" Her granny speak Creole, patois, knew no other language, spoke it badly and taught it badly to Jeanne, who did her best to convert it into good French when she came to Paris and started mixing with swells but made a hash of it, her heart wasn't in it. no wonder. It was as thought her tongue had been cut out and another one sewn in that did not fit well. Therefore you could say, not so much that Jeanne did not understand the lapidary, troubled serenity of her lover's poetry but, that it was a perpetual affront to her. He recited it to her by the hour and she ached, raged and chafed under it because his eloquence denied her language. It made her dumb, a dumbness all the more profound because it manifested itself in a harsh clatter of ungrammatical recriminations and demands which were not directed at her lover so much -- she was quite fond of him -- as at her own condition, great gawk of an ignorant black girl, good for nothing: correction. good only for one thing, even if the spirochetes were already burrowing away diligently at her spinal marrow while she bore up the superb weight of oblivion on her Amazonian head.
The greatest poet of alienation stumbled upon the perfect stranger, theirs was a match made in heaven. In his heart, he must have known this."
..... ...... ......
" The young man inhales the aroma of coconut oil which she rubs into her hair to make it shine. His agonized romanticism transforms this homely odor of the Caribbean kitchen into the perfume of the air of those tropical islands he can sometimes persuade himself are the happy lands for which he longs. His lively imagination performs an alchemical alteration on the healthy tang of her sweat, freshly awakened by dancing. He thinks her sweat smells of cinnamon because she has spices in her ores. He thinks she is made of a different kind of flesh than his."
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