lycanthropia

a) So I called the University of Denver today and the admin (probably overrun with annoying people like me calling her) was just that little bit snippy/crisp as she said: We only received your completed application from the graduate college yesterday, which is why I didn’t email you back.

Oh, I said, trying to sound encouraging and warm.

And, she continued, I’m sorry to say that the faculty will not be offering you a place.

(One day? It took Eleni and Bin one whole day to reject me?)

Thank you, I said heartily, that really does help clarify things!

Guess I’m movin’ to Houston, y’all.

b) Then I tried to write Houston an email accepting their offer, but couldn’t bring myself to send it somehow, and had to go to teach class anyway. Afterward I found myself unaccountably cast down, but why? I drove home trying to figure it out. Am I scared to live in Texas again after twenty years away? Am I sad because I really am leaving my ex behind now, probably forever? Do I have cold feet about spending more time in grad school? Am I sad to leave beloved friends here?

I drove to the thrift store on the way home and bought the cherry-red Amelia Earhart suitcase to cheer myself up. Cheery cherry.

c) But I remain’d uncheer’d until I got home, dutifully worshipped the cat, and ate leftover butternut squash ravioli with green pesto, red marinara, and white alfredo sauces. I know I like myself when I make all three sauces for me. Tricolore.

Then I ate almost all the truffles.

d) In the mail: rejection from American Poetry Review. Even after Dana’s generously allowing me to use her name, I still got the slip. More truffle-eating.

e) In the mail: my copy of Feminaissance! More cheering than suitcases and five-year teaching contracts combined. I haven’t opened it yet, I am just admiring its sick/pretty cover and the way “Numbers Trouble” runs through the whole text, two lines at the top of every page, in bold font.

f) In the mail: a replacement cable for my camera, so I will finally be able to upload movies and pictures (besides the Photo Booth kind). Here is the first one just for starts. This is a poem I am trying to write based on a blogpost and I think it rather a failure so far, but a fun failure.

g) A note I wrote to myself, some weeks ago I think:

poemquilts, one week should be enough to get to them, the self judgment, is it real or in me, story/poem/story about hair catching on fire

h) My friend Cambria and I went to a two-hour Nia “jam” on Saturday which wiped me out so hard I slept until TWO P.M. on Sunday, which, I can’t even express how unprecedented that is. It was crazy fun and we were both laughing aloud as we struggled to shimmy and groove and shake our moneymakers. I want to go all the time, even though my quads still hurt.

i) I give up: I’m finally ready to admit it: I totally love 30 Rock. ARE YOU HAPPY TINA FEY ARE YOU? That I watch a television show now all because of you? I couldn’t stop laughing over the following exchange in this week’s episode, I had to pause it so I could laugh harder:

Liz Lemon [distraught on the streets of NYC because she may be out of a job]: We need the written word! Because I don’t have a Plan B, and my parents let me major in theatre tech. Why did they do that?!
[Three people appear out of the mist: an Asian woman in a suit, a large working-class white guy, and a black man in sunglasses with a saxophone.]
Liz: Who are you?
Asian woman: We are people whose profession used to be a thing. I was a travel agent…
White guy: …I was an American auto worker…
Black guy: …and I played dynamite saxophone solos in rock songs!
Asian woman [reaching out her hand]: Come with us. We live in the subways below the city, with the CEO of Friendster.

j) It’s my birthday on Wednesday! And I have to teach. But later, maybe Saturday, I want to go out dancing with friends, and drink something pretty, and eat something sweet. That is what I want to do.

k) The cat just got scared by the cover of Feminaissance, ha ha ha!

l) Something I copied off the chalkboard of the schoolroom where we have our 12-step meeting every week:

1. Two __us two is four.
(pl, bl, cl)
2. the cow has a tail
3. cup, plate, bowl, rock
4. nail open meat
5. square things
6. it’s

m) I have a crush on someone totally inappropriate, who will never in a zillion years reciprocate! That’s progress, right? I mean the crush part, not the inappropriate and non-reciprocal part.

