Eng11 FS1718 Reader

Eng 11 Reader
Literature and Society

1st Semester 20172018
Professor: Timothy Ong
Why Short Stories Are Essential
and Why They Are Seldom Read
Charles E. May
I take the first part of my title from the great South American writer Jorge Luis Borges,
who once said, Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.1 I
take the second part from the sad fact that, in spite of what Borges says, the short story
is largely scorned by agents, editors, readers, and scholars. What I hope to do in this
essay is to offer some possible justifications for Borgess provocative remark, provide
some explanations for the short storys neglected status, and perhaps suggest how the
former is the cause of the latter.
To that end, I wish to examine what I consider to be five of the most significant
generic issues that have clustered about the short story as it has developed historically:
how the short story deals with the relationship between sequence and significance,
how it mediates mystery and pattern, how it constructs character, why its resolution
is often metaphoric, and why it shuns explanation.
Sequence and Significance

The basic question that interests me is this: What are the significant theoretical and
historical implications of shortness in narrative? If, as Frederic Jameson has suggested,
narrative is an epistemological category, one of the abstract coordinates by which we
come to understand the world, I want to know if short narratives understand the
world differently than do long narratives (95). As Mikhail M. Bakhtin and Pavel N.
Medvedev note, If we approach genre from the point of view of its intrinsic thematic
relationship to reality and the generation of reality, we may say that every genre has
its methods and means of seeing and conceptualizing reality, which are accessible to
it alone (133). What I want to know is, what methods and means of seeing are acces-
sible to prose fictions that are short?
One of the most helpful discussions of the effect of artistic smallness on the per-
ceiver is Claude Lvi-Strausss essay The Science of the Concrete, in which he argues
that the reduction of scale or number of properties in an art work creates a reversal in
the process of understanding. To understand a real object, says Lvi-Strauss, we tend
Why Short Stories Are Essential and Why They Are Seldom Read 15
to divide it and to work from its parts. Reduction in scale reverses this situation.
Knowledge of the whole seems to precede knowledge of the parts. Even if this is an
illusion, he says, the point of the procedure is to create or sustain the illusion, which
gratifies the intelligence and gives rise to a sense of pleasure which can already be
called aesthetic on these grounds alone (148).
That the short storys shortness creates the illusion that understanding of the whole
precedes understanding of the parts was first proposed by Edgar Allan Poe. Indeed,
Poes most significant contribution to the development of the short story as a new
genre in American literature was his creation of an alternative definition of plot.
Instead of simple complexity or involution of incident, Poe adapted from A. W.
Schlegel a new meaning of the termthat from which no part can be displaced
without ruin to the whole. By this one stroke, Poe shifted the readers narrative focus
from mimetic events to aesthetic pattern. Poe argued that without the key of the
overall design or plan of a work of fiction, many points would seem insignificant or
unimportant through the impossibility of the readers comprehending them. Once
the reader has the overall design in mind, however, all those points that might other-
wise have been insipid or null will break out in all directions like stars, and throw
quadruple brilliance over the narrative.2
What Poes approach to the shortness of story reflects is the basic paradox inherent
in all narrative: the writers restriction to the dimension of time juxtaposed against his
or her desire to create a structure that reflects an atemporal theme. The central prob-
lem, says C. S. Lewis, is that for stories to be stories, they must be a series of events;
yet at the same time it must be understood that this series is only a net to catch some-
thing else. And this something else has no sequence in it; it is something other
than a process and much more like a state or quality. The result is that the means of
fiction are always at war with its end. Lewis says, In real life, as in a story, something
must happen. That is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and find only a succession
of events in which the state is never quite embodied (91).
The problem for the writer is how to convert mere events, one thing after another,
into significance. This raises the additional problem that even as writers encourage
the reader to keep turning pages to find out what happens next, they must make the
poor reader understand that ultimately what happens next is not what is important.
This basic incompatibility, which has been noted by many critics, is much more obvi-
ous in the short narrative (which, in its frequent focus on a frozen moment in time,
seems atemporal) than the long narrative (which seems primarily just a matter of one
thing after another).
Ambrose Bierces An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a particularly clear
example of the paradox. At the end of part 1 of the story, when the protagonist looks
down at the water below and contemplates how he might escape being hanged, the
narrator cues the reader to the storys inevitable artistic distortion of time: As these
16 CHARLES E. MAY
thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed mans
brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. The sergeant
stepped aside. This is a self-reflexive reminder that although authors wish to commu-
nicate that which is instantaneous or timeless, they are always trapped by the time-
bound nature of words. Thus we are shocked to discover what all fictions urge us to
ignore in the reading but to be aware of in retrospect: that what seems to be taking
place in time is an illusion necessitated by the time-bound nature of narrative language.
Peter Brooks has reminded us that prior events in narrative are so only retrospec-
tively. Brooks says, In this sense, the metaphoric work of eventual totalization deter-
mines the meaning and status of the metonymic work of sequencethough it must
also be claimed that the metonymies of the middle produced, gave birth to, the final
metaphor. The contradiction may be in the very nature of narrative, which not only
uses but is a double logic (29). The illusion Lvi-Strauss describes of perceiving the
totality before perceiving the parts, that is, perceiving the discourse or pattern before
perceiving the sequence of events, makes the short story, as Georg Lukcs has said,
the most purely artistic form (51).
Mystery and Pattern

Two basic characteristics of the short story as a universal mode have been recognized
by authors and critics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both of
which are results of the shortness of the form and the tradition from which it derives.
They are the storys focus on a basic sense of mystery unsupported by a social frame-
work and its consequent dependence on formal pattern and structure.
Critics of the nineteenth-century German Novelle, the precursor of the so-called
tale proper for which Poe laid out characteristics in the famous Twice-Told Tales
review, note that every discussion of that form has some cognate word that suggests
strangeness, the unusual, the unexpected, concluding that the element of the strange,
the unheard of is one of nineteenth-century short fictions essential ingredients.
This typical short story focus continues in the twentieth century. Flannery OConnor
has said that short stories make alive some experience which we are not accustomed
to observe everyday, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary
life. . . . Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mys-
tery and the unexpected. The unique problem of the short story writer, says OCon-
nor, is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence
as possible (40, 98).
Terry Eagleton has recently noted that whereas realism, the most common modal
perspective of the novel, is primarily a cognitive form concerned to map the causal
processes underlying events, the short story, by contrast, can yield us some single bizarre
occurrence of epiphany of terror whose impact would merely be blunted by lengthy
realist elaboration. As Eagleton notes, since realism is a chronically naturalizing
mode, it is hard for it to cope with the ineffable or unfathomable, given those built-
in mechanisms which offer to transmute all of this into the assuringly familiar (150).
The short storys focus on mystery and the unfamiliar is partially attributable to the
fact that, as Boris jxenbaum has pointed out, it is a fundamental, elementary form
(81). As a result, the short story has remained closer than the novel to what Northrop
Frye has called the primal origin and model of all narrative, the secular scripture of
the romance. The strange, unheard-of experiences of the ineffable or unfathomable
on which the short story most often seems to focus can best be understood as those
moments of crisis and awareness identified by twentieth-century existentialist thought.
The ability of the short tale to reflect human reality in moments that cannot be so
easily naturalized underlies the distinction between story and what Isak Dinesen calls
a novel art of narration that, for the sake of realism and individual characters, sacri-
fices story. Whereas the novel, Dinesen says, is a human product, the divine art is the
story. In the beginning was the story. And within our whole universe, she continues,
the story only has authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters, that one cry
of heart of each of them: Who am I? (26). And as Heidegger says, trying to answer
the question Who am I? by focusing merely on description of everyday existence is
bound to be unauthentic (11316).
The short storys focus on the mysteries of dreams, fears, and anxieties based on
experiences or perceptions outside the realm of familiar, everyday life has always
been closely related to the formal demands of the genre. What often has been termed
the artificial patterning of the short story heightens intensity, thus creating the cryp-
tic, elliptical nature of the genre. Let me comment briefly on the title story of Alice
Munros collection The Love of a Good Woman as an example of the difference
between novelistic elaboration and short story mystery and intensity. The story begins
with three boys finding the body of the towns optometrist in his car submerged in the
river. Although one might expect the plot immediately to focus on the mystery of the
drowned man, Munro is in absolutely no hurry to satisfy the readers curiosity. She
follows the three boys into their individual homes and leisurely explores their ordinary
secrets. At the beginning of the next section of the story, Munro leaves the body and
the boys altogether and focuses on a cranky dying woman, Mrs. Quinn, cared for by
a lonely home nurse named Enid. Mrs. Quinn tells Enid that Rupert, her husband,
killed the optometrist when he saw him trying to fondle her. When Mrs. Quinn dies,
Enid, who cares for Rupert, decides she must tell him what she has heard and urge
him to give himself up. The way she decides to do this, however, creates the open-
ended ambiguity of the story: she asks him to row her out on the river, where she will
tell him what she knows, also informing him that she cannot swim. At the last minute,
she changes her mind but cannot escape the situation. The story ends just before they
leave the shore, so the reader does not know whether Enid confronts Rupert and, if
she does, whether he pushes her in the river or rows them both back to the shore.
18 CHARLES E. MAY
The Love of a Good Woman begins like a novel, but instead of continuing to
broaden out, as it introduces new characters and seemingly new stories, it tightens up,
slowly connecting what at first seemed disparate and unrelated. It is a classic example
of Munros most characteristic technique of creating a world that has all the illusion
of external reality, while all the time pulling the reader deeper and deeper into what
becomes a hallucinatory inner world of mystery, secrecy, and deception. Unlike the
novel, which would be bound to develop some sort of satisfying closure, Munros
story reaches a moral impasse, an ambiguous, open end in which the reader suddenly
realizes that instead of living in the world of apparent reality, he or she has been
whirled, as if by a centrifugal force, to an almost unbearable central point of intensity.
One of the most significant implications of the compactness demanded of the
short story is its need to transform mere objects and events into significance. Whereas
the particular can remain merely the particular in the novel, in the short story, Eliza-
beth Bowen suggests, the particular must be given general significance (259). The
novel gains assent to the reality of the work by the creation of enough detail to give
the reader the illusion that he or she knows the experience, although, of course, he
or she cannot know it in the same way that he or she knows actual experience. In the
short story, however, detail is transformed into metaphoric significance. For example,
the hard details in Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe exist as a resistance to be over-
come in Crusoes encounter with the external world. However, in a short story, such
as Hemingways Big, Two-Hearted River, which is also filled with details, the physi-
cal realities exist only to embody Nicks psychic problem. As opposed to Crusoe, Nick
is not concerned with surviving an external conflict but rather an internal one. In the
short story the hard material outlines of the external world are inevitably transformed
into the objectifications of psychic distress. Thus, at the end of Hemingways story,
Nicks refusal to go into the swamp is purely a metaphoric refusal, having nothing to
do with the real qualities of the swamp.
The Problem of Character

In his famous essay Freud and the Future, Thomas Mann reminds us that life is a
mingling of the individual elements and the formal stock-in-trade; a mingling in
which the individual, as it were, only lifts his head above the formal and impersonal
elements. Much of the extra-personal, Mann insists, much unconscious identifi-
cation, much that is conventional and schematic, is none the less decisive for the
experience not only of the artist but of the human being in general. Mann says the
author thus gains a knowledge of the schema in which and according to which the
supposed individual lives, unaware, in his naive belief in himself as unique in space
and time, of the extent to which his life is but formula and repetition (42122).
Our interest in fictional characters, Mann implies, is, regardless of the events in
which they are enmeshed, always centrally located in the process by which they try
to find their identity, the means by which they attempt to answer the age-old Oedipal
question: Who am I? In such a process the two forces of the subjective and the
schematic are decisive. As Robert Langbaum has described it, when you realize that
introspection leads to nothing but endless reflection, you see that the only way to find
out who you are is to don a mask and step into a story. The point is, says Langbaum,
at that level of experience where events fall into a pattern . . . they are an objectifi-
cation of your deepest will, since they make you do things other than you consciously
intend; so that in responding like a marionette to the necessities of the story, you actu-
ally find out what you really want and who you really are. Echoing Mann, Lang-
baum says, psychological interest passes over into the mythical at that psychological
depth where we desire to repeat mythical patterns. Life at its intensest is repetition
(177).
However, neither Mann nor Langbaum tells us in what manner a character in fic-
tion pursues his desire to repeat mythical patterns, nor how a psychologically real per-
son can be transformed into a psychological archetype by such a desire. We must
assume that as the psychological character, thinking, speaking, acting much like a
person in real life, attempts to answer the questionWho am I?he or she seems to
create his or her own individual story. But because story is always schematic and con-
ventionalized, the character is transformed into an automaton-like figure governed by
his or her place in the story itself. Thus, the character seems to be the determiner of
the schema, which in turn determines the character. The problem for the critic is iso-
lating the specific mechanisms by which the psychological passes into the mythical,
that is, the means by which the individual story is transformed into the schematic.
This involves finding a way to trace the conventional nature of the story to its source
in the desires of the psychological character and then showing how this conventional
schema transforms the character into an archetype of desire.
When we analyze a character in a story as if he or she were a real person, we
approach the character in terms of the context of the similitude of a real world the
story presents; when we interpret a character as an archetype, we must discover the
latent structure of the plot, that is, the schema or code that makes the character an
archetype by virtue of the position he or she holds in the fable itself. The former is a
response to what is individual, subjective, and metonymic; the latter is a response to
the traditional, the schematic, and the metaphoric.
To see how metonymic and metaphoric devices interact in a mixed, that is, both
realistic and romantic, fiction, it is perhaps best to begin with the extreme form of the
metaphoric or romance pole, the allegory. In an allegory, the only way to approach
the characters is by reference to their position in a preexistent code. An analysis of the
metonymic context leads nowhere. Angus Fletcher suggests the code-bound nature
of the allegorical figure when he says that if we were to meet an allegorical character
in real life, we would think the person driven by some central obsession (68). The
20 CHARLES E. MAY
obsessive-like behavior of the character is, of course, a result of his or her actions
being totally determined by the position he or she holds in the preexistent code. The
difference between an allegorical character and a character in a romance is that the
romance figure not only acts as if obsessed because of his or her position in the story
but also seems obsessed in reference to the similitude of real life created in the work
itself.
This combination seems most effectively achieved when a psychologically real
characters obsession is so extreme that he or she projects the obsession on someone
or something outside the self and then, ignoring that the source of the obsession is
within, acts as if it were without. Thus, although the obsessive action takes place
within a similitude of a realistic world, once the character has projected an inner state
outward and then has reacted to the projection as if it were outside, this very reaction
transforms the character into a parabolic rather than a realistic figure.
The most obvious early examples are those stories by Poe that focus on the per-
verse, that obsessive-like behavior that compels someone to act in a way that may
go against reason, common sense, even the best interests of the survival of the physi-
cal self. In many of Poes most important stories, the obsession occurs as behavior
that can be manifested only in elliptical or symbolic ways. For example, in The Tell-
Tale Heart the narrators desire to kill the old man because of his eye can be under-
stood only when we realize that eye must be heard, not seen, as the first-person
pronoun I.
Two of Hawthornes best-known storiesWakefield and Young Goodman Brown
also manifest this same mysterious sense of obsessive acts that have no obvious,
commonsense motivation. Goodman Brown alternately acts as if he were an allegori-
cal figure who must make his journey into the forest as an inevitable working out of
the preordained mythic story of which he is a part, and as a psychologically complex,
realistic character who, although obsessed with his journey, is able to question its wis-
dom and morality. In Wakefield Hawthorne is not interested in a man who is real-
istically motivated to leave his wife because he no longer cares for her, but rather a
character who gets so entangled in an obsessive act that he can neither explain it nor
escape it.
Melvilles Bartleby cannot explain why he is compelled to behave as he does
either. He responds to the wall outside his window as if it were not merely a metaphor
for the absurdity that confronts him, but rather the absurdity itself and, thus, like
Kurtz in Conrads Heart of Darkness, he responds to the map as if it were the terri-
tory, kicks himself loose from the earth, and becomes transformed into a character
who no longer can be defined within social, historical, or cultural contexts. As a result,
the reader is caught in an ambivalent situation of not knowing whether to respond to
Bartleby as if he is a character who is psychologically obsessed or an allegorical emblem
of obsession. It is typical of the short story that when an obsessed character makes the
metaphoric mistake of perceiving a metaphor as real, he or she becomes transformed

into a parabolic figure in a fable of his or her own creation.
Metaphoric Resolution
A primary characteristic of the modern post-Chekhovian short story is that stories that
depend on the metaphoric meaning of events and objects can only achieve closure
aesthetically rather than phenomenologically. James Joyces stories often end with
tacit epiphanies, for example, in which a spinster understands but cannot explain the
significance of clay or in which a young boy understands but cannot explain the sig-
nificance of Araby. His most respected short fiction, The Dead, is like a textbook
case of a story that transforms hard matter into metaphor and that is resolved only aes-
thetically. Throughout the story the stuff described stubbornly remains mere meto-
nymic details; even the snow that is introduced casually into the story on the shoes of
the party-goers feet is merely the cold white stuff that covers the groundthat is,
until the end of the story when Gabriels recognition transforms it into a metaphor
that closes the work by mystically covering over everything.
Bernard Malamud is one of the best-known modern writers within this tradition of
stories that end with aesthetic rather than dramatic resolutions. Critics have pointed
out that although Malamuds manner is that of the teller of tales, his technique or
structure is poetic and symbolic. He seems, says Earl Rovit, to construct his stories
backwardsbeginning with his final climactic image and then manipulating his
characters into the appropriate dramatic poses which will contribute to the total sig-
nificance of that image. The dramatic action of the story leads the characters into a
situation of conflict that is resolved by being fixed poetically in the final ambigu-
ity of conflicting forces frozen and united in their very opposition. Rovit furthermore
remarks that the aesthetic form of Malamuds story rounds upon itself and the mean-
ing of the storythe precise evaluation of forcesis left to the reader. In this way
irreconcilable forces are resolved aesthetically (7).
Jonathan Culler has observed that narratives themselves often question the prior-
ity of story to discourse. Positing the priority of events to the discourse which reports
or presents them, narratology establishes a hierarchy which the functioning of narra-
tives often subverts by presenting events not as givens but as the products of discursive
forces or requirements (29). The short story, more often than the novel, foregrounds
the demands that discourse makes on preexisting story. A narrative, by its very nature,
cannot be told until the events that it takes as its subject matter have already occurred.
Consequently, the end of the events, both in terms of their actual termination and
in terms of the purpose to which the narrator binds them, is the beginning of the dis-
course. It is therefore hardly necessary to say that the only narrative that the reader
ever gets is that which is already discourse, already ended as an event so that there is
nothing left for it but to move toward its end in its aesthetic, eventless wayvia tone,
22 CHARLES E. MAY
metaphor, and all the other purely artificial conventions of fictional discourse. Thus,
it is inevitable that events in the narrative will be motivated or determined by demands
of the discourse that may have little to do with the psychological motivation or phe-
nomenological cause of the actual events.
The short storys most basic assumption is that everyday experience reveals the self
as a mask of habits, expectations, duties, and conventions. But the short story insists
that the self must be challenged by crisis and confrontation. This is the basic tension
in the form; in primitive story the conflict can be seen as the confrontation between
the profane, which is the everyday, and the sacred, which are those strange eruptions
that primitive humans took to be the genuinely real. The short story, however, can
never reconcile this tension either existentially or morally, for the tension between
the necessity of the everyday metonymic world and the sacred metaphoric world is
one of those basic tensions that can only be held in suspension. The only resolution
possible is an aesthetic one.
The Refusal to Explain

