Ariana Harwicz is an intensely passionate and fearless writer whose irresistible prose deserves to be read far and wide.
Claire-Louise Bennett, author of POND
Reading Ariana Harwicz is a raw, unforgiving, deeply unsettling experience. Her ferocious yet surgically precise sentences cut to the deepest strata of the subconscious (…). Ariana Harwicz is the real deal, the very definition of an artist.
Adam Biles, author of FEEDING TIME
The acoustic quality of her prose, the pulse of her voice, the intensity of her imagery make her subjects so daring, so relentless, so damned and unconventional – very hard to drop or ever to forget.
Lina Meruane, author of SEEING RED
The prose of Ariana Harwicz embarks on a vertiginous linguistic journey that joyfully shreds all vestiges of common sense.
María Sonia Cristoff, author of FALSE CALM
Harwicz achieves an asphyxiating writing, saturated with images of great beauty despite their disturbing character.
Isaac Rosa, El País (Spain)
We are used to female narrators who occupy one of several familiar niches (…). Harwicz takes us somewhere more profound and forces us to confront the thought that these easy fictional ‘explanations’ are specious. Lurking inside all of us is the potential for horror.
Hari Kunzru
Ariana Harwicz
Feebleminded
Translated by
Annie McDermott and Carolina Orloff
I
I come from nowhere. The world is a cave, a stone heart
crushing you, a horizontal vertigo. The world is a moon slashed by black whips, by arrows and gunfire. How far must I dig before striking disdain, before my days burn. I could have been born with white eyes like this forest of stark pines, and yet I’m woken by volcanic ash on the garden clover. And yet my mother’s pulling out clumps of hair and throwing them on the fire. The day begins, I’m a baby and my mother’s in her armchair with her back to me, crying. I wake up as a girl. Outside, the lavender; inside, mother, her black hair in the embers. Cuttings of cloud everywhere, low and pasty, high and fleeting, dark and nondescript. Sitting on my clit I invent a life for myself in the clouds. I quiver, I shake, my fingers are my morphine and for that brief moment everything’s fine. My hand inside is a thousand times his face inside me. How hard can you possess a face, how hard can you shove a face into your sex. For that moment, the grass is grass and I can run through the meadows. Of all the ways of being, I ended up with this one. I recognise nobody, and when I’m really desperate I live anywhere. My mother’s stopped crying. I can already walk on my own, I can already speak, we already share clothes. I want him to come back against all odds, against all grief. I want his eyes to unearth me until I see the treetops. My head takes a turn. My head is in freefall, entrenched. Suddenly I have the voice of a dead woman. My face swollen like an addict in the bath, the epic body of a woman about to leap into the void. Suddenly I realise it’s midday. The blue eyes of the hares shine cold and I go outside to eat, but it’s already over. I begin to pray, or is it that I’m in love. I ask him to spit on me, to crush my face with a slap. I stare at him. I’m not crazy, just possessed, the answer’s always the same. Mum, I’m bored. My brain is moths in a jar, hanging themselves.
My mum and the guy grab each other by the neck and rub against the slippery concrete floor. The guy comes inside my mum looking skyward and so it all begins. Let’s put a microscope to my shapeless body on this afternoon thick with slow flies. People could hang it in the living room like an abstract painting. This is when the hot trees appear with their clammy leaves, and I hide from her. I hear her cry out. I’m tramping around on the hill, but where am I going. For now there’s just the noise of the wind at the top and snatches of song. For now the mysticism lasts and there are ants on my arm. If you like living in a dream so much why don’t you stay there, she grumbles, and shuts herself away. Without her, everything is smoke. This feverish childhood memory in a burnt-out car always comes back to me. My mother staring straight ahead, my mother on the back of my neck like a hard-shelled insect. My mother’s gaze while she smokes on the train’s torn fake-leather seat. Me, wide awake in the locked car, unable to speak, the neighbours calling the police. I move around tamely, where is he now. I crouch to kiss the ground. How is this possible: a relentless, niggling desire, the idiot cousin who comes to interrupt our al-fresco breakfasts of cream croissants and ends up throwing himself off the balcony. The idiot cousin who touches his nose and says nose. This epileptic desire, this deformed desire, a drooling lustful crip who needs two people to lift him and carry him like a cart so he can fuck on the soft mattress. And yet he’s got nothing else to do but fuck me, but want me from his chair. And yet the clear viscous halo on the mattress is proof that I’m alive. I get my finger ready but I overthink and faint. The thought of desire on top of desire itself leaves me unhinged, a parasite with eye bags down to my neck. Where are you, Mum, I’m sick of this. I’ve been on my feet working for the past nine hours, the staff need a break, you know. My mum, warm, very warm, hot and now she’s burnt. If she saw me like this she’d get a fright, the hatred I give off is something else. If you want to live in your dreams, suit yourself. She pokes her head out of her mousehole to insult me.
Why are we so gormless at the display counters, not knowing what to eat? Why do we use shop-bought parsley and basil when they grow in the garden anyway? And we laugh. Death a tempting option when she drops the jars of herbs and spices and we have to pick them up one by one like pieces of a skeleton, dry garlic sticking to our fingers. Lying on the sand, on the short grass, the dry soil. No more fighting my mother’s arms. I try to concentrate on the taste of courgettes. They’re raw, I say. Barely sautéed, she replies, just a touch of olive oil. Look at the grass, the way it’s growing in patches, how strange. There are dry bits, as if only they caught the sun, and then sunken bits like marshes. A mystery, my dear, not worth worrying about. Eat up. Looks like the hens are hungry, they screech and screech. We eat. The hand goes back and forth from the mouth. Where’s my phone, mum. It’s not here. We said we’d do it and we’re doing it really well, both of us, add a little salt. I don’t ask about the thick-bottomed glasses either. Mum. He could have phoned. Concentrate. Stare at a point in space and eat up. Good idea to buy this rectangular table, wasn’t it? Not too expensive, and it came with the chairs. Maybe we could do with a parasol, a sun lounger even. Yellow or stripy? It’d be nice to add a bit of colour. They say colour brings life. What crap. How about polka-dots? I’m staring at a point in space. So? Nothing exists. He’s getting further away and it feels like a knife thrust in my gut. These images you fixate on are like junk food. Why don’t you think about the wide-eyed, cheerful little girl you were before you met him, when you used to build hospitals for dying ants? Please don’t ruin this meal. He’s made you so ungrateful, you rude little hussy. I’ve never been cheerful. I cook from scratch instead of reheating stuff and not a word of thanks.
We clear the table surrounded by crickets. Lucky for me there’s no child around, one less plate, no congealed remains, no voice cutting through mine. Nothing happening when I tear off my head with a single yank. A whiteness expands, a fog swallowing us up. It comes from back there and engulfs us, sweeping us over the plains. Chuckling, my mum remembers when my little body slipped from her hands and she was left clutching the purple cord. Everything comes back to that, to tiny knives under the water, to eels. The two of us doing the dishes with cheap washing-up liquid and gloves. The two of us putting the cutlery away in the drawers with compartments, forks with the forks, we sing, spoons with the spoons, and we do a little dance like a tarantella. The two of us go outside to drink a bottle of pastis. There’s nothing. The slightest thing can bring us down: a bumblebee sting on the elbow, a glass blown over and smashed, the motionless doors and windows. One of us swings to and fro, the other sits on the bench waiting her turn. We’re both in heat from the scalp down, two abandoned sows. Two foxy little sluts with bright orange muzzles. Allergic. Secretly longing for a couple of guys in wide-brimmed hats to stride through the gate, ‘Can we come in?’ and then