n) The cat is patting with her foot at the small of my back. She wants attention.

o) I pause and give her attention.

p) Then I pour the last of the Riesling.

q)

r) Tonight I will watch I Am Love, with the fabulous multilingual Tilda Swinton.

s) Who is not my crush, but if I knew her, boy howdy would she be.

t) I am running out of stuff to say, but not letters.

u) I am tipsy.

v) I so do not want my ex to know where I am going. I don’t want anyone to volunteer the information. I want him to have to ask for it. I want him to want to know badly enough where I am and what I am doing that he has to ASK someone to tell him. I want him to have to work to find out where I went. I want to leave and not say goodbye.

w) Because that is the vestigial shred remaining of “power” (which isn’t even real, there is no power) that I have over this situation. That he doesn’t get anything from me. Not friendship, not even acquaintanceship, but a total, global cutting-off of everything. He doesn’t get my poems, my cooking, how cute I look in underwear, my coordinates, my new cellphone number, NONE of it.

x) I am tipsy. Wait, I already said that. I am listening over and over to The Weepies and singing all Deb Talan’s parts in high harmony.

y) OMG I AM FUCKING MOVING TO FUCKING HOUSTON WHERE WILL I LIVE

z) so look up up ahead city lights are dancing for you
or is it the aurora burning off the edges of the sky
don’t cry don’t cry
that’s all over now that’s all over now

now you only dream in peaceful blue
the morning doesn’t even scare you anymore
you are a phoenix with your feathers still a little wet
baby the ashes just look pretty on your eyes

[Deb Talan, "Ashes on Your Eyes," much thanks to Sydney]

Lie on your sofa in the fading afternoon light, savoring a tiny morsel of François Pralus Le 100% Criollo chocolate, which is, as its name would in fact indicate, 100% chocolate, which explains why it is a tiny morsel. No sugar, no dairy, no any blooming thing, just dark glossy waxy pungent heaven—sent courtesy of the charming Ms. Dianne Cowan of Cambridge, MA, who gamely engaged in chocolate swapping before it grows too hot here in Phoenix for you to put anything in the post that melts (and who further sent a bar of grainy, sugary Taza 80% Stone-Ground, in partial exchange for some locally produced, magical-herbal-essence-infused Wei Relaxed 68%).

Consider, as you allow the almost black, slightly acidic and flowery François Pralus to melt in your mouth, that what it would really be good for, would be making truffles. Decide that you have two things to celebrate—first of all, you somehow managed to get admitted to the University of Houston’s five-year PhD program, with a five-year teaching contract and various bits of financial extras; and second, you recently engaged in yet another profitless email back-and-forth with your ex, with one big difference: This time, you feel emotionally unencumbered and untortured now that it’s over. You feel, in fact, light and free. Which is probably because you know you’ll be moving away soon. Lurch up from the sofa abruptly, causing the cat to lift her head and complain.

Walk slowly into the kitchen, because both your feet are asleep, and make

IMPROMPTU MAMANESQUE MEXICAN TRUFFLES

1. Break the remaining chocolate into a small saucepan and put the heat on low. Very, very low. Cocoa butter melts at skin temperature. Do not rush this. Do not, do not.

2. Drop a good-sized chunk of unsalted pasture butter into the pan. Jab at the whole thing with a fork, sliding around the melting chocolate and remembering Maman’s wicked chocolate ice-cream sauce, which involved a whole stick of butter and an entire can of condensed sweetened milk (aka “Eagle Brand”). Remember how, whenever she was putting most of a stick of butter into something, she would say, in dulcet tones, “Look away, darling….”

