Feebleminded

Ariana Harwicz, Carolina Orloff, Annie McDermott

• Publisher: Charco Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781916465671
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Fiction
• Index: Literature

Following the international success of Die, My Love (longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2018), Ariana Harwicz again takes us into the darkest recesses of the imagination with this delirious, furious account of a mother and daughter bound by chaos as much as love. Driven to the edge by the men in their lives, they oscillate between erratic bursts of housework, lazing in the garden, and drunken escapades. But is the constant undercurrent of violence all in the daughter's mind or will they actually go through with their plan for revenge? With a shocking, edge-of-the-seat finale worthy of Thelma & Louise if it were remade by David Lynch, Feebleminded is a wild ride of a novel with echoes of Ágota Kristóf, Elfriede Jelinek and Alan Warner, and will leave you both shaken and begging for more.

Ariana Harwicz

Feebleminded

Translated by

Annie McDermott and Carolina Orloff

I

I come from nowhere. The world is a cave, a stone heart
crushing you, a horizontal vertigo. The world is a moon slashed by black whips, by arrows and gunfire. How far must I dig before striking disdain, before my days burn. I could have been born with white eyes like this forest of stark pines, and yet I’m woken by volcanic ash on the garden clover. And yet my mother’s pulling out clumps of hair and throwing them on the fire. The day begins, I’m a baby and my mother’s in her armchair with her back to me, crying. I wake up as a girl. Outside, the lavender; inside, mother, her black hair in the embers. Cuttings of cloud everywhere, low and pasty, high and fleeting, dark and nondescript. Sitting on my clit I invent a life for myself in the clouds. I quiver, I shake, my fingers are my morphine and for that brief moment everything’s fine. My hand inside is a thousand times his face inside me. How hard can you possess a face, how hard can you shove a face into your sex. For that moment, the grass is grass and I can run through the meadows. Of all the ways of being, I ended up with this one. I recognise nobody, and when I’m really desperate I live anywhere. My mother’s stopped crying. I can already walk on my own, I can already speak, we already share clothes. I want him to come back against all odds, against all grief. I want his eyes to unearth me until I see the treetops. My head takes a turn. My head is in freefall, entrenched. Suddenly I have the voice of a dead woman. My face swollen like an addict in the bath, the epic body of a woman about to leap into the void. Suddenly I realise it’s midday. The blue eyes of the hares shine cold and I go outside to eat, but it’s already over. I begin to pray, or is it that I’m in love. I ask him to spit on me, to crush my face with a slap. I stare at him. I’m not crazy, just possessed, the answer’s always the same. Mum, I’m bored. My brain is moths in a jar, hanging themselves.

My mum and the guy grab each other by the neck and rub against the slippery concrete floor. The guy comes inside my mum looking skyward and so it all begins. Let’s put a microscope to my shapeless body on this afternoon thick with slow flies. People could hang it in the living room like an abstract painting. This is when the hot trees appear with their clammy leaves, and I hide from her. I hear her cry out. I’m tramping around on the hill, but where am I going. For now there’s just the noise of the wind at the top and snatches of song. For now the mysticism lasts and there are ants on my arm. If you like living in a dream so much why don’t you stay there, she grumbles, and shuts herself away. Without her, everything is smoke. This feverish childhood memory in a burnt-out car always comes back to me. My mother staring straight ahead, my mother on the back of my neck like a hard-shelled insect. My mother’s gaze while she smokes on the train’s torn fake-leather seat. Me, wide awake in the locked car, unable to speak, the neighbours calling the police. I move around tamely, where is he now. I crouch to kiss the ground. How is this possible: a relentless, niggling desire, the idiot cousin who comes to interrupt our al-fresco breakfasts of cream croissants and ends up throwing himself off the balcony. The idiot cousin who touches his nose and says nose. This epileptic desire, this deformed desire, a drooling lustful crip who needs two people to lift him and carry him like a cart so he can fuck on the soft mattress. And yet he’s got nothing else to do but fuck me, but want me from his chair. And yet the clear viscous halo on the mattress is proof that I’m alive. I get my finger ready but I overthink and faint. The thought of desire on top of desire itself leaves me unhinged, a parasite with eye bags down to my neck. Where are you, Mum, I’m sick of this. I’ve been on my feet working for the past nine hours, the staff need a break, you know. My mum, warm, very warm, hot and now she’s burnt. If she saw me like this she’d get a fright, the hatred I give off is something else. If you want to live in your dreams, suit yourself. She pokes her head out of her mousehole to insult me.

