prompt #3
She usually visited me on a Sunday. Often we did talk about books.
I tried to guide her to Eliot and Auden. She would not be guided. She jumped aimlessly, like a click-beetle: Faulkner, Pinter, Camus, Dylan Thomas, Patrick White. New Zealand poetry. Dante. Chinese poetry. She woke in me a puritanism I had not known I possessed.
"I’m sampling,” she said.
To me it was more like an orgy.
~
She sighed, “I’m going to Spain one day. I’m going to learn Spanish.”
“There’s a town called Lorca. It’s hot and white and dusty.” I read her several of Lorca’s poems. Then she asked for flute music- something primitive.
While she listened she undid her plait and shook her hair loose. She combed it with her fingers. I reflected that I had broken the first rule of den living. I had allowed the spirit of an outsider into the room. It was haunted now, I could no longer curl up in it, foetus in womb.
- extracts from ‘In My Father’s Den’, by Maurice Gee
screencap from La Petite Lili