(Pause for a moment, rubbing one tingling foot against the other, remembering you and Elizabeth both sneaking spoonsful of the sauce straight out of its jar in the refrigerator, without even heating it up first, much less bothering to pour it over ice cream. It melting in your mouth as you moved back to Maman’s bedroom, a brief time-out during a long day or night of nursing her as best you could, not knowing what you were doing but learning how to do it as you went, changing linens, changing wound dressings, changing meds, flushing out her J-tube, flushing out her Hickman, S-A-S-H, Saline Antibiotic Saline Heperin, flicking the bubbles out of the line because she hated to see them, flushing the blood out of the line because she hated to see it, salty-sweet almond-fragrant chocolate still melting in your mouth, soft South Texas air coming gently in at the French doors—)

3. Open the cupboard and take out the vanilla and almond flavorings, both of these now alcohol-based, since you no longer live with a recovering alcoholic and therefore no longer have to use the glycerin-based flavorings that are weak by comparison, and require about four times as much. Congratulate self on this, as well as on the fact that you can have wine with dinner and it’s no big freaking deal.

4. Go back to the cupboard for the cinnamon. Dust melting chocolate with a disappointingly small amount, and upend bottle, peering in to verify that, yes, it is all gone.

Wonder how it is that cinnamon is always purchased for you by men—this bottle having come from the boyfriend before the ex, the one who dumped you because you were too crazy for him. Or really, you were too crazy together. Which wasn’t untrue.

Remember that when you moved into the house with your ex, the one where you lived together for three years, it was a sign to you of great domestic companionship that you each had brought your cinnamon and now they would be blended. Remember photographing the two cinnamons side by side and planning to use this picture to illustrate a blogpost about the delights of harmonious cohabitation. Remember not ever writing this blogpost because you were too busy having fun living together.

Be momentarily stricken as you remember coming home the day after he had abruptly moved out without telling you and finding your cinnamon all alone in the cupboard, and feeling outraged, and thinking blindly How could he, how could he just take his cinnamon just like that, without so much as, as, as—

Decide you are going to buy your own damn cinnamon at the next available opportunity.

5. Put a frozen gordita in the toaster to toast while the chocolate melts. Eat it when it pops up even though it’s too hot and the molten refritos burn your tongue. Sniffle when the jalapeño hits your soft palate. Eat tiny bites off its edge with the chocolatey fork. Tell yourself defensively it’s like molé.

6. When the last bit of chocolate has melted, beat in the flavorings and a goodly quantity of dark organic agave nectar. Then start pouring in a thin stream of heavy cream, beating, beating, beating. Taste. Add more agave. Add more cream. Beat until the cream has turned the mahogany-black chocolate into more of a, well, chocolate brown color.

Contemplate most recent series of communications with ex, which began under the evil influence of the supermoon and went like this:

You text: I love you.
[Furtively, romantically, beneath supermoon with friends.]
He texts: I love you.
[Pause.]
He emails: Yay we can be friends!
You email: Um, not likely, for as already stated I still love you.
[Pause.]
You almost: Run into him in a parking lot.
You don’t: Speak to or look at him, but hurry past, head down. It is the closest you have been to him since last August and the breakup.
He doesn’t: Speak to you either.
You agonize: About this for several days. What if he thinks you were snubbing him! What if he’s mad at you.
Your sponsor: Tells you not to do anything.
You finally email: So, Sunday night was awkward, huh.
He emails: What are you talking about?
You think: OMG HOW FUCKING TYPICAL, I HAVE BEEN WRINGING MY HANDS FOR DAYS OVER WHETHER I HURT HIS FEELINGS, I WALKED RIGHT PAST HIM AND HE DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE BECAUSE HE WAS TALKING TO A WOMAN, HA HA! HA HA! HA HA, HA HA!
[Pause.]
He emails: Blah blah blah me me me so yeah I do still love you too but hey listen [insert very fancy reasoning/mentation about why he can't be with you], in summary because I have not yet learned to tell right from wrong I therefore have no business being in a relationship with anyone at this point in my life, even though almost fifty, and also in case you hadn’t noticed me me me me me more about ME!
[Pause.]
You email: Nothing.
You start: Looking on craigslist for a flat in Houston.

