第四章
For me the whole town is inhabited by the beggar woman in the road.
And all the beggar women of the towns, the rice fields, the tracks bordering Siam, the banks of the Mekong~for me the beggar woman who frightened me is inhabited by them.
She comes from everywhere.
She always ends up in Calcutta wherever she started out from.
She's always slept in the shade of the cinnamon-apple trees in the playground.
And always my mother has been there beside her, tending her foot eaten up with maggots and covered with flies.
Beside her, the little girl in the story.
She's carried her two thousand kilometers.
She's had enough of her, wants to give her away.
Go on,take her.
No more children.
No more child.
All dead or thrown away, it amounts to a lot after a whole life.
The one asleep under the cinnamon-apple trees isn't yet dead.
She's the one who'll live longest.
She'l die inside the house, in a lace dress.
She'll be mourned.
She's on the banks of the rice fields on either side of the track, shouting and laughing at the top of her voice.
She has a golden laugh, fit to wake the dead, to wake anyone who listens to children's laughter.
She stays outside the bungalow for days and days, there are white people in the bungalow, she remembers they give food to beggars.
And then one day,lo and behold, she wakes at daybreak and starts to walk,one day she goes, who can tell why, she turns off toward the mountains, goes up through the forest, follows the paths running along the tops of the mountains of Siam.
Having seen, perhaps, seen a yellow and green sky on the other side of the plain, she crosses over.
At last begins to descend to the sea.
With her great gaunt step she descends the slopes of the forest.On, on.
They are forests full of pestilence.
Regions of great heat.
There's no healthy wind from the sea.
There's the stagnant din of mosquitoes, dead children, rain every day.
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