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PARTISAN REVIEW
not make plans for her child.... Hers was more of a physical pain
resulting from that sickening amputation: a weight of flesh attached
to your breast by its mouth drawn away in death. Her mind did not
let her dwell on the memory of her child, which to her had been a
shriveled little corpse monstrously joined to one of her breasts by its
nails and that dead mouth....
Such were my reflections, during my walk in the sun, on seeing
a servant-girl slowly making her way along the road to the cemetery
to bury her infant daughter.
(Translated by Frances A. Lippman)
HUNGER
FoR
A
long time he 11uffered from it, and from the cold, in a little
room for which he was not paying. One night he could no longer
endure it. His hunger was such that it could have nourished him.
He felt it in his belly-something with the consistency of matter about
to be digested. It arose in waves from his belly to his mouth, where it
expired, consuming itself for being only a desire. He turned over on
his bed and wanted to think of Paulo who had given
him
the foulard
tie, which was hung on a nail in the wall. Friendship was not against
the idea that he could get from this scrap of faded silk enough money
to buy bread. Whom could he sell it to? It was a souvenir, but Paulo
would have understood how his foulard was used to appease the
hunger of his friend.
''If
I had cut myself on the leg, he would think it
all
right if I
stopped the blood with his foulard, even if the foulard is ruined after–
wards."
A call arose in his body, something like the faint twisting of an
organ by a delicate hand. He got up. The room was small, in a mo–
ment he was at the door and he went out. By these few movements
and those he made to go downstairs, he forgot his hunger, but as soon
as he was on the avenue, wondering whether to turn left or right,
it pounced upon
him
with the speed of a galloping horse; that is,
he felt himself thrown to the ground by a victorious
animal
who
would trample him thus to the end of time. He turned right. The
avenue looked sombre. The trees were alive with a glory, an infernal
joy. He would have to count on a miracle. On the ground floor of
a house, on a window ledge-it was a janitor's apartment-he saw a
cat. Riton stopped and without even caressing the animal, took it in