Will you move August 1? It looks increasingly likely. Frankly you kind of wish you were moving tomorrow.

7. Transfer pan into the refrigerator so the truffles can start setting up. Get out Dagoba unsweetened cocoa powder to roll truffles in. Wonder how Ms. Cowan liked the Wei Relaxed.

Prop open the back door for the cat, using the empty green recycling bucket which you have had for a decade now, it being a reclaimed pickle bucket from a bagel place in Santa Fe. Wonder what it’s like to live somewhere that’s not the desert Southwest. Allow yourself to become prematurely nostalgic. Watch amused as the cat races from front door to back door, back and forth, back and forth, her claws scrabbling on the dark hardwood floor, as the sun sets and the lingering traces of chocolate cycle in your mouth through their different flavors, turning from sour and bitter to sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet.

It’s one of those nights I’m deeply content to be alone. The cat purrs like a small outboard motor and I curl up under the yellow quilt with her on top of me and we watch The Fantastic Mr. Fox, having had a dinner of plantains, sweet potatoes, black beans and amaranth polenta. It’s amazing what they can do with frozen dinners these days.

Oh okay fine I feel like Liz Lemon. Who am I fooling, I’m one step away from wearing a pink sweatshirt and a fanny pack.

I’m being stubborn. I should go to bed. I don’t know why I’m fighting sleep. Probably because I can no longer put off grading the papers and will have to do it tomorrow so I’m procrastinating even on tomorrow’s arrival.

If I ever get the goddamned papers graded, I will write my Jane Eyre review.

In the meantime—here, Internet, I made you a movie. I say “um” a lot and talk with my eyes closed. I’d like to practice enough to get the hang of this, to do something interesting with it. But I need content rather than just babbling. I guess I could read poems aloud. Or fulminate and foam at the mouth about something, and become another crazy Youtube celebrity. Maybe there really is a reason I’m a writer and not a performance artist. Also, WTF happened to my chin, which has suddenly gone all wobbly, as though I should be addressed with a prefatory “Dame.” But Helen Mirren and Judi Dench don’t have jawlines like this! Why am I suddenly so elderly?

I blame my ex. And Arizona.

The neighborhood rooster has already started crowing. It’s 1:37 a.m. I love that I live in an immigrant community, and that in the middle of downtown Phoenix I can close my eyes and pretend I’m home on the farm.

PS—I still haven’t received rejections from the remaining PhD programs, or heard anything about the teaching fellowship. However at this late date any acceptances seem unlikely. So when Exurbia Community College offered me two lit sections for the fall, I took them. Looks like I’ll be celebrating yet another New Year’s Eve tout seule here. At least we have a rooster.

PPS—I rarely quote Geneen Roth, but since I have been obsessing about cupcakes all day, it seemed apposite. Apposite. The opposite of appetite? I am too tired, they shouldn’t let me drive the Internet when I’m this tired. But there’s a theory in me about why American women love to read Geneen Roth, and I’ll have to try to articulate it when I can type without squinting.

What is the point of wanting something I can’t have? Why not spare myself the pain and turn to something I can have—food—instead?

The point is that when you give yourself permission to want what you want instead of replacing it with a substitution, you make contact with your heart’s desire. Believe it or not, feeling the desire itself is incredibly, immensely, deeply satisfying. It’s the desire—not its fulfillment—that nourishes you because it’s the language of your heart. When you listen to that language, you hear your self. You return your own true, deepest nature (which is, after all, what we thought that cupcake would do for us).