Walter Benjamin has noted in his essay on the storyteller that the rise of the novel is
one of the primary symptoms of the decline of storytelling, for the novel neither comes
from the oral tradition nor goes into it. Benjamin says that information has come to
predominate in the modern world. Whereas the truth of information derives from
an abstracting effort to arrive at a distilled discursive meaning, the truth of story is com-
municated by a patterned recounting of a concrete experience in such a way that the
truth is embodied rather than explained. The story has a compactness that defies psy-
chological analysis, argues Benjamin.
According to Benjamin, whereas realistic narrative forms such as the novel focus
on the relatively limited areas of human experience that indeed can be encompassed
by information, characters in story encounter those most basic mysteries of human
experience that cannot be explained by rational means. Stories do not demand plau-
sibility or conformity to the laws of external reality, argues Benjamin. What story does
is to show us how to deal with all that we cannot understand; it is half the art of story-
telling to be free from information. Because the reader of story is permitted to inter-
pret things, story has an amplitude lacking in information (83109).
Storytellers have often expressed their impatience with explanation and their frus-
tration with listeners who cannot understand the story they are trying to tell. Poes nar-
rator cannot seem to explain the mystery of Roderick Usher; Melvilles lawyer struggles
to account for the enigma of Bartleby; Sherwood Anderson laments that it would take
a poet to tell the story of Wing Biddlebaums hands; Chekhovs Ivan feels that he has
failed to communicate the secret lives of those who suffer behind the scenes in
Gooseberries. And, in perhaps the most famous example of this frustration of the
storyteller in modern Western literature, Conrads Marlow sits cross-legged on the
ship deck and laments, Do you see the story? . . . Do you see anything? It seems to
me I am trying to tell you a dream.
Raymond Carver knew well the short storys tradition of centering on that which
can be narrated but not explained; in On Writing he accepted Chekhovs demand-
ing dictum: In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much,
because,becauseI dont know why. (198). The more recent writer from whom
he learned about the short storys shunning of explanation was Flannery OConnor,
who argued that since the short story writer has only a small space in which to work
and cannot make use of mere statement, he has to make the concrete work double
time (98).
Errand, one of Carvers final stories, is seemingly a straightforward, realistically
detailed presentation of the last hours of Chekhovs life. However, what makes it
more than a realistic report is the young servant who is asked to bring in the cham-
pagne that Chekhov drinks just before his death and Olga Knippers urgent instruc-
tions to the young man at the end of the story. Although the young man sees the body
of Chekhov in the next room on the bed, he also sees the cork from the bottle on the
floor near the toe of his shoe. The moment is a delicate one, for as the young man
awkwardly stands there listening to Chekhovs distracted wife asking him to go get a
mortician, the two seem to exist in different worlds.
What Carver brilliantly captures in the story is Olgas storytelling effort to send the
boy on his errand. In a manner that is typical in Carvers stories, she repeatedly asks
him, Do you understand what Im saying to you? As he grapples to understand, she
tells him a story describing his own actions in performing the errand. Because Olgas
narrative of what the boy is to do is described as if it were actually taking place, the
verb tense of the story shifts from future to present: The mortician would be in his
forties. . . . He would be modest, unassuming. . . . Probably he would be wearing an
apron. He might even be wiping his hands on a dark towel. At this juncture, the
point of view shifts to present tense: The mortician takes the vase of roses. . . . The
one time the young man mentions the name of the deceased, the morticians eye-
brows rise just a little. Chekhov, you say? Just a minute, and Ill be with you. How-
ever, as Olga urges the waiter to perform his important errand, the young man is
thinking about the cork at the toe of his shoe. And just before he leaves, he leans over
without looking down and closes his hand around itan embodiment of those seem-
ingly innocuous but powerfully significant details that constitute the true genius of
Chekhovs art. It is the most poignant example in Carvers fiction of his understand-
ing of his Chekhovian realization: It is possible, in a poem or a short story, to write
about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and
to endow those thingsa chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a womans earring
with immense, even startling power.3
24 CHARLES E. MAY
Conclusion
The very shortness of the short story, as well as the necessary artistic devices de-
manded by this shortness, force it to focus not on the whole of experience (whatever
that is) in all its perceptual and conceptual categorization, but rather on a single
experience lifted out of the everyday flow of human actuality and active striving, an
experience that is lifted out precisely because it is not a slice of that reality, but rather
a moment in which reality itself is challenged. The novel, by its very length, regard-
less of how many crisis moments it may present, still must in some way resolve them,
cover them over, conceal them by the very bulk of its similitude to the ordinary flow
of everyday experience. The short story, standing alone, with no life before it or after
it, can receive no such comforting merging of the extraordinary with the ordinary. For
example, we might hypothesize that after Miss Brill has been so emphatically made
aware of her role in the park each Sunday, she will still go on with her life, but Kather-
ine Mansfields story titled Miss Brill gives us no such comforting afterthought
based on our confidence that life goes on, for it ends with the revelation.
The question of the short storys form being true to reality or false to it, of being a
natural form or a highly conventional one, requires a reevaluation of what we mean
when we say reality or natural. If we assume that reality is what we experience
every day, if we assume that reality is our well-controlled and comfortable self, then
the short story is neither realistic nor natural. If, however, we feel that beneath the
everyday or immanent in the everyday there is some other reality that somehow
evades us, if our view is a religious one in its most basic sense, that is, if we feel that
something is lacking, if we have a sense of the liminal nature of existence, then the
short story is more realistic than the novel can possibly be. It is closer to the nature
of reality as we experience it in those moments when we are made aware of the
inauthenticity of everyday life, those moments when we sense the inadequacy of our
categories of perception. It is for these reasons, I think, that short stories are essential
and yet seldom read.
Notes
1. Quoted by Halpern, Art of the Tale, v.
2. Quoted in May, Edgar Allan Poe, 121.
3. On Writing, 275.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, M. M., and P. N. Medvedev. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. Trans-
lated by Albert J. Wehrle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
Benjamin, Walter. The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov. In Illumi-
nations, translated by Harry Zohn, 83109. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970.
Bowen, Elizabeth. The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories. In The New Short Story Theo-
ries, edited by Charles E. May, 25662. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot. New York: Knopf, 1984.
Carver, Raymond. Errand. In Where Im Calling From, 38191. New York: Atlantic Monthly
Press, 1988.
. On Writing. In The New Short Story Theories, edited by Charles E. May, 27377.
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The next several pages contain a tripletthree selectionsconsisting
of a literary text (Long Walk to Forever), an expository piece (The
Human Story Machine), and a visual representation
(www.makeanewfriend.com).
Questions intended to guide the reader are included in the margins of
each selection. As you read, try to answer these questions. You may make
your own notes in the margins as you read. As you progress through the
reading section of this study guide, you will be asked to refer to these
selections several times.
Literary Selection
Long Walk to Forever

by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
What details
does the author
use to create a 1 They had grown up next door to each other, on the fringe of
tranquil mood in a city, near fields and woods and orchards, within sight of a
paragraph 1?
lovely bell tower that belonged to a school for the blind.
2 Now they were 20, had not seen each other for nearly a year.
There had always been playful, comfortable warmth between
them, but never any talk of love.
3 His name was Newt. Her name was Catharine. In the early
afternoon, Newt knocked on Catharines front door.
4 Catharine came to the door. She was carrying a fat, glossy
magazine she had been reading. The magazine was devoted
entirely to brides. Newt! she said. She was surprised to see
him.
5 Could you come for a walk? he said. He was a shy person,
even with Catharine. He covered his shyness by speaking
absently, as though what really concerned him were far awayas
though he were a secret agent pausing briefly on a mission
between beautiful, distant, and sinister points. This manner of
speaking had always been Newts style, even in matters that
concerned him desperately.
6 A walk? said Catharine.
7 One foot in front of the other, said Newt, through leaves,
over bridges
11
8 I had no idea you were in town, she said.

9 Just this minute got in, he said.
10 Still in the Army, I see, she said.
What details 11 Seven more months to go, he said. He was a private first
does the author class in the Artillery. His uniform was rumpled. His shoes were
use to charac-
terize Newt in dusty. He needed a shave. He held out his hand for the magazine.
paragraph 11? Lets see the pretty book, he said.
What can you
infer about 12 She gave it to him. Im getting married, Newt, she said.
Newt from
these details? 13 I know, he said. Lets go for a walk.
14 Im awfully busy, Newt, she said. The wedding is only a
week away.
15 If we go for a walk, he said, it will make you rosy. It will
make you a rosy bride. He turned the pages of the magazine. A
rosy bride like herlike herlike her, he said, showing her
rosy brides.
What does 16 Catharine turned rosy, thinking about rosy brides.

Newt invite 17 That will be my present to Henry Stewart Chasens, said
Catharine to do?
Newt. By taking you for a walk, Ill be giving him a rosy bride.
18 You know his name? said Catharine.
19 Mother wrote, he said. From Pittsburgh?
20 Yes, she said. Youd like him.
21 Maybe, he said.
22 Cancan you come to the wedding, Newt? she said.
23 That I doubt, he said.
24 Your furlough isnt for long enough? she said.
25 Furlough? said Newt. He was studying a two-page ad for
flat silver. Im not on furlough, he said.
26 Oh? she said.
27 Im what they call A.W.O.L.,1 said Newt.
What is
Catharine's 28 Oh, Newt! Youre not! she said.
reaction when
she learns that 29 Sure I am, he said, still looking at the magazine.
Newt is
A.W.O.L.?
A.W.O.L. is a military term for absent without leave.
1
12
30 Why, Newt? she said.

What is ironic 31 I had to find out what your silver pattern is, he said. He
about this state- read names of silver patterns from the magazine. Albermarle?
ment?
Heather? he said. Legend? Rambler Rose? He looked up,
smiled. I plan to give you and your husband a spoon, he said.
What details
lead you to 32 Newt, Newttell me really, she said.
believe that
Newt does not 33 I want to go for a walk, he said.
really want to 34 She wrung her hands in sisterly anguish. Oh, Newtyoure
buy Catharine
and Henry a fooling me about being A.W.O.L., she said.
spoon?
35 Newt imitated a police siren softly, raised his eyebrows.
36 Wherewhere from? she said.
37 Fort Bragg, he said.
38 North Carolina? she said.
39 Thats right, he said. Near Fayettevillewhere Scarlet
OHara went to school.
40 How did you get here, Newt? she said.
41 He raised his thumb, jerked it in a hitchhike gesture. Two
days, he said.
Newt says that
he did not come 42 Does your mother know? she said.
to see his moth-
er. What can 43 I didnt come to see my mother, he told her.
you infer from
this? 44 Who did you come to see? she said.
45 You, he said.
46 Why me? she said.
Why do you
think Newt 47 Because I love you, he said. Now can we take a walk? he
repeats this
phrase from said. One foot in front of the otherthrough leaves, over
paragraph 7? bridges
Why do you
think the author
includes an extra
space here?
48 They were taking the walk now, were in a woods with a
brown-leaf floor.
49 Catharine was angry and rattled, close to tears. Newt, she
said, this is absolutely crazy.
50 How so? said Newt.
13
51 What a crazy time to tell me you love me, she said. You
never talked that way before. She stopped walking.
52 Lets keep walking, he said.
53 No, she said. So far, no farther. I shouldnt have come out
with you at all, she said.
Catharine says 54 You did, he said.
that she agreed
to go for a walk 55 To get you out of the house, she said. If somebody walked
with Newt to in and heard you talking to me that way, a week before the
get him out of
the house. Do wedding
you think that
this is her real 56 What would they think? he said.
reason? 57 Theyd think you were crazy, she said.
58 Why? he said.
How would you 59 Catharine took a deep breath, made a speech. Let me say
summarize that Im deeply honored by this crazy thing youve done, she
Catharine's
"speech"? What said. I cant believe youre really A.W.O.L., but maybe you are. I
characteristics cant believe you really love me, but maybe you do. But
does it reveal
about her? 60 I do, said Newt.
What conflict 61 Well, Im deeply honored, said Catharine, and Im very
does Catharine's fond of you as a friend, Newt, extremely fondbut its just too
speech reveal? late. She took a step away from him. Youve never even kissed
How does the me, she said, and she protected herself with her hands. I dont
author reveal mean you should do it now. I just mean this is all so unexpected.
Catharine's I havent got the remotest idea of how to respond.
affection for
Newt in para- 62 Just walk some more, he said. Have a nice time.
graph 61?
63 They started walking again.
64 How did you expect me to react? she said.
65 How would I know what to expect? he said. Ive never
done anything like this before.
66 Did you think I would throw myself into your arms? she
said.
67 Maybe, he said.
68 Im sorry to disappoint you, she said.
69 Im not disappointed, he said. I wasnt counting on it. This
is very nice, just walking.
14
70 Catharine stopped again. You know what happens next?

she said.
71 Nope, he said.
72 We shake hands, she said. We shake hands and part
friends, she said. Thats what happens next.
How would you 73 Newt nodded. All right, he said. Remember me from time
describe Newt's
approach to pur- to time. Remember how much I loved you.
suing Catharine? 74 Involuntarily, Catharine burst into tears. She turned her back
What does this
show about to Newt, looked into the infinite colonnade of the woods.
him?
75 What does that mean? said Newt.
76 Rage! said Catharine. She clenched her hands. You have
Catharine feels
that her tears no right
are caused by
rage. What 77 I had to find out, he said.
other emotions 78 If Id loved you, she said, I would have let you know before
might be causing
her outburst? now.
79 You would? he said.
80 Yes, she said. She faced him, looked up at him, her face
quite red. You would have known, she said.
81 How? he said.
82 You would have seen it, she said. Women arent very clever
at hiding it.
Notice the con- 83 Newt looked closely at Catharines face now. To her
text clues for consternation, she realized that what she had said was true, that
the word
consternation. a woman couldnt hide love.
84 Newt was seeing love now.
85 And he did what he had to do. He kissed her.
86 Youre hell to get along with! she said when Newt let her go.
87 I am? said Newt.
88 You shouldnt have done that, she said.
89 You didnt like it? he said.
15
90 What did you expect, she saidwild, abandoned

passion?
91 I keep telling you, he said, I never know whats going to
happen next.
92 We say good-bye, she said.
93 He frowned slightly. All right, he said.
94 She made another speech. Im not sorry we kissed, she said.
That was sweet. We should have kissed, weve been so close. Ill
always remember you, Newt, and good luck.
What important
change does the 95 You too, he said.
author reveal to 96 Thank you, Newt, she said.
the reader?
97 Thirty days, he said.
98 What? she said.
99 Thirty days in the stockade, he saidthats what one kiss
will cost me.
100 IIm sorry, she said, but I didnt ask you to go A.W.O.L.
101 I know, he said.
102 You certainly dont deserve any heros reward for doing
something as foolish as that, she said.
103 Must be nice to be a hero, said Newt. Is Henry Stewart
Chasens a hero?
104 He might be, if he got the chance, said Catharine. She noted
What can you uneasily that they had begun to walk again. The farewell had
infer from the been forgotten.
fact that
Catharine con- 105 You really love him? he said.
tinues to walk?
106 Certainly I love him! she said hotly. I wouldnt marry him
if I didnt love him!
107 Whats good about him? said Newt.
108 Honestly! she cried, stopping again. Do you have an idea
how offensive youre being? Many, many, many things are good
How would you about Henry! Yes, she said, and many, many, many things are
describe probably bad too. But that isnt any of your business. I love
Catharine's
feelings toward Henry, and I dont have to argue his merits with you!
Henry?
109 Sorry, said Newt.
16
110 Honestly! said Catharine.

111 Newt kissed her again. He kissed her again because she
wanted him to.
112 They were now in a large orchard.
113 How did we get so far from home, Newt? said Catharine.
114 One foot in front of the otherthrough leaves, over
bridges, said Newt.
115 They add upthe steps, she said.
116 Bells rang in the tower of the school for the blind nearby.
117 School for the blind, said Newt.
118 School for the blind, said Catharine. She shook her head in
drowsy wonder. Ive got to go back now, she said.
119 Say good-bye, said Newt.
120 Every time I do, said Catharine, I seem to get kissed.
121 Newt sat down on the close-cropped grass under an apple
tree. Sit down, he said.
122 No, she said.
123 I wont touch you, he said.
124 I dont believe you, she said.
125 She sat down under another tree, 20 feet away from him. She
closed her eyes.
Why do 126 Dream of Henry Stewart Chasens, he said.
you think Newt
tells Catharine 127 What? she said.
to dream of
Henry? 128 Dream of your wonderful husband-to-be, he said.
129 All right, I will, she said. She closed her eyes tighter, caught
glimpses of her husband-to-be.
130 Newt yawned.
131 The bees were humming in the trees, and Catharine almost
fell asleep. When she opened her eyes she saw that Newt really
was asleep.
132 He began to snore softly.
17
133 Catharine let Newt sleep for an hour, and while he slept she
adored him with all her heart.
134 The shadows of the apple tree grew to the east. The bells in
the tower of the school for the blind rang again.
135 Chick-a-dee-dee-dee, went a chickadee.
136 Somewhere far away an automobile starter nagged and failed,
nagged and failed, fell still.
What are para- 137 Catharine came out from under her tree, knelt by Newt.
graphs 132137
mostly about? 138 Newt? she said.
139 Hm? he said. He opened his eyes.
140 Late, she said.
141 Hello, Catharine, he said.
142 Hello, Newt, she said.
143 I love you, he said.
144 I know, she said.
145 Too late, he said.
146 Too late, she said.
147 He stood, stretched groaningly. A very nice walk, he said.
148 I thought so, she said.
149 Part company here? he said.
150 Where will you go? she said.
151 Hitch into town, turn myself in, he said.
152 Good luck, she said.
What charac- 153 You, too, he said. Marry me, Catharine?
teristic of Newt
does paragraph 154 No, she said.
153 reveal?
155 He smiled, stared at her hard for a moment, then walked away
quickly.
156 Catharine watched him grow smaller in the long perspective
of shadows and trees, knew that if he stopped and turned now, if
he called to her, she would run to him. She would have no
choice.
18
Why does the 157 Newt did stop. He did turn. He did call. Catharine, he
author use short called.
sentences in
paragraph 157? 158 She ran to him, put her arms around him, could not speak.
Long Walk to Forever, from WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., copyright 1961 by
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Used by permission of Dell Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc.
19
THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO
by Edgar Allan Poe
(1846)
THE thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed
revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a
threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely, settled --but the very definitiveness with
which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity. A wrong
is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to
make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.
It must be understood that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good will. I
continued, as was my in to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my to smile now was at the
thought of his immolation.
He had a weak point --this Fortunato --although in other regards he was a man to be respected and even
feared. He prided himself on his connoisseurship in wine. Few Italians have the true virtuoso spirit. For the
most part their enthusiasm is adopted to suit the time and opportunity, to practise imposture upon the
British and Austrian millionaires. In painting and gemmary, Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack,
but in the matter of old wines he was sincere. In this respect I did not differ from him materially; --I was
skilful in the Italian vintages myself, and bought largely whenever I could.
It was about dusk, one evening during the supreme madness of the carnival season, that I encountered my
friend. He accosted me with excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much. The man wore motley. He
had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells. I was so
pleased to see him that I thought I should never have done wringing his hand.
I said to him --"My dear Fortunato, you are luckily met. How remarkably well you are looking to-day. But I
have received a pipe of what passes for Amontillado, and I have my doubts."
"How?" said he. "Amontillado, A pipe? Impossible! And in the middle of the carnival!"
"I have my doubts," I replied; "and I was silly enough to pay the full Amontillado price without consulting
you in the matter. You were not to be found, and I was fearful of losing a bargain."
"Amontillado!"
"I have my doubts."
"Amontillado!"
"And I must satisfy them."
"Amontillado!"
"As you are engaged, I am on my way to Luchresi. If any one has a critical turn it is he. He will tell me --"
"Luchresi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry."
"And yet some fools will have it that his taste is a match for your own.
"Come, let us go."
"Whither?"
"To your vaults."
"My friend, no; I will not impose upon your good nature. I perceive you have an engagement. Luchresi--"
"I have no engagement; --come."
"My friend, no. It is not the engagement, but the severe cold with which I perceive you are afflicted. The
vaults are insufferably damp. They are encrusted with nitre."
"Let us go, nevertheless. The cold is merely nothing. Amontillado! You have been imposed upon. And as
for Luchresi, he cannot distinguish Sherry from Amontillado."
Thus speaking, Fortunato possessed himself of my arm; and putting on a mask of black silk and drawing a
roquelaire closely about my person, I suffered him to hurry me to my palazzo.
There were no attendants at home; they had absconded to make merry in honour of the time. I had told
them that I should not return until the morning, and had given them explicit orders not to stir from the
house. These orders were sufficient, I well knew, to insure their immediate disappearance, one and all, as
soon as my back was turned.
I took from their sconces two flambeaux, and giving one to Fortunato, bowed him through several suites of
rooms to the archway that led into the vaults. I passed down a long and winding staircase, requesting him to
be cautious as he followed. We came at length to the foot of the descent, and stood together upon the damp
ground of the catacombs of the Montresors.
The gait of my friend was unsteady, and the bells upon his cap jingled as he strode.
"The pipe," he said.
"It is farther on," said I; "but observe the white web-work which gleams from these cavern walls."
He turned towards me, and looked into my eves with two filmy orbs that distilled the rheum of intoxication.
"Nitre?" he asked, at length.
"Nitre," I replied. "How long have you had that cough?"
"Ugh! ugh! ugh! --ugh! ugh! ugh! --ugh! ugh! ugh! --ugh! ugh! ugh! --ugh! ugh! ugh!"
My poor friend found it impossible to reply for many minutes.
"It is nothing," he said, at last.
"Come," I said, with decision, "we will go back; your health is precious. You are rich, respected, admired,
beloved; you are happy, as once I was. You are a man to be missed. For me it is no matter. We will go
back; you will be ill, and I cannot be responsible. Besides, there is Luchresi --"
"Enough," he said; "the cough's a mere nothing; it will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough."
"True --true," I replied; "and, indeed, I had no intention of alarming you unnecessarily --but you should use
all proper caution. A draught of this Medoc will defend us from the damps.
Here I knocked off the neck of a bottle which I drew from a long row of its fellows that lay upon the
mould.
"Drink," I said, presenting him the wine.
He raised it to his lips with a leer. He paused and nodded to me familiarly, while his bells jingled.
"I drink," he said, "to the buried that repose around us."
"And I to your long life."
He again took my arm, and we proceeded.
"These vaults," he said, "are extensive."
"The Montresors," I replied, "were a great and numerous family."
"I forget your arms."
"A huge human foot d'or, in a field azure; the foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are imbedded in
the heel."
"And the motto?"
"Nemo me impune lacessit."
"Good!" he said.
The wine sparkled in his eyes and the bells jingled. My own fancy grew warm with the Medoc. We had
passed through long walls of piled skeletons, with casks and puncheons intermingling, into the inmost
recesses of the catacombs. I paused again, and this time I made bold to seize Fortunato by an arm above the
elbow.
"The nitre!" I said; "see, it increases. It hangs like moss upon the vaults. We are below the river's bed. The
drops of moisture trickle among the bones. Come, we will go back ere it is too late. Your cough --"
"It is nothing," he said; "let us go on. But first, another draught of the Medoc."
I broke and reached him a flagon of De Grave. He emptied it at a breath. His eyes flashed with a fierce
light. He laughed and threw the bottle upwards with a gesticulation I did not understand.
I looked at him in surprise. He repeated the movement --a grotesque one.
"You do not comprehend?" he said.
"Not I," I replied.

