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PARTISAN REVIEW
guessed the instinctive affinity of the things they designate. From
piddling poultice they went on to bigger and better things, namely
agents of vengeance. I revenged myself on my infirmities. I applied
names indiscriminately and they stuck. Perhaps their surprise at what
they were affixed to induced the secretion of something like glue. To a
malodorous suppuration of the balls I applied the label, peristalsis.
And the suppuration stopped dead in its tracks. I said peristalsis and
thought scrotum, slumbering in its hide. And so on and so forth ,
earlobe contorted by the wind would be known forever by the name
scrotum sag in my dictionary of symptoms, lexicon guaranteed immu–
nity to obsolescence because if you refuse to ride with the times then
you are not uprooted by time's scythe. I even applied the names of
infirmities to my most treasured talents which gave my foul-smelling
phantoms no end of pleasure. But I forgot to say so eager was I to
refrain from peddling the pathos of a last farewell, she pronounced my
name accurately and with great conviction for the first time, upon
leaving. She compressed so much that was unspoken into it, almost an
idyll. Though a strockroom is hardly a place to compress an idyll into
a minute or two. Well, in that one word, my name, she labelled me
exhaustively she took everything into account. She labelled me more
exhaustively than raindrops the leaves they crucify. She had much
power over me at that moment.
If
she had said, Set fire to the
stockroom, I would have done it. I had often asked myself if the hairs
that lines the supervisor's anal canal were inflammable. But she
restrained herself, she did not misuse her power. That's what you do
when you've been educated in the best schools. You become estranged
from your instincts and ignore their unsightly eruption in others. She
pretended not to see my tears. So that when she said, You never cry, it
was less commentary than edict. But why did she have so much power
over me at the moment of farewell, function of departure or of the
words she used at the moment of departure, and if of the words then of
old words or words used for the worst time. They clogged crevices in
my being. They created and clogged the crevices simultaneously, like
music worth weeping to.
