The Autobiography of My Mother Read Online Free PDF

from me; but she did not stop wishing me dead.
    The school I attended was five miles away in the next village, and I walked to it with some other children, most of them boys. We had to cross a river, but in the dry season that meant stepping on the stones in the riverbed. When it rained and the water had risen very high, we would remove our clothes and tie them in a bundle, placing them on our heads, and cross the river naked. One day when the river was very high and we were crossing naked, we saw a woman in the part of the river where the mouth met the sea. It was deep there and we could not tell if she was sitting or standing, but we knew she was naked. She was a beautiful woman, more beautiful than any woman we had ever seen, beautiful in a way that made sense to us, not a European way: she was dark brown in skin, her hair was black and shiny and twisted into small coils all around her head. Her face was like a moon, a soft, brown, glistening moon. She opened her mouth and a strange yet sweet sound came out. It was mesmerizing; we stood and stared at her. She was surrounded by fruit, mangoes—it was the season for them—and they were all ripe, and those shades of red, pink, and yellow were tantalizing and mouth-watering. She beckoned to us to come to her. Someone said it was not a woman at all, that we should not go, that we should run away. We could not move away. And then this boy, whose face I can remember because it was the male mask of heedlessness and boastfulness that I have come to know, started forward and forward, and he laughed as he went forward. When he seemed to get to the place where she was, she moved farther away, yet she was always in the same place; he swam toward her and the fruit, and each time he was almost near, she became farther away. He swam in this way until he began to sink from exhaustion; we could see only the top of his head, we could see only his hands; then we could see nothing at all, only a set of expanding circles where he used to be, as if a pebble had been thrown there. And then the woman with her fruit vanished, too, as if she had not been there, as if the whole thing had never happened.
    The boy disappeared; he was never seen again, not dead even, and when the water got low in that place, we would go and look, but he wasn’t there. It was as if it had never happened, and the way we talked about it was as if we had imagined it, because we never spoke about it out loud, we only accepted that it had happened, and it came to exist only in our minds, an act of faith, like the Virgin Birth for some people, or other such miracles; and it had the same power of belief and disbelief, only unlike the Virgin Birth we had seen this ourselves. I saw it happen. I saw a boy in whose company I would walk to school swim out naked to meet a woman who was also naked and surrounded by ripe fruit and disappear in the muddy waters where the river met the sea. He disappeared there and was never seen again. That woman was not a woman; she was a something that took the shape of a woman. It was almost as if the reality of this terror was so overwhelming that it became a myth, as if it had happened a very long time ago and to other people, not us. I know of friends who witnessed this event with me and, forgetting that I was present, would tell it to me in a certain way, daring me to believe them; but it is only because they do not themselves believe what they are saying; they no longer believe what they saw with their own eyes, or in their own reality. This is no longer without an explanation to me. Everything about us is held in doubt and we the defeated define all that is unreal, all that is not human, all that is without love, all that is without mercy. Our experience cannot be interpreted by us; we do not know the truth of it. Our God was not the correct one, our understanding of heaven and hell was not a respectable one. Belief in that apparition of a naked woman with outstretched arms beckoning