Why are we so gormless at the display counters, not knowing what to eat? Why do we use shop-bought parsley and basil when they grow in the garden anyway? And we laugh. Death a tempting option when she drops the jars of herbs and spices and we have to pick them up one by one like pieces of a skeleton, dry garlic sticking to our fingers. Lying on the sand, on the short grass, the dry soil. No more fighting my mother’s arms. I try to concentrate on the taste of courgettes. They’re raw, I say. Barely sautéed, she replies, just a touch of olive oil. Look at the grass, the way it’s growing in patches, how strange. There are dry bits, as if only they caught the sun, and then sunken bits like marshes. A mystery, my dear, not worth worrying about. Eat up. Looks like the hens are hungry, they screech and screech. We eat. The hand goes back and forth from the mouth. Where’s my phone, mum. It’s not here. We said we’d do it and we’re doing it really well, both of us, add a little salt. I don’t ask about the thick-bottomed glasses either. Mum. He could have phoned. Concentrate. Stare at a point in space and eat up. Good idea to buy this rectangular table, wasn’t it? Not too expensive, and it came with the chairs. Maybe we could do with a parasol, a sun lounger even. Yellow or stripy? It’d be nice to add a bit of colour. They say colour brings life. What crap. How about polka-dots? I’m staring at a point in space. So? Nothing exists. He’s getting further away and it feels like a knife thrust in my gut. These images you fixate on are like junk food. Why don’t you think about the wide-eyed, cheerful little girl you were before you met him, when you used to build hospitals for dying ants? Please don’t ruin this meal. He’s made you so ungrateful, you rude little hussy. I’ve never been cheerful. I cook from scratch instead of reheating stuff and not a word of thanks.

We clear the table surrounded by crickets. Lucky for me there’s no child around, one less plate, no congealed remains, no voice cutting through mine. Nothing happening when I tear off my head with a single yank. A whiteness expands, a fog swallowing us up. It comes from back there and engulfs us, sweeping us over the plains. Chuckling, my mum remembers when my little body slipped from her hands and she was left clutching the purple cord. Everything comes back to that, to tiny knives under the water, to eels. The two of us doing the dishes with cheap washing-up liquid and gloves. The two of us putting the cutlery away in the drawers with compartments, forks with the forks, we sing, spoons with the spoons, and we do a little dance like a tarantella. The two of us go outside to drink a bottle of pastis. There’s nothing. The slightest thing can bring us down: a bumblebee sting on the elbow, a glass blown over and smashed, the motionless doors and windows. One of us swings to and fro, the other sits on the bench waiting her turn. We’re both in heat from the scalp down, two abandoned sows. Two foxy little sluts with bright orange muzzles. Allergic. Secretly longing for a couple of guys in wide-brimmed hats to stride through the gate, ‘Can we come in?’ and then they rape us over the chairs, against the wooden seesaw, in the pergola, taking one of us from behind and the daughter face-to-face. Pushing her up against the bathroom sink they stick something inside mum, the blonde guy’s baseball bat. She doesn’t like it much but she pretends so I think she’s enjoying it. We look at each other and nothing matters. Possessing those dark, clashing eyes. They grab us by the armpits, spin us around and our long hair sweeps over the hay like a shadowy curtain. Is there any whisky left, daughter dear? It’s such a relief your childhood’s over, wonderful now everything’s so distant it’s almost like it never happened, the smell of wet eucalyptus from when you trapped your finger in the automatic door gone for good. The smell of hot tarpaulin, of rubber, of bicycle rental shops. The smell of sugared almonds, apples, pink candyfloss. I’ve been waiting for this moment since you were born. Did we or did we not go to the sandbanks when you turned six? Didn’t we balance on the jetty? Didn’t we lie along the shore, covered in sand like pieces of schnitzel, inches from the jellyfish? Is it true that when you heard a gunshot from our hotel room that day you thought it was me? Didn’t we spend a whole summer sleeping under the tourists’ beach canopies without them knowing, your little piles of poo like defensive walls? Those golden days, holding in my sour breath and taking you roller-skating, whole days spent helping you do headstands on the water’s edge, making you jump on the trampoline, scrubbing your knickers with my fists. Hiding on the cold sand as the sun set over the beach, vomiting up your childhood.

