52
PARTISAN REVIEW
head : the pains , confused now, overlaid, being of various kinds, on
and in my chest, were in some instances like a glare and noise , and in
others like the night, the night outdoors, a bulge of murmurs , perhaps
menaces, a row of bulging trees, weighting down, rustling-the
rustling of sensation .
My contempt for her was a failure of belief, a measurement of
her: she is bluffing .
I do not have to fear her if she cannot hurt me.
But meanwhile my face , against my will, winces : I suffer th@
foretaste, the imagination of blows , an imagination based on other
experiences, such as falling on concrete, such things as that : but a
falling has been convened to a- to
ajoke :
a joke is you-can ' t-scream–
this-is-a-joke: that is, the comic is an inability, an absolute inability to
hun or kill. I have already been hurt-but it is as much mental as
physical : this reintroduction to the pain world, the pain continuum in
my life . But I am on my feet , I am not screaming, I can manage to hold
Nonie in contempt. This is not an absolute joke-I can still hate her for
this-but it is still a joke , a bad joke: it isn ' t death so far as I know.
When the mop handle approached my face , my skin nearest it ,
the skin ofmy face would shrivel circu.larly , would pucker-I would be
clutched by cold , as if in prepatlition to be hit , the cold of incipient
shock , of anesthesia, of purposeful and unpurposeful anesthesia ,
humiliation.
Then the cold would turn into a chafing-as it might after I fell
and was not seriously wounded (no brain concussion, no tearing open
ofmy nose)-a chafing which led to an abraded heat : but the chafing
was also the humiliation of she-made-me-think-I-was-about-to-be-hit
(and-dissolved) . Anger, somewhat diluted by helplessness , by concern
about what is going to happen next , about when-will-this-end , oozes
into a stinging sweat , pure, that is, light and childish, a smoothed ,
horrible sweat of it-is-over, which was foolishness , since here the stick
comes again : I hated the-burning-foolishness , the humbling , and
angering , chagrin , the being a puppet in this way-shrivelled , chilled ,
chafed, opened out into anger-chagrin, too , at ever having liked my
tormentor, at having been fool enough to come here : or to put it in
terms closer to the wordless ones of what I felt , chagrin at not knowing
Nonie-was-always-bad , was always-this-bad, at having forgotten any–
thing like this could happen , that life can get to be this bad .
