suffering, bearing her tribulations in silence. (A “long-suffering” person is less sensitive to pain than a person whom adversity has hardly touched.) Through suffering, our women become like our men: invulnerable, impassive, and stoic.

It might be said that by turning what ought to be a cause for shame into a virtue, we are only trying to relieve our guilt feelings and cover up a cruel reality. This is true, but it is also true that in attributing to her the same invulnerability that we strive to achieve ourselves, we provide her with a moral immunity to shield her unfortunate anatomical openness. Thanks to suffering and her ability to endure it without protest, she transcends her condition and acquires the same attributes as men.

It is interesting to note that the image of the mala mujer – the “bad woman” – is almost always accompanied by the idea of aggressive activity. She is not passive like the “self-denying mother,” the “waiting sweetheart,” the hermetic idol: she comes and goes, she looks for men and then leaves them. Her extreme mobility, through a mechanism similar to that described above, renders her invulnerable. Activity and immodesty unite to petrify her soul. The mala is hard and impious and independent like the macho. In her own way she also transcends her physiological weakness and closes herself off from the world.

It is likewise significant that masculine homosexuality is regarded with a certain indulgence insofar as the active agent is concerned. The passive agent is an abject, degraded being. This ambiguous conception is made very clear in the word games or battles – full of obscene allusions and double meanings – that are so popular in Mexico City. Each of the speakers tries to humiliate his adversary with verbal traps and ingenious linguistic combinations, and the loser is the person who cannot think of a comeback, who has to swallow his opponent’s jibes. These jibes are full of aggressive sexual allusions; the loser is possessed, is violated, by the winner and the spectators laugh and sneer at him. Masculine homosexuality is tolerated, then, on condition that it consists in violating a passive agent. As with heterosexual relationships, the important thing is not to open oneself up and at the same time to break open one’s opponent.

It seems to me that all of these attitudes, however different their sources, testify to the “closed” nature of our reactions to the world around us or to our fellows. But our mechanisms of defense and self-preservation are not enough, and therefore we make use of dissimulation, which is almost habitual with us. It does not increase our passivity; on the contrary, it demands an active inventiveness and must reshape itself from one moment to another. We tell lies for the mere pleasure of it, like all imaginative peoples, but we also ell lies to hide ourselves and to protect ourselves from intruders. Lying plays a decisive role in our daily lives, our politics, our love-affairs and our friendships, and since we attempt to deceive ourselves as well as others, our lies are brilliant and fertile, not like the gross inventions of other peoples. Lying a tragic game in which we risk a part of our very selves. Hence it is pointless to denounce it.

The dissembler pretends to be someone he is not. His role requires constant improvisation, a steady forward progress across shifting sands. Every moment he must remake, re-crated, modify the personage he is playing, until at last the moment arrives when reality and appearance, the lie and the truth, are one. At first the pretense is only a fabric of inventions intended to baffle our neighbors, but eventually it becomes a superior – because more artistic – form of reality. Our lies reflect both what we lack and what we desire, both what we are not and what we would like to be. Through dissimulation we come closer to our model, and sometimes the gesticulator, as Usigli saw so profoundly, becomes one with his gestures and thus makes them authentic. The death of Professor Rubio changed him into what he wanted to be: General Rubio, a sincere revolutionary and a man capable of giving the stagnating Revolution a fresh impetus and purity. In the Usigli play Professor Rubio invents a new self and becomes a general, and his lie is so truthlike that the corrupt Navarro has no other course than to murder him, as if he were murdering his old commander, General Rubio, all over again. By killing him he kills the truth of the Revolution.

If we can arrive at authenticity by means of lies, an excess of sincerity can bring us to refined forms of lying. When we fall in love we open ourselves up and reveal our intimate feelings, because an ancient tradition requires that the man suffering from love display his wounds to the loved one. But in displaying them the lover transforms himself into an image, an object he presents for the loved one’s – and his own – contemplation. He asks her to regard him with the same worshipful eyes with which he regards himself. And now the looks of others do not strip him naked; instead, they clothe him in piety. He has offered himself as a spectacle, asking the spectators to see him as he sees himself, and in so doing he has escaped from the game of love, has saved his true self by replacing it with an image.

Human relationships run the risk, in all lands and ages, of becoming equivocal. This is especially true of love. Narcissism and masochism are not exclusively Mexican traits, but it is notable how often our popular songs and sayings and our everyday behavior treat love as falsehood and betrayal. We almost always evade the perils of a naked relationship be exaggerating our feelings. At the same time, the combative nature of our eroticism is emphasized and aggravated. Love is an attempt to penetrate another human being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual. It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, an immersion in he waters of reality, and an unending re-creation. The Mexican conceives of love as combat and conquest. It is not so much an attempt to penetrate reality by means of the body as it is to violate it. Therefore the image of the fortunate lover – derived, perhaps, from the Spanish Don Juan – is confused with that of the man who deliberately makes use of his feelings, real or invented, to win possession of a woman.

