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By Root 371 0

comprehend how it is he is sitting in my living room reading to me from this strange book. Have I stopped hating him? I gaze at Benny, who looks so happy, and then down into my lap. My eyes sting the way they do when I’m drugged; closing them brings relief. Pierre is reading as if I am listening: “God had further intercourse with his earth-wife, and this time without mishaps of any kind, the excision of the offending member having removed the cause of the former disorder.” I feel him stop, rustle the pages, and look over at me. I raise my eyes and attempt a bright look in his direction. I am awake, I say. Indeed, I am listening. However, as he resumes reading, the words, on touching my ear, bounce back into his mouth, as if they’re made of India rubber. This is a distracting sight, and I look at Benny to see if he has noticed it. He hasn’t. He sits enraptured, his notepad on his lap. Who taught him to write, I ask myself, if he can never remember anything?

“The spirit drew two outlines on the ground, one on top of the other, one male and the other female. The man stretched himself out on these two shadows of himself, and took both of them for his own. The same thing was done for the woman. Thus it came about that each human being from the first was endowed with two souls of different sex, or rather with two principles corresponding to two distinct persons. In the man the female soul was located in the prepuce; in the woman the male soul was in the clitoris.”

Here I looked up. Pierre continued: “Man’s life was not capable of supporting both beings: each person would have to merge himself in the sex for which he appeared to be best fitted.” So, said Pierre, closing the book but keeping his finger between its pages, the man is circumcised to rid him of his femininity; the woman is excised to rid her of her masculinity. In other words, he said, leaning forward in his chair, a very long time ago, men found it necessary to permanently lock people in the category of their obvious sex, even while recognizing sexual duality as a given of nature.

How long ago was this? I ask, my focus somewhat blurred.

Pierre shrugged, and I fancied I saw his mother’s body in the fluid ripple of his shoulders.

Even Cleopatra was circumcised, he says. Nefertiti, also. But some people think the people in this book, the Dogon, are from a civilization even older than theirs, and that this civilization spread northward, from central Africa up toward ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean. He paused, musing. My mother used to say genital mutilation, which predates all the major religions, was a kind of footbinding.

After he leaves the house to accompany Benny to a basketball game, I am left with the book, whose pages he has thoughtfully marked, and with the puzzle of his last comment. Suddenly I see Lisette very clearly. She is sitting by a window in front of which there is a desk. She is thinking of me as she looks into a thick brown book in front of her, and her white brow is puckered in a frown. She is gazing at a drawing of a tiny, putrid, Chinese woman’s foot, and reading the notation that says the rotten smell was an aphrodisiac for the man, who liked to hold both small feet helpless in his large hand, raising them to his nose as he prepared to ravish the woman, who could not run away. This immobility most satisfying to his lust. The pain of her hobbling attempts to escape pure incentive to relish the chase.

His mother has been conjured by the odd, unAmerican movement of Pierre’s shoulders, as much as by his words. Why, I wonder, do we assume people who think deeply about us ever die?

As I open the book, my eye falls on a passage Pierre had not read: “The man then had intercourse with the woman, who later bore the first two children of a series of eight, who were to become the ancestors of the Dogon people. In the moment of birth the pain of parturition was concentrated in the woman’s clitoris, which was excised by an invisible hand, detached itself and left her, and was changed into the form of a scorpion. The pouch and the sting symbolized