True at First Light полностью

It was enjoyable to sit in the empty mess tent alone with my correspondence and imagine the emotionally mature brother grimacing perhaps in the kitchen over a snack from the Frigidaire, or seated in front of the TV set watching Mary Martin as Peter Pan and I thought how kind it was for this lady from Iowa to write me and how pleasant it would be to have her emotionally mature grimacing brother shaking his head here now at this moment.

You cannot have everything, writer old man, I said to myself philosophically. What you win on the swings you lose on the roundabouts. You simply have to give up this emotionally mature brother. Give him up, I tell you. You must go it alone, boy. So I gave him up and continued to read Our Lady of Iowa. In Spanish I thought of her as Nuestra Senora de los Apple Knockers and at the surge of such a splendid name I felt a rush of piety and Whitman-like warmth. But keep it directed toward her, I cautioned myself. Don’t let it lead you toward the grimacer.

It was exciting as well to read the tribute of the brilliant young columnist. It had that simple but instant catharsis that Edmund Wilson has called “The Shock of Recognition,” and recognizing the quality of this young columnist who indeed would have had a brilliant future on the East African Standard had he been born in the Empire and hence been able to secure a work permit I thought again, as one approaches the edge of a precipice, of the well-loved face of the grimacing brother of my correspondent but my feelings toward the grimacer had changed now and I was no longer attracted to him as I had been but, rather, saw him seated among the corn stalks, his hands uncontrollable in the night as he heard the growth of the stems of the mealies. In the Shamba we had mealies that grew as tall as corn grows in the Middle West. But nobody heard it grow in the night because the nights were cool and the corn grew in the afternoon and at night; even if it had grown at night, you could not have heard it for the talking of the hyenas and the jackals and the lions when they were hunting and the noise the leopards made.

I thought the hell with this stupid Iowa bitch writing letters to people she does not know about things she knows nothing about and I wished her the grace of a happy death as soon as possible, but I remembered her last sentence: “Why not write SOMETHING that is worthwhile, before you die?” and I thought, you ignorant Iowa bitch, I have already done this and I will do it again many times.