The things you want are breadcrumbs leading you home. If you follow your desire for them, if you trust that desire, if you are willing to be curious about and really feel the depth of the desire rather than push it away or act it out, you get closer and closer to who you really are. To what you really want from this life. And what you end up discovering is….it’s not the cupcakes, it’s not the potato chips, it’s not the chocolate cake. If you give yourself permission to want without judging or dismissing your desires as crazy, you too have the power to return yourself to what you want most: the center of your own stunning, tender, radiant heart. You, it turns out, have been the cupcake all along.

I have a meandering review of the most recent Jane Eyre adaptation in my hot little pocket (one word: tinglegina) but tonight some friends and I are driving out to the Superstitions to watch the moonrise and maybe pray and dance away some of the bad lunar mojo currently smiting the earth (even though scientists say its proximity has nothing to do with the Japanese earthquake and tsunami). In other news I have been working on my supposedly professional website but I cannot make it look the way I want and I fear I just look like a crazy person instead. The colors I liked so much in 2005 now seem shabby and dated; the accomplishments I used to list proudly, equally so. But it seems increasingly likely that I’ll be rejected from all five PhD programs plus the Emory teaching fellowhip, and will find myself thrown upon the nonexistent community-college job market and therefore should have some kind of site that represents me with at least quiet humble dignity, if not panache. (Which always makes me think of ganache. Maybe I should jack everything in and go to cooking school.)

Off to howl at the giantmegafuckingsupermoon. May all beings be lycanthropic.

Reader, it is the week of spring break here in glorious Phoenicia. So far all this has meant for underemployed me is yet more unproductive day-sleeping and pointless (?) social networking; but also I am trying to take the opportunity to retool my thesis/book ms completely, converting it for once and for all from Still Falling into Cherry-emily (which mostly involves removing surprisingly tedious suicide narratives and replacing them with break-up lyrics, for it seems Cherry-emily is all about sex instead of death).

I did drive to the post office to mail out two copies to publishers yesterday, and want to post four more by the end of the month. I am not entirely sure why I continue to submit it, instead of just saving my money and self-publishing; but it seems the thing to do, the attempt to make, at least for a few more months. I think after December I’ll officially call it quits and start looking around for a good print-on-demand venue.

Otherwise there’s been a bit of poem-drafting, and a fair amount of Step Four writing. Also at some point there must be some paper-grading, but knowing me I will probably save that for Sunday night around, oh, 11 pm.

Thus, in the spirit of completely inappropriate frivolity, particularly given the fresh horrors unveiling themselves hourly in Japan, this will be a blogpost about pretty much nothing. Because nothing is what’s happening with me, and my mind is a blank. I know these paragraph breaks don’t make any sense. Really I just want to go out drinking with a friend, but everyone’s doing other things and I wouldn’t know where to go, or really with whom I could have the kind of conversation I want to have. It’s a deep loneliness, untouchable in its precision, but not uncomfortable, just unfillable; and I really don’t mind being alone rather than being with the wrong person.

Instead I go for a long slow stroll this evening around the ridiculously named Town & Country mall just north of where I live—it’s outdoors, but not quite a strip mall—there’s this kind of sad simulacrum of little cobbled streets and water fountains etc., but it’s a pleasant enough leg-stretch. And the orange trees are in blossom and the smell is so fragrant and sweet it makes your throat ache from the sugar of it. I go forth in quest of frozen yogurt, and lo, I obtain it from the self-dispensing machines, coconut and vanilla, with strawberries, papaya, and mango on top. Then meander elderly-fashion through the mall, huffing orange blossom and slurping yogurt, eating it with a wooden spoon I keep in my purse. (There’s nothing that makes me feel worse in the world than using yet another “disposable” plastic spoon. Well, maybe stomach flu. And nuclear meltdowns.)