Dissimulation is an activity very much like that of actors in the theater, but the true actor surrenders himself to the role he is playing and embodies it fully, even though he sloughs it off again, like a snake its skin, when the final curtain comes down. The dissembler never surrenders or forgets himself, because he would no longer be dissembling if he became one with his image. But this fiction becomes an inseparable – and spurious – part of his nature. He is condemned to play his role throughout life, since the pact between himself and his impersonation cannot be broken except by death or sacrifice. The lie takes command of him and becomes the very foundation of his personality.
To simulate is to invent, or rather to counterfeit, and thus to evade our condition. Dissimulation requires greater subtlety: the person who dissimulates is not counterfeiting but attempting to become invisible, to pass unnoticed without renouncing his individuality. The Mexican excels at the dissimulation of his passions and himself. He is afraid of others’ looks and therefore he withdraws, contracts, becomes a shadow, a phantasm, an echo. Instead of walking, he glides; instead of stating, he hints; instead of replying, he mumbles; instead of complaining, he smiles. Even when he sings he does so – unless he explodes, ripping open his breast – between clenched teeth and in a lowered voice, dissimulating his song:

And so great is the tyranny

of this dissimulation

that although my heart swells

with profoundest longing,

there is challenge in my eyes

and resignation in my voice.
Perhaps our habit of dissimulating originated in colonial times. The Indians and mestizos had to sing in a low voice, as in the poem by Alfonso Reyes, because “words of rebellion cannot be heard well from between clenched teeth.” The colonial world has disappeared, but not the fear, the mistrust, the suspicion. And now we disguise not only our anger but also our tenderness. When our country people beg one’s pardon, they say: “Pretend it never happened, senor.” And we pretend. We dissimulate so eagerly that we almost cease to exist.

In its most radical forms dissimulation become mimicry. The Indian blends into the landscape until he is an indistinguishable part of the white wall against which he leans at twilight, of the dark earth on which he stretches out to rest at midday, of the silence that surrounds him. He disguises his human singularity to such an extent that he finally annihilates it and turns into a stone, a tree, a wall, silence, and space. I am not saying that he communes with the All like a pantheist, or that he sees an individual tree as an archetype of all trees, what I am saying is that he actually blends into specific objects in a concrete and particular way.

Mimicry is a change of appearance rather than of nature, and it is significant that the chosen representation is either of death or of inert space. The act of spreading oneself out, of blending with space, of becoming space, is a way of rejecting appearances, but it is also a way of being nothing except Appearance. The Mexican is horrified by appearances, although his leaders profess to love them, and therefore he disguises himself to the point of blending into the objects that surround him. That is, he becomes mere Appearance because of his fear of appearances. He seems to be something other than what he is, and he even prefers to appear dead or nonexistent rather than to change, to open up his privacy. Dissimulation as mimicry, then, is one of the numerous manifestations of our hermeticism. The gesticulator resorts to a mask, and the rest of us wish to pass unnoticed. In either case we hide our true selves, and sometimes deny them. I remember the afternoon I heard a noise in the room next to mine, and asked loudly: "Who is in there?" I was answered by the voice of a servant who had recently come to us from her village: "No one, Señor. I am."

We dissimulate in order to deceive ourselves, and turn transparent and phantasmal. But that is not the end of it: we also pretend that our fellow-man does not exist. This is not to say that we deliberately ignore or discount him. Our dissimulation here is a great deal more radical: we change him from somebody into nobody, into nothingness. And this nothingness takes on its own individuality, with a recognizable face and figure, and suddenly becomes Nobody.

Don No One, who is Nobody's Spanish father, is able, well fed, well respected; he has a bank account, and speaks in a loud, self-assured voice. Don No One fills the world with his empty, garrulous presence. He is everywhere, and has friends everywhere. He is a banker, an ambassador, a businessman. He can be seen in all the salons, and is honored in Jamaica and Stockholm and London. He either holds office or wields influence, and his manner of not-being is aggressive and conceited. On the other hand, Nobody is quiet, timid, and resigned. He is also intelligent and sensitive. He always smiles. He always waits. When he wants to say something, he meets a wall of silence; when he greets someone, he meets a cold shoulder; when he pleads or weeps or cries out, his gestures and cries are lost in the emptiness created by Don No One's interminable chatter. Nobody is afraid not to exist: he vacillates, attempting now and then to become Somebody. Finally, in the midst of his useless gestures, he disappears into the limbo from which he emerged.

It would be a mistake to believe that others prevent him from existing. They simply dissimulate his existence and behave as if he did not exist. They nullify him, cancel him out, turn him to nothingness. It is futile for Nobody to talk, to publish books, to paint pictures, to stand on his head. Nobody is the blankness in our looks, the pauses in our conversations, the reserve in our silences. He is the name we always and inevitably forget, the eternal absentee, the guest we never invite, the emptiness we can never fill. He is an omission, and yet he is forever present. He is our secret, our crime, and our remorse. Thus the person who creates Nobody, by denying Somebody's existence, is also changed into Nobody. And if we are all Nobody, then none of us exists. The circle is closed and the shadow of Nobody spreads out over our land, choking the Gesticulator and covering everything. Silence-the prehistoric silence, stronger than all the pyramids and sacrifices, all the churches and uprisings and popular songs-comes back to rule over Mexico.