A Cup of Rage by Raduan Nassar Read Free Book Online Page A

saw how a stark despair took control of her, but without rushing I
said ‘I’m not wearing socks or shoes, as always my feet are clean and
moist’ and suddenly from her eyes I heard a crazed cry for help ‘loose all
your demons on me now, it’s only with them that I can come’, and listening
to this strangled moan I, the bastard, whispered ‘you remember the foot I once
gave you?’ and here she said ‘my love’ as if she were suffocating, and
I, the old man, reminded her ‘it was a foot as slim and white as a lily, remember?
…’ and slowly closing her eyes she said ‘my love my love’, and
I, the bastard, even asked ‘what did you do with the foot I once gave you?
…’ and now in agonies she sighed ‘my love my love my love’ and
that’s when I saw I really had my foot on her, and that – in my forge
– I could turn the supposed rigour of her logic upside down, because if I said
with a sigh ‘you see how many things I’ve taught you?’ she would have
to say ‘yes my love yes’ and if Ialso said ‘why
persist so much in trying to teach me?’ she would have to say ‘forget it my
love forget it’ and if I said to her ‘it’s day already, your common
sense stretched its limbs long ago, which path is it wandering down now?’ she
would have to say ‘no idea my love no idea’ and seeing the sacred and
obscene heat simmering in her flesh I would be able to say ‘be more careful in
your judgements, put some of this burning material into them too’ and she would
agree without hesitation ‘of course my love of course’ and remembering the
scorn which she had heaped on me I, still the bastard, could get the last word, saying
‘and who is your only man, the clay of your clay?’ and she as loyal as ever
would reply ‘you my love you’ and I’d even be able to put my tongue in
her earhole, until it reached the little uterus deep in her skull, and spitting my blood
in a well-aimed fiery gob, say ‘the one who uses reason incorporates his passions
into it’, imbuing the grey hydrangea hidden there with a deep red, sending that
anaemic flower mad for good, making a new species germinate with my thick sperm, a new
species that for all I cared could live or die, because in fact it was only to save a
few moments that, notwithstanding my huge turmoil, I was rioting, she got on my nerves
with her visits, getting in my way every day, but I didn’t say or do any of this,
and for a while I just continued to look at her numbed, crushed face beneath my feet,
examining without any mercy, almost as a doctor would, the by-product of my sorcery
(hadn’t I told her a hundred times that pious prostration and the erection of a
saint are mutually dependent?) as I listened to her anointed lips stripping in an
obsessive delirium ‘my dirty love my dirty love my dirty love’, and when I
felt her little hand trembling as it slid under my shirt, become a finch that has flown
from a nearby thicket to nest in my chest hairs, it was only then that I washed the
bastard from my face and in a flash pounced, she was a white sheet of fear as I roared
‘take it! take the other one too!’ and held out thefoot
like a soldier would ‘at least take the big toe and put it between your legs,
since it so tickled your clit’ I was shouting ‘go on, fucking bitch,
it’s the only thing I’m leaving you, cut off the big toe while you’ve
got the chance’ and I saw her dumbstruck face, the free and easy turtle, I’d
known how to make her feel the weight and torture of a shell again, I’d reduced
her reaction to an agony, I saw the terror in her eyes, it’s not enough to
sacrifice an animal, you need to send it off with the right ritual prayers too
‘snap out of it, not a bit of my body ever again, nothing! nothing! you’ll
go to the dogs too!’ I was also shouting, knowing that I was digging a deep pit in
her memory forever ‘nothing! nothing of my body ever again’
‘you’re not human’ she said coming out of her