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Sunday; he taught Sunday school. The more he robbed, the more money he had, the more he went to church; it is not an unheard-of linking. And the richer he became, the more fixed the mask of his face grew, so that now I no longer remember what he really looked like when I first knew him long ago, before I came to live with him. And so my mother and father then were a mystery to me: one through death, the other through the maze of living; one I had never seen, the other I saw constantly.
    The world I came to know was full of danger and treachery, but I did not become afraid, I did not become cautious. I was not indifferent to the danger my father’s wife posed to me, and I was not indifferent to the danger she thought my presence posed to her. So in my father’s house, which was her home, I tried to cloak myself in an atmosphere of apology. I did not in fact feel sorry for anything at all, I had not done anything, either deliberately or by accident, that warranted my begging for forgiveness, but my gait was a weapon—a way of deflecting her attention from me, of persuading her to think of me as someone who was pitiable, an ignorant child. I did not like her, I did not wish her dead, I only wanted her to leave me alone. I was very careful how far I carried this attitude of piousness, because I did not wish to draw the sympathy of anyone else, especially not my father, for I calculated she might become jealous of that. I had a version of this piety that I took with me to school. To my teachers I seemed quiet and studious; I was modest, which is to say, I did not seem to them to have any interest in the world of my body or anyone else’s body. This wearying demand was only one of many demands made on me simply because I was female. From the moment I stepped out of my bed in the early morning to the time I covered myself up again in the dark of night, I negotiated many treacherous acts of deception, but it was clear to me who I really was.
    I lay in my bed at night, and turned my ear to the sounds that were inside and outside the house, identifying each noise, separating the real from the unreal: whether the screeches that crisscrossed the night, leaving the blackness to fall to earth like so many ribbons, were the screeches of bats or someone who had taken the shape of a bat; whether the sound of wings beating in that space so empty of light was a bird or someone who had taken the shape of a bird. The sound of the gate being opened was my father coming home long after the stillness of sleep had overtaken most of his household, his footsteps stealthy but sure, coming into the yard, up the steps; his hand opening the door to his house, closing the door behind him, turning the bar that made the door secure, walking to another part of the house; he never ate meals when he returned home late at night. The sound of the sea then, at night, could be heard so clearly, sometimes as a soft swish, a lapping of waves against the shore of black stones, sometimes with the anger of water boiling in a cauldron resting unsteadily on a large fire. And sometimes when the night was completely still and completely black, I could hear, outside, the long sigh of someone on the way to eternity; and this, of all things, would disturb the troubled peace of all that was real: the dogs asleep under houses, the chickens in the trees, the trees themselves moving about, not in a way that suggested an uprooting, just a moving about, as if they wished they could run away. And if I listened again I could hear the sound of those who crawled on their bellies, the ones who carried poisonous lances, and those who carried a deadly poison in their saliva; I could hear the ones who were hunting, the ones who were hunted, the pitiful cry of the small ones who were about to be devoured, followed by the temporary satisfaction of the ones doing the devouring: all this I heard night after night, again and again. And it ended only after my hands had traveled up