FUNERAL RITES
159
for a long time you feel as if your eyelids have been scorched. But
there are times too when grief disintegrates your faculties, scatters
your rind. The boys back there have an expression for that too. When
they see a man all in pieces because of too much suffering, they say:
"He's lower than a snake's chin." That is when you suffer, when you
cannot keep your mind off your grief, and your actions are surrounded
by an aura of lassitude and regret which makes them seem untrue–
only a little so, not altogether-but untrue because they do not satisfy
you. You are
ill
at ease about them, though you feel, you know, that
it would take very little, just a small shift somewhere in the set-up,
to make the whole thing click again. All that is needed, in fact, is for
you to act-or to see your actions carried out-in the world inhabited
by the person for whom they are performed, that world in which
they would no longer have any meaning unless you were compelled
by love, one day, secretly to consecrate them to it.
Grief had. left the mind of the servant scattered. Rarely did she
think of her little girl, but she suffered because she was incapable of
performing an act that fully satisfied her. She came to a farm where
the gate was ajar. The dog must have taken her for a beggar, or a
tramp, for she was limping; he came up to her, sniffed, then began
to bark.
"If
the dog throws me a stone," she said to herself, "I'll bring
it back to
him
between my teeth." Then, facing him, she waved both
arms high in the air; the dog, frightened, went away, barking louder
than ever. This first violent attempt to bring her gestures into relation
with life made her almost automatically gather up her veil, which
had blown out like a sail in her sudden about-face, and hold it against
her chest. In so doing, her whole body was somehow comforted; she
walked with head high and felt a desire to remove her hat for greater
physical well-being. Without stopping, she raised her hand, then
withdrew it. Instantly, a great weariness descended upon her; she had
not, as a result of
this
gesture, thought more about her baby, nor of
her
o~n
grief, but she had the feeling that her actions were untrue.
They had been performed
in
the normal, everyday, physical world,
whereas she moved and had her being, in that same world, it is true,
but a world rectified by suffering. In such circumstances, only certain
symbolical acts accord us that sense of plenitude which, in other acts,
we are denied.
The poor little servant was unable to think about her child, who
had never been anything but a red-faced excrescence of unclean
flesh severed from the body of its mother. Two weeks old when she
had died! . . . She had not lived for her. But then, a servant does
