Chapter One
Looking at the sleeping child, I watch myself looking at
the sleeping child, placing the dyad in a cultural
context, classifying the feelings I am feeling even as I
feel them. This is partly the result of my training as an
anthropologist and ethnographer and partly a product of
wonder that I can still experience feelings other than
terror. It has been a while. I assess these feelings as
appropriate for female, white, American, Anglo-Saxon
ethnicity, Roman Catholic (lapsed), early-twenty-first c.,
socioeconomic status one, working below SES.
Socioeconomic status. Having these feelings. Motherhood.
Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless
arm, as Auden says. Maladie de l'anthropologie, Marcel
used to call it, a personalized version of Mannheim's
paradox: the ethnographer observes the informant, at the
same time observes herself observing the informant,
because she, the ethnographer, is part of a culture too.
Then at the same time observing herself observing herself
as a member of her culture observing the informant, since
the goal is complete scientific objectivity, stripping
away all cultural artifacts including the one
called "scientific objectivity," and then what do you
have? Meaning itself slips from your grasp like an eyelash
floating in a cup of tea. Hence the paradox. Geertz found
a theoretical solution as far as fieldwork goes, but in
the heart's core? Not so easy.
It is not all that interesting to watch a child sleep,
although people do it all the time. Parents do, and
perhaps also Mr. Auden, at least once. I am not, however,
this child's mother. I am this child's mother's murderess.
The child: female, ethnicity unknown, nationality unknown,
presumed American. SES probably five: rock bottom. Four
years of age, though she looks younger. In Africa there
were kids of eight who looked five, because of
malnutrition. Plenty of food around, but the kids didn't
get any. The old folks hogged all the high protein, as was
their right. A cultural difference, there. Her skin is the
palest red-brown, like bisque pottery. Her hair is black,
thick, and quite straight, but dry and friable. She is
still thin, her spine a string of staring knobs, her knees
bulging out beyond the bones they articulate. I think her
mother was starving her to death, although usually if
they're going to starve them they do it in infancy. The
bruises are gone now, but the scars remain, thin cross-
hatchings on the backs of her thighs and buttocks. I
expect that they were made by a wire coat hanger, an
example of what Levi-Strauss called bricolage: a cultural
artifact used in a new and creative way. I fear brain
damage, too, although so far there are no frank signs of
this. She has not spoken yet, but the other day I heard
her crooning to herself, in well-shaped notes. It was the
first two bars of "Maple Leaf Rag," which is what the
local ice-cream truck plays when it comes to the park. I
thought that was a good sign.
My own knees are rather like hers, for I am an anorexic.
My condition doesn't result from a neurotic defect in body
image, like those pathetic young girls exhibited on the
talk shows. I got sick in Africa and lost forty pounds and
subsequently I've eaten little, for I court invisibility.
This is a strategic error, I realize: to become really
invisible in America, a woman must become very fat. I
tried that for a while and failed; everything came up, and
I worried about scarring of the esophagus. So I starve,
and try to fatten the child.
In my longings, I wish to be mist, or the ripple of wind
on the water, or a bird. Not a gull, a class I feel has
been aesthetically overrated, no; but a little bird, a
sparrow of the type God watches fall, or a swallow, like
the kind we saw in Africa. We had a houseboat on the
Niger, above Bamako, in Mali. From its deck we would watch
them come from their nests on the soft banks and fill the
sky over the river in a pattern of flitting silhouettes in
the ocher dusk, and in their hundreds and dozens of
hundreds they would hunt the flying insects and dip to
drink sips from the oily brown surface. I would watch them
for their hour, and would pray that they contained the
souls of women dead in childbirth, as the Fang people are
said to believe.
She blows a tiny bubble in her sleep, so babyish an action
that my heart flows over with love and for an instant I am
rejoined to my true self, not watching from outside, like
an anthropologist, or a fugitive, which is another thing I
am, and after that instant the fear flows back again like
batter in a bowl from which a finger has been withdrawn.
Affection, attachment, weakness, destruction, not allowed,
not for me. Or remorse. I killed a human being. Did I mean
to? Hard to say, it went down so quickly. Hold a knife to
my throat and I'd tell the truth: the child was doomed
with her, she's better off with me, I'm glad the woman's
dead, God rest her soul, and I'll answer for it in heaven
along with all the other stuff. Worse stuff.
Naturally, the little girl doesn't resemble me in the
least, which is a problem, for people watch us and wonder
who did she fuck to get that one? No, actually, that's
unfair: most people don't see us at all, both of us are
good at fading into the foliage, going gray in the
shadows. We go out in the dusk, before the quick fall of
the tropical night, or, as on the weekend just passing,
very early. Tomorrow I will have to find a place to put
her while I work. I have only a little sick time left and
I need the money. She has been with me ten days. Her name
is Luz ...
© 2003-2026