The Other Side of the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

despoiled and ravaged? Do you take pleasure in seeing men, women, and children exploited and driven to early graves in order to provide lubricants for our machines, and poisons for our food and arteries? Do you take
pride in your portion of responsibility for the deadly conditions that prevail in the enchanted world you’ve been inhabiting?”
    â€œOf course not,” I said, and resisted the urge to start talking about just what I did feel about Borneo and palm oil. “It’s complicated,” I said. “If you’d been there you’d understand that it’s very complicated…”
    â€œWhat isn’t?” Seana said. “Nevertheless, our conversation has served to put me in mind once again of George Sand, a woman rarely far from my thoughts, and in particular—the obvious inspiration for the accusatory grilling I’ve just subjected you to—of her dying words: Ne détruisez pas la verdure .”
    â€œDo not destroy the greenery,” my father said.
    â€œI don’t need a translator,” Seana snapped. “And ‘greenery’ stinks—doesn’t begin to capture what she meant.”
    â€œWhen Seana was considering continuing on for a doctorate,” my father explained, “she talked of writing her dissertation on George Sand.”
    â€œOn Sand and Eliot,” Seana said, correcting him. “The two great Georges. Gorgeous Georges? Curious Georges? Our own Ms. Oates notwithstanding, George Sand, you will recall—Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, and for greater part of her adult life, the Baroness Dudevant—was the most prolific female author in history. Nobody reads her anymore, though I would point out that Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, a man of exceptional erudition and discernment—like you, Professor Max—admired her enormously.”
    â€œAs did many men,” my father said.
    â€œTruly and duly noted,” Seana said, her voice slurred. “Pagello above all.” Seana turned to me. “Pagello was an Italian doctor—a country doctor, but not out of Kafka, and he fell in love with Sand, and she transported him with her across Italy and lived with him in Paris, and then she ditched him, and he returned to Venice, where he married and fathered children. He died at
the age of ninety-one, nearly sixty years later. Your father once considered writing a novel about him.”
    â€œThat’s true,” Max said.
    â€œActually, I know who you’re talking about,” I said. “I saw a movie about him where he gets to shag Juliet Binoche. A piss-poor movie, if you ask me.”
    â€œA novel manqué ? my father asked.
    â€œ Mutilé would be more like it,” Seana said. “And as for you, Max—didn’t I hear you say it was past your bedtime?”
    Seana stood, steadied herself by leaning on the table, said that it was true that she and I had things to talk about, and that, to prepare herself, she would now proceed to brew a cup of coal-black coffee.
    She swayed a bit as she made her way to the kitchen, stopping at my chair, where she touched my shoulder briefly, even as my father said again what a joy it was to have me home. He wished us both pleasant dreams, and headed upstairs.
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    The list Seana gave me—titles with brief one-sentence explanatory tags attached to them, like log-lines you see in television listings for movies—was in her handwriting, which was exquisitely graceful, a skill of small value, she asserted, and one shared by most girls who’d survived a childhood of Catholic schools. My father’s full list—titles with and without the tags—was extensive, she said. Amazing, actually—page after page of titles and snippets in search of authors and stories—so that what she’d done was to choose a baker’s dozen that on a first reading seemed the most obviously promising, and, more to the point, ones that