Enclosed garden

Author: Detambel Regine
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-01-01
Features: [Excerpt:] Thirteen To be able to despair quietly in this sanctuary of the mortal world, to grow up undisturbed here, I never stepped outside the park. I am a small boat built in a bottle. In short, I am destined to fail, because I see you, my father and mother, complaining endlessly, exhausted by foolish taxes, earning little and living poorly, only occasionally finding joy when the TV plays scenes from the depths of the ocean or the leaping gazelles. When you hear the sound of water or the wind of the vast grasslands, you no longer consider the incomprehensible illness that threatens your son, nor do you care about the votes you cast, nor do you think about unemployment and the scavengers, nor do you concern yourselves with syringes, drug use, Christmas, famine, failed surgeries, football, and war. You say I am in a state of extreme meditation, far removed from the fragmented images of television you watch every night. The feeling of isolation and self-imposed confinement will gradually diminish with the passage of time. Cold is not difficult for me to handle, and the rain will dry quickly. My stomach will be able to adapt to any food. You will see countless monsters, hear unbearable complaints, and you will pace the house barefoot on the tile floor late at night. When you see too much bloodshed, you will have to drink a glass of hot milk to calm yourself down. No one cares about your misfortunes. And I, I am an orphan. Go back to your house, find another boy or girl who looks like me, and he or she should have enough ability to protect you. I am weak, and I don’t have the courage to imagine you. You work carelessly, letting your cars age in the garage. The velvet sofa in your house has been stamped with the marks of twenty years of life, day after day, year after year, until suddenly you no longer want to live. You once said that when faced with your death and disappearance, I might not even be able to make a useful gesture, let alone four years ago when I encountered Elsa being knocked to the ground. Because I don’t have the power to bring the dead back to life. You are proud of my quiet childhood. In my mother’s eyes, I am polite, lively, and charming. In my father’s eyes, I will be a man of great promise. You see my entire life as a game and a process of servile apprenticeship year after year. In the morning, I pull up the mattress of Lebetty to fold it away, only to find that it is filled with cockroaches, bedbugs, fleas, and some furry, rough-clawed creatures whose names I don’t know. When I lift the mattress, they scurry everywhere, afraid that the sun will dry out their bodies. Scabies, ulcers, parasites, ticks, lice all gather on me. After a long walk outdoors on Sundays, I bury my face in my hands and cry, but you are too indifferent to lift your head and look at me closely. You think I am just a bit tired and going through puberty, that my legs are too long and prone to pain. Of course, I feel the same way, but I don’t anticipate anything because I believe you. But I have already become like a leper, losing my reason, rotten by misfortune and society. The dampness of the earth has given me terrible frostbite, sometimes hemorrhoids and anal fissures, but apart from that, I get along well with the earth. We silently exchange the animals that grow on us. I didn’t save Elsa, and similarly, I am of no use to you, but I can give new life to the cut flowers. I remember again on my twelfth birthday, my blind parents gave me a book called The Black Tulip. I read the book, but I felt disappointed and confused because it only talked about unrealistic flowers and love. Because the prisoner didn’t scream wildly, didn’t rush at the guard to snatch his gun and threaten him, because he didn’t think of any way to escape, but instead cared for a treacherous sprout with piety and motherly tenderness. I felt bored, but I still finished the book because I expected a turn of events, the moment the prisoner would reject his fate. Do you remember? In the book, nothing happened except for a slight change in the tulip bulbs in the soil. That’s how, through these stories about proud, upright, and arrogant men, you taught me the value of silence, shaping me into a useless person, transparent as gauze.
Fourteen Sandrine kept some aggressive crickets, which fought and bit each other until they were limbless and bloody. The legs they lost fell onto the humus in the straw-woven cages. These beautiful remnants would not weather or disperse. They remained lifelike for a long time. Even after the black, earth-eating insects died, they still retained their lifelike appearance because their skeletons were still intact, and the chitin in their exoskeletons gave us the impression that they were still alive. Our eyes lack the penetration to observe the death of jewel beetles, stag beetles, and scarab beetles, because their deaths are internal, and their bodies still retain their hard and beautiful exteriors. The large iron gate sliding on the copper rails of the park resembles a giant, armored insect. The black, golden-yellow spear-like tips on the gate, like arrows with sharp points and hooks, undoubtedly resemble the frontal horns of ancient crustaceans and the piercing tools of ancient insects, like the twigs of trees ten thousand years ago, like modern antennas but without consciousness, like tempered iron, like the bulging suckers of animals, like the mouthparts of insects, like the upper jaws of crustaceans, the stings of wasps, the stingers of insects, and the glands of toxic fluids that have been exhausted. When the hair of pedestrians or the long fur of animals gets caught in these tips, they resemble the drawing frames used by silkworms to spin silk. When the wind blows through the gate, it sounds like a buzzing resonator. Building such a large gate is a laborious task, with all the lines arranged haphazardly, and every design designed to obscure the view. During the day, the golden-black gate shines, as if it were an insect wearing armor but hollowed out inside. At night, it’s the opposite—moonlight makes the gate neither golden nor black, but instead turns it red from top to bottom. As the gate slides on the tracks, it resembles a vertebrate with blood dripping from its skeleton, all the ribs piled together, all the tibias neatly arranged, and the long, thick femurs acting as pillars, supporting the humerus that extends over the top. At the other end of the park, there is another gate, both narrow and iron-cast with intricate designs. When both gates are opened at the same time, the park becomes a passage, a shortcut. Pedestrians walk through the park without even glancing at it. They enter through one gate and exit through another, not even noticing the cocoons hanging on the gates, from which moths that suck nettle will soon emerge.
You like the Temple of Abu Simbel because it represents fervent hope, that ray of sunlight that can pierce through the cold temple and shine deep into the earth. You hope I can tell you a long, heart-pounding story. You hope to hear this story about you from my lips. Unfortunately, I was not born for this— I don’t have this inherited talent for eloquence. People never know what kind of face I will show: will I be frivolous or shy, sharp or absent-minded, mediocre or cautious. I am like a cake made of wet sand from a plastic mold. The pastry chefs spend a long time pressing the sand into the molds, hoping to shape it into a turtle or a fish, but when they pour the sand out of the molds, they find that it’s either missing a leg or a head, or the sand dries too quickly, the cake can’t stand, it all falls apart, and turns back into sand. I also didn’t expect that a sand cake would turn into a baked, sturdy earthenware pot, this reshaped form allowing your recovered senses to experience the feeling of being caressed again, to trust men again, to lie on the broad shoulders of a man once more.