35th Thread: I feel no more

In the city, she had lived from men. She knew how to read, dance, sing. She taught me, but I forgot. What use would these refinements serve here? In the countryside, it is not a good trade, men prefer not to pay. That’s why we work in the fields, that’s why, all hunched up, we hoe this ravine under the ravenous sun.

When I was a child, my mother played with me, she would chase me until she caught me, smothering me with kisses and tickles. Delighted, I would laugh, I would return her caresses a thousand times. Sometimes she laughed at my awkwardness and I would get mad. Joy, tenderness, anger, like the trinkets in our living room, belonged to the city life. I do not know these feelings anymore, I do not feel anything. My childhood seems a fantasy that I have dreamed just to make reality all the harder. I work to eat and I take care of you, because that’s what mothers do. Look at the cows, they take care of their calves, ewes of their lambs, and even evil ravens feed their chicks before they get nailed on a door. You will do the same, for the life of idleness and pleasure that filled the big city was but a passing mirage.
We are born, we mate, babies come out one after the other, we grow old and die. And we work the soil from morning to evening, sometimes into the night, until the end, when our body is lowered into a hole.
The priest upsets me when he says that it will be different one day, that the earth will burn and death will no longer exist and that we shall return to a life without suffering. I prefer not to think about it.