Look at Me (Chapter 3: Revised ((Moon and Heart))

3

The moon and the heart

There was a moon with dark clouds filtering over the levee, like a canopy that God Himself had broken. There was a glow and then a gloom that came from this intermittent flickering phenomenon; – everything is filtered through the houses and trees of the dike. The dogs’ heads bobbed up and down in the water, which could be seen when their gloom was covered by glitter for a moment. From the echoes coming out of the water, the voices of drowning men and women, choking sounds, snorting and spitting out of the water could be heard more than before: painful sounds prolong sounds; everyone stained and soaked; the whites of his eyes stained his face.

The old man was hungry, but all that popped into his mind was tacky, was the iron in the water draining his taste buds. Only voices prevailed, sounds of movement around them, sounds of mourning, sounds of anguish to themselves.

As the water poured over his head, like buckets, buckets of water piercing and pounding, buckets upon buckets – he tied a handkerchief over and around so it wouldn’t be so cold, as piercing as it was, the rains were pounding and pounding. pounding and trying to punch a hole in his head, like someone is playing drums on his head. Their ears were receiving the sound and patter of drops of water beating on them, constantly on them; Compared to someone snapping their fingers inside your ear, towards them, over them, over them in them, in moments, I couldn’t tell where they came from, they were just there, they just kept coming.

“Get out … out of the way!” A voice shouted in the distance, in the river, a man swimming, and the boot was filled with people hanging, no one helping the drowning man: everyone was worried about their space in the boat, the old man thought, ‘there is no place for me ‘he murmured, he said with a painful stomach cramp, as he shifted his gaze, moving from nowhere to somewhere, looking down from the roof to where his daughter was.

Günter was now breathing heavily, gasping for air and hardly breathing, taking sips of air, slowly, very slowly, with his mouth open, and as if his lips were swollen, he ran a hundred miles: trying to open his chest. by pushing the air down, deep into his stomach, it could give him the force he outlawed, he considered; He also measured his heartbeat, he could even hear his own heart beating, he was running, running, like a dog after a rabbit, it was like jumping off his chest, jumping and jumping to the State Capitol six blocks. far. The Mississippi seemed to be above them, the levee was made of earth to protect the land from bodies of water and overflowing waves. But it never did.

Logs, beams and large blocks of wood that kept the dike safe, now floating in all directions, were beginning to prevent people from swimming, some hit a small number of people, pushing them underwater, some got in the way the logs crushed them to death, they broke ribs and punctured lungs, saving them from drowning. No one had protection, in fact, being in the cabin like Jean-lee was, allowed her to be safer for the moment, at least for the moment. Fortunately, the driftwood and driftwood had not slammed, nor directly hit his daughter’s house, not yet, not yet, but as he scanned the area with his tired and bloodied ox eyes, luck would not hold for always, I knew … Floating blocks of wood, or logs by hand that have not yet struck, but sooner or later would. “Luck,” he whispered, Luck, what is luck? Luck is a poor man’s way of saying that he has no courage, that is luck. You make your destiny, you do it, you have to do something and luck will not save anyone. “Me neither,” he murmured, if the floating logs hit his hut. How true that was, but possibly, perhaps providence did, divine providence; It would have to be through a little miracle, yes, divine intervention, he thought, that would do it, it would help.

The levee was for the most part a free government parcel of land at one point: or at least at one point it was free if you claimed it, and built it before someone else did. The Italians, the gypsies had taken it years ago, and now it was the land of the people, they had combed it into a small community, while it lasted. But the question always arose, always arose, especially during the flood season, to get rid of the dike, the houses on the dike, it was never intended for that purpose – it was meant to slow down the river. But tell people who were once homeless, now from the same community; The people above the dam, that community, not the dam community, didn’t want it; yes, they deliberated; It was a dangerous place to live: oh yes, at one point you could do well to slow down the river, when there were no other ways to control the water, but now dams were built. And today, this moment would be a deciding factor for their future survival of the upper levee. Was it more or less an advantage to the surrounding populations? Was the question to be answered at a later date?