I feel gentle and mildly happy, in my embroidered white hippie shirt I’ve had for years and my sloppy green Thai fisherman pants and my flip-flops. And I drive home with the car windows down, Ani DiFranco singing “present/infant” and it seems just for me, the way a song can.

lately I been glaring into mirrors
picking myself apart
you’d think at my age I’d have thought
of something better to do—

At a red light I consider the fact that, since Utah and Houston and Denver have already notified some of their acceptees according to the redoubtable Mr. Abramson, this presumably means I am not among them—at least, not unless someone turns down a spot, which they still might. I’m probably second-tier, reasonably speaking. I mean I did go to Cambridge.

And as the light turns green, I consider how unworked-up I am about the whole thing. That I really don’t care where I live next, only that I’m a tiny bit anxious only UNLV will accept me and I’ll have spend my forties in Las Vegas. But even that I don’t care about. I don’t care a thing about what happens to me. For now I have frozen yogurt and ashtanga and the cat, and I write poems. I am a stupid human, a simple thing, and, as the Clarice Lispector story says (and my ex loved to quote), today no one ate me yet.

I’ll find it for you, that story—it’s one of the best stories ever written. You’ll love it. It will redeem today even in my lazy eyes, if not me.

§

The Smallest Woman in the World.

In the depths of Equatorial Africa the French explorer, Marcel Pretre, hunter and man of the world, came across a tribe of surprisingly small pygmies. Therefore he was even more surprised when he was informed that a still smaller people existed, beyond forests and distances. So he plunged farther on.

In the Eastern Congo, near Lake Kivu, he really did discover the smallest pygmies in the world. And—like a box within a box within a box—obedient, perhaps, to the necessity nature sometimes feels of outdoing herself—among the smallest pygmies in the world there was the smallest of the smallest pygmies in the world.

Among mosquitoes and lukewarm trees, among leaves of the most rich and lazy green, Marcel Pretre found himself facing a woman seventeen and three-quarter inches high, full-grown, black, silent—”Black as a monkey,” he informed the press—who lived in a treetop with her little spouse. In the tepid miasma of the jungle, that swells the fruits so early and gives them an almost intolerable sweetness, she was pregnant.

So there she stood, the smallest woman in the world. For an instant, in the buzzing heat, it seemed as if the Frenchman had unexpectedly reached his final destination. Probably only because he was not insane, his soul neither wavered nor broke its bounds. Feeling an immediate necessity for order and for giving names to what exists, he called her Little Flower. And in order to be able to classify her among the recognizable realities, he immediately began to collect facts about her.

Her race will soon be exterminated. Few examples are left of this species, which, if it were not for the sly dangers of Africa, might have multipied. Besides disease, the deadly effluvium of the water, insufficient food, and ranging beasts, the great threat to the Likoualas are the savage Bahundes, a threat that surrounds them in the silent air, like the dawn of battle. The Bahundes hunt them with nets, like monkeys. And eat them. Like that: they catch them in nets and eat them. The tiny race, retreating, always retreating, has finished hiding away in the heart of Africa, where the lucky explorer discovered it. For strategic defense, they live in the highest trees. The women descend to grind and cook corn and to gather greens; the men, to hunt. When a child is born, it is left free almost immediately. It is true that, what with the beasts, the child frequently cannot enjoy this freedom for very long. But then it is true that it cannot be lamented that for such a short life there had been any long, hard work. And even the language that the child learns is short and simple, merely the essentials. The Likoualas use few names; they name things by gestures and animal noises. As for things of the spirit, they have a drum. While they dance to the sound of the drum, a little male stands guard against the Bahundes, who come from no one knows where.

That was the way, then, that the explorer discovered, standing at his very feet, the smallest existing human thing. His heart beat, because no emerald in the world is so rare. The teachings of the wise men of India are not so rare. The richest man in the world has never set eyes on such a strange grace. Right there was a woman that the greed of the most exquisite dream could never have imagined. It was then that the explorer said timidly, and with a delicacy of feeling of which his wife would never have thought him capable: “You are Little Flower.”

At that moment, Little Flower scratched herself where no one scratches. The explorer—as if he were receiving the highest prize for chastity to which an idealistic man dares aspire—the explorer, experienced as he was, looked the other way.

