Читать книгу My Ariel - Sina Queyras - Страница 14

I feel all the daddies, Sylvia. They brawl inside me like drunken Colossi, elbowing my aorta, kicking my uterus. I hear you wrestling with them too, trying to keep down that one toe, big as a Frisco seal. They rise up again in bean green over blue. I always heard that line as a choke of rage, now I hear you choking back disbelief, then laughing as they turn and turn. Laugh if you will, in the end it was you who was through (or not through), you who coughed your life up into husband-daddy’s hands. Still, I envy your arriving at funny. I wish I could laugh when the hands that caught me at birth and later slit me in two like an apricot fly up at me in the middle of sex. Don’t complain, the brothers say, at least he showed interest. And that is true: if you’re going to defile one of your children, you might defile them all equally. Years later I returned to that hotel room and picked that fifteen-year-old girl up off the floor. What a fool, I thought, so weak, so trusting: my vulnerability repelled. I had no love for it. It was her or me and I wanted to live, Sylvia, so I stuck a dagger in her then, and I said, We’re through. She cried out as if I had killed her. I said, Surely you’re overstating harm. Surely you can do with a gash or two, a lost limb, a cunt that drags – how greedy you are to want to be whole. You see how inside out I was? So, Daddy, I had to kill you too. I didn’t need a knife for you. I made a guillotine of my mind and let it drop. In a blink you were gone. And then you were really gone: the black boot of your lung had rotted from the inside out, and when the surgeon pierced bone, a small Nagasaki was unleashed. But even death did not kill you. You followed me for years, a man in a clean white van, offering me sweet things if I went for a ride. You haunted me with such a look of incomprehension. Didn’t know me, or that you weren’t through, or why. You turned and turned like an injured bird. I have tried so hard to kill not you exactly – more the you that you left inside of me, Daddy. You once confessed you missed the war, Hitler, the resistance: you said it was the last time you were certain who the enemy was. This is why they stone haunted women. They have to kill them hard to get all the ghosts.