40
PARTISAN REVIEW
fall asleep-let me say it this way: one day she climbed up on her bed,
sat on it cross-legged, opened her school books, and fell asleep, sitting
up: she snored very faintly, a young girl's snore: I tiptoed back to my
own room .
But if when the doll hit me, it was as if I had a covering of dust,
smartly disordered and scattered-but each particle glowed and had in
it a bit of feeling which
I
felt; or if it was as if I was like a piano,
strummed, jangled, chopped at-unsuspected elements in me would
race and twang, I would be filled with sounds-and all this then re–
solved itself into an ache, a stone or a wall, with no face drawn on it, a
sheer obduracy, then I was caught up in an unendurable storm of
nonsense:
much of the world was unreadable, was nonsense, news–
print, foliage, an adult running in a hallway-I heard noises, saw
blurs: I did not know it was an adult, I did not realize anyone, or
anything , was
running.
The linear, the comprehensible was tender–
was meant for
a chtfd.
One was very shy about
nonsense-at
least, I
was. Nonsense was
another world.
Small, stinging pain was beyond
sense:
Nonie hurt me:
incomprehension, adrenalin, and pain flowed
together, side by side; or rather, formed, materialized at once, in the
vial, the singular unity of a child's body . There were not too many sub–
s::antial choices, automatic or conscious ones, but the repertoire grew as
I did, as days passed, leaving a residue of captions, guesses, that the
nights, and night-dreams played with-the nights were full of study.
On one occasion, in Nonie's room, the child's face twists, he prepares
to howl-"Don't be silly: we were only playing," she said, and she
hugged me.
On another, the child rolls away, gets under the bed.
It
is another
afternoon: the child knocks over a night table . And here, in a different
light, he kicks his seated sister, holding his pants, while his eyed and
warmed ass, outraged and awake, refused to be silent but silently
howled behind him .
She will not let life be other than this .
If! refuse to be consoled, she buttons my clothes by force. If I get
away, she says she was getting me ready
to
go to the bathroom and I try
to make a mess-pee-in her room . A lie is designed for utterance: it
is meant
to
be comprehended-it is not like the truth which is an
utterance full of failure, of references , of an otherness to itself. A lie
consoles and flatters with obvious and acceptable meanings : one's
