Free Arcadio by William Goyen

stomach was spread with it like a mayonnaise, my hair set in a marcel of come and my face a running icing that strung down to my neck in pearl drops and there was a necklace of gold around my neck and the pieces of men and women like soggy peaches broken open sopping against me and hot tongues licked over every piece of me and there didn’t seem no way out for me I was goin under I was dyin and I was in my hot death, muerto, muerto, muriendo . And once in the mirror in the dawn light I saw my ash-white face with the bitter smile of the maldito damned-in-the-flesh on it, the demonio of the fucked dying was on it, perdido, perdido , and over the dead river seen a little moon of salt. And Jesucristo was with me in all those places, Oyente , in the Baths and in the whorehouse, too, you wan hear, and in the room of dying over the dead river, waiting for me to cry to him, softly knocking. And if you are sick of flesh and body and feeling and wanting and cannot put out of your mind pictures of the flesh, if you are haunted and in that bondage then you can remember me, you can recall my story and cry for the knocking hombre de reconciliación , or put it all aside as something that does not have nothing to do with you and perdóname, Señor, Señora, Señorita, compadre, Corazón . You wan hear?

10
Song of Tomasso
    I HUNTED THEN Tomasso. When you are hunting somebody you think you see them everywhere but in this time I did not know what the object of my hunting looked like, comprendes , though I had a face of him before my eyes in my imagination.
    Seen, at a place on a lake, one young man moving alone in a little boat on a gray lake on a gray day, twas up in Rhode Island, I had come up there, up that far, up to a completely lonely lake, outside Providence. Suddenly I asked myself could this rower be Tomasso my half brother? A Mescan Jew in Rhode Island? But I guess twas not my half brother Tomasso, whose mother was my mother. I went on.
    Saw in a choir in the Deliverance Church in Norfork Virginia a handsome boy, paler than the others, white in his brownness, singing among the black people. Something strange about him. The pale choir singer haunted me, the movement of his body as he sang the way he joyfully clapped his hands not clapping them but holding them back from each other just a little before they come together and his hands spread wide open; he haunted me, this pale boy the way he flickered his eyes, flickering his brow with the joyful smile. Was he a Mescan boy living among the blacks, living and singing among the blacks? Something of Chupa in him. But guessed twas not my half brother Tomasso. But was this Tomasso, my half brother, whose mother was my mother? Could this be Tomasso, a Mescan Jew in a black choir?
    I waited till the singing was done and when the singing was done I saw the dark eyes of the light-colored boy stare upon me drawing me and pulling me and tenía miedo I felt ascared but I could not turn away; and then I saw the light-colored boy come towards me.
    When he was close upon me I seen the dark eyes and I seen something of mi madre on him, on his brow or over his face somewhere over his facial features I don know what and I seen my lips upon him those lips was mine come upon his mouth from me through our mother you know what I mean lips handed down sounds funny to hand down lips but tis Anglo tis not Mescan we have no such Mescan espression. Tomasso! I softly called and he said Quién me llamas? who calls? Tomasso! I cried and the light-colored boy said Sí? I am your brother, I said. Sí he said, all men are brothers, that is what the Deliverance Choir sings about, my brother. Where have you come from as a birthplace I asked him; and how come you say Mescan words? From a Missoura jail, he said and I said there is no doubt you are my brother—half—adding to that that you know Mescan, too, how come you know Mescan words. I have not told you our mother is the same woman, and