A Cup of Rage Read Free Page B

was perfectly well known
that his hours started at seven, not six), or to go upstairs to the kitchen, or even
whether she should stay to open the gate for the little miss, who in a provisional
rebuke had just grasped her door handle, and the best that Dona Mariana rummaged out of
her head, after much excited flapping about, was to stand a little to the side, wisely
hidden by the corner of the house and near to the stairs, but she didn’t climb
them or do anything else, and that was when she, still holding the handle, swallowing
the perfect kernel of my bait, and putting on, as befitted the situation, the air of
someone who discusses serious matters (she could act this role well), came on stage
again of her own accord, and said to me fairly calmly, ‘I don’t understand
how this change comes over you, suddenly you turn into a fascist’ and she said
this in a more or less serious tone, a straight objective commentary, only adding a
little more of a twist to the corners of her mouth, so that her expression ended up
sketching how repulsive the thing was, and that got me in the balls, and it wasn’t
my balls that deserved to get it, I was sure (in spite of everything), was sure that my
rage would be washed clean in its fount, ‘you perplex me’ she added in the
same serious tone, ‘perplex me!’, but I held steady, didn’t move for a
while except to pick up two or three logs from the ground, feeding dry wood to the fire
that I was just starting (I who was – methodically – mixing reason and
emotion into an extraordinary alchemical amalgam), after all she still hadn’t got
into her car, I knew her, she wasn’t the type to say something and then get in, on
the contrary she was one of those women who only needle you in the greedy expectation of
receiving a good beating, so much so that when she pricked me she already had her eye on
the satisfying wood for my fire, in any case she had really got to me, or was I rather,
an actor, only faking, to follow an example, the pain that I really felt, 1 I who this
time had gone right into myself and in the heathere inside knew what
changes I was capable of (I wasn’t a monolithic block, no one is of course, and
then there’s the fact that certain traits she attributed to my personality had
more to do with the situation), but I wasn’t going to mention this to her, yes, I
could take up her challenge and launch myself into a battle royal, comfortingly with
shared content, knowing that in spite of her impatience she wouldn’t scorn a good
preamble, I only had to pretend that I was falling into the trap, nibbling all the while
at the bait, sucking at the kernel of sweetcorn as if sucking the nipple of her breast,
while to pick a fight it was enough to hurl the classic words ‘you’re hardly
the one to teach me how to treat a maid’, remembering straight after that nothing
stops whoever’s stepping on someone else from protesting about the person stepping
on them, but that you always need to start by looking at your own paws, your body before
clothes, this heartfelt revelation that precedes communion, and, if I had wanted, I
could’ve found plenty of reasons to trip her up, not that I was so naïf I
demanded coherence, I didn’t expect that of her, I didn’t even boast of that
myself, only idiots and bastards proclaim that they serve a single lord, in the end we
are all beasts born of one and the same dirty womb, carriers of the most vile
contradictions, but if someone were to flaunt their morals, then right from the start
that person should admit to a complete lack of shame, the truth being that all these
quarrels among the hand-wringing children of the petite bourgeoisie really got my goat,
as they guilelessly vied for the most generously soft boots, even extracting from their
comparisons an air of liberal virtue, and how she loved this purgative, just as she
would purge herself by giving the middle class a good whipping, this class that is
almost always hated, perhaps for