51st Thread: The Hunchback

Everyone thought he would be crippled like her, but he came out big and healthy, a boy who cried loudly, who wanted to nurse all the time. I was born first, before my brother. My aunt who had never given birth did not say anything because I was a small girl, and not very strong at that. But a handsome boy, that was too much. She beat my mother all the more. She screamed, screamed at my uncle: “How could you?!” The three of us slept on a straw mat next to the kitchen. Sometimes Uncle came at night. He laid with my mother and grunted. My aunt waited for my brother to walk and eat bread, then she threw my mother out. I worried they would send me away too. My aunt kept us both, my brother and me. She wanted him as a son, and I would be the maid. We had to call her Mother, but Uncle stayed Uncle.

I saw her sometimes, making baskets on the shore, or breaking open pine cones. I don’t know where she slept. The children of the village shouted at her, filthy hunchback, nasty hunchback. They threw stones at her. I followed them. She protected her head with her arms and fled on her short twisted legs. But under the cover of her hands, her eyes looked for mine. I threw stones too. The monastery took her in for a while. She did their cleaning and weaved their baskets, until she was pregnant again and got thrown out. What happened next, I don’t know. Perhaps she died from lack of everything. I grew up without a mother, with nobody to love me. My aunt pampered my brother, she pretended that he had really come out of her body. Whereas my aunt treated me like a slave, my uncle did not seem to see me at all. Then, one day he said: “Pack your things, you’re leaving”. He took me to his younger brother and married us there and then, without any ceremony. His brother had wanted to marry a stranger, when our family had always lived here in the village. She did not even come from a family of fishermen, but from vagabonds who refuse to work. Your father accepted me, because he could not refuse my uncle, but he would have preferred the other woman with her dark skin and her large mouth that laughed so much. No one has ever loved me, no one will. Yet I have never caught the disease. I am not distorted and I turn out fat, strong babies that the whole village envies. You will too.