"Then you are not of the brotherhood."
"How?"
"You are not of the masons."
"Yes, yes," I said; "yes, yes."
"You? Impossible! A mason?"
"A mason," I replied.
"A sign," he said, "a sign."
"It is this," I answered, producing from beneath the folds of my roquelaire a trowel.
"You jest," he exclaimed, recoiling a few paces. "But let us proceed to the Amontillado."
"Be it so," I said, replacing the tool beneath the cloak and again offering him my arm. He leaned upon it
heavily. We continued our route in search of the Amontillado. We passed through a range of low arches,
descended, passed on, and descending again, arrived at a deep crypt, in which the foulness of the air caused
our flambeaux rather to glow than flame.
At the most remote end of the crypt there appeared another less spacious. Its walls had been lined with
human remains, piled to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of Paris. Three sides of
this interior crypt were still ornamented in this manner. From the fourth side the bones had been thrown
down, and lay promiscuously upon the earth, forming at one point a mound of some size. Within the wall
thus exposed by the displacing of the bones, we perceived a still interior crypt or recess, in depth about four
feet, in width three, in height six or seven. It seemed to have been constructed for no especial use within
itself, but formed merely the interval between two of the colossal supports of the roof of the catacombs, and
was backed by one of their circumscribing walls of solid granite.
It was in vain that Fortunato, uplifting his dull torch, endeavoured to pry into the depth of the recess. Its
termination the feeble light did not enable us to see.
"Proceed," I said; "herein is the Amontillado. As for Luchresi --"
"He is an ignoramus," interrupted my friend, as he stepped unsteadily forward, while I followed

immediately at his heels. In niche, and finding an instant he had reached the extremity of the niche, and
finding his progress arrested by the rock, stood stupidly bewildered. A moment more and I had fettered him
to the granite. In its surface were two iron staples, distant from each other about two feet, horizontally.
From one of these depended a short chain, from the other a padlock. Throwing the links about his waist, it
was but the work of a few seconds to secure it. He was too much astounded to resist. Withdrawing the key I
stepped back from the recess.
"Pass your hand," I said, "over the wall; you cannot help feeling the nitre. Indeed, it is very damp. Once
more let me implore you to return. No? Then I must positively leave you. But I must first render you all the
little attentions in my power."
"The Amontillado!" ejaculated my friend, not yet recovered from his astonishment.
"True," I replied; "the Amontillado."

As I said these words I busied myself among the pile of bones of which I have before spoken. Throwing
them aside, I soon uncovered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these materials and with the aid
of my trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the entrance of the niche.
I had scarcely laid the first tier of the masonry when I discovered that the intoxication of Fortunato had in a
great measure worn off. The earliest indication I had of this was a low moaning cry from the depth of the
recess. It was not the cry of a drunken man. There was then a long and obstinate silence. I laid the second
tier, and the third, and the fourth; and then I heard the furious vibrations of the chain. The noise lasted for
several minutes, during which, that I might hearken to it with the more satisfaction, I ceased my labours
and sat down upon the bones. When at last the clanking subsided, I resumed the trowel, and finished
without interruption the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh tier. The wall was now nearly upon a level with my
breast. I again paused, and holding the flambeaux over the mason-work, threw a few feeble rays upon the
figure within.
A succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly from the throat of the chained form, seemed to
thrust me violently back. For a brief moment I hesitated, I trembled. Unsheathing my rapier, I began to
grope with it about the recess; but the thought of an instant reassured me. I placed my hand upon the solid
fabric of the catacombs, and felt satisfied. I reapproached the wall; I replied to the yells of him who
clamoured. I re-echoed, I aided, I surpassed them in volume and in strength. I did this, and the clamourer
grew still.
It was now midnight, and my task was drawing to a close. I had completed the eighth, the ninth and the
tenth tier. I had finished a portion of the last and the eleventh; there remained but a single stone to be fitted
and plastered in. I struggled with its weight; I placed it partially in its destined position. But now there
came from out the niche a low laugh that erected the hairs upon my head. It was succeeded by a sad voice,
which I had difficulty in recognizing as that of the noble Fortunato. The voice said--
"Ha! ha! ha! --he! he! he! --a very good joke, indeed --an excellent jest. We will have many a rich laugh
about it at the palazzo --he! he! he! --over our wine --he! he! he!"
"The Amontillado!" I said.
"He! he! he! --he! he! he! --yes, the Amontillado. But is it not getting late? Will not they be awaiting us at
the palazzo, the Lady Fortunato and the rest? Let us be gone."
"Yes," I said, "let us be gone."
"For the love of God, Montresor!"
"Yes," I said, "for the love of God!"
But to these words I hearkened in vain for a reply. I grew impatient. I called aloud --
"Fortunato!"
No answer. I called again --
"Fortunato!"
No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in
return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it
so. I hastened to make an end of my labour. I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. Against
the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed
them. In pace requiescat!
!
In A Grove
Akutagawa, Ryunosuke
Translator: Takasi Kojima
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The Storm
by Kate Chopin
The leaves were so still that even Bibi thought it was going to rain. Bobint, who was accustomed
to converse on terms of perfect equality with his little son, called the child's attention to certain
sombre clouds that were rolling with sinister intention from the west, accompanied by a sullen,
threatening roar. They were at Friedheimer's store and decided to remain there till the storm had
passed. They sat within the door on two empty kegs. Bibi was four years old and looked very wise.
"Mama'll be 'fraid, yes, he suggested with blinking eyes.
"She'll shut the house. Maybe she got Sylvie helpin' her this evenin'," Bobint responded
reassuringly.
"No; she ent got Sylvie. Sylvie was helpin' her yistiday,' piped Bibi.
Bobint arose and going across to the counter purchased a can of shrimps, of which Calixta was
very fond. Then he returned to his perch on the keg and sat stolidly holding the can of shrimps
while the storm burst. It shook the wooden store and seemed to be ripping great furrows in the
distant field. Bibi laid his little hand on his father's knee and was not afraid.
II
Calixta, at home, felt no uneasiness for their safety. She sat at a side window sewing furiously on a
sewing machine. She was greatly occupied and did not notice the approaching storm. But she felt
very warm and often stopped to mop her face on which the perspiration gathered in beads. She
unfastened her white sacque at the throat. It began to grow dark, and suddenly realizing the
situation she got up hurriedly and went about closing windows and doors.
Out on the small front gallery she had hung Bobint's Sunday clothes to dry and she hastened out
to gather them before the rain fell. As she stepped outside, Alce Laballire rode in at the gate.
She had not seen him very often since her marriage, and never alone. She stood there with
Bobint's coat in her hands, and the big rain drops began to fall. Alce rode his horse under the
shelter of a side projection where the chickens had huddled and there were plows and a harrow
piled up in the corner.
"May I come and wait on your gallery till the storm is over, Calixta?" he asked.
Come 'long in, M'sieur Alce."
His voice and her own startled her as if from a trance, and she seized Bobint's vest. Alce,
mounting to the porch, grabbed the trousers and snatched Bibi's braided jacket that was about to
be carried away by a sudden gust of wind. He expressed an intention to remain outside, but it was
soon apparent that he might as well have been out in the open: the water beat in upon the boards
in driving sheets, and he went inside, closing the door after him. It was even necessary to put
something beneath the door to keep the water out.
"My! what a rain! It's good two years sence it rain' like that," exclaimed Calixta as she rolled up a
piece of bagging and Alce helped her to thrust it beneath the crack.
She was a little fuller of figure than five years before when she married; but she had lost nothing of
her vivacity. Her blue eyes still retained their melting quality; and her yellow hair, dishevelled by the
wind and rain, kinked more stubbornly than ever about her ears and temples.
The rain beat upon the low, shingled roof with a force and clatter that threatened to break an
entrance and deluge them there. They were in the dining room the sitting room the general utility
room. Adjoining was her bed room, with Bibi's couch along side her own. The door stood open, and
the room with its white, monumental bed, its closed shutters, looked dim and mysterious.
Alce flung himself into a rocker and Calixta nervously began to gather up from the floor the
lengths of a cotton sheet which she had been sewing.
lf this keeps up, Dieu sait if the levees goin' to stan it!" she exclaimed.
"What have you got to do with the levees?"
"I got enough to do! An' there's Bobint with Bibi out in that storm if he only didn' left
Friedheimer's!"
"Let us hope, Calixta, that Bobint's got sense enough to come in out of a cyclone."
She went and stood at the window with a greatly disturbed look on her face. She wiped the frame
that was clouded with moisture. It was stiflingly hot. Alce got up and joined her at the window,
looking over her shoulder. The rain was coming down in sheets obscuring the view of far-off cabins
and enveloping the distant wood in a gray mist. The playing of the lightning was incessant. A bolt
struck a tall chinaberry tree at the edge of the field. It filled all visible space with a blinding glare
and the crash seemed to invade the very boards they stood upon.
Calixta put her hands to her eyes, and with a cry, staggered backward. Alce's arm encircled her,
and for an instant he drew her close and spasmodically to him.
"Bont!" she cried, releasing herself from his encircling arm and retreating from the window, the
house'll go next! If I only knew w'ere Bibi was!" She would not compose herself; she would not be
seated. Alce clasped her shoulders and looked into her face. The contact of her warm, palpitating
body when he had unthinkingly drawn her into his arms, had aroused all the old-time infatuation
and desire for her flesh.
"Calixta," he said, "don't be frightened. Nothing can happen. The house is too low to be struck, with
so many tall trees standing about. There! aren't you going to be quiet? say, aren't you?" He pushed
her hair back from her face that was warm and steaming. Her lips were as red and moist as
pomegranate seed. Her white neck and a glimpse of her full, firm bosom disturbed him powerfully.
As she glanced up at him the fear in her liquid blue eyes had given place to a drowsy gleam that
unconsciously betrayed a sensuous desire. He looked down into her eyes and there was nothing
for him to do but to gather her lips in a kiss. It reminded him of Assumption.
"Do you rememberin Assumption, Calixta?" he asked in a low voice broken by passion. Oh! she
remembered; for in Assumption he had kissed her and kissed and kissed her; until his senses
would well nigh fail, and to save her he would resort to a desperate flight. If she was not an
immaculate dove in those days, she was still inviolate; a passionate creature whose very
defenselessness had made her defense, against which his honor forbade him to prevail. Now well,
now her lips seemed in a manner free to be tasted, as well as her round, white throat and her
whiter breasts.
They did not heed the crashing torrents, and the roar of the elements made her laugh as she lay in
his arms. She was a revelation in that dim, mysterious chamber; as white as the couch she lay
upon. Her firm, elastic flesh that was knowing for the first time its birthright, was like a creamy lily
that the sun invites to contribute its breath and perfume to the undying life of the world.
The generous abundance of her passion, without guile or trickery, was like a white flame which
penetrated and found response in depths of his own sensuous nature that had never yet been
reached.
When he touched her breasts they gave themselves up in quivering ecstasy, inviting his lips. Her
mouth was a fountain of delight. And when he possessed her, they seemed to swoon together at
the very borderland of life's mystery.
He stayed cushioned upon her, breathless, dazed, enervated, with his heart beating like a hammer
upon her. With one hand she clasped his head, her lips lightly touching his forehead. The other
hand stroked with a soothing rhythm his muscular shoulders.
The growl of the thunder was distant and passing away. The rain beat softly upon the shingles,
inviting them to drowsiness and sleep. But they dared not yield.
III
The rain was over; and the sun was turning the glistening green world into a palace of gems.
Calixta, on the gallery, watched Alce ride away. He turned and smiled at her with a beaming face;
and she lifted her pretty chin in the air and laughed aloud.
Bobint and Bibi, trudging home, stopped without at the cistern to make themselves presentable.
"My! Bibi, w'at will yo' mama say! You ought to be ashame'. You oughta' put on those good pants.
Look at 'em! An' that mud on yo' collar! How you got that mud on yo' collar, Bibi? I never saw such
a boy!" Bibi was the picture of pathetic resignation. Bobint was the embodiment of serious
solicitude as he strove to remove from his own person and his son's the signs of their tramp over
heavy roads and through wet fields. He scraped the mud off Bibi's bare legs and feet with a stick
and carefully removed all traces from his heavy brogans. Then, prepared for the worst the meeting
with an over-scrupulous housewife, they entered cautiously at the back door.
Calixta was preparing supper. She had set the table and was dripping coffee at the hearth. She
sprang up as they came in.
"Oh, Bobint! You back! My! But I was uneasy. W'ere you been during the rain? An' Bibi? he ain't
wet? he ain't hurt?" She had clasped Bibi and was kissing him effusively. Bobint's explanations
and apologies which he had been composing all along the way, died on his lips as Calixta felt him
to see if he were dry, and seemed to express nothing but satisfaction at their safe return.
"I brought you some shrimps, Calixta," offered Bobint, hauling the can from his ample side pocket
and laying it on the table.
"Shrimps! Oh, Bobint! you too good fo' anything!" and she gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek
that resounded, "J'vous rponds, we'll have a feas' to-night! umph-umph!"
Bobint and Bibi began to relax and enjoy themselves, and when the three seated themselves at
table they laughed much and so loud that anyone might have heard them as far away as
Laballire's.
IV
Alce Laballire wrote to his wife, Clarisse, that night. It was a loving letter, full of tender solicitude.
He told her not to hurry back, but if she and the babies liked it at Biloxi, to stay a month longer. He
was getting on nicely; and though he missed them, he was willing to bear the separation a while
longer realizing that their health and pleasure were the first things to be considered.
V
As for Clarisse, she was charmed upon receiving her husband's letter. She and the babies were
doing well. The society was agreeable; many of her old friends and acquaintances were at the bay.
And the first free breath since her marriage seemed to restore the pleasant liberty of her maiden
days. Devoted as she was to her husband, their intimate conjugal life was something which she
was more than willing to forego for a while.
So the storm passed and every one was happy.

