More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Like the old car that had picked Noemí up, the town clung to the dregs of splendor.
Vice, Noemí thought and was reminded of the nuns who had overseen her education. She’d learned rebellion while muttering the rosary.
She had experience dealing with irritating men. They did not fluster her. She had learned, by navigating cocktail parties and meals at restaurants, that showing any kind of reaction to their crude remarks emboldened them.
The Kublai Khan sent messengers across his realm who carried a stone with his seal, and whoever mistreated a messenger would be put to death.
The name Doyle was carved in capital letters above this doorway along with a phrase in Latin: Et Verbum caro factum est.
Noemí’s father said she cared too much about her looks and parties to take school seriously, as if a woman could not do two things at once.
“The walls speak to me. They tell me secrets. Don’t listen to them, press your hands against your ears, Noemí. There are ghosts. They’re real. You’ll see them eventually.”
A woman who is not liked is a bitch, and a bitch can hardly do anything: all avenues are closed to her.
“Then you won’t help me. You’re afraid of them! Oh, and here I am without a friend in the world,” she said, clutching her purse and standing up slowly, her lip quivering dramatically. Men always panicked when she did that, afraid she’d cry. Men were always so afraid of tears, of having a hysterical woman on their hands.
She felt it necessary to be positive, to hope, for High Place was a place of hopelessness. Its shabby grimness made her want to push forward.
Yet the thought of anyone more substantial made her nervous, for she was trapped between competing desires, a desire for a more meaningful connection and the desire to never change. She wished for eternal youth and endless merriment.
“I told you, the nuns would have loved you.” “I’m sure they liked you.” “No. Everyone says they like me well enough, but that’s because they have to. No one is going to declare they hate Noemí Taboada. It would be crass to state such a thing while you’re nibbling at a canapé. You have to whisper it in the foyer.”
In a sense all dreams foretell events, but some more clearly than others.
Noemí was struck with the desire to lean forward and kiss him, a feeling like wishing to light a match, a burning, bright, and eager feeling. Yet she hesitated. It was easy to kiss someone when it didn’t matter; it was more difficult when it might be meaningful.
“Where will you find a priest?” “My father can officiate; he’s done so before.” “So I’ll be wed in the Church of the Holy Incestuous Mushroom?” she intoned. “I doubt that’s valid.”
He smiled, and the smile, like his voice, was genuine. Everything in High Place was gnarled and begrimed, but he’d been able to grow bright and mindful, like an odd plant that is carried onto the wrong flower bed.
This house had been built atop bones. And no one had noticed such an atrocity, rows and rows of people streaming into the house, into the mine, and never leaving. Never to be mourned, never to be found. The serpent does not devour its tail, it devours everything around it, voracious, its appetite never quenched.
Please, are you hurt?” She chuckled. A ghastly chuckle, since she had fended off a rapist and escaped being choked to death.
The world might indeed be a cursed circle; the snake swallowed its tail and there could be no end, only an eternal ruination and endless devouring.
The future, she thought, could not be predicted, and the shape of things could not be divined. To think otherwise was absurd. But they were young that morning, and they could cling to hope. Hope that the world could be remade, kinder and sweeter.
