In my Zulu language manual, it says that "the acquisition of a vocabulary is a primary and inescapable consideration in learning a language. Without words we are dumb." The magnitude of the second, simple five word sentence plagued me yesterday, and now today I learn the words for my father ubaba and my mother nnama, baba and mama… while eat and enjoy are the same word, dla. Chair is isihlalo, isifo is disease, umzimba the body, hleba to tell tales. The English/Zulu dictionary gives no word for skin, the largest organ of the body. People who suffer from eczema may have to be restrained from scratching off their perniciously itchy skin and some suffer a daily agony. It is impossible to feel another's agony the way the sufferer feels it, and nothing makes someone feel more alone than suffering, whether it is mental or physical, pain is unbearable but borne. I could have talked, this morning, to the woman with psoriasis, who needed attention, and given her the name of my dermatologist, and told her about treatments available that might soothe or temporarily remedy her skin, even if she and it were never cured. The young woman's psoriasis was in full bloom this morning, livid as the complexion of an ancient alcoholic, so that for her it appeared being in love assaulted her calm, the idea of love had attacked her peace of mind, as symptoms flourished on her cheeks, her elbows, and the backs of her hands. The tall balding man, it's rumored, has had many lovers, sometimes simultaneously, but when he is in love, Contesa generously explained, he is intense and engaged, so that the woman he directs himself toward in that moment feels she alone exists for him; and no matter that he has left many a woman brokenhearted, all of whom have felt the way the young woman might now, her hands blazing with discomfort, and reason demands that this will happen again, each woman thinks she will be the one to change him, as she does now.
I don't like tending a fire, since I'm easily distracted, I have many ideas, which are spread about the room and on the floor, and none I want to realize, but most I'd like to undo, if I could, like relationships and many experiences, and I don't like having to check on a fire to verify that it's burning well and not going out of control, the way the Polish woman tends to me and makes sure that, because my skin's sensitive, there's not too much heat coming from the chamomile concoction over which I lower my face, to absorb its cleansing and rejuvenating goodness, steaming open my pores, since too much heat is had for such sensitive skin as mine, she tells me. Sometimes she won't permit me to place my face above this potion but instead positions me under a heat lamp, which is supposedly kinder to skin like mine. Then she leaves the room. I can hear her making phone calls, writing notes or opening nail-polish bottles, because she also gives manicures, though I have never had one from her, because during a manicure, you sit face to face, and I don't want to see her face that long. She speaks in Polish to those she calls or who call her, though not to clients like myself who don't know the language, but especially to the owner who phones often; I don't understand what she's saying, I don't seriously imagine she is talking about me, yet it's not impossible, since there are many things we don't say to each other. We talk about the same things again and again when I visit, rarely diverging from these by now familiar subjects, and I have no way of knowing what she is saying in her native language, her mother tongue, but she returns to the room within twenty-five minutes, to lift my head from the benevolent vapors of the chamomile potion and dote on me like a baby.
I once tried to imagine, to the extent I could, because I had scant knowledge of it, having a baby and caring for it. I didn't give it a sex, I wanted to see if I would ever want one, or if I could care for one, because I don't want one, yet women are supposed to want one, and if you've had the fate to be born a female, about which I had no choice, you have no choice about the most important things in life, it's expected and encouraged that you should want a child, that it's unnatural not to want a child, and that in some way you're selfish to have life without bringing more life into it, offspring who will be dependent for years. Human beings care for their young longer and longer, prolonging their infancy and effecting a mature infantilism in them, who will probably disdain those who raised them for a good part of that dependency and also later, tied to them with a hatred that's also love. My mother and my (lead father live, in a significant way, with me, and lodge in an abstract section of me that I can't excise, mostly because I have no control over it, since I don't know where it's located or what its function is, unlike my relationship to other objects which I understand better and whose design, like a chair's, either pleases or displeases me, but unlike a chair I have no choice about its position.
When I first arrived, intent upon settling in, becoming as comfortable as I could, I spent several days finding a chair I could sit upon and look at, too, but there was only one, finally, that served, though I never really loved it, it was never comfortable enough, and it was certainly not beautiful to my eye, and also I had to get a cushion for it, so sitting on it was awkward, I had to keep adjusting the cushion. It was serviceable, so I accepted the chair and its limits, just as I learned not to hate my mother, to accept her more or less, or maybe even love her in the way an animal might, for warmth and comfort, which I never really received from her, she merely represents those qualities, but it doesn't matter anymore, since she's old, too old to fault, though my brother does, presumably, because he never contacts her, though our father is dead, my brother hated him more than he hated me, I think. My brother and father fought, I watched them, my mother took her husband's side, I was too young to know what the subject of their endless argument was. My brother hid, he slammed his door, locked it, I don't know what he was doing in his bedroom, he must have grown inward like a stubborn, short leg hair and become inflamed with pus, his furious objections never pierced and placated, and, as I record him now, his mouth is cast in a grimace. Scowling, he disappeared. I've known his kind of anger in others, I may seek it out, but I don't want to look for him.
An infant's tiny fingers and toes are terrifying, the least thing might damage them, and I don't want to look at photographs of their tiny toes and fingers, each toe is too little, the nails on their fingers like thin ice, and I hate to think of their nails being cut by scissors or clippers that are bigger than their feet and fingers. Their nails are dead skin, oddly, a newborn arrives with dead skin, hair, also, both shooting from delicate fingers or heads, the skulls of which are not yet closed at the crown, the crown covered by a membrane or slither of cells of alarming fragility. Their neurological systems are also not yet complete, so infants arrive unfinished and at risk. I once fell hard on the hack of my head, by jumping backward down the poured concrete stairs leading to the patio of the house I loved, because I was curious if I could jump backward down stairs, but I never mentioned my fall to anyone, though my head hurt for months, because the act embarrassed me, and, after it I was less curious about feats that might incur physical injury. I believe my crown has never entirely closed. Adam and Eve acquired a knowledge of death for their human curiosity, the pair weren't innocent of sex but of mortality. Einstein said both human stupidity and the universe were infinite, but he was less sure about the universe's infinitude, and, as the very first humans couldn't have known about death, it still existed outside their experience of the future, it must have been an eternal punishment to suffer its awareness, which distinguishes people from other animals, except maybe elephants. Over a hunk of raw meat, which they tore with their hands and teeth before the invention of tools and fire, one of the cavedwellers-bush people were the first humans-clutched his heart and fell to the floor, lifeless. Or, Eve's death came first, maybe during a painful childbirth, though some people die in their sleep, and then it's intoned, "They just went." Death lives, but only for others, as Duchamp said, it's an impossible idea, the gravest in life, and every day I stare at pictures of my dead friends with wonder at their perpetual absence. But creatively, I believe, which is my will to bring into existence something I have not grasped before, both literally and figuratively, since even in undoing, there is a making, at least for me, I forge them into my life, and, also, looking at them, inert, I rehearse my end. I'd like to be prepared for it. Though change confounds fate, there it is, even death is a change, but also hope persists because there is change, but about hope and its virulent partner disappointment I am querulous.