Chapter 6 Part 1

On the History of Harm in Animals

Being a pig and all, all Genevieve's mother ever had was a rich inner life. Her reaction to the events that would, at least in a grander historical sense, define her husband was bemused arrogance. She was too smart to ever have hope for the little inbred or their family. I think the specific moment (although there were obviously many, as the family was not estranged from mediocrity) would be when she observed the young lady's reaction to their mother telling her about the banality of cruelty that defined men's interactions with other people. In essence, to communicate the rationalization of why the mother stayed with the father. A duty to preserve some idiotic platonic ideal of family. A less platonic child would have wept for their mother. Quite the incandescence considering how their life would turn out, quite ironic how the soul burned to emulate an average.

From her perspective, her mother had made herself into grains of sand, whose only ability was to count the time as she