light. She came back, mounted my body and began to drown me in feverish kisses. I was used to her unexpected reversals of mood, for which I could rarely find any reasonable explanation. Her behavior was exactly the same way, contradictory and open to various interpretations. One moment, she would be weak and resigned, and within seconds, she would suddenly have regained her despotic ways and her sharpness. Sometimes when she appeared she was as sensitive and delicate as a fine summer morning, and other times she would shatter me to the bones like a hurricane coming through. From the beginning I believed utterly that she exceeded my powers of comprehension. She was simply too cryptic for me to fully understand. So I stopped working my mind so hard to solve the riddle. That way, Dai was more beautiful. She was a secret I would never divulge because I would never really know what was at the heart of it.
No sooner was I engulfed in Dai’s body than a knock came suddenly on the door, doubling my heart rate instantly as various thoughts raced through my brain, colliding head-on. Fear ran a marathon race through my veins. I shot upward in less than a second. Doing up the buttons on my shirt required two tries, both unsuccessful, and then a third, with Dai’s hand, as she got up calmly to put on her clothes, without any haste, and without a single change of expression on her face.
I opened the door to see our maid standing there. I let go with my rude tongue as I jabbed my finger toward a sign slashed red to signal NO ENTRANCE. It hung on my door and meant that I did not want anyone to bother me, no matter what the issue, no matter how serious it was, because I was asleep or I was taking a bath or I had gone to hell. All that mattered was that no one knock at my door! For her part, Edna faltered and stuttered as she tried explaining something to me that had to do with the telephone and Hiba. I know Hiba. If something has gotten lodged in her head, she will not retreat even momentarily for any reason at all. She must have called and refused to hang up, letting the phone ring and ring, and then nothing would satisfy her but insisting that Edna knock on my door. I thanked the maid apologetically and turned back into my room, making sure that the door was once again closed and locked.
Hugely sarcastic grimaces had swept over Dai’s face. She did not comment; she did not ask, even. Her face alone was expressive enough to fill an entire dictionary of sick jokes and giggles. She stared at me as she would at a clown who has not done a good job of putting on his face, maybe forgetting his red nose in the dressing room, and then when everyone laughs at him—because he is so funny, he assumes—they are actually laughing at him for being so stupid.
Dai treated me as if I were a child of five who did not understand anything yet. When I kissed her, she would slouch into a short and derisive laugh before receiving the kiss from me with a slightly intimate familiarity as if she were a dear and highly respected friend. It was not long before she enrolled me in school. She dictated and made me write out the domestic chores associated with five or six girls’ school curriculum options, and she prescribed punishments arising from every mistake I made, no matter how tiny. At the year’s end, she gave me my diploma signed off with her professorial moniker. My diploma was a sentence she wrote in black ink onto my body: You are a possession of mine and of mine alone. She said it would be hard for me to understand the full import of this signature if I did not have any immediate feelings toward it. And in truth, at the time two contradictory emotions were sweeping over me: one feeling urged me to hurl my body away from all of this and outside of Dai, and the other craved her power over this body of mine.
I called Hiba because the little demons jumping around inside of her would never quiet down if I did not call her as quickly as I possibly could.
No sooner was I engulfed in Dai’s body than a knock came suddenly on the door, doubling my heart rate instantly as various thoughts raced through my brain, colliding head-on. Fear ran a marathon race through my veins. I shot upward in less than a second. Doing up the buttons on my shirt required two tries, both unsuccessful, and then a third, with Dai’s hand, as she got up calmly to put on her clothes, without any haste, and without a single change of expression on her face.
I opened the door to see our maid standing there. I let go with my rude tongue as I jabbed my finger toward a sign slashed red to signal NO ENTRANCE. It hung on my door and meant that I did not want anyone to bother me, no matter what the issue, no matter how serious it was, because I was asleep or I was taking a bath or I had gone to hell. All that mattered was that no one knock at my door! For her part, Edna faltered and stuttered as she tried explaining something to me that had to do with the telephone and Hiba. I know Hiba. If something has gotten lodged in her head, she will not retreat even momentarily for any reason at all. She must have called and refused to hang up, letting the phone ring and ring, and then nothing would satisfy her but insisting that Edna knock on my door. I thanked the maid apologetically and turned back into my room, making sure that the door was once again closed and locked.
Hugely sarcastic grimaces had swept over Dai’s face. She did not comment; she did not ask, even. Her face alone was expressive enough to fill an entire dictionary of sick jokes and giggles. She stared at me as she would at a clown who has not done a good job of putting on his face, maybe forgetting his red nose in the dressing room, and then when everyone laughs at him—because he is so funny, he assumes—they are actually laughing at him for being so stupid.
Dai treated me as if I were a child of five who did not understand anything yet. When I kissed her, she would slouch into a short and derisive laugh before receiving the kiss from me with a slightly intimate familiarity as if she were a dear and highly respected friend. It was not long before she enrolled me in school. She dictated and made me write out the domestic chores associated with five or six girls’ school curriculum options, and she prescribed punishments arising from every mistake I made, no matter how tiny. At the year’s end, she gave me my diploma signed off with her professorial moniker. My diploma was a sentence she wrote in black ink onto my body: You are a possession of mine and of mine alone. She said it would be hard for me to understand the full import of this signature if I did not have any immediate feelings toward it. And in truth, at the time two contradictory emotions were sweeping over me: one feeling urged me to hurl my body away from all of this and outside of Dai, and the other craved her power over this body of mine.
I called Hiba because the little demons jumping around inside of her would never quiet down if I did not call her as quickly as I possibly could.
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