Midsummer
(American Colonial Literature)
By Manuel E. Arguilla
He pulled down his hat until the wide brim touched his shoulders. He
crouched lower under the cover of his cart and peered ahead. The road
seemed to writhe under the lash of the noon-day heat; it swum from side to
side, humped and bent itself like a feeling serpent, and disappeared behind
the spur of a low hill on which grew a scrawny thicket of bamboo.
There was not a house in sight. Along the left side of the road ran the deep,
dry gorge of a stream, the banks sparsely covered by sun-burned cogon
grass. In places, the rocky, waterless bed showed aridly. Farther, beyond
the shimmer of quivering heat waves rose ancient hills not less blue than
the cloud-palisaded sky. On the right stretched a land waste of low rolling
dunes. Scattered clumps of hardy ledda relieved the otherwise barren
monotony of the landscape. Far away he could discern a thin indigo line
that was the sea.
The grating of the cartwheels on the pebbles of the road and the almost
soundless shuffle of the weary bull but emphasized the stillness. Now and
then came the dry rustling of falling earth as lumps from the cracked sides
of the gorge fell down to the bottom.
He struck at the bull with the slack of the rope. The animal broke into a
heavy trot. The dust stirred slumbrously. The bull slowed down, threw up
his head, and a glistening thread of saliva spun out into the dry air. The
dying rays of the sun were reflected in points of light on the wet, heaving
flanks.
The man in the cart did not notice the woman until she had rounded the
spur of land and stood unmoving beside the road, watching the cart and its
occupant come toward her. She was young, surprisingly sweet and fresh
amidst her parched surroundings. A gaily stripped kerchief covered her
head, the ends tied at the nape of her neck. She wore a homespun bodice of
light red cloth with small white checks. Her skirt was also homespun and
showed a pattern of white checks with narrow stripes of yellow and red.
With both hands she held by the mouth a large, apparently empty, water
jug, the cool red of which blended well with her dress. She was barefoot.
She stood straight and still beside the road and regarded him with frank
curiosity. Suddenly she turned and disappeared into the dry gorge.
Coming to where she had stood a few moments before, he pulled up the
bull and got out of the cart. He saw where a narrow path had been cut into
the bank and stood a while lost in thought, absently wiping the
perspiration from his face. Then he unhitched his bull and for a few
moments, with strong brown fingers, kneaded the hot neck of the beast.
Driving the animal before him, he followed the path. It led up the dry bed
of the stream; the sharp fragments of sun-heated rocks were like burning
coals under his feet. There was no sign of the young woman.
He came upon her beyond a bed in the gorge, where a big mango tree,
which had partly fallen from the side of the ravine, cast its cool shade over
a well.
She had filled her jar and was rolling the kerchief around her hand into a
flat coil which she placed on her head. Without glancing at him, where he
had stopped some distance off, she sat down of her heels, gathering the
fold of her skirt between her wide-spread knees. She tilted the brimful jar
to remove part of the water. One hand on the rim, the other supporting the
bottom, she began to raise it to her head. She knelt on one kneeresting, for a
moment, the jar onto her head, getting to her feet at the same time. But she
staggered a little and water splashed down on her breast. The single bodice
instantly clung to her bosom molding the twin hillocks of her breasts
warmly brown through the wet cloth. One arm remained uplifted, holding
the jar, while the other shook the clinging cloth free of her drenched flesh.
Then not once having raised her eyes, she passed by the young man, who
stood mutely gazing beside his bull. The animal had found some grass
along the path and was industriously grazing.
He turned to watch the graceful figure beneath the jar until it vanished
around a bend in the path leading to the road. Then he led the bull to the
well, and tethered it to a root of the mango tree.
"The underpart of her arm is white and smooth," he said to his blurred
image on the water of the well, as he leaned over before lowering the
bucket made of half a petroleum can. "And her hair is thick and black." The
bucket struck with a rattling impact. It filled with one long gurgle. He
threw his hat on the grass and pulled the bucket up with both hands.
The twisted bamboo rope bit into his hardened palms, and he thought
how... the same rope must hurt her.
He placed the dripping bucket on a flat stone, and the bull drank. "Son of
lightning!" he said, thumping the side of the bull after it had drunk the
third bucketful, "you drink like the great Kuantitao!" A low, rich rumbling
rolled through the cavernous body of the beast. He tied it again to the root,
and the animal idly rubbed its horns against the wood. The sun had fallen
from the perpendicular, and noticing that the bull stood partly exposed to
the sun, he pushed it farther into shade. He fanned himself with his hat. He
whistled to entice the wind from the sea, but not a breeze stirred.
After a while he put on his hat and hurriedly walked the short distance
through the gorge up to the road where his cart stood. From inside he took
a jute sack which he slung over one shoulder. With the other arm, he
gathered part of the hay at the bottom of the cart. He returned to the well,
slips of straw falling behind him as he picked his way from one tuft of
grass to another, for the broken rocks of the path has grown exceedingly
hot.
He gave the hay to the bull, Its rump was again in the sun, and he had to
push it back. "Fool, do you want to broil yourself alive?" he said good-
humoredly, slapping the thick haunches. It switched its long-haired tail
and fell to eating. The dry, sweet-smelling hay made harsh gritting sounds
in the mouth of the hungry animal. Saliva rolled out from the corners,
clung to the stiff hairs that fringed the thick lower lip, fell and gleamed and
evaporated in the heated air.
He took out of the jute sack a polished coconut shell. The top had been
sawed off and holes bored at opposite sides, through which a string tied to
the lower part of the shell passed in a loop. The smaller piece could thus be
slipped up and down as a cover. The coconut shell contained cooked rice
still a little warm. Buried on the top was an egg now boiled hard. He next
brought out a bamboo tube of salt, a cake of brown sugar wrapped in
banana leaf, and some dried shrimps. Then he spread the sack in what
remained of the shade, placed his simple meal thereon, and prepared to eat
his dinner. But first he drew a bucketful of water from the well, setting the
bucket on a rock. He seated himself on another rock and ate with his
fingers. From time to time he drank from the bucket.
He was half through with his meal when the girl came down the path once
more. She had changed the wetted bodice. He watched her with lowered
head as she approached, and felt a difficulty in continuing to eat, but went
through the motions of filling his mouth nevertheless. He strained his eyes
looking at the girl from beneath his eyebrows. How graceful she was! Her
hips tapered smoothly down to round thighs and supple legs, showing
against her skirt and moving straight and free. Her shoulders, small but
firm, bore her shapely neck and head with shy pride.
When she was very near, he ate more hurriedly, so that he almost choked.
He did not look at her. She placed the jar between three stones. When she
picked up the rope of the bucket, he came to himself. He looked up--
straight into her face. He saw her eyes. They were brown and were
regarding him gravely, without embarrassment; he forget his own timidity.
"Won't you join me, Ading?" he said simply. He remained seated.
Her lips parted in a half smile and a little dimple appeared high upon her
right cheek. She shook her head and said: "God reward you, Manong."
"Perhaps the poor food I have is not fit for you?"
"No, no. It isn't that. How can you think of it? I should be ashamed. It is
that I have must eaten myself. That is why I came to get water in the
middle of the day--we ran out of it. I see you have eggs and shrimps and
sugar. Why, be had nothing but rice and salt."
"Salt? Surely you joke."
"I would be ashamed..."
"But what is the matter with salt?"
"Salt...salt...Makes baby stout," he intoned. "My grandmother used to sing

that to me when I complained of our food."
They laughed and felt more at ease and regarded each other more openly.
He took a long time fingering his rice before raising it to his mouth, the
while he gazed up at her and smiled for no reason. She smile back in turn
and gave the rope which she held an absent-minded tug. The bucket came
down from its perch of rock in a miniature flood. He leaped to his feet with
a surprised yell, and the next instant the jute sack on which he lay his meal
was drenched. Only the rice inside the coconut shell and the bamboo of
tube of salt were saved from
the water.
She was distressed, but he only laughed.
"It is nothing," he said. "It was time I stopped eating. I have filled up to my
neck."
"Forgive me, Manong," she insisted. "It was all my fault. Such a clumsy
creature I am."
"It was not your fault," she assured him. "I am to blame for placing the
bucket of water where I did."
"I will draw you another bucketful," he said. "I am stronger than you."
"No, you must let me do it."
But when he caught hold of the bucket and stretched forth a brawny arm
for the coil of rope in her hands, she surrendered both to him quickly and
drew back a step as though shy of his touch. He lowered the bucket with
his back to her, and she had time to take in the tallness of him, the breadth
of his shoulders, the sinewy strength of his legs. Down below in the small
of his back, two parallel ridges of rope-like muscle stuck out against the
wet shirt. As he hauled up the bucket, muscles rippled all over his body.
His hair, which was wavy, cut short behind but long in fronts fell in a
cluster over his forehead.
"Let me hold the bucket while you drink," she offered.
He flashed her a smile over his shoulders as he poured the water into her
jar, and again lowered the bucket.
"No, no, you must not do that." She hurried to his side and held one of his
arms. "I couldn't let you, a stranger..."
"Why not?" He smiled down at her, and noticed a slight film of moisture
clinging to the down on her upper lip and experienced a sudden desire to
wipe it away with his forefinger. He continued to lower the bucket while
she had to stand by.
"Hadn't you better move over to the shade?" he suggested, as the bucket
struck the water.
"What shall I do there?" she asked sharply, as though the idea of seeking
protection from the heat were contemptible to her.
"You will get roasted standing here in the sun," he said, and began to haul
up the bucket.
But she remained beside him, catching the rope as it feel from his hands,
coiling it carefully. The jar was filled, with plenty to drink as she tilted the
half-filled can until the water lapped the rim. He gulped a mouthful,
gargled noisily, spewed it out, then commenced to drink in earnest. He
took long, deep droughts of the sweetish water, for he was more thirsty
than he had thought. A chuckling sound persisted in forming inside his
throat at every swallow. It made him self-conscious. He was breathless
when through, and red in the face.
"I don't know why it makes that sound," he said, fingering his throat and
laughing shamefacedly.
"Father also makes that sound when he drinks, and mother always laughs
at him," she said. She untied the headkerchief over her hair and started to
roll it.
Then sun had descended considerably and there was now hardly any
shade under the tree. The bull was gathering with its tongue stray slips of
straw. He untied the animal to lead it to the other side of the girl who
spoke; "Manong, why don't you come to our house and bring your animal
with you? There is shade and you can sleep, though our house is very
poor."
She had already placed the jar on her head and stood, half-turned to him,
waiting for his answer.
"I would be troubling you, Ading."
"No. You come. I have told mother about you." She turned and went down
the path.
He sent the bull after her with smart slap on its side. Then he quickly
gathered the remains of his meal, put them inside the jute sack which had
almost dried, and himself followed. Then seeing that the bull had stopped
to nibble the tufts of grass that dotted the bottom of the gorge, he picked
up the dragging rope and urged the animal on into a trot. They caught up
with the girl near the cart. She stopped to wait.
He did not volunteer a word. He walked a step behind, the bull lumbering
in front. More than ever he was conscious of her person. She carried the jar
on her head without holding it. Her hands swung to her even steps. He
drew back his square shoulders, lifted his chin, and sniffed the motionless
air. There was a flourish in the way he flicked the rump of the bull with the
rope in his hand. He felt strong. He felt very strong. He felt that he could
follow the slender, lithe figure to the end of the world.
Dead Stars
Paz Mrquez-Bentez
THROUGH the open window the air-steeped outdoors passed into his room, quietly enveloping
him, stealing into his very thought. Esperanza, Julia, the sorry mess he had made of life, the years
to come even now beginning to weigh down, to crush--they lost concreteness, diffused into
formless melancholy. The tranquil murmur of conversation issued from the brick-tiled azotea where
Don Julian and Carmen were busy puttering away among the rose pots.
"Papa, and when will the 'long table' be set?"
"I don't know yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand Esperanza wants it to be next
month."
Carmen sighed impatiently. "Why is he not a bit more decided, I wonder. He is over thirty, is he
not? And still a bachelor! Esperanza must be tired waiting."
"She does not seem to be in much of a hurry either," Don Julian nasally commented, while his rose
scissors busily snipped away.
"How can a woman be in a hurry when the man does not hurry her?" Carmen returned, pinching off
a worm with a careful, somewhat absent air. "Papa, do you remember how much in love he was?"
"In love? With whom?"
"With Esperanza, of course. He has not had another love affair that I know of," she said with good-
natured contempt. "What I mean is that at the beginning he was enthusiastic--flowers, serenades,
notes, and things like that--"
Alfredo remembered that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame. That was less than four
years ago. He could not understand those months of a great hunger that was not of the body nor
yet of the mind, a craving that had seized on him one quiet night when the moon was abroad and
under the dappled shadow of the trees in the plaza, man wooed maid. Was he being cheated by
life? Love--he seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that others told about a mere fabrication
of perfervid imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies
such as made up his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity
of soul? In those days love was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a
stranger to love as he divined it might be.
Sitting quietly in his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of those days, the feeling of
tumultuous haste, such as he knew so well in his boyhood when something beautiful was going on
somewhere and he was trying to get there in time to see. "Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it,"
someone had seemed to urge in his ears. So he had avidly seized on the shadow of Love and
deluded himself for a long while in the way of humanity from time immemorial. In the meantime, he
became very much engaged to Esperanza.
Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed--
the desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the
emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible
future fullness of ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed--mortgaging the future--
forcing the hand of Time, or of Fate.
"What do you think happened?" asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.

"I supposed long-engaged people are like that; warm now, cool tomorrow. I think they are oftener
cool than warm. The very fact that an engagement has been allowed to prolong itself argues a
certain placidity of temperament--or of affection--on the part of either, or both." Don Julian loved to
philosophize. He was talking now with an evident relish in words, his resonant, very nasal voice
toned down to monologue pitch. "That phase you were speaking of is natural enough for a
beginning. Besides, that, as I see it, was Alfredo's last race with escaping youth--"
Carmen laughed aloud at the thought of her brother's perfect physical repose--almost indolence--
disturbed in the role suggested by her father's figurative language.
"A last spurt of hot blood," finished the old man.
Few certainly would credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had amusedly
diagnosed his blood as cool and thin, citing incontrovertible evidence. Tall and slender, he moved
with an indolent ease that verged on grace. Under straight recalcitrant hair, a thin face with a
satisfying breadth of forehead, slow, dreamer's eyes, and astonishing freshness of lips--indeed
Alfredo Salazar's appearance betokened little of exuberant masculinity; rather a poet with wayward
humor, a fastidious artist with keen, clear brain.
He rose and quietly went out of the house. He lingered a moment on the stone steps; then went
down the path shaded by immature acacias, through the little tarred gate which he left swinging
back and forth, now opening, now closing, on the gravel road bordered along the farther side by
madre cacao hedge in tardy lavender bloom.
The gravel road narrowed as it slanted up to the house on the hill, whose wide, open porches he
could glimpse through the heat-shrivelled tamarinds in the Martinez yard.
Six weeks ago that house meant nothing to him save that it was the Martinez house, rented and
occupied by Judge del Valle and his family. Six weeks ago Julia Salas meant nothing to him; he did
not even know her name; but now--
One evening he had gone "neighboring" with Don Julian; a rare enough occurrence, since he
made it a point to avoid all appearance of currying favor with the Judge. This particular evening
however, he had allowed himself to be persuaded. "A little mental relaxation now and then is
beneficial," the old man had said. "Besides, a judge's good will, you know;" the rest of the
thought--"is worth a rising young lawyer's trouble"--Don Julian conveyed through a shrug and a
smile that derided his own worldly wisdom.
A young woman had met them at the door. It was evident from the excitement of the Judge's
children that she was a recent and very welcome arrival. In the characteristic Filipino way formal
introductions had been omitted--the judge limiting himself to a casual "Ah, ya se conocen?"--with
the consequence that Alfredo called her Miss del Valle throughout the evening.
He was puzzled that she should smile with evident delight every time he addressed her thus. Later
Don Julian informed him that she was not the Judge's sister, as he had supposed, but his sister-in-
law, and that her name was Julia Salas. A very dignified rather austere name, he thought. Still, the
young lady should have corrected him. As it was, he was greatly embarrassed, and felt that he
should explain.
To his apology, she replied, "That is nothing, Each time I was about to correct you, but I
remembered a similar experience I had once before."
"Oh," he drawled out, vastly relieved.

"A man named Manalang--I kept calling him Manalo. After the tenth time or so, the young man rose
from his seat and said suddenly, 'Pardon me, but my name is Manalang, Manalang.' You know, I
never forgave him!"
He laughed with her.
"The best thing to do under the circumstances, I have found out," she pursued, "is to pretend not to
hear, and to let the other person find out his mistake without help."
"As you did this time. Still, you looked amused every time I--"
"I was thinking of Mr. Manalang."
Don Julian and his uncommunicative friend, the Judge, were absorbed in a game of chess. The
young man had tired of playing appreciative spectator and desultory conversationalist, so he and
Julia Salas had gone off to chat in the vine-covered porch. The lone piano in the neighborhood
alternately tinkled and banged away as the player's moods altered. He listened, and wondered
irrelevantly if Miss Salas could sing; she had such a charming speaking voice.
He was mildly surprised to note from her appearance that she was unmistakably a sister of the
Judge's wife, although Doa Adela was of a different type altogether. She was small and plump,
with wide brown eyes, clearly defined eyebrows, and delicately modeled hips--a pretty woman with
the complexion of a baby and the expression of a likable cow. Julia was taller, not so obviously
pretty. She had the same eyebrows and lips, but she was much darker, of a smooth rich brown with
underlying tones of crimson which heightened the impression she gave of abounding vitality.
On Sunday mornings after mass, father and son would go crunching up the gravel road to the
house on the hill. The Judge's wife invariably offered them beer, which Don Julian enjoyed and
Alfredo did not. After a half hour or so, the chessboard would be brought out; then Alfredo and Julia
Salas would go out to the porch to chat. She sat in the low hammock and he in a rocking chair and
the hours--warm, quiet March hours--sped by. He enjoyed talking with her and it was evident that
she liked his company; yet what feeling there was between them was so undisturbed that it
seemed a matter of course. Only when Esperanza chanced to ask him indirectly about those visits
did some uneasiness creep into his thoughts of the girl next door.
Esperanza had wanted to know if he went straight home after mass. Alfredo suddenly realized that
for several Sundays now he had not waited for Esperanza to come out of the church as he had
been wont to do. He had been eager to go "neighboring."
He answered that he went home to work. And, because he was not habitually untruthful, added,
"Sometimes I go with Papa to Judge del Valle's."
She dropped the topic. Esperanza was not prone to indulge in unprovoked jealousies. She was a
believer in the regenerative virtue of institutions, in their power to regulate feeling as well as
conduct. If a man were married, why, of course, he loved his wife; if he were engaged, he could not
possibly love another woman.
That half-lie told him what he had not admitted openly to himself, that he was giving Julia Salas
something which he was not free to give. He realized that; yet something that would not be denied
beckoned imperiously, and he followed on.
It was so easy to forget up there, away from the prying eyes of the world, so easy and so
poignantly sweet. The beloved woman, he standing close to her, the shadows around, enfolding.
"Up here I find--something--"

He and Julia Salas stood looking out into the she quiet night. Sensing unwanted intensity, laughed,
woman-like, asking, "Amusement?"
"No; youth--its spirit--"
"Are you so old?"
"And heart's desire."
Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart of every man?
"Down there," he had continued, his voice somewhat indistinct, "the road is too broad, too trodden
by feet, too barren of mystery."
"Down there" beyond the ancient tamarinds lay the road, upturned to the stars. In the darkness the
fireflies glimmered, while an errant breeze strayed in from somewhere, bringing elusive, faraway
sounds as of voices in a dream.
"Mystery--" she answered lightly, "that is so brief--"
"Not in some," quickly. "Not in you."
"You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery."
"I could study you all my life and still not find it."
"So long?"
"I should like to."
Those six weeks were now so swift--seeming in the memory, yet had they been so deep in the
living, so charged with compelling power and sweetness. Because neither the past nor the future
had relevance or meaning, he lived only the present, day by day, lived it intensely, with such a
willful shutting out of fact as astounded him in his calmer moments.
Just before Holy Week, Don Julian invited the judge and his family to spend Sunday afternoon at
Tanda where he had a coconut plantation and a house on the beach. Carmen also came with her
four energetic children. She and Doa Adela spent most of the time indoors directing the
preparation of the merienda and discussing the likeable absurdities of their husbands--how
Carmen's Vicente was so absorbed in his farms that he would not even take time off to accompany
her on this visit to her father; how Doa Adela's Dionisio was the most absentminded of men,
sometimes going out without his collar, or with unmatched socks.
After the merienda, Don Julian sauntered off with the judge to show him what a thriving young
coconut looked like--"plenty of leaves, close set, rich green"--while the children, convoyed by Julia
Salas, found unending entertainment in the rippling sand left by the ebbing tide. They were far
down, walking at the edge of the water, indistinctly outlined against the gray of the out-curving
beach.
Alfredo left his perch on the bamboo ladder of the house and followed. Here were her footsteps,
narrow, arched. He laughed at himself for his black canvas footwear which he removed forthwith
and tossed high up on dry sand.
When he came up, she flushed, then smiled with frank pleasure.
"I hope you are enjoying this," he said with a questioning inflection.
"Very much. It looks like home to me, except that we do not have such a lovely beach."
There was a breeze from the water. It blew the hair away from her forehead, and whipped the
tucked-up skirt around her straight, slender figure. In the picture was something of eager freedom
as of wings poised in flight. The girl had grace, distinction. Her face was not notably pretty; yet she
had a tantalizing charm, all the more compelling because it was an inner quality, an achievement of
the spirit. The lure was there, of naturalness, of an alert vitality of mind and body, of a thoughtful,
sunny temper, and of a piquant perverseness which is sauce to charm.
"The afternoon has seemed very short, hasn't it?" Then, "This, I think, is the last time--we can
visit."
"The last? Why?"
"Oh, you will be too busy perhaps."
He noted an evasive quality in the answer.
"Do I seem especially industrious to you?"
"If you are, you never look it."
"Not perspiring or breathless, as a busy man ought to be."
"But--"
"Always unhurried, too unhurried, and calm." She smiled to herself.
"I wish that were true," he said after a meditative pause.
She waited.
"A man is happier if he is, as you say, calm and placid."
"Like a carabao in a mud pool," she retorted perversely
"Who? I?"
"Oh, no!"
"You said I am calm and placid."
"That is what I think."
"I used to think so too. Shows how little we know ourselves."
It was strange to him that he could be wooing thus: with tone and look and covert phrase.
"I should like to see your home town."
"There is nothing to see--little crooked streets, bunut roofs with ferns growing on them, and
sometimes squashes."
That was the background. It made her seem less detached, less unrelated, yet withal more distant,
as if that background claimed her and excluded him.
"Nothing? There is you."
"Oh, me? But I am here."
"I will not go, of course, until you are there."
"Will you come? You will find it dull. There isn't even one American there!"
"Well--Americans are rather essential to my entertainment."
She laughed.
"We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees."
"Could I find that?"
"If you don't ask for Miss del Valle," she smiled teasingly.
"I'll inquire about--"
"What?"
"The house of the prettiest girl in the town."
"There is where you will lose your way." Then she turned serious. "Now, that is not quite sincere."
"It is," he averred slowly, but emphatically.
"I thought you, at least, would not say such things."
"Pretty--pretty--a foolish word! But there is none other more handy I did not mean that quite--"
"Are you withdrawing the compliment?"
"Re-enforcing it, maybe. Something is pretty when it pleases the eye--it is more than that when--"
"If it saddens?" she interrupted hastily.
"Exactly."
"It must be ugly."
"Always?"
Toward the west, the sunlight lay on the dimming waters in a broad, glinting streamer of crimsoned
gold.
"No, of course you are right."
"Why did you say this is the last time?" he asked quietly as they turned back.
"I am going home."
The end of an impossible dream!

