Hannibal - Thomas Harris [11]
Give it a moment before we proceed..Now I will show you a quality you have that will help you: You are not blinded by tears, you have the onions to read on.
Here's an exercise you might find useful. I want you physically to do this with me: Do you have a black iron skillet? You are a southern mountain girl, I can't imagine you would not.
Put it on the kitchen table. Turn on the overhead lights.
Mapp had inherited her grandmother's skillet and used it often. It had a glassy black surface that no soap ever touched. Starling put it in front of her on the table.
Look into the skillet, Clarice. Lean over it and look down. If this were your mother's skillet, and it well may be, it would hold among its molecules the vibrations all the conversations ever held in its presence. All the exchanges, the petty irritations, the deadly revelations the flat announcements of disaster, the grunts and poetry of love.
Sit down at the table, Clarice. Look into the skillet. If it is well cured, it's a black pool, isn't it? It's like looking down a well. Your detailed reflection is not in the bottom, but you loom there, don't you? The you, there you are in blackface, with a corona like your hair on fire.
We are elaborations of carbon, Clarice. You a the skillet and Daddy dead in the ground, cold as the skillet. It's all still there. Listen. How did they really sound, and live - your struggling parents. The concrete memories, not the imagi that swell your heart.
Why was your father not a deputy sheriff, in tight with the courthouse crowd? Why did your mother clean motels to keep you, even if she failed to keep you together until you were grown? What is your most vivid memory of the kitchen? Not the hospital, the kitchen.
My mother washing the blood out of my father's hat.
What is your best memory, in the kitchen? My father peeling oranges with his old pocketknife with the tip broken off, and passing the sections to us.
Your father, Clarice, was a night watchman. Your mother was a chambermaid.
Was a big federal career your hope or theirs? How much would your father bend to get along in a stale bureaucracy? How many buttocks would he kiss? Did you ever in your life see him toady or fawn? Have your supervisors demonstrated any values, Clarice? How about your parents, did they demonstrate any? If so, are those values the same? Look into the honest iron and tell me. Have you failed your dead family? Would they want you to suck up? What was their view on fortitude? You can be as strong as you wish to be.
You are a warrior, Clarice. The enemy is dead, the baby safe. You are a warrior.
The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver.
Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you.
Hannibal Lecter.P.S. You still owe me some information, you know. Tell me if you still wake up hearing the lambs. On any Sunday place an ad in the agony column of the national edition of the Times, the International HeraldTribune, and the China Mail. Address it to A. A. Aaron so it will be first, and sign it Hannah.
Reading, Starling heard the words in the same voice that had mocked her and pierced her, probed her life and enlightened her in the maximum security ward of the insane asylum, when she had to trade the quick of her life to Hannibal Lecter in exchange for his vital knowledge of Buffalo Bill. The metallic rasp of the seldomused voice still sounded in her dreams.
There was a new spiderweb in the corner of the kitchen ceiling. Starling stared