Hot Milk

by Deborah Levy

I have always wanted to go to Trieste because it sounds like tristesse, which is a light-hearted word, even though in French it means sadness. In Spanish it is tristeza, which is heavier than French sadness, more of a groan than a whisper.

I do have work to do. I am studying Ingrid Bauer’s bow and arrow. It is magnifying in my mind until it becomes a weapon that can wound its prey. The bow is shaped like lips. The arrow’s tip is sharp. Why am I a monster to Ingrid? She thinks of me as some sort of creature. I am her creature. The tip of the arrow is aimed at my heart. I felt very light. Like an arrow in flight.

She was a farmer and grandmother running her own economy with her money bag pressed against her womb.

I had been stung into desire.

It was as if he had hijacked something she did and applied it to what he did. The executives he trains are his sacred buffalo. He helps them build a persona, a mask through which they can speak authentically on behalf of the brand. The face beneath the mask has to grow seamlessly into the mask. If this apparatus cracks they can call upon him to put it together again.

Ingrid and Juan. He is masculine and she is feminine but, like a deep perfume, the notes cut into each other and mingle.

My father suddenly spoke. ‘I unveiled my shame to our Lord, and he has shown himself to me in all his mercy.’ He was looking at his plate but I think he was speaking to me.

Women were for sex and birth, and for spinning and weaving and lamenting at funerals. It was the women and girls who did all the mourning for the loss of kin. Their voices were higher and had more effect as they wailed and tore at their clothes. The men stood further back while the women did the expressing for them. My problem is that I want to smoke the cigar and for someone else to light it. I want to blow out smoke. Like a volcano. Like a monster. I want to fume. I do not want to be the girl whose job it is to wail in a high-pitched voice at funerals. A snake. A star. A cigar. Those were some of the images and words that Ingrid told me surface in her mind when she embroiders.

Yes, some things are getting bigger, other things are getting smaller. Love is getting bigger and more dangerous. Technology is getting smaller, the human body is getting bigger, my low-rise jeans are cutting into my hips which are round and brown and toned from a month of swimming every day but I am still spilling over the waistband of these jeans not made for hips. I am overflowing like coffee leaking from a paper cup. I wonder, shall I make myself smaller? Do I have enough space on Earth to make myself less? The coil of black smoke had melted into the sky.

I was flesh thirst desire dust blood lips cracking feet blistered knees skinned hips bruised, but I was so happy not to be napping on a sofa under a blanket with an older man by my side and a baby on my lap.