"When?" after a long silence.
"Tomorrow. I received a letter from Father and Mother yesterday. They want me to spend Holy
Week at home."
She seemed to be waiting for him to speak. "That is why I said this is the last time."
"Can't I come to say good-bye?"
"Oh, you don't need to!"
"No, but I want to."
"There is no time."
The golden streamer was withdrawing, shortening, until it looked no more than a pool far away at
the rim of the world. Stillness, a vibrant quiet that affects the senses as does solemn harmony; a
peace that is not contentment but a cessation of tumult when all violence of feeling tones down to
the wistful serenity of regret. She turned and looked into his face, in her dark eyes a ghost of
sunset sadness.
"Home seems so far from here. This is almost like another life."
"I know. This is Elsewhere, and yet strange enough, I cannot get rid of the old things."
"Old things?"
"Oh, old things, mistakes, encumbrances, old baggage." He said it lightly, unwilling to mar the hour.
He walked close, his hand sometimes touching hers for one whirling second.
Don Julian's nasal summons came to them on the wind.
Alfredo gripped the soft hand so near his own. At his touch, the girl turned her face away, but he
heard her voice say very low, "Good-bye."
II
ALFREDO Salazar turned to the right where, farther on, the road broadened and entered the heart
of the town--heart of Chinese stores sheltered under low-hung roofs, of indolent drug stores and
tailor shops, of dingy shoe-repairing establishments, and a cluttered goldsmith's cubbyhole where
a consumptive bent over a magnifying lens; heart of old brick-roofed houses with quaint hand-and-
ball knockers on the door; heart of grass-grown plaza reposeful with trees, of ancient church and
convento, now circled by swallows gliding in flight as smooth and soft as the afternoon itself. Into
the quickly deepening twilight, the voice of the biggest of the church bells kept ringing its insistent
summons. Flocking came the devout with their long wax candles, young women in vivid apparel
(for this was Holy Thursday and the Lord was still alive), older women in sober black skirts. Came
too the young men in droves, elbowing each other under the talisay tree near the church door. The
gaily decked rice-paper lanterns were again on display while from the windows of the older houses
hung colored glass globes, heirlooms from a day when grasspith wicks floating in coconut oil were
the chief lighting device.
Soon a double row of lights emerged from the church and uncoiled down the length of the street
like a huge jewelled band studded with glittering clusters where the saints' platforms were. Above
the measured music rose the untutored voices of the choir, steeped in incense and the acrid fumes
of burning wax.
The sight of Esperanza and her mother sedately pacing behind Our Lady of Sorrows suddenly
destroyed the illusion of continuity and broke up those lines of light into component individuals.
Esperanza stiffened self-consciously, tried to look unaware, and could not.
The line moved on.
Suddenly, Alfredo's slow blood began to beat violently, irregularly. A girl was coming down the line--
a girl that was striking, and vividly alive, the woman that could cause violent commotion in his
heart, yet had no place in the completed ordering of his life.
Her glance of abstracted devotion fell on him and came to a brief stop.
The line kept moving on, wending its circuitous route away from the church and then back again,
where, according to the old proverb, all processions end.
At last Our Lady of Sorrows entered the church, and with her the priest and the choir, whose voices
now echoed from the arched ceiling. The bells rang the close of the procession.
A round orange moon, "huge as a winnowing basket," rose lazily into a clear sky, whitening the iron
roofs and dimming the lanterns at the windows. Along the still densely shadowed streets the young
women with their rear guard of males loitered and, maybe, took the longest way home.
Toward the end of the row of Chinese stores, he caught up with Julia Salas. The crowd had
dispersed into the side streets, leaving Calle Real to those who lived farther out. It was past eight,
and Esperanza would be expecting him in a little while: yet the thought did not hurry him as he said
"Good evening" and fell into step with the girl.
"I had been thinking all this time that you had gone," he said in a voice that was both excited and
troubled.
"No, my sister asked me to stay until they are ready to go."
"Oh, is the Judge going?"
"Yes."
The provincial docket had been cleared, and Judge del Valle had been assigned elsewhere. As
lawyer--and as lover--Alfredo had found that out long before.
"Mr. Salazar," she broke into his silence, "I wish to congratulate you."
Her tone told him that she had learned, at last. That was inevitable.
"For what?"
"For your approaching wedding."
Some explanation was due her, surely. Yet what could he say that would not offend?
"I should have offered congratulations long before, but you know mere visitors are slow about
getting the news," she continued.
He listened not so much to what she said as to the nuances in her voice. He heard nothing to
enlighten him, except that she had reverted to the formal tones of early acquaintance. No
revelation there; simply the old voice--cool, almost detached from personality, flexible and vibrant,
suggesting potentialities of song.
"Are weddings interesting to you?" he finally brought out quietly
"When they are of friends, yes."
"Would you come if I asked you?"
"When is it going to be?"
"May," he replied briefly, after a long pause.
"May is the month of happiness they say," she said, with what seemed to him a shade of irony.
"They say," slowly, indifferently. "Would you come?"
"Why not?"
"No reason. I am just asking. Then you will?"
"If you will ask me," she said with disdain.
"Then I ask you."
"Then I will be there."
The gravel road lay before them; at the road's end the lighted windows of the house on the hill.
There swept over the spirit of Alfredo Salazar a longing so keen that it was pain, a wish that, that
house were his, that all the bewilderments of the present were not, and that this woman by his side
were his long wedded wife, returning with him to the peace of home.
"Julita," he said in his slow, thoughtful manner, "did you ever have to choose between something
you wanted to do and something you had to do?"
"No!"
"I thought maybe you had had that experience; then you could understand a man who was in such
a situation."
"You are fortunate," he pursued when she did not answer.
"Is--is this man sure of what he should do?"
"I don't know, Julita. Perhaps not. But there is a point where a thing escapes us and rushes
downward of its own weight, dragging us along. Then it is foolish to ask whether one will or will not,
because it no longer depends on him."
"But then why--why--" her muffled voice came. "Oh, what do I know? That is his problem after all."
"Doesn't it--interest you?"
"Why must it? I--I have to say good-bye, Mr. Salazar; we are at the house."
Without lifting her eyes she quickly turned and walked away.
Had the final word been said? He wondered. It had. Yet a feeble flutter of hope trembled in his
mind though set against that hope were three years of engagement, a very near wedding, perfect
understanding between the parents, his own conscience, and Esperanza herself--Esperanza
waiting, Esperanza no longer young, Esperanza the efficient, the literal-minded, the intensely
acquisitive.
He looked attentively at her where she sat on the sofa, appraisingly, and with a kind of aversion
which he tried to control.
She was one of those fortunate women who have the gift of uniformly acceptable appearance. She
never surprised one with unexpected homeliness nor with startling reserves of beauty. At home, in
church, on the street, she was always herself, a woman past first bloom, light and clear of
complexion, spare of arms and of breast, with a slight convexity to thin throat; a woman dressed
with self-conscious care, even elegance; a woman distinctly not average.
She was pursuing an indignant relation about something or other, something about Calixta, their
note-carrier, Alfredo perceived, so he merely half-listened, understanding imperfectly. At a pause
he drawled out to fill in the gap: "Well, what of it?" The remark sounded ruder than he had
intended.
"She is not married to him," Esperanza insisted in her thin, nervously pitched voice. "Besides, she
should have thought of us. Nanay practically brought her up. We never thought she would turn out
bad."
What had Calixta done? Homely, middle-aged Calixta?
"You are very positive about her badness," he commented dryly. Esperanza was always positive.
"But do you approve?"
"Of what?"
"What she did."
"No," indifferently.
"Well?"
He was suddenly impelled by a desire to disturb the unvexed orthodoxy of her mind. "All I say is
that it is not necessarily wicked."
"Why shouldn't it be? You talked like an--immoral man. I did not know that your ideas were like
that."
"My ideas?" he retorted, goaded by a deep, accumulated exasperation. "The only test I wish to
apply to conduct is the test of fairness. Am I injuring anybody? No? Then I am justified in my
conscience. I am right. Living with a man to whom she is not married--is that it? It may be wrong,
and again it may not."
"She has injured us. She was ungrateful." Her voice was tight with resentment.
"The trouble with you, Esperanza, is that you are--" he stopped, appalled by the passion in his
voice.
"Why do you get angry? I do not understand you at all! I think I know why you have been indifferent
to me lately. I am not blind, or deaf; I see and hear what perhaps some are trying to keep from me."
The blood surged into his very eyes and his hearing sharpened to points of acute pain. What would
she say next?
"Why don't you speak out frankly before it is too late? You need not think of me and of what people
will say." Her voice trembled.
Alfredo was suffering as he could not remember ever having suffered before. What people will
say--what will they not say? What don't they say when long engagements are broken almost on the
eve of the wedding?
"Yes," he said hesitatingly, diffidently, as if merely thinking aloud, "one tries to be fair--according to
his lights--but it is hard. One would like to be fair to one's self first. But that is too easy, one does
not dare--"
"What do you mean?" she asked with repressed violence. "Whatever my shortcomings, and no
doubt they are many in your eyes, I have never gone out of my way, of my place, to find a man."
Did she mean by this irrelevant remark that he it was who had sought her; or was that a covert
attack on Julia Salas?
"Esperanza--" a desperate plea lay in his stumbling words. "If you--suppose I--" Yet how could a
mere man word such a plea?
"If you mean you want to take back your word, if you are tired of--why don't you tell me you are
tired of me?" she burst out in a storm of weeping that left him completely shamed and unnerved.
The last word had been said.
III
AS Alfredo Salazar leaned against the boat rail to watch the evening settling over the lake, he
wondered if Esperanza would attribute any significance to this trip of his. He was supposed to be in
Sta. Cruz whither the case of the People of the Philippine Islands vs. Belina et al had kept him, and
there he would have been if Brigida Samuy had not been so important to the defense. He had to
find that elusive old woman. That the search was leading him to that particular lake town which
was Julia Salas' home should not disturb him unduly Yet he was disturbed to a degree utterly out of
proportion to the prosaicalness of his errand. That inner tumult was no surprise to him; in the last
eight years he had become used to such occasional storms. He had long realized that he could not
forget Julia Salas. Still, he had tried to be content and not to remember too much. The climber of
mountains who has known the back-break, the lonesomeness, and the chill, finds a certain
restfulness in level paths made easy to his feet. He looks up sometimes from the valley where
settles the dusk of evening, but he knows he must not heed the radiant beckoning. Maybe, in time,
he would cease even to look up.
He was not unhappy in his marriage. He felt no rebellion: only the calm of capitulation to what he
recognized as irresistible forces of circumstance and of character. His life had simply ordered itself;
no more struggles, no more stirring up of emotions that got a man nowhere. From his capacity of
complete detachment he derived a strange solace. The essential himself, the himself that had its
being in the core of his thought, would, he reflected, always be free and alone. When claims
encroached too insistently, as sometimes they did, he retreated into the inner fastness, and from
that vantage he saw things and people around him as remote and alien, as incidents that did not
matter. At such times did Esperanza feel baffled and helpless; he was gentle, even tender, but
immeasurably far away, beyond her reach.
Lights were springing into life on the shore. That was the town, a little up-tilted town nestling in the
dark greenness of the groves. A snubcrested belfry stood beside the ancient church. On the
outskirts the evening smudges glowed red through the sinuous mists of smoke that rose and lost
themselves in the purple shadows of the hills. There was a young moon which grew slowly
luminous as the coral tints in the sky yielded to the darker blues of evening.
The vessel approached the landing quietly, trailing a wake of long golden ripples on the dark water.
Peculiar hill inflections came to his ears from the crowd assembled to meet the boat--slow, singing
cadences, characteristic of the Laguna lake-shore speech. From where he stood he could not
distinguish faces, so he had no way of knowing whether the presidente was there to meet him or
not. Just then a voice shouted.
"Is the abogado there? Abogado!"
"What abogado?" someone irately asked.
That must be the presidente, he thought, and went down to the landing.
It was a policeman, a tall pock-marked individual. The presidente had left with Brigida Samuy--
Tandang "Binday"--that noon for Santa Cruz. Seor Salazar's second letter had arrived late, but
the wife had read it and said, "Go and meet the abogado and invite him to our house."
Alfredo Salazar courteously declined the invitation. He would sleep on board since the boat would
leave at four the next morning anyway. So the presidente had received his first letter? Alfredo did
not know because that official had not sent an answer. "Yes," the policeman replied, "but he could
not write because we heard that Tandang Binday was in San Antonio so we went there to find her."
San Antonio was up in the hills! Good man, the presidente! He, Alfredo, must do something for him.
It was not every day that one met with such willingness to help.
Eight o'clock, lugubriously tolled from the bell tower, found the boat settled into a somnolent quiet.
A cot had been brought out and spread for him, but it was too bare to be inviting at that hour. It was
too early to sleep: he would walk around the town. His heart beat faster as he picked his way to
shore over the rafts made fast to sundry piles driven into the water.
How peaceful the town was! Here and there a little tienda was still open, its dim light issuing
forlornly through the single window which served as counter. An occasional couple sauntered by,
the women's chinelas making scraping sounds. From a distance came the shrill voices of children
playing games on the street--tubigan perhaps, or "hawk-and-chicken." The thought of Julia Salas in
that quiet place filled him with a pitying sadness.
How would life seem now if he had married Julia Salas? Had he meant anything to her? That
unforgettable red-and-gold afternoon in early April haunted him with a sense of incompleteness as
restless as other unlaid ghosts. She had not married--why? Faithfulness, he reflected, was not a
conscious effort at regretful memory. It was something unvolitional, maybe a recurrent awareness
of irreplaceability. Irrelevant trifles--a cool wind on his forehead, far-away sounds as of voices in a
dream--at times moved him to an oddly irresistible impulse to listen as to an insistent, unfinished
prayer.
A few inquiries led him to a certain little tree-ceilinged street where the young moon wove indistinct
filigrees of fight and shadow. In the gardens the cotton tree threw its angular shadow athwart the
low stone wall; and in the cool, stilly midnight the cock's first call rose in tall, soaring jets of sound.
Calle Luz.
Somehow or other, he had known that he would find her house because she would surely be sitting
at the window. Where else, before bedtime on a moonlit night? The house was low and the light in
the sala behind her threw her head into unmistakable relief. He sensed rather than saw her start of
vivid surprise.
"Good evening," he said, raising his hat.
"Good evening. Oh! Are you in town?"
"On some little business," he answered with a feeling of painful constraint.
"Won't you come up?"
He considered. His vague plans had not included this. But Julia Salas had left the window, calling
to her mother as she did so. After a while, someone came downstairs with a lighted candle to open
the door. At last--he was shaking her hand.
She had not changed much--a little less slender, not so eagerly alive, yet something had gone. He
missed it, sitting opposite her, looking thoughtfully into her fine dark eyes. She asked him about the
home town, about this and that, in a sober, somewhat meditative tone. He conversed with
increasing ease, though with a growing wonder that he should be there at all. He could not take his
eyes from her face. What had she lost? Or was the loss his? He felt an impersonal curiosity
creeping into his gaze. The girl must have noticed, for her cheek darkened in a blush.
Gently--was it experimentally?--he pressed her hand at parting; but his own felt undisturbed and
emotionless. Did she still care? The answer to the question hardly interested him.
The young moon had set, and from the uninviting cot he could see one half of a star-studded sky.
So that was all over.
Why had he obstinately clung to that dream?
So all these years--since when?--he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet
seemingly still in their appointed places in the heavens.
An immense sadness as of loss invaded his spirit, a vast homesickness for some immutable refuge
of the heart far away where faded gardens bloom again, and where live on in unchanging
freshness, the dear, dead loves of vanished youth.
AD INFINITUM: A SHORT STORY
John Barth
United States
A t the far end of their lawn, down by the large pond or small marshy lake, he is in his daylily garden
weeding, feeding, clearing out dead growth to make room for new when the ring of the telephone bell
begins this story. They spend so much of their day outdoors, in the season, that years ago they installed an
outside phone bell under the porch roof overhang. As a rule, they bring a cordless phone out with them, too,
onto the sundeck or the patio, where they can usually reach it before the answering machine takes over. It is
too early in the season, however, for them to have resumed that convenient habit. Anyhow, this is a weekday
midmorning; shes indoors still, in her studio. Shell take the call.
2 The telephone rings a second time, but not a third. On his knees in the daylily garden, he has paused, trowel
in hand, and straightened his back. He returns to his homely work, which he always finds mildly agreeable
but now suddenly relishes: simple physical work with clean soul in fine air and sunlight. The call could be
routine: some bit of business, some service person. In the season, hes the one who normally takes weekday
morning calls, not to interrupt her concentration in the studio; but its not quite the season yet. The caller
could be a friend although their friends generally dont call them before noon. It could be a telephone
solicitor: There seem to be more of those every year, enough to lead them to consider unlisting their number,
but not quite yet to unlist it. It could be a misdial.
3 If presently she steps out onto the sundeck, looking for him, whether to bring him the cordless phone if the
call is for him or to report some news, this storys beginning will have ended, its middle begun.
4 Presently she steps out onto the sundeck, overlooking their lawn and the large pond or small lake beyond it.
She had been at her big old drafting-table, working trying to work, anyhow; pretending to work; maybe
actually almost really working when the phone call began this story. From her upholstered swivel chair,
through one of the water-facing windows of her studio, she could see him on hands and knees down in his
daylily garden along the waters edge. Indeed, she had been more or less watching him, preoccupied in his old
jeans and sweatshirt and gardening gloves, while she worked or tried or pretended to work at her worktable.
At the first ring, she saw him straighten his back and square his shoulders, his trowel-hand resting on his
thigh-top, and at the second (which she had waited for before receiving the receiver) look houseward and
remove one glove. At the non-third ring, as she said hello to the caller, he pushed back his eyeglasses with his
ungloved hand. She had continued then to watch him returning to his task, his left hand still ungloved for
picking out the weeds troweled up with his right as she received the callers news.
5 The news is bad indeed. Not quite so bad, perhaps, as her very-worst-case scenario, but considerably worse
than her average-feared scenarios, and enormously worse than her best-case, hoped-against-hope scenarios.
The news is of the sort that in one stroke eliminates all agreeable plans and expectations indeed, all prospect
of real pleasure from the moment of its communication. In effect, the news puts a period to this pairs
prevailingly happy though certainly not carefree life; there cannot imaginably be further delight in it, of the
sort that they have been amply blessed with through their years together. All that is over now: for her already;
for him and for them as soon as she relays the news to him which, of course, she must and promptly will.
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6 Gone. Finished. Done with.
7 Meanwhile, she knows the news, but he does not, yet. From her worktable she sees him poke at the lily-bed
mulch with the point of his trowel and pinch out by the roots, with his ungloved hand, a bit of chickweed,
wire grass, or ground ivy. She accepts the callers terse expression of sympathy and duly expresses in return her
appreciation for that unenviable bit of message-bearing. She had asked only a few questions there arent
many to be asked and has attended the courteous, pained, terrible but unsurprising replies. Presently she
replaces the cordless telephone on its base and leans back for a moment in her comfortable desk chair to
watch her mate at his ordinary, satisfying work and to assimilate what she has just been told.
8 There is, however, no assimilating what she has just been told or, if there is, that assimilation is to be
measured in years, even decades, not in moments, days, weeks, months, seasons. She must now get up from
her chair, walk through their modest, pleasant house to the sundeck, cross the lawn to the daylily garden
down by the lake or pond, and tell him the news. She regards him for some moments longer, aware that he
proceeds with his gardening, his mind is almost certainly on the phone call. He will be wondering whether
shes still speaking with the caller or has already hung up the telephone and is en route to tell him the news.
Perhaps the call was merely a routine bit of business, not worth reporting until their paths recross at coffee
break or lunchtime. A wrong number, even, it might have been, or another pesky telephone solicitor. He may
perhaps be half-deciding by now that it was, after all, one of those innocuous possibilities.
9 She compresses her lips, closes and reopens her yes, exhales, rises, and goes to tell him the news.
10 He sees her, presently, step out onto the sundeck, and signals his whereabouts with a wave of his trowel in
case she hasnt spotted him down on his knees in the daylily garden. At that distance, he can read nothing in
her expression or carriage, but he notes that she isnt bringing with her the cordless telephone. Not
impossibly, of course, she could be simply taking a break from her studio to stretch her muscles, refill her
coffee mug, use the toilet, enjoy a breath of fresh springtime air, and report to him that the phone call was
nothing a misdial, or one more canvasser. She has stepped from the deck and begun to recross the lawn,
himward, unurgently. He resumes weeding out the wire grass that perennially invades their flowerbeds, its
rhizomes spreading under the mulch, secretly reticulating the clean soil and choking the lily bulbs. A weed, he
would agree, is not an organism wicked in itself, its simply one of natures creatures going vigorously about
its natural business in a place where one wishes that it would not. He finds something impressive, even
awesome, in the intricacy and tenacity of those rhizomes and their countless interconnections; uproot one
carefully and it seems to network the whole bed the whole lawn, probably. Break it off at any point and it
redoubles like the monster Whatsitsname in Greek mythology. The Hydra. So its terrible, too, in its way, as
well as splendid, that blind tenacity, that evolved persistence and virtual ineradicability, heedless of the
daylilies that it competes with and vitiates, indifferent to everything except its mindless self-proliferation. It
occurs to him that, on the other hand, that same persistence is exactly what he cultivates in his flowers,
pinching back the rhododendrons and dead-heading yesterdays lilies to encourage multiple blooms. An asset
here, a liability there, from the gardeners point of view, while Nature shrugs its nonjudgmental shoulders.
Unquestionably, however, it would be easier to raise a healthy crop of wire grass by weeding out the daylilies
than vice versa.
11 With such reflections he distracts himself, or tries or pretends to distract himself, as she steps unhurriedly
from the sundeck and begins to cross the lawn, himward.
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12 She is, decidedly, in no hurry to cross the lawn and say what she must say. There is her partner, lover, best
friend, and companion, at his innocent, agreeable work: half chore, half hobby, a respite from his own busy
professional life. Apprehensive as he will have been since the telephone call, he is still as if all right; she, too,
and their life and foreseeable future as if still all right. In order to report to him the dreadful news, she must
cross the entire lawn, with its central Kwanzan cherry tree: a magnificently spreading, fully mature specimen,
just now at the absolute pink peak of its glorious bloom. About halfway between the sundeck and that
Kwanzan cherry stands a younger and smaller, but equally vigorous, Zumi crab apple that they themselves put
in a few seasons past to replace a storm-damaged predecessor. It, too, is a near-perfect specimen of its kind,
and likewise at or just past the peak of its flowering, the new green leaves thrusting already through the white
clustered petals. To reach her husband with the news, she must pass under that Kwanzan cherry the
centerpiece of their property, really, whose great widespread limbs they fear for in summer thunder squalls.
For her to reach that cherry tree will take a certain small time: perhaps twenty seconds, as shes in no hurry.
To stroll leisurely even to the Zumi crab apple takes ten or a dozen seconds about as long as it takes to read
this sentence aloud. Walking past that perfect crab apple, passing under that resplendent cherry, crossing the
remaining half of the lawn down to the lily garden and telling him the news these sequential actions will
comprise the middle of this story, already in progress.
13 In the third of a minute required for her to amble from sundeck to cherry tree even in the dozen seconds
from deck to crab apple (shes passing that crab apple now) her companion will have weeded his way
perhaps one trowels length farther through his lily bed, which borders that particular stretch of pond- or
lakeside for several yards, to the far corner of their lot, where the woods begin. Musing upon this
circumstance a reflex of insulation, perhaps, from the devastating news puts her in mind of Zenos famous
paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. Swift Achilles, Zeno teases, can never catch the tortoise, for in whatever
short time required for him to close half the hundred yards between them, the sluggish animal will have
moved perhaps a few inches; and in the very short time require to halve that remaining distance, an inch or
two more, et cetera ad infinitum, inasmuch as finite distance however small, can be halved forever. It occurs
to her, indeed although she is neither philosopher nor mathematician that her husband neednt even
necessarily be moving away from her, so to speak, as she passes now under the incredibly full-blossomed
canopy of the Kwanzan cherry and pauses to be quietly reastonished, scarcely soothed by its splendor. He
(likewise Zenos tortoise) could remain fixed in the same spot; he could even rise and stroll to meet her, run to
meet her under the flowered canopy; in every case and at whatever clip, the intervening distances must be
halved, re-halved, and re-re-halved forever, ad infinitum. Like the figured love in Keats Ode on a Grecian
Urn (another image from her college days), sha and he will never touch, although unlike those, these are
living people en route to the how-many-thousandth tte--tte of their years together when, alas, she must
convey to him her happiness-ending news. In John Keats words and by the terms of Zenos paradox, forever
will he love, and she be fair. Forever theyll go on closing the distance between them as they have in effect
been doing, like any well-bonded pair since Day One of their connection yet never closing it altogether:
asymptotic curves that eternally approach, but never meet.
14 But of course they will meet, very shortly, and before even then theyll come with hailing distance, speaking
distance, murmuring distance. Here in the middles of the middle of the story, as she re-emerges from under
the bridal-like canopy of cherry blossoms into the tender midmorning sunlight, an osprey suddenly plummets
from the sky to snatch a small fish from the shallows. They both turn to look. He, the nearer, can see the fish
flip vainly in the raptors talons; the osprey aligns its prey adroitly fore-and-aft, head to wind, to minimize
drag, and flaps off with it toward rickety treetop nest across the pond or lake.
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15 The fish is dying. The fish is dying. The fish is dead.
16 When he was a small boy being driven in his parents car to something feared a piano recital for which he
felt unready, a medical procedure that might hurt, some new town or neighborhood that the family was
moving to he used to tell himself that as long as the car-ride lasted, all would be well, and wished it would
last forever. The condemned en route to execution must feel the same, he supposes, while at the same time
wanting the dread thing done with: The tumbril has not arrived at the guillotine; until it does, we are
immortal, and here meanwhile is the once pleasing avenue, this handsome small park with its central
fountain, the plane-tree-shaded corner where, in happier times . . .
17 A gruesome image occurs to him, from his reading of Dantes Inferno back in college days: The Simoniacs,
traffickers in sacraments and holy offices, are punished in Hell by being thrust head-downward for all eternity
into holes in the infernal room. Kneeling to speak with them in that miserable position, Dante is reminded of
the similar fate of convicted assassins in his native Florence, executed by being bound hand and foot and
buried alive, head-down in a hole. Before the hole is filled, the officiating priest bends down as the poet is
doing, to hear the condemned mans last confession which, in desperation, the poor wretch no doubt
prolongs, perhaps adding fictitious sins to his factual ones in order to postpone the end and in so doing (it
occurs to him now, turning another trowelsworth of soil as his wife approaches from the cherry tree)
appending one more real though venial sin, the sin of lying, to the list yet to be confessed.
18 Distracted, he breaks off a wire-grass root.
19 Time, declares the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, is the true hero of every feast. It is also the final
dramaturge of every story. History is a Mandelbrot set, as infinitely subdivisible as space in Zenos paradox.
No interval past or future but can be partitioned and sub-partitioned, articulated down through ever finer,
self-similar scales like the infinitely indented coastlines of fractal geometry. This intelligent, as-if-still-happy
couple in latemid-story what are they doing with such reflections as these but attempting unsuccessfully to
kill time, as Time is unhurriedly but surely killing them? In narrated life, even here (halfway between cherry
tree and daylily garden) we could suspend and protract the remaining action indefinitely, without freeze-
framing it as on Keats urn; we need only slow it, delay it, atomize it, flash back in time as the woman strolls
forward in space with her terrible news. Where exactly on our planet are these people, for example? What
pond or lake is that beyond their pleasant lawn, its olive surface just now marbled with spring-time yellow
pollen? Other than the one osprey nest in a dead but still-standing oak, what is the prospect of its farther
shore? We have mentioned the mans jeans, sweatshirt, gloved, and eyeglasses, but nothing further of his
appearance, age, ethnicity, character, temperament, and history (other than that he once attended college),
and (but for that same detail) nothing whatsoever of hers; nor anything, really, of their life together, its
gratifications and tribulations, adventures large or small, careers, corner-turnings. Have they children?
Grandchildren, even? What sort of telephone solicitors disturb their evidently rural peace? What of their
houses architecture and furnishings, its past owners, if any, and the history of the land on which it sits back
to the last glaciation, say, which configure their pond or lake and its topographical surround? Without our
womans pausing for an instant in her hasteless but steady course across those few remaining yards of lawn,
the narrative of her final steps might suspend indefinitely their completion. What variety of grasses does that
lawn comprise, interspersed with what weeds, habitating what insecta and visited by what birds? How,
exactly, does the spring air feel on her sober-visaged face? Are his muscles sore from gardening, and, if so is
that degree of soreness, from that source, agreeable to him or otherwise? What is the relevance, if any, of their
uncertainty whether that water beyond their lawn is properly to be denominated a large pond or a small lake,
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and has that uncertainty been a running levity through their years there? Is yonder ospreys nest truly rickety,
or only apparently so? The middle of this story nears its end, but has not reached it yet, not yet. Theres time
still, still world enough and time. There are narrative possibilities still unforeclosed. If our lives are stories, and
if this story is three-fourths told, it is not yet four-fifths told; if four-fifths, not yet five-sixths, et cetera, et
cetera and meanwhile, meanwhile it is as if all were still well.
20 In non-narrated life, alas, it is a different story, as in the world of actual tortoises, times, and coastlines. It
might appear that in Times infinite sub-segmentation, 11:00 A.M. can never reach 11:30, far less noon; it
might appear that Achilles can never reach the tortoise, nor any story its end, nor any news its destined hearer
yet reach it they do, in the world we know. Stories attain their denouement by selective omission, as do real-
world coastline measurements; Achilles swiftly overtakes the tortoise by ignoring the terms of Zenos paradox.
Time, however, more wonderful than these, omits nothing, ignores nothing, yet moves inexorably from hour
to hour in just five dozen minutes.
21 The story of our life is not our life; it is our story. Soon she must tell him the news.
22 Our lives are not stories. Now she must tell him the news.
23 This story will never end. This story ends.
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THE HEADSTRONG HISTORIAN
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Many years after her husband had died, Nwamgba still