Everything in the water moved with its own inertia. Now he forgot about the moon: the old man said to himself, pay more attention to the silver-gray water that hits my face, so he said to himself as he opened his mouth, reluctantly swallowing water, up to his burning throat, more than he . wanted.

The heart

There was a tremendous gasp, sharp needle-like pains in the old man’s chest, in his heart; such resistance was not made for such elderly men. A tension in the pendulum, as if it were an endless clock ticking, ticking, for fifty-eight years ticked with a strange cadence, but now it jumped out of that rhythm, or at least that, and ran, running along a time. collusion – a demolition. He could hear his daughter crying now, a silent moan, a superficial one. [snivel you might say], but his ears could hear it; his senses sharpened.

He had raised her for a few years during her teenage life; precious years to him, years in which he got to know her better. Before the man she married took her away from him, cursed him for trying to help them, and soured their relationship. She had wanted to leave him once, saying in essence: he wouldn’t be much in life, he was too lazy; – but he told her to give her another chance, to try to fix things as best she could, and if they couldn’t, she could always go home, and that he would take care of her and the children, yes, take her with nothing, at that time, but she had a baby and a husband and she needed to think about that at that time, now she had two, two children; the children and the father visited their grandfather on the east side of town, off Arcade Street, about three or four miles away. Little by little, it turned out to work on its own; he was happy about that, lo and behold, it was not right to get divorced because of simple differences; just because it wouldn’t work would be a good enough reason, good enough reason to leave, and it proved to work that way, to work alone. He even let them live in a four-story house that he owned, a mansion he bought and built in an apartment building with four apartments, and made them be the spouses’ caretakers, but he was stubborn and moved out. Then he bought the shack from them, a two-room shack, to appease them, I suppose, which didn’t work out either. Nothing seemed to work, but envy always seems to have a strong grip around a man’s soul, so strong that it makes him feel smaller than the person he envies for having what he has, and not himself. I was actually very fond of him [the old man]He liked it, and he gave the money to a man who had now died in life, gave him $ 500, for the cabin, and saved it for an occasion as when someone might need it, like his daughter and her husband. . Although the land was free, the structure was not. And wherever the structure was, the land belonged to the structure, and he had a bill of sale and a deed.

“Envy and jealousy creeps to the bottom of an empty man’s jug,” she once told her daughter, and that was the character of her husband. The face of his son-in-law seemed to appear before him as he continued with the rescue. The son-in-law who had worked on some of their properties, and one afternoon, received a blunt blow and that caused grudges between them. Although he tried to settle the matter, it was not going to be settled so easily, and he did not wish them any harm, on the contrary, to feel that stabilization was the pillar they needed, and that he demanded his rights to see the children and the daughter, would not lead to a successful conclusion to the envy of the heart of his son-in-law, (he rarely does) consequently, breaking in any case, the pillar of safety for children. On another note, he knew that once poisoned, once the heart becomes resentful, he knew that he would be asking too much to be sacrificed to restore a family relationship that he did not want restored, and again, because his participation would only make the situation. more difficult. As far as he felt, he was decontaminating himself by keeping his distance, and now, at this very moment, possibly the purification process was taking shape in its final drink, its final stage; its current winds would settle in one way or another.

Consequently, the pain that the son-in-law could inflict on his wife’s father was to keep him at bay, rescue him, blackmail him, not allow him to see him, nor his children, at the cost of offending him, it would be a final cost to him. damage them. Nor would the husband allow his family to visit any of the relatives on his father’s side, even the great-grandmother was deprived of this right, until the day of her death. However, such a dispute would not be allowed to develop to such an extent on the side of the sons-in-law of the family, another thorn in the side of good and evil, and undue punishment; repercussions of an acid heart. If he died, he would be the first in line that he knew about: the first in line to count the money: counting the money as if it were in his pockets. I guess I couldn’t die soon enough.