The Autobiography of My Mother Read Online Free PDF Page A

voluptuous blackness that was the night; a morning naturally followed. I awoke in the false paradise into which I was born, the false paradise in which I will die, the same landscape that I had always known, each aspect of it beyond reproach, at once beautiful, ugly, humble, and proud; full of life, full of death, able to sustain the one, inevitably to claim the other.
    My father’s wife showed me how to wash myself. It was not done with kindness. My human form and odor were an opportunity to heap scorn on me. I responded in a fashion by now characteristic of me: whatever I was told to hate I loved and loved the most. I loved the smell of the thin dirt behind my ears, the smell of my unwashed mouth, the smell that came from between my legs, the smell in the pit of my arm, the smell of my unwashed feet. Whatever about me caused offense, whatever was native to me, whatever I could not help and was not a moral failing—those things about me I loved with the fervor of the devoted. Her hands as they touched me were cold and caused me pain. We would never love each other. In her was a despair rooted in a desire long thwarted: she had not yet been able to bear my father a child. She was afraid of me; she was afraid that because of me my father would think of my mother more often than he thought of her. On that first morning she gave me some food and it was old, moldy, as if she had saved it specially for me in order to make me sick. I did not eat what she gave me after that; I learned then how to prepare my own food and made this a trait by which others would know me: I was a girl who prepared her own food.
    Parts of my life, incidents in my life then, seem, when I remember them now, as if they were happening in a very small, dark place, a place the size of a dollhouse, and the dollhouse is at the bottom of a hole, and I am way up at the top of the hole, peering down into this little house, trying to make out exactly what it is that happened down there. And sometimes when I look down at this scene, certain things are not in the same place they were in the last time I looked: different things are in the shadows at different times, different things are in the light.
    *   *   *
    My father’s wife wished me dead, at first in a way that would have allowed her to make a lavish display of sorrow over my death: an accident, God’s desire. And then when no accident occurred and God did not seem to care one way or the other whether I lived or died, she tried to accomplish this herself. She made me a present of a necklace fashioned from dried berries and polished wood and stone and shells from the sea. It was most beautiful, too beautiful for a child, but a child, a real child, would have been dazzled by it, would have been seduced by it, would have immediately placed it around her neck. I was not a real child. I thanked and thanked her. I thanked her again. I did not take it into my small room. I did not want to hold on to it for very long. I had made a small place in the everlastingly thick grove of trees at the back of the house. She did not know of it yet; when eventually she discovered it, she sent something that I could not see to live there and it drove me away. It was in this secret place that I left the necklace until I could decide what to do with it. She would look at my neck and notice that I was not wearing it, but she never mentioned it again. Not once. She never urged me to wear it at all. She had a dog that she took to ground with her; this dog was a gift from my father, it was to protect her from real human harm, a harm that could be seen, it was meant to make her feel a kind of safety. One day I placed the necklace around the dog’s neck, hiding it in the hair there; within twenty-four hours he went mad and died. If she found the necklace around his neck she never mentioned it to me. She became pregnant then and bore the first of her two children, and this took her close attention away