closed her eyes from time to time to relive his nightly
visits to her hut, and the mornings after, when she
would walk to the stream humming a song, thinking of
the smoky scent of him and the firmness of his weight,
and feeling as if she were surrounded by light. Other
memories of Obierika also remained clearhis stubby
fingers curled around his flute when he played in the
evenings, his delight when she set down his bowls of
food, his sweaty back when he brought baskets filled
with fresh clay for her pottery. From the moment she
had first seen him, at a wrestling match, both of them
staring and staring, both of them too young, her waist
not yet wearing the menstruation cloth, she had
believed with a quiet stubbornness that her chi and his
chi had destined their marriage, and so when he and his
Image by: Yvetta Fedorova
relatives came to her father a few years later with pots
of palm wine she told her mother that this was the man
she would marry. Her mother was aghast. Did Nwamgba not know that Obierika was an only
child, that his late father had been an only child whose wives had lost pregnancies and buried
babies? Perhaps somebody in their family had committed the taboo of selling a girl into slavery
and the earth god Ani was visiting misfortune on them. Nwamgba ignored her mother. She went
into her fathers obi and told him she would run away from any other mans house if she was not
allowed to marry Obierika. Her father found her exhausting, this sharp-tongued, headstrong
daughter who had once wrestled her brother to the ground. (Her father had had to warn those
who saw this not to let anyone outside the compound know that a girl had thrown a boy.) He, too,
was concerned about the infertility in Obierikas family, but it was not a bad family: Obierikas late
father had taken the Ozo title; Obierika was already giving out his seed yams to sharecroppers.
Nwamgba would not starve if she married him. Besides, it was better that he let his daughter go
with the man she chose than to endure years of trouble in which she would keep returning home
after confrontations with her in-laws; and so he gave his blessing, and she smiled and called him
by his praise name.
To pay her bride price, Obierika came with two maternal cousins, Okafo and Okoye, who were like
brothers to him. Nwamgba loathed them at first sight. She saw a grasping envy in their eyes that
afternoon, as they drank palm wine in her fathers obi; and in the following yearsyears in which
Obierika took titles and widened his compound and sold his yams to strangers from afarshe saw
their envy blacken. But she tolerated them, because they mattered to Obierika, because he
pretended not to notice that they didnt work but came to him for yams and chickens, because he
wanted to imagine that he had brothers. It was they who urged him, after her third miscarriage, to
marry another wife. Obierika told them that he would give it some thought, but when they were
alone in her hut at night he assured her that they would have a home full of children, and that he
would not marry another wife until they were old, so that they would have somebody to care for
them. She thought this strange of him, a prosperous man with only one wife, and she worried
more than he did about their childlessness, about the songs that people sang, the melodious mean-
spirited words: She has sold her womb. She has eaten his penis. He plays his flute and hands over
his wealth to her.
Once, at a moonlight gathering, the square full of women telling stories and learning new dances, a
group of girls saw Nwamgba and began to sing, their aggressive breasts pointing at her. She asked
if they would mind singing a little louder, so that she could hear the words and then show them
who was the greater of two tortoises. They stopped singing. She enjoyed their fear, the way they
backed away from her, but it was then that she decided to find a wife for Obierika herself.
Nwamgba liked going to the Oyi stream, untying her wrapper from her waist and walking down
the slope to the silvery rush of water that burst out from a rock. The waters of Oyi seemed fresher
than those of the other stream, Ogalanya, or perhaps it was simply that Nwamgba felt comforted
by the shrine of the Oyi goddess, tucked away in a corner; as a child she had learned that Oyi was
the protector of women, the reason it was taboo to sell women into slavery. Nwamgbas closest
friend, Ayaju, was already at the stream, and as Nwamgba helped Ayaju raise her pot to her head
she asked her who might be a good second wife for Obierika.
She and Ayaju had grown up together and had married men from the same clan. The difference
between them, though, was that Ayaju was of slave descent. Ayaju did not care for her husband,
Okenwa, who she said resembled and smelled like a rat, but her marriage prospects had been
limited; no man from a freeborn family would have come for her hand. Ayaju was a trader, and her
rangy, quick-moving body spoke of her many journeys; she had even travelled beyond Onicha. It
was she who had first brought back tales of the strange customs of the Igala and Edo traders, she
who had first told stories of the white-skinned men who had arrived in Onicha with mirrors and
fabrics and the biggest guns the people of those parts had ever seen. This cosmopolitanism earned
her respect, and she was the only person of slave descent who talked loudly at the Womens
Council, the only person who had answers for everything. She promptly suggested, for Obierikas
second wife, a young girl from the Okonkwo family, who had beautiful wide hips and who was
respectful, nothing like the other young girls of today, with their heads full of nonsense.
As they walked home from the stream, Ayaju said that perhaps Nwamgba should do what other
women in her situation didtake a lover and get pregnant in order to continue Obierikas lineage.
Nwamgbas retort was sharp, because she did not like Ayajus tone, which suggested that Obierika
was impotent, and, as if in response to her thoughts, she felt a furious stabbing sensation in her
back and knew that she was pregnant again, but she said nothing, because she knew, too, that she
would lose it again.
Her miscarriage happened a few weeks later, lumpy blood running down her legs. Obierika
comforted her and suggested that they go to the famous oracle, Kisa, as soon as she was well
enough for the half days journey. After the dibia had consulted the oracle, Nwamgba cringed at
the thought of sacrificing a whole cow; Obierika certainly had greedy ancestors. But they
performed the ritual cleansings and the sacrifices as required, and when she suggested that he go
and see the Okonkwo family about their daughter he delayed and delayed until another sharp
pain spliced her back, and, months later, she was lying on a pile of freshly washed banana leaves
behind her hut, straining and pushing until the baby slipped out.
They named him Anikwenwa: the earth god Ani had finally granted a child. He was dark and
solidly built, and had Obierikas happy curiosity. Obierika took him to pick medicinal herbs, to
collect clay for Nwamgbas pottery, to twist yam vines at the farm. Obierikas cousins Okafo and
Okoye visited often. They marvelled at how well Anikwenwa played the flute, how quickly he was
learning poetry and wrestling moves from his father, but Nwamgba saw the glowing malevolence
that their smiles could not hide. She feared for her child and for her husband, and when Obierika
dieda man who had been hearty and laughing and drinking palm wine moments before he
slumpedshe knew that they had killed him with medicine. She clung to his corpse until a
neighbor slapped her to make her let go; she lay in the cold ash for days, tore at the patterns
shaved into her hair. Obierikas death left her with an unending despair. She thought often of a
woman who, after losing a tenth child, had gone to her back yard and hanged herself on a kola-nut
tree. But she would not do it, because of Anikwenwa.
Later, she wished she had made Obierikas cousins drink his mmili ozu before the oracle. She had
witnessed this once, when a wealthy man died and his family forced his rival to drink his mmili
ozu. Nwamgba had watched an unmarried woman take a cupped leaf full of water, touch it to the
dead mans body, all the time speaking solemnly, and give the leaf-cup to the accused man. He
drank. Everyone looked to make sure that he swallowed, a grave silence in the air, because they
knew that if he was guilty he would die. He died days later, and his family lowered their heads in
shame. Nwamgba felt strangely shaken by it all. She should have insisted on this with Obierikas
cousins, but she had been blinded by grief and now Obierika was buried and it was too late.
His cousins, during the funeral, took his ivory tusk, claiming that the trappings of titles went to
brothers and not to sons. It was when they emptied his barn of yams and led away the adult goats
in his pen that she confronted them, shouting, and when they brushed her aside she waited until
evening, then walked around the clan singing about their wickedness, the abominations they were
heaping on the land by cheating a widow, until the elders asked them to leave her alone. She
complained to the Womens Council, and twenty women went at night to Okafos and Okoyes
homes, brandishing pestles, warning them to leave Nwamgba alone. But Nwamgba knew that
those grasping cousins would never really stop. She dreamed of killing them. She certainly could,
those weaklings who had spent their lives scrounging off Obierika instead of working, but, of
course, she would be banished then, and there would be no one to care for her son. Instead, she
took Anikwenwa on long walks, telling him that the land from that palm tree to that avocado tree
was theirs, that his grandfather had passed it on to his father. She told him the same things over
and over, even though he looked bored and bewildered, and she did not let him go and play at
moonlight unless she was watching.
Ayaju came back from a trading journey with another story: the women in Onicha were
complaining about the white men. They had welcomed the white mens trading station, but now
the white men wanted to tell them how to trade, and when the elders of Agueke refused to place
their thumbs on a paper the white men came at night with their normal-men helpers and razed the
village. There was nothing left. Nwamgba did not understand. What sort of guns did these white
men have? Ayaju laughed and said that their guns were nothing like the rusty thing her own
husband owned; she spoke with pride, as though she herself were responsible for the superiority
of the white mens guns. Some white men were visiting different clans, asking parents to send their
children to school, she added, and she had decided to send her son Azuka, who was the laziest on
the farm, because although she was respected and wealthy, she was still of slave descent, her sons
were still barred from taking titles, and she wanted Azuka to learn the ways of these foreigners.
People ruled over others not because they were better people, she said, but because they had better
guns; after all, her father would not have been enslaved if his clan had been as well armed as
Nwamgbas. As Nwamgba listened to her friend, she dreamed of killing Obierikas cousins with
the white mens guns.
The day the white men visited her clan, Nwamgba left the pot she was about to put in her oven,
took Anikwenwa and her girl apprentices, and hurried to the square. She was at first disappointed
by the ordinariness of the two white men; they were harmless-looking, the color of albinos, with
frail and slender limbs. Their companions were normal men, but there was something foreign
about them, too: only one spoke Igbo, and with a strange accent. He said that he was from Elele,
the other normal men were from Sierra Leone, and the white men from France, far across the sea.
They were all of the Holy Ghost Congregation, had arrived in Onicha in 1885, and were building
their school and church there. Nwamgba was the first to ask a question: Had they brought their
guns, by any chance, the ones used to destroy the people of Agueke, and could she see one? The
man said unhappily that it was the soldiers of the British government and the merchants of the
Royal Niger Company who destroyed villages; they, instead, brought good news. He spoke about
their god, who had come to the world to die, and who had a son but no wife, and who was three
but also one. Many of the people around Nwamgba laughed loudly. Some walked away, because
they had imagined that the white man was full of wisdom. Others stayed and offered cool bowls of
water.
Weeks later, Ayaju brought another story: the white men had set up a courthouse in Onicha where
they judged disputes. They had indeed come to stay. For the first time, Nwamgba doubted her
friend. Surely the people of Onicha had their own courts. The clan next to Nwamgbas, for
example, held its courts only during the new yam festival, so that peoples rancor grew while they
awaited justice. A stupid system, Nwamgba thought, but surely everyone had one. Ayaju laughed
and told Nwamgba again that people ruled others when they had better guns. Her son was
already learning about these foreign ways, and perhaps Anikwenwa should, too. Nwamgba
refused. It was unthinkable that her only son, her single eye, should be given to the white men,
never mind the superiority of their guns.
Three events, in the following years, caused Nwamgba to change her mind. The first was that
Obierikas cousins took over a large piece of land and told the elders that they were farming it for
her, a woman who had emasculated their dead brother and now refused to remarry, even though
suitors came and her breasts were still round. The elders sided with them. The second was that
Ayaju told a story of two people who had taken a land case to the white mens court; the first man
was lying but could speak the white mens language, while the second man, the rightful owner of
the land, could not, and so he lost his case, was beaten and locked up, and ordered to give up his
land. The third was the story of the boy Iroegbunam, who had gone missing many years ago and
then suddenly reappeared, a grown man, his widowed mother mute with shock at his story: a
neighbor, whom his father had often shouted down at Age Grade meetings, had abducted him
when his mother was at the market and taken him to the Aro slave dealers, who looked him over
and complained that the wound on his leg would reduce his price. He was tied to others by the
hands, forming a long human column, and he was hit with a stick and told to walk faster. There
was one woman in the group. She shouted herself hoarse, telling the abductors that they were
heartless, that her spirit would torment them and their children, that she knew she was to be sold
to the white man and did they not know that the white mans slavery was very different, that
people were treated like goats, taken on large ships a long way away, and were eventually eaten?
Iroegbunam walked and walked and walked, his feet bloodied, his body numb, until all he
remembered was the smell of dust. Finally, they stopped at a coastal clan, where a man spoke a
nearly incomprehensible Igbo, but Iroegbunam made out enough to understand that another man
who was to sell them to the white people on the ship had gone up to bargain with them but had
himself been kidnapped. There were loud arguments, scuffling; some of the abductees yanked at
the ropes and Iroegbunam passed out. He awoke to find a white man rubbing his feet with oil and
at first he was terrified, certain that he was being prepared for the white mans meal, but this was a
different kind of white man, who bought slaves only to free them, and he took Iroegbunam to live
with him and trained him to be a Christian missionary.
Iroegbunams story haunted Nwamgba, because this, she was sure, was the way Obierikas
cousins were likely to get rid of her son. Killing him would be too dangerous, the risk of
misfortunes from the oracle too high, but they would be able to sell him as long as they had strong
medicine to protect themselves. She was struck, too, by how Iroegbunam lapsed into the white
mans language from time to time. It sounded nasal and disgusting. Nwamgba had no desire to
speak such a thing herself, but she was suddenly determined that Anikwenwa would speak
enough of it to go to the white mens court with Obierikas cousins and defeat them and take
control of what was his. And so, shortly after Iroegbunams return, she told Ayaju that she wanted
to take her son to school.
They went first to the Anglican mission. The classroom had more girls than boys, sitting with slates
on their laps while the teacher stood in front of them, holding a big cane, telling them a story about
a man who transformed a bowl of water into wine. The teachers spectacles impressed Nwamgba,
and she thought that the man in the story must have had powerful medicine to be able to
transform water into wine, but when the girls were separated and a woman teacher came to teach
them how to sew Nwamgba found this silly. In her clan, men sewed cloth and girls learned pottery.
What dissuaded her completely from sending Anikwenwa to the school, however, was that the
instruction was done in Igbo. Nwamgba asked why. The teacher said that, of course, the students
were taught Englishhe held up an English primerbut children learned best in their own
language and the children in the white mens land were taught in their own language, too.
Nwamgba turned to leave. The teacher stood in her way and told her that the Catholic
missionaries were harsh and did not look out for the best interests of the natives. Nwamgba was
amused by these foreigners, who did not seem to know that one must, in front of strangers,
pretend to have unity. But she had come in search of English, and so she walked past him and
went to the Catholic mission.
Father Shanahan told her that Anikwenwa would have to take an English name, because it was not
possible to be baptized with a heathen name. She agreed easily. His name was Anikwenwa as far
as she was concerned; if they wanted to name him something she could not pronounce before
teaching him their language, she did not mind at all. All that mattered was that he learn enough of
the language to fight his fathers cousins.
Father Shanahan looked at Anikwenwa, a dark-skinned, well-muscled child, and guessed that he
was about twelve, although he found it difficult to estimate the ages of these people; sometimes
what looked like a man would turn out to be a mere boy. It was nothing like in Eastern Africa,
where he had previously worked, where the natives tended to be slender, less confusingly
muscular. As he poured some water on the boys head, he said, Michael, I baptize you in the
name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
He gave the boy a singlet and a pair of shorts, because the people of the living God did not walk
around naked, and he tried to preach to the boys mother, but she looked at him as if he were a
child who did not know any better. There was something troublingly assertive about her,
something he had seen in many women here; there was much potential to be harnessed if their
wildness were tamed. This Nwamgba would make a marvellous missionary among the women.
He watched her leave. There was a grace in her straight back, and she, unlike others, had not spent
too much time going round and round in her speech. It infuriated him, their overlong talk and
circuitous proverbs, their never getting to the point, but he was determined to excel here; it was the
reason he had joined the Holy Ghost congregation, whose special vocation was the redemption of
black heathens.
Nwamgba was alarmed by how indiscriminately the missionaries flogged students: for being late,
for being lazy, for being slow, for being idle, and, once, as Anikwenwa told her, Father Lutz put
metal cuffs around a girls hands to teach her a lesson about lying, all the time saying in Igbofor
Father Lutz spoke a broken brand of Igbothat native parents pampered their children too much,
that teaching the Gospel also meant teaching proper discipline. The first weekend Anikwenwa
came home, Nwamgba saw welts on his back, and she tightened her wrapper around her waist
and went to the school and told the teacher that she would gouge out the eyes of everyone at the
mission if they ever did that to him again. She knew that Anikwenwa did not want to go to school
and she told him that it was only for a year or two, so that he could learn English, and although the
mission people told her not to come so often, she insistently came every weekend to take him
home. Anikwenwa always took off his clothes even before they had left the mission compound. He
disliked the shorts and shirt that made him sweat, the fabric that was itchy around his armpits. He
disliked, too, being in the same class as old men, missing out on wrestling contests.
But Anikwenwas attitude toward school slowly changed. Nwamgba first noticed this when some
of the other boys with whom he swept the village square complained that he no longer did his
share because he was at school, and Anikwenwa said something in English, something sharp-
sounding, which shut them up and filled Nwamgba with an indulgent pride. Her pride turned to
vague worry when she noticed that the curiosity in his eyes had diminished. There was a new
ponderousness in him, as if he had suddenly found himself bearing the weight of a heavy world.
He stared at things for too long. He stopped eating her food, because, he said, it was sacrificed to
idols. He told her to tie her wrapper around her chest instead of her waist, because her nakedness
was sinful. She looked at him, amused by his earnestness, but worried nonetheless, and asked why
he had only just begun to notice her nakedness.
When it was time for his initiation ceremony, he said he would not participate, because it was a
heathen custom to be initiated into the world of spirits, a custom that Father Shanahan had said
would have to stop. Nwamgba roughly yanked his ear and told him that a foreign albino could not
determine when their customs would change, and that he would participate or else he would tell
her whether he was her son or the white mans son. Anikwenwa reluctantly agreed, but as he was
taken away with a group of other boys she noticed that he lacked their excitement. His sadness
saddened her. She felt her son slipping away from her, and yet she was proud that he was learning
so much, that he could be a court interpreter or a letter writer, that with Father Lutzs help he had
brought home some papers that showed that their land belonged to them. Her proudest moment
was when he went to his fathers cousins Okafo and Okoye and asked for his fathers ivory tusk
back. And they gave it to him.
Nwamgba knew that her son now inhabited a mental space that she was unable to recognize. He
told her that he was going to Lagos to learn how to be a teacher, and even as she screamedHow
can you leave me? Who will bury me when I die?she knew that he would go. She did not see
him for many years, years during which his fathers cousin Okafo died. She often consulted the
oracle to ask whether Anikwenwa was still alive, and the dibia admonished her and sent her away,
because of course he was alive. Finally, he returned, in the year that the clan banned all dogs after a
dog killed a member of the Mmangala Age Grade, the age group to which Anikwenwa would
have belonged if he did not believe that such things were devilish.
Nwamgba said nothing when Anikwenwa announced that he had been appointed catechist at the
new mission. She was sharpening her aguba on the palm of her hand, about to shave patterns into
the hair of a little girl, and she continued to do soflick-flick-flickwhile Anikwenwa talked
about winning the souls of the members of their clan. The plate of breadfruit seeds she had offered
him was untouchedhe no longer ate anything at all of hersand she looked at him, this man
wearing trousers and a rosary around his neck, and wondered whether she had meddled with his
destiny. Was this what his chi had ordained for him, this life in which he was like a person
diligently acting a bizarre pantomime?
The day that he told her about the woman he would marry, she was not surprised. He did not do it
as it was done, did not consult people about the brides family, but simply said that somebody at
the mission had seen a suitable young woman from Ifite Ukpo, and the suitable young woman
would be taken to the Sisters of the Holy Rosary in Onicha to learn how to be a good Christian
wife. Nwamgba was sick with malaria that day, lying on her mud bed, rubbing her aching joints,
and she asked Anikwenwa the young womans name. Anikwenwa said it was Agnes. Nwamgba
asked for the young womans real name. Anikwenwa cleared his throat and said she had been
called Mgbeke before she became a Christian, and Nwamgba asked whether Mgbeke would at
least do the confession ceremony even if Anikwenwa would not follow the other marriage rites of
their clan. He shook his head furiously and told her that the confession made by women before
marriage, in which, surrounded by female relatives, they swore that no man had touched them
since their husband declared his interest, was sinful, because Christian wives should not have been
touched at all.
The marriage ceremony in the church was laughably strange, but Nwamgba bore it silently and
told herself that she would die soon and join Obierika and be free of a world that increasingly
made no sense. She was determined to dislike her sons wife, but Mgbeke was difficult to dislike,
clear-skinned and gentle, eager to please the man to whom she was married, eager to please
everyone, quick to cry, apologetic about things over which she had no control. And so, instead,
Nwamgba pitied her. Mgbeke often visited Nwamgba in tears, saying that Anikwenwa had
refused to eat dinner because he was upset with her, that Anikwenwa had banned her from going
to a friends Anglican wedding because Anglicans did not preach the truth, and Nwamgba would
silently carve designs on her pottery while Mgbeke cried, uncertain of how to handle a woman
crying about things that did not deserve tears.
Mgbeke was called missus by everyone, even the non-Christians, all of whom respected the
catechists wife, but on the day she went to the Oyi stream and refused to remove her clothes
because she was a Christian the women of the clan, outraged that she had dared to disrespect the
goddess, beat her and dumped her at the grove. The news spread quickly. Missus had been
harassed. Anikwenwa threatened to lock up all the elders if his wife was treated that way again,
but Father ODonnell, on his next trek from his station in Onicha, visited the elders and apologized
on Mgbekes behalf, and asked whether perhaps Christian women could be allowed to fetch water
fully clothed. The elders refusedif a woman wanted Oyis waters, then she had to follow Oyis
rulesbut they were courteous to Father ODonnell, who listened to them and did not behave like
their own son Anikwenwa.
Nwamgba was ashamed of her son, irritated with his wife, upset by their rarefied life in which
they treated non-Christians as if they had smallpox, but she held out hope for a grandchild; she
prayed and sacrificed for Mgbeke to have a boy, because she knew that the child would be
Obierika come back and would bring a semblance of sense again into her world. She did not know
of Mgbekes first or second miscarriage; it was only after the third that Mgbeke, sniffling and
blowing her nose, told her. They had to consult the oracle, as this was a family misfortune,
Nwamgba said, but Mgbekes eyes widened with fear. Michael would be very angry if he ever
heard of this oracle suggestion. Nwamgba, who still found it difficult to remember that Michael
was Anikwenwa, went to the oracle herself, and afterward thought it ludicrous how even the gods
had changed and no longer asked for palm wine but for gin. Had they converted, too?
A few months later, Mgbeke visited, smiling, bringing a covered bowl of one of those concoctions
that Nwamgba found inedible, and Nwamgba knew that her chi was still wide awake and that her
daughter-in-law was pregnant. Anikwenwa had decreed that Mgbeke would have the baby at the
mission in Onicha, but the gods had different plans, and she went into early labor on a rainy
afternoon; somebody ran in the drenching rain to Nwamgbas hut to call her. It was a boy. Father
ODonnell baptized him Peter, but Nwamgba called him Nnamdi, because he would be Obierika
come back. She sang to him, and when he cried she pushed her dried-up nipple into his mouth,
but, try as she might, she did not feel the spirit of her magnificent husband, Obierika. Mgbeke had
three more miscarriages, and Nwamgba went to the oracle many times until a pregnancy stayed,
and the second baby was born at the mission in Onicha. A girl. From the moment Nwamgba held
her, the babys bright eyes delightfully focussed on her, she knew that the spirit of Obierika had
finally returned; odd, to have come back in a girl, but who could predict the ways of the ancestors?
Father ODonnell baptized the baby Grace, but Nwamgba called her Afamefunamy name will
not be lostand was thrilled by the childs solemn interest in her poetry and her stories, by the
teen-agers keen watchfulness as Nwamgba struggled to make pottery with newly shaky hands.
Nwamgba was not thrilled that Afamefuna was sent away to secondary school in Onicha. (Peter
was already living with the priests there.) She feared that, at boarding school, the new ways would
dissolve her granddaughters fighting spirit and replace it with either an incurious rigidity, like her
sons, or a limp helplessness, like Mgbekes.
The year that Afamefuna left for secondary school, Nwamgba felt as if a lamp had been blown out
in a dim room. It was a strange year, the year that darkness suddenly descended on the land in the
middle of the afternoon, and when Nwamgba felt the deep-seated ache in her joints she knew that
her end was near. She lay on her bed gasping for breath, while Anikwenwa pleaded with her to be
baptized and anointed so that he could hold a Christian funeral for her, as he could not participate
in a heathen ceremony. Nwamgba told him that if he dared to bring anybody to rub some filthy oil
on her she would slap them with her last strength. All she wanted before she joined the ancestors
was to see Afamefuna, but Anikwenwa said that Grace was taking exams at school and could not
come home.
But she came. Nwamgba heard the squeaky swing of her door, and there was Afamefuna, her
granddaughter, who had come on her own from Onicha because she had been unable to sleep for
days, her restless spirit urging her home. Grace put down her schoolbag, inside of which was her
textbook, with a chapter called The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of Southern Nigeria, by
an administrator from Bristol who had lived among them for seven years.
It was Grace who would eventually read about these savages, titillated by their curious and
meaningless customs, not connecting them to herself until her teacher Sister Maureen told her that
she could not refer to the call-and-response her grandmother had taught her as poetry, because
primitive tribes did not have poetry. It was Grace who would laugh and laugh until Sister
Maureen took her to detention and then summoned her father, who slapped Grace in front of the
other teachers to show them how well he disciplined his children. It was Grace who would nurse a
deep scorn for her father for years, spending holidays working as a maid in Onicha so as to avoid
the sanctimonies, the dour certainties, of her parents and her brother. It was Grace who, after
graduating from secondary school, would teach elementary school in Agueke, where people told
stories of the destruction of their village by the white men with guns, stories she was not sure she
believed, because they also told stories of mermaids appearing from the River Niger holding wads
of crisp cash. It was Grace who, as one of a dozen or so women at the University College in Ibadan
in 1953, would change her degree from chemistry to history after she heard, while drinking tea at
the home of a friend, the story of Mr. Gboyega. The eminent Mr. Gboyega, a chocolate-skinned
Nigerian, educated in London, distinguished expert on the history of the British Empire, had
resigned in disgust when the West African Examinations Council began talking of adding African
history to the curriculum, because he was appalled that African history would even be considered
a subject. It was Grace who would ponder this story for a long time, with great sadness, and it
would cause her to make a clear link between education and dignity, between the hard, obvious
things that are printed in books and the soft, subtle things that lodge themselves in the soul. It was
Grace who would begin to rethink her own schooling: How lustily she had sung on Empire Day,
God save our gracious king. Send him victorious, happy and glorious. Long to reign over us.
How she had puzzled over words like wallpaper and dandelions in her textbooks, unable to
picture them. How she had struggled with arithmetic problems that had to do with mixtures,
because what was coffee and what was chicory, and why did they have to be mixed? It was
Grace who would begin to rethink her fathers schooling and then hurry home to see him, his eyes
watery with age, telling him she had not received all the letters she had ignored, saying amen
when he prayed, and pressing her lips against his forehead. It was Grace who, driving past
Agueke on her way to the university one day, would become haunted by the image of a destroyed
village and would go to London and to Paris and to Onicha, sifting through moldy files in
archives, reimagining the lives and smells of her grandmothers world, for the book she would
write called Pacifying with Bullets: A Reclaimed History of Southern Nigeria. It was Grace who,
in a conversation about the book with her fianc, George Chikadibiastylish graduate of Kings
College, Lagos, engineer-to-be, wearer of three-piece suits, expert ballroom dancer, who often said
that a grammar school without Latin was like a cup of tea without sugarunderstood that the
marriage would not last when George told her that it was misguided of her to write about
primitive culture instead of a worthwhile topic like African Alliances in the American-Soviet
Tension. They would divorce in 1972, not because of the four miscarriages Grace had suffered but
because she woke up sweating one night and realized that she would strangle George to death if
she had to listen to one more rapturous monologue about his Cambridge days. It was Grace who,
as she received faculty prizes, as she spoke to solemn-faced people at conferences about the Ijaw
and Ibibio and Igbo and Efik peoples of Southern Nigeria, as she wrote common-sense reports for
international organizations, for which she nevertheless received generous pay, would imagine her
grandmother looking on with great amusement. It was Grace who, feeling an odd rootlessness in
the later years of her life, surrounded by her awards, her friends, her garden of peerless roses,
would go to the courthouse in Lagos and officially change her first name from Grace to
Afamefuna.
But on that day, as she sat at her grandmothers bedside in the fading evening light, Grace was not
contemplating her future. She simply held her grandmothers hand, the palm thickened from years
of making pottery.
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INTRODUCTION TO POETRY
Billy Collins
1 I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
5 I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poems room