Whisky with my mother as the electric blue fades into the small hours and now, a long way from home, my hands are covered in excrement. I didn’t know my own smell, the layer of smell that forms on the body as the hours without water go by. My tongue gets distracted eating grass. Sucking on an animal’s hard udders, sucking on the fur, teeth galvanised, or imagining the death of your parents. It’s all the same. From the moment he entered my head, this saltwater hell. Zealous hammering on my veins. The trouble with my brain is I can’t hold it back, it rolls on and on through the spiky undergrowth like a bulldozer. Where am I. I don’t recognise these big houses. I’ve never rounded this bend in the road. Degenerate desire. Damaging desire. Demented desire. I don’t know how to get back. My mother will be blind drunk, sprawled on the sloping grass, her poor feet carved up by the blades. The clouds are tree trunks at this time of night, my hangover’s going nowhere and I throw myself down any old how to masturbate, my hair on end, my skin hot, my eyelids rigid. My hand works away then falls still as an insect, so that nothing is enough. Me and him in a convertible. Me and him on a muddy road. Bodies shouldn’t have breasts after a certain age; when my breasts turn to thick heavy flesh I’ll have them removed. The sex should stop opening, too. I look for a word to replace the word. I look for a word that shows my devotion. The word that marks the spot, the distance, the very centre of my delirium. We should be like tiny snakes till the end, and be buried that way, in long holes. I get up feeling anxious, my head thick with blood. I walk round the house and open the windows. The wind sweeps over the insect corpses trapped in the mosquito net. He keeps jars back there full of rusty water and all kinds of fossils. He looks like he’s never slept, always needing a wash, a new haircut, a pair of trousers with no piss stains. And after all, what is that scant pleasure we get from our fingers when we’re young. What is that scant golden liquid dripping, diluting, if afterwards, later on, when at last I find her holding the thick-bottomed glass, swirling the ice cube around and asking the waiter for the same again, my mum and I are sitting at the garden table with a pot of thin broth and two spoons. What is that leftover desire, that sunken desire, while we eat our soup and the steam hits us in the face and nothing, but nothing is left.

No more whisky ever again, I say. No more whisky ever again, she says. Ever again, huh. And we make crosses with our fingers and toast ourselves with water and throw the empty bottles in the incinerator. What did I say. I want to say there’s an aura of death. No. That death is all too present between my mother’s mouth and mine, and in the bottom of the sunken glass. And the hours can’t fix that. Starting a new day, like unplugging the refrigeration unit and plugging it back in once the storm’s died down and the power’s returned, and the rush to gobble up the food before it rots. But the maggot-infested cheese and the meat and entrails make us nauseous. Or mending, a whole week spent with a needle and thread, mending the holes in the mosquito nets on the window frames and painting the flower urns green. Or setting wire traps to stop the owls shitting everywhere, or throwing stones at their nests. The canary-yellow stickiness of the yolk between your pinkies. Or buying a turtle and forgetting to feed it and change the water. W...

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