Arcadia by Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam

Author:Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: queer lit;sexuality;dystopia;utopia;gender identity;intersex;queerness;queer;award winner;french translation;literature in translation;women in translation;french literature;coming of age;environmental book;environment;drama;novels;fiction;fiction books;lgbt;lgbt books;books fiction;lgbt fiction;lgbt novels;lgbtq;feminism;gender;feminist;romance;essays;psychology;literary fiction;writing;21st century;classic;love;philosophy;gender studies;poesia;french;short stories;poems;women authors
Published: 2021-01-28T18:55:48+00:00

20.

Free Instinctive Flow

War, peace, magic mountain, sense, sensibility, punishment, devil’s pool, and sea wall, my summer reading is progressing, but I still haven’t found anything that might dissipate my gender trouble. As for my grand sociological survey, I simply gave up on it after so many salvos of wretched and inapplicable answers. I’ve just settled into the shade to start The Voyage Out, when Epifanio comes to find me, more distraught and panting than ever. I notice in passing that he has nothing but a few scattered spots of brown left on his forehead by which to remember his original color: the rest of it is now Circassian white.

“Farah, I need you!”

The twins hurtle up behind him, with grumpy faces that do not bode well—they know all about their dad’s enthusiasms.

“Dolores and Teresa . . .”

“Yes?”

“They have their . . . their thing, you know, like, their business.”

No, I don’t know, and I wish he would make up his mind and use the right word instead of waffling on.

“Of course you do! You know what I mean! They . . . they got it!”

Dolores breaks the standoff with a whisper:

“We got our periods.”

Relieved, their father suddenly becomes dangerously garrulous:

“Yes, can you believe it? The same day! This morning, both of them, at the same time! Can you believe it? I’m completely bowled over, because, you know, I don’t know anything about it, and then, usually, it’s mothers that talk to their daughters about these things. Right? Am I right? But my daughters, poor things, don’t have a mother, and so here we are, I thought you could help. Just you girls together, right, you can talk about stuff. You can tell them, like, what to do, what happens, and all that, right? And then, what they should buy, you know, diapers, pads, what they should use when it happens, I mean, you know . . . because, like, I don’t want them to make a mess of their clothes. This morning, right, we didn’t have what we needed, but from now on, I want them to have what they need . . . and maybe they also need, I dunno, like, some medicine, you know, just in case . . .”

In fact, Dos and Tres do have a mother, except she took off shortly after they were born. Apparently two babies were just too much for her—and Epifanio was probably too much too. He attributes the onset of his vitiligo to the emotional shock of waking up one morning, alone, with two babies howling with hunger and their mother vanished with no explanation.

Embarrassed by their father’s logorrhea, the twins are avoiding eye contact with me: Dolores’s orange eyelashes drop onto her translucent cheeks, while Teresa pretends to be insatiably interested by her freshly polished nails. Epifanio, having finally shut up, is standing in front of me with crossed arms. He’s probably expecting me to remedy thirteen years of maternal deprivation just like that, thinking I’m richly endowed with the knowledge that Birdie has passed on to me, and fortified by my own experience of menstruation.

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