and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to water-ski

10 across the surface of a poem
waving at the authors name on the shore.
But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with a rope
and torture a confession out of it.
15 They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.
LET ME TELL YOU WHAT A POEM BRINGS
Juan Felipe Herrera
for Charles Fishman
1 Before you go further

let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries,
5 yes, it is that easy, a poem, imagine me telling you this,
instead of going day by day against the razors, well,
the judgments, all the tick-tock bronze, a leather jacker
sizing you up, the fashion mall, for example, from
the outside you think you are being entertained,
10 when you enter, things change, you get caught by surprise.
your mouth goes sour, you get thirsty, your legs grow cold
standing still in the middle of a storm, a poem, of course,
is always open for business too, except, as you can see,
it isnt exactly business that pulls your spirit into
15 the alarming waters, there you can bathe, you can play,
you can even join in on the gossipthe mist, that is,
the mist becomes central to your existence.
LAS RUINAS DEL CORAZON
Eric Gamalinda
1 Juana the Mad married the handsomest man in Spain

and that was the end of it, because when you marry a man
more beautiful than you, they said you pretty much lost control
of the situation. Did she ever listen? No. When he was away
5 annexing more kingdoms, she had horrible dreams

of him being cut and blown apart, or spread on the rack,
or sleeping with exotic women. She prayed to the twin guardians

of the Alhambra, Saint Ursula and Saint Susana, to send him home
and make him stay forever. And they answered her prayers
10 and killed Philip the Handsome at twenty-eight.
Juana the Mad was beside herself with grief, and she wrapped
his body in oil and lavender, and laid him out in a casket of lead,
and built a marble effigy of the young monarch in sleep,

and beside it her own dead figure, so he would never think
15 he was alone. And she kept his body beside her, and every day
for the next twenty years, as pungent potions filled the rooms,
she peeked into his coffin like a chef peeks into his pot,
and memories of his young body woke her adamant desire.
She wanted to possess him entirely, and since not even death
20 may oppose the queen, she found a way to merge death and life
by eating a piece of him, slowly, lovingly, until he was entirely

in her being. She cut a finger and chewed the fragrant skin,
then sliced a thick portion of his once ruddy cheeks. Then she ate
an ear, the side of a thigh, the solid muscles of his chest,
25 then lunged for an eye, a kidney, part of the large intestine.

