Читать книгу Crocodile Tears онлайн

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From the threshold she observes the familiar space, the large cheerful room, the sun filtering between the curtains, light bouncing off the oak table; she runs her eyes over the cupboards, the spice jars, the fridge. She looks at the fridge. She imagines what’s inside and her mouth waters. But she is also alert, she knows the housekeeper is taking a siesta in the servant’s bedroom, next to the kitchen. She listens to the woman’s rasping, deepening snores.

18She’s a hungry girl but her fear is powerful, she hesitates before deciding to desecrate the comfortable domestic order of the kitchen, to enter the forbidden territory, the dangerous geography, to enter a world that at once beckons her in and shuts her out, a world watched over by the housekeeper, the white-aproned woman who is asleep in the next room.

She thinks about food day and night, when she wakes up and when she falls asleep, before sitting at the table, as she eats what the housekeeper or her father has put on her plate, and while she finishes the small portions and gets up, her cravings scarcely dented, still thinking about food. She thinks about it while she’s at school, while she’s watching television, while she and her sister, Luz, are playing with their dolls. Luz is thin and is allowed to eat as much as she likes, but she barely even touches what she is served. Her sister is thin and her father says she’s beautiful, just like her mother. But as he says this he looks not at Luz but at her, and she feels right then that her body occupies too much space.