Between Learning and Facing
From Tender is the Flesh, by Agustina Bazterrica (translated by Sarah Moses):
His sister looks at him with surprise and contained fury. Their tacit contract implies not humiliating her, and he’s always respected it. Until today.
“Between school, homework, how far away he is, it’s really tough. And then there’s the curfew.”
Maru is about to say something, but her mother touches her hand and keeps talking.
“You have to understand that they’re enrolled in the best school — it’s an excellent school, a state school, of course, because private schools are terribly expensive. But if they don’t keep up, they’ll have to transfer to one with a fee, and that’s not something we can take on.”
His sister’s words are like dry leaves piled up in a corner, rotting.
I want to ask you to think about one-hundred pages that you’ve just read about a society in full collapse — humanity at its lowest point.
Reflect a minute.
I want to now ask you to think about another one-hundred pages that you will read about that same narrative.
Take another minute.
Before. In the middle. After. What did you feel?
You can always read about leaves piled and rotting. But to take them into your mind, palpable? To become more than just chemical properties, they rely on surroundings and their timestamp in the universe.
These particular brown black graying sharp roundish pieces of matter shown above exist in the turmoil of a man living the full experience of the disorder around him, and they exist in a woman seemingly trying to live the least amount of that disorder as possible.
Marcos contemplates and reflects. Marisa ignores and deflects. Still, I think both of them add to the pile. In this instance the narrator passes no judgment even though it points out that it’s her words that are decomposing at this time.
The larger picture is that the leaves are everywhere. It’s not that they don’t exist since the narrator hasn’t pointed them out.
Leaves line the streets and cover the work places. They fill people’s mouths and are grasped within their palms. People breathe the dust of them and expel their dark collected masses.
People have and hold and did these things one-hundred pages ago. They will do them again in a hundred more.
In this gap, you get the chance to see at least where two participants — knowingly or unknowlingly — have been and where they might go. Bazterrica’s precursor of thousands of words builds the case for what we should believe. Only at this point would it be appropriate for us to see it and split our time learning with our time facing.
A masterful simile placed delicately in the darkness.