Then she diced his penis and his pebble-like testicles
and washed everything down with sweet jerez.

Then she decided she was ready to die.
But before she did, she asked the poets to record these moments
30 in song, and the architects to carve the song in marble,
and the marble to be selected from the most secret veins

of the earth and placed where no man could see it,
because that is the nature of love, because one walks alone
through the ruins of the heart, because the young must sleep
35 with their eyes open, because the angels tremble

from so much beauty, because memory moves in orbits
of absence, because she holds her hands out in the rain,

and rain remembers nothing, not even how it became itself.
[YOU WHO NEVER ARRIVED]
Rainier Maria Rilke
1 You who never arrived

in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
5 would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt
landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and
10 unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
15 You, Beloved, who are all

the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
20 Streets that I chanced upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
25 Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...
Translated by Stephen Mitchell

THE TRIUMPH OF ACHILLES
Louise Glck
1 In the story of Patroclus

no one survives, not even Achilles
who was nearly a god.
Patroclus resembled him; they wore
5 the same armor.
Always in these friendships

one serves the other, one is less than the other:
the hierarchy
is always apparant, though the legends
10 cannot be trusted--
their source is the survivor,
the one who has been abandoned.
What were the Greek ships on fire

compared to this loss?
15 In his tent, Achilles

grieved with his whole being
and the gods saw
he was a man already dead, a victim
of the part that loved,
20 the part that was mortal.
DRINKING ALONE BY MIDNIGHT
Li Bai
1 A pot of wine in the flower garden,

but no friends drink with me.
So I raise my cup to the bright moon
and to my shadow, which makes us three,
5 but the moon wont drink
and my shadow just creeps about my heels.
Yet in your company, moon and shadow,
I have a wild time till spring dies out.
I sing and the moon shudders.
10 My shadow staggers when I dance.
We have our fun while I can stand
then drift apart when I fall asleep.
Lets share this empty journey often
and meet again in the milky river of stars.
A SKETCH FOR A MODERN LOVE POEM
Tadeusz Rewicz
1 And yet whiteness

can be best described by greyness
a bird by a stone
sunflowers
5 in december
love poems of old

used to be descriptions of flesh
they described this and that
for instance eyelashes
10 and yet redness

should be described
by greyness the sun by rain
the poppies in november
the lips at night
15 the most palpable

description of bread
is that of hunger
there is in it
a humid porous core
20 a warm inside
sunflowers at night
the breasts the belly the thighs of Cybele
a transparent
source-like description
25 of water is that of thirst
of ash
of desert
it provokes a mirage
clouds and trees enter
30 a mirror of water
lack hunger
absence
of flesh
is a description of love
35 in a modern love poem
Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz

THE RED WHEELBARROW
William Carlos Williams
1 so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
5 glazed with rain

water
beside the white

chickens
TONIGHT I CAN WRITE THE SADDEST LINES
Pablo Neruda
1 Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, 'The night is starry

and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
5 Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

10 How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
15 What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

The night is starry and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.

20 My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
25 Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.

Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms

30 my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
Translated by W.S. Merwin

THE CINNAMON PEELER
Michael Ondaatje
1 If I were a cinnamon peeler

I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.
5 Your breasts and shoulders would reek

you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
10 though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.
Here on the upper thigh

at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
15 or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peelers wife.
I could hardly glance at you

20 before marriage
never touch you
your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
25 over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers
When we swam once

I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
30 you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said
this is how you touch other women

the grasscutters wife, the lime burners daughter.
And you searched your arms
35 for the missing perfume.
and knew
what good is it
to be the lime burners daughter
left with no trace
40 as if not spoken to in an act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.
You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
45 I am the cinnamon
peelers wife. Smell me.
WISHBONE
Richard Siken
1 You saved my life he says. I owe you everything.

You dont, I say, you dont owe me squat, lets just get going, lets just
get gone, but hes relentless,
keeps saying I owe you, says Your shoes are filling with your own
5 damn blood, you must want something, just tell me, and its yours.
But I cant look at him, can hardly speak,
I took the bullet for all the wrong reasons, Id just as soon kill you myself,
I say. You keep saying I owe you, I owe but you say the same thing
every time. Lets not talk about it, lets just not talk.
10 Not because I dont believe it, not because I want it any different, but Im
always saving and youre always owing and Im tired of asking to settle
the debt. Dont bother. You never mean it
anyway, not really, and it only makes me that much more ashamed.
Theres only one thing I want, dont make me say it, just get me bandages,
15 Im bleeding, Im not just making conversation.
Theres smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. Its a Western,
Henry. Its a downright shoot-em-up. Weve made a graveyard
out of the bone white afternoon.
Its another wrong-man-dies scenario and we keep doing it, Henry,
20 keep saying until we get it right but we always win and we never quit.
See, weve won again,
here we are at the place where I get to beg for it where I get to say Please,
for just one night, will you lay down next to me, we can leave our clothes on,
we can stay all buttoned up?
25 But we both know how it goes I say I want you inside me and you hold
my head underwater, I say I want you inside me and you split me open
with a knife.
Im battling monsters, Im pulling you out of the burning buildings
and you say Ill give you anything but you never come through.
30 Even when youre standing up
you look like youre lying down, but will you let me kiss your neck, baby?
Do I have to tie your arms down? Do I have to stick my tongue in your
mouth like the hand of a thief,
like a burglary, like its just another petty theft? It makes me tired,
35 Henry. Do you see what I mean? Do you see what Im getting at?
I swear, I end up
feeling empty, like youve taken something out of me, and I have to search
my body for the scars, thinking Did he find that one last tender place to
sink his teeth in?
40 I know you want me to say it, Henry, its in the script, you want me to say
Lie down on the bed, youre all I ever wanted and worth dying for too
but I think Id rather keep the bullet.
Its mine, see, Im not giving it up. This way you still owe me, and thats
as good as anything. You cant get out of this one, Henry, you cant get it
45 out of me, and with this bullet lodged in my chest,
covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because Im hungry
and hollow and just want something to call my own. Ill be your
slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue
and final resting, walking around with this bullet inside me like the bullet
50 was already there, like its been waiting inside me the whole time.
Do you want it? Do you want anything I have?
Will you throw me to the ground like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle
it out with your bare hands? If you love me, Henry, you dont love me
in a way I understand.
55 Do you know how it ends? Do you feel lucky? Do you want to go home
now? Theres a bottle of whiskey in the trunk of the Chevy and a
dead man at our feet
staring up at us like were something interesting. This is where the evening
splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard,
60 and make a wish.
YGUDUH
e. e. cummings
1 ydoan
yunnuhstan
ydoan o
yunnuhstand dem
5 yguduh ged
yunnuhstan dem doidee

yguduh ged riduh
ydoan o nudn
LISN bud LISN
10 dem
gud
am
lidl yelluh bas

tuds weer goin
15 duhSIVILEYEzum
THE WINDHOVER
Gerard Manley Hopkins
To Christ Our Lord
1 I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
5 In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
10 Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sher pld makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
SEND ME TO THE MOON
Conchitina Cruz
1 I have no time for seeming,

said the poet to his mistress, in summer heat,
in distress, on his knees, to impress,
say I to you now, my one
5 and one again, beyond question, this moment,
my shaky fact and sweeping statement,
the sting of your wandering eye gone
in a blink, the stink of your sin dismissed
in a split-second, no longer pissed, no longer dissed by my friendsthis heart
10 sought and bought, this mind blundered
and plundered of reason.
What to mend in this season, swell heaven, my body swells
in the theory of your touch,
my crotch restless and rootless without the thrill
of your skill,
15 ever faithful, ever loyal
to none and all, every fall a road to get back on
again. After all, who wants to remain
unsullied, my precious umlaut and ampersand,
my limbs curling in letters yet to be written
20 with you, who wouldnt melt in the face
of your face, unkemptWhy attempt to leave you be,
a missed opportunity?
If I may, dear player,
my favorite bullshitter, let me say
25 steer clear of those women, proud in their heels,
their store-bought feminism, and love me
instead, mousy-haired and well-read,
able to read genre for your sake,
able to take slasher in your company.
30 Lay down your arms where I can
stay in them and send me to the moon, forget the freaks
we ran away from one afternoon by the library, the guard whistling in the hall,
the howl and swagger and the fall
Havent we all made that jump? Havent we all heard
35 the plunk, the mere grunt of you,
the mere spunk of you, reeking of musk
while teaching me physics, crawling down the road piss drunk
at 3 am, plastered and master
to none, pushing my head down in cars all over town
40 Dont we all stoop and deliver?
And so, what now, hopping from bed to bed, all red with rage,
the age of the wine on the label tossed
in the wastebasket, the taste
of it all, the last of it all, the pale madness of this song,
45 my thong tugged at again
by your wandering fingers, still smelling of
another sweet wonderDont we all
have another? Where are my fangs?
Where are my pangs of guilt for my sins, where the wince
50 in the eternal threat of end, how mend the nights
idiosyncrasy, the spittoon in the fantasy
of ordinary life, your wife,
my darling nonbeliever, my unwarranted claim.
What fame do I have now, possessing you
55 in these words,
the lie almost triumphant, ecstatic,
unrepentant. Sweet fever, sweet being,
lie down with me now,
in the middle of this heat, this summer,
60 now that, now long ago, when we were mad,
we said yes, we were convinced,
never mind what happened since.
HAIKU SELECTIONS
Not wanting
to show my heart
my words in white breath
Takako Hashimoto
Translator unknown
In its eye
are mirrored far-off mountains
dragonfly!
Kobayashi Issa
Translated from Japanese by Harold Henderson
The old pond

a frog jumps in,
sound of water.
Matsuo Bash!
Translated from Japanese by Robert Hass
SONNET CXVI
William Shakespeare
1 Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
5 O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
10 Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
THE COLONEL
Carolyn Forch
What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and
sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily
papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its
black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken
bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a
mans legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in
liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked
how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took
everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern.
The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself
from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned
with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table.
They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of
them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive
there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people
they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the
last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on
the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to
the ground.
THE SECOND COMING
William Butler Yeats
1 Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
5 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;

10 Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
15 A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
20 Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
IN A STATION OF THE METRO
Ezra Pound
1 The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

petals on a wet, black bough.
INSTEAD OF A PREFACE
Anna Akhmatova
1 In the awful days of the Yezhovschina I passed seventeen months in the outer
waiting line of the prison visitors in Leningrad. Once, somebody identified me
there. Then a woman, standing behind me in the line, which, of course, never heard
my name, waked up from the torpor, typical for us all there, and asked me,
5 whispering into my ear (all spoke only in a whisper there):
And can you describe this?
And I answered:
Yes, I can.
Then the weak similarity of a smile glided over that, what had once been her face.
Translated from Russian by Yevgeny Bonver

WHERE I AM FROM
Ma. Fatima V. Lim
1 And I answer: From the Philippines.

7,000 and more islands scattered over the Pacific
Like the brown-green clusters of carabao turd.
48,000,000 people shouting at each other
5 Over the barriers of the Sierra Madre
And the Celebes Sea,
Through the din of the rice sparrows
And reconnaissance planes.
Natives with Chinese eyes and Malayan skin,
10 Castillian airs and Made in the U.S.A. minds,
We cross ourselves in the pit before the cockfight.
Oh, we are slow, how slow we are.
We fall asleep in the shade of the palm trees.
Our hoes rust in the fields;
15 The tuba rushes to our brains from our bellies.
The women change
In our coconut-fermented dreams:
Maria Clara has goatmilk skin,
Laguna de Bay eyes and teeth.
20 Her breasts swell fuller than the upo gourds.
Oh! How slower we are still to walking.
Juan Tamad took 400 years.
He finally got rid of the European devil
With a stone-sharpened bolo
25 But blinded by stars and stripes,
Poor Juan embraces the sixfoot Santa Claus.
We still are dreaming of a pure white Christmas
In our land of constant summer and Lent
Beating our breasts, re-enacting
30 The bleeding passion of Christ,
Beating down the angry spirits of our past,
Our bare feet turning
And turning the barrenning earth.
Oh! But we are quick to change
35 From one master to another
Ready to scrape and smile,
Even to speak in the conquerors tongue.
Buenos dias! Hi ya all! Konnichi wa!
We are the poor Filipinos
40 Richly blessed with malarial squatters,
Malacaang Palace puppets,
And inflatable peso bills.
How can God not be kind to us?
Surely he sees our lifted faces,
45 Wet with the manna
Of monsoon rain.
TONGUES
Mikael de Lara Co
1 Ive stopped writing

in a language that doesnt have a word
for snow. Ive stopped living
in a country where the sun burns
5 shapes into my eyes, where rivers
are the color of rust and ash,
where children are made to kneel
on salt for believing that stones can talk.
That the moon is a spotlight always trained
10 on the held hands of lovers, and mothers
who leave are immune to sadness.
Ive stopped living in a country
where young boys sit on sidewalks
waiting for everyone to return.
15 That boy, he walks streets paved
with people whose hunger is borne by a mouthful
of words: Sori. Eskyusmi. Pasensiya.
In this country without a word
for guilt, he rides a trike and gives the driver
20 a few extra coins, steals
a word to describe this: Delikadesa.
He takes a cube of ice
and places it inside his mouth
and speaks: Snow. The damp, bitter air
25 forms shapes with his breath.
He sees places.
He is there.
ZERO CHILD POLICY
Cyril Wong
1 we decided never to adopt

while still living
in Singapore
imagine the lies
5 our kids would have to tell

and worse
to themselves
in a place this repressive
and why have them

10 when we are already
each others
child
as when in bed this evening

I call you uncle
15 and you whisper
baby
MY COUNTRY AND MY PEOPLE
Lee Tzu Pheng
1 My country and my people

are neither here nor there, nor
in the comfort of my preferences,
if I could even choose.
5 At any rate, to fancy is to cheat;
and worse than being alien, or
subversive without cause,
is being a patriot
of the will.
10 I came in the boom of babies, not guns,
a daughter of a better age;
I held a pencil in a school
while the age was quelling riots
in the street, or cutting down
15 those foreign devils,
(whose books I was being taught to read).
Thus privileged I entered early
the Lion Citys jaws.
But they sent me back as fast
20 to my shy, forbearing family.
So I stayed in my parents house,
and had only household cares.
The city remained a distant way,
but I had no land to till;
25 only a duck that would not lay,
and a runt of a papaya tree,
(which also turned out to be male).
Then I learnt to drive instead
and praise the highways till
30 I saw them chop the great trees down,
and plant the little ones;
impound the hungry buffalo
(the big ones and the little ones)
because the cars could not be curbed.
35 Nor could the population.
They built milli-mini-flats
for a multi-mini-society.
The chiselled profile in the sky
took on a lofty attitude,
40 but modestly, at any rate
it made the tourist feel at home.
My country and my people
I never understood.
I grew up in Chinas mighty shadow,
45 with my gentle, brown-skinned neighbours;
but I keep diaries in English.
I sought to grow
in humanitys rich soil,
and started digging on the banks, then saw
50 life carrying my friends downstream.
Yet, careful tending of the human heart
may make a hundred flowers bloom;
and perhaps, fence-sitting neighbour,
I claim citizenship in your recognition
55 of our kind,
my people, and my country,
are you, and you my home.

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Literature and Society

Sequence and Significance

Mystery and Pattern

The Problem of Character

metaphoric mistake of perceiving a metaphor as real, he or she becomes transformed

The Refusal to Explain

Long Walk to Forever

8 I had no idea you were in town, she said.

What does 16 Catharine turned rosy, thinking about rosy brides.

30 Why, Newt? she said.

70 Catharine stopped again. You know what happens next?

90 What did you expect, she saidwild, abandoned

110 Honestly! said Catharine.

"I have my doubts."

"And I must satisfy them."

"Luchresi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry."

"To your vaults."

"I have no engagement; --come."

"The pipe," he said.

"Nitre?" he asked, at length.

"Nitre," I replied. "How long have you had that cough?"

My poor friend found it impossible to reply for many minutes.

"It is nothing," he said, at last.

"Drink," I said, presenting him the wine.

"And I to your long life."

He again took my arm, and we proceeded.

"These vaults," he said, "are extensive."

"The Montresors," I replied, "were a great and numerous family."

"I forget your arms."

"And the motto?"

"Nemo me impune lacessit."

I looked at him in surprise. He repeated the movement --a grotesque one.

"You do not comprehend?" he said.

"Not I," I replied.

"You are not of the masons."

"Yes, yes," I said; "yes, yes."

"You? Impossible! A mason?"

"A mason," I replied.

"A sign," he said, "a sign."

"Proceed," I said; "herein is the Amontillado. As for Luchresi --"

"He is an ignoramus," interrupted my friend, as he stepped unsteadily forward, while I followed

"True," I replied; "the Amontillado."

"The Amontillado!" I said.

"Yes," I said, "let us be gone."

"For the love of God, Montresor!"

"Yes," I said, "for the love of God!"

No answer. I called again --

"Mama'll be 'fraid, yes, he suggested with blinking eyes.

Come 'long in, M'sieur Alce."

"What have you got to do with the levees?"

So the storm passed and every one was happy.

"Won't you join me, Ading?" he said simply. He remained seated.

"Perhaps the poor food I have is not fit for you?"

"Salt? Surely you joke."

"I would be ashamed..."

"But what is the matter with salt?"

"Salt...salt...Makes baby stout," he intoned. "My grandmother used to sing

"No, you must let me do it."

"Let me hold the bucket while you drink," she offered.

"I would be troubling you, Ading."

"Papa, and when will the 'long table' be set?"

"In love? With whom?"

"What do you think happened?" asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.