A photograph of Little Flower was published in the colored supplement of the Sunday Papers, life-size. She was wrapped in cloth, her belly already very big. The flat nose, the black face, the splay feet. She looked like a dog.

On that Sunday, in an apartment, a woman seeing the picture of Little Flower in the paper didn’t want to look a second time because “It gives me the creeps.”

In another apartment, a lady felt such perverse tenderness for the smallest of the African women that—an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure—Little Flower could never be left alone to the tenderness of that lady. Who knows to what murkiness of love tenderness can lead? The woman was upset all day, almost as if she were missing something. Besides, it was spring and there was a dangerous leniency in the air.

In another house, a little girl of five, seeing the picture and hearing the comments, was extremely surprised. In a houseful of adults, this little girl had been the smallest human being up until now. And, if this was the source of all caresses, it was also the source of the first fear of the tyranny of love. The existence of Little Flower made the little girl feel—with a deep uneasiness that only years and years later, and for very different reasons, would turn into thought—made her feel, in her first wisdom, that “sorrow is endless.”

In another house, in the consecration of spring, a girl about to be married felt an ecstasy of pity: “Mama, look at her little picture, poor little thing! Just look how sad she is!”

In another house, a clever little boy had a clever idea. “Mummy, if I could put this little woman from Africa in little Paul’s bed when he’s asleep? When he woke up wouldn’t he be frightened? Wouldn’t he howl? When he saw her sitting on his bed? And then we’d play with her! She would be our toy!”

His mother was setting her hair in front of the bathroom mirror at the moment, and she remembered what a cook had told her about life in an orphanage. The orphans had no dolls, and, with terrible maternity already throbbing in their hearts, the little girls had hidden the death of one of the children from the nun. They kept the body in a cupboard and when the nun went out they played with the dead child, giving her baths and things to eat, punishing her only to be able to kiss and console her. In the bathroom, the mother remembered this, and let fall her thoughtful hands, full of curlers. She considered the cruel necessity of loving. And she considered the malignity of our desire for happiness. She considered how ferociously we need to play. How many times we will kill for love. Then she looked at her clever child as if she were looking at a dangerous stranger. And she had a horror of her own soul that, more than her body, had engendered that being, adept at life and happiness. She looked at him atentively and with uncomfortable pride, that child who had already lost two front teeth, evolution evolving itself, teeth falling out to give place to those that could bite better. “I’m going to buy him a new suit,” she decided, looking at him, absorbed. Obstinately, she adorned her gap-toothed son with fine clothes; obstinately, she wanted him very clean, as if his cleanliness could emphasize a soothing superficiality, obstinately perfecting the polite side of beauty. Obstinately drawing away from, and drawing him away from, something that ought to be “black as a monkey.” Then, looking in the bathroom mirror, the mother gave a deliberately refined and social smile, placing a distance of insuperable milleniums between the abstract lines of her features and the crude face of Little Flower. But, with years of practice, she knew that this was going to be a Sunday on which she would have to hide from herself anxiety, dreams, and lost millenniums.

In another house, they gave themselves up to the enthralling task of measuring the seventeen and three-quarter inches of Little Flower against the wall. And, really, it was a delightful surprise: she was even smaller than the sharpest imagination could have pictured. In the heart of each member of the family was born, nostalgic, the desire to have that tiny and indomitable thing for itself, that thing spared having been eaten, that permanent source of charity. The avid family soul wanted to devote itself. To tell the truth, who hasn’t wanted to own a human being just for himself? Which, it is true, wouldn’t always be convenient; there are times when one doesn’t want to have feelings.

“I bet if she lived here it would end in a fight,” said the father, sitting in the armchair and definitely turning the page of the newspaper. “In this house everything ends in a fight.”

“Oh, you, José—always a pessimist,” said the mother.

