A Hero's Journey: A Personal Narrative Of My Life

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I A HOUSE DIVIDED I HAVE LOST COUNT of the days that have passed since I fled the horrors of Vasco Miranda's mad fortress in the Andalusian mountain-village of Benengeli; ran from death under cover of darkness and left a message nailed to the door. And since then along my hungry, heat-hazed way there have been further bunches of scribbled sheets, swings of the hammer, sharp exclamations of two-inch nails. Long ago when I was green my beloved said to me in fondness, 'Oh, you Moor, you strange black man, always so full of theses, never a church door to nail them to.' (She, a self-professedly godly un-Christian Indian, joked about Luther's protest at Wittenberg to tease her determinedly ungodly Indian Christian lover: how stories travel, what…show more content…
Consequently, the sixty-year-old matriarch Epifania--whose personal mosquito-net had over the years developed a number of small but significant holes which she was too myopic or stingy to notice--would be awakened each morning by itching bites on her bony blue forearms and would then unleash a thin shriek at the sight of flies buzzing around the tray of bed-tea and sweet biscuits placed beside her by Tereza the maid (who swiftly fled). Epifania fell into a useless frenzy of scratching and swatting, lunging around her curvaceous teak boat-bed, often spilling tea on the lacy cotton bedclothes, or on her white muslin nightgown with the high ruffled collar that concealed her once swan-like, but now corrugated, neck. And as the fly-swatter in her right hand thwacked and thumped, as the long nails on her left hand raked her back in search of ever more elusive mosquito-bites, so Epifania da Gama's nightcap would slip from her head, revealing a mess of snaky white hair through which…show more content…
Carmen da Gama was Aires's first cousin, the orphan child of Epifania's sister Blimunda and a smalltime printer named Lobo. Both parents had been carried away by a malaria epidemic, and Carmen's marriage prospects had been lower than zero, frozen solid until Aires amazed his mother by agreeing to the making of a match. Epifania in a torment of indecision suffered a week of sleepless nights, unable to choose between her dream of finding Aires a fish worth hooking and the increasingly desperate need to palm Carmen off on someone before it was too late. In the end her duty to her dead sister took precedence over her hopes for her

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