The End of Eddy

There is a will that exists, a desperate, continual, constantly renewed effort to place some people on a level below you, not to be on the lowest rung of the social ladder.

It took me a long time to understand that she wasn't being incoherent or contradictory, but rather that it was I myself, arrogant class renegade that I was, who tried to force her discourse into a foreign kind of coherence, one more compatible with my values—that incoherence appears to exist only when you fail to reconstruct the logic that lies behind any given discourse or practice. I came to understand that many different forms of discourse intersected in my mother and spoke through her, that she was constantly torn between her shame at not having finished school and her pride that even so, as she would say, she'd 'made it through and had a bunch of beautiful kids,' and that these two modes of discourse existed only in relation to each other.

Maybe what she meant was that obviously she wasn't a lady because there was no way she could be. To be ordinary, as if pride were not the first manifestations of shame.

Although she is an angry woman, she is not one who knows what to do with the hatred that never leaves her.

De mi infancia no me queda ningún recuerdo feliz. No quiero decir que no haya tenido nunca, en esos años, ningún sentimiento feliz o alegre. Lo que pasa es que el sufrimiento es totalitario: hace desaparecer todo cuanto no entre en su sistema

She didn’t understand that her trajectory, what she would call her mistakes, fitted in perfectly with a whole set of logical mechanisms that were practically laid down in advance and non-negotiable. She didn’t realise that her family, her parents, her brothers and sisters, even her children, pretty much everyone in the village, had had the same problems, and what she called mistakes were, in fact, no more and no less than the perfect realisation of the normal course of things.

She didn't realise that her family, her parents, her brothers and sisters, even her children, pretty much everyone in the village, had had the same problems, and what she called mistakes were, in fact, no more and no less than the perfect realisation of the normal course of things.

My father never forgot, saying in front of me That fucking son of a bitch who abandoned us, left my mother with nothing, I’d piss all over him if I had the chance.

(And I can’t stop asking myself, years later, what the real meaning of complicity is, what the boundaries are that separate complicity from active participation, from innocence, from carelessness, from fear.)

Ik herinner me die ruzie met de nauwkeurigheid van gebeurtenissen die je in je leven schept op basis van herinneringen die onbeduidend en banaal hadden kunnen zijn. Maar dan, maanden, jaren later, afhankelijk van wat je wordt, krijgen ze betekenis.

Aan mijn kinderjaren bewaar ik geen enkele goede herinnering. Ik wil niet zeggen dat ik in die jaren nooit een gevoel van geluk of van vreugde heb gekend. Het is alleen zo dat leed totalitair is: alles wat niet in zijn systeem past laat het verdwijnen.

Mutta ihmiselle ei tule luonnostaan ensimmäiseksi mieleen pakeneminen, koska hän ei tiedä, että on olemassa toisenlainen maailma. Hän ei tiedä, että pakeneminen on mahdollista. Ensin hän yrittää olla niin kuin muut, ja minä yritin olla niin kuin kaikki muut.

my brother would bring home a new girl every month, making introductions, and talking about engagement, marriage, kids. (This was a privilege reserved for young men. When my sister, coming home from a dance, introduced her second boyfriend to my parents – having broken up with the first one – they told her this wasn’t acceptable. She couldn’t be bringing home a different boy, given that the whole village had already seen her with another one You know the problem’s not with us, he seems fine and we don’t have anything against him, but you can’t just bring boys home like that whenever you want. It’s for your own good we’re telling you this, cause other folks, you better believe it, they’re just going to call you a whore.)

Still I grew attached to my teachers, and I knew that to please them I had to get good marks, or at least show them I was trying despite my difficulties. There was something suspicious about the way I would obey them: being an obedient student at school was considered girlish.

A father reinforced his own masculine identity through his sons, to whom he was duty-bound to transmit his own virility, and my father was going to do it, make me into a tough guy, his pride as a man was at stake.

Man nav laimīgu bērnības atmiņu. Negribu sacīt, ka šo gadu laikā es ne reizi nebūtu izjutis laimi vai prieku. Taču ciešanas ir visaptverošas: tās izdzēš visu, kas neiekļaujas to sistēmā.

I just stood there, immobile and inert, as passive--to invoke an expression my sister used and that I borrowed frequently--as a ballsack in a tar pit.

They'd been waiting for this moment all day, in a way, the whole day made sense only as a prelude to this moment of watching 'Wheel' in the evening, glass in hand.