“But, Mama, have you thought of the size her baby’s going to be?” said the oldest little girl, aged thirteen, eagerly.

The father stirred uneasily behind his paper.

“It should be the smallest black baby in the world,” the mother answered, melting with pleasure. “Imagine her serving our table, with her big little belly!”

“That’s enough!” growled father.

“But you have to admit,” said the mother, unexpectedly offended, “that it is something very rare. You’re the insensitive one.”

And the rare thing itself?

In the meanwhile, in Africa, the rare thing herself, in her heart—and who knows if the heart wasn’t black, too, since once nature has erred she can no longer be trusted—the rare thing herself had something even rarer in her heart, like the secret of her own secret: a minimal child. Methodically, the explorer studied that little belly of the smallest mature human being. It was at this moment that the explorer, for the first time since he had known her, instead of feeling curiousity, or exaltation, or victory, or the scientific spirit, felt sick.

The smallest woman in the world was laughing.

She was laughing, warm, warm—Little Flower was enjoying life. The rare thing herself was experiencing the ineffable sensation of not having been eaten yet. Not having been eaten yet was something that at any other time would have given her the agile impulse to jump from branch to branch. But, in this moment of tranquility, amid the thick leaves of the Eastern Congo, she was not putting this impulse into action—it was entirely concentrated in the smallness of the rare thing itself. So she was laughing. It was a laugh such as only one who does not speak laughs. It was a laugh that the explorer, constrained, couldn’t classify. And she kept on enjoying her own soft laugh, she who wasn’t being devoured. Not to be devoured is the most perfect feeling. Not to be devoured is the secret goal of a whole life. While she was not being eaten, her bestial laughter was as delicate as joy is delicate. The explorer was baffled.

In the second place, if the rare thing herself was laughing, it was because, within her smallness, a great darkness had begun to move.

The rare thing herself felt in her breast a warmth that might be called love. She loved that sallow explorer. If she could have talked and had told him that she loved him, he would have been puffed up with vanity. Vanity that would have collapsed when she added that she also loved the explorer’s ring very much, and the explorer’s boots. And when that collapse had taken place, Little Flower would not have understood why. Because her love for the explorer—one might even say “profound love,” since, having no other resources, she was reduced to a profundity—her profound love for the explorer would not have been at all diminished by the fact that she also loved his boots. There is an old misunderstanding about the word love, and, if many children are born from this misunderstanding, many others have lost the unique chance of being born, only because of the susceptibility that demands that it be me! me! that is loved, and not my money. But in the humidity of the forest, these cruel refinements do not exist, and love is not to be eaten, love is to find a boot pretty, love is to like the strange color of a man who isn’t black, is to laugh for love of a shiny ring. Little Flower blinked with love, and laughed warmly, small, gravid, warm.

The explorer tried to smile back, without knowing exactly to what abyss his smile responded, and then he was embarrassed as only a very big man can be embarrassed. He pretended to adjust his explorer’s hat better; he colored, prudishly. He turned a lovely color, a greenish-pink, like a lime at sunrise. He was undoubtedly sour.

Perhaps adjusting the symbolic helmet helped the explorer to get control of himself, severely recapture the discipline of his work, and go on with his note-taking. He had learned how to understand some of the tribe’s few articulate words, and to interpret their signs. By now, he could ask questions.

Little Flower answered “Yes.” That it was very nice to have a tree of her own to live in. Because—she didn’t say this but her eyes became so dark that they said it—because it is good to own, good to own, good to own. The explorer winked several times.

Marcel Pretre had some difficult moments with himself. But at least he kept busy taking notes. Those who didn’t take notes had to manage as best they could.

“Well,” suddenly declared one old lady, folding up the newspaper decisively, “Well, as I always say: God knows what He’s doing.”

(Clarice Lispector, translated by Elizabeth Bishop)

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there’s nothing wrong with your face

love is all over the place
there’s nothing wrong with your face