THE SPECTACLE

Perhaps because I was so lonely and confused, and yet yearned to play a brilliant role, I started all alone to provide myself with scenarios that differed radically from my everyday life. I created and performed a series of endless songs and staged them all across the fields. The words were corny and always impassioned, and I would perform them in those lonely fields as if they were theater pieces. The acting consisted of jumps, yells, chest beating, kicking up stones, shrieks, races through the trees, imprecations; sticks and dead leaves thrown together into the air. And all the while, I was singing those endless songs that would drive away anyone who might hear them. Once I made such a commotion that my own mother and my grandmother, who were weeding a cornfield, ran away in fear, not knowing where those ghostly howls were coming from.

Of course, I never wrote down the words of those songs. At the time, I hardly knew how to write. Instead, those operatic songs (or whatever they were) came to me spontaneously as I enacted them in the fields. The words, the music, and my voice were probably horrendous, but after performing one of those outrageous “cantatas,” I had a feeling of peace and could go back home. I was more in harmony with my world and would go to sleep early, next to my mother, in the smallest room of that ramshackle house.

The house had five rooms. My grandparents’ bedroom was furnished with two huge iron beds and an immense wardrobe that reached up to the ceiling. Some of my abandoned aunts and various cousins slept in another room. A third room was shared by an uncle, who had had several women but finally was left alone, and my great-grandmother. A fourth room had belonged to my great-uncle, a bachelor who ended up hanging himself with a liana. My mother and I slept in that little room, next to the passageway. On the other side of the passageway, close to the palm-frond wall, slept the pigs, who would grunt all night. Sometimes when I got full of chiggers and could not sleep, I spent the night scratching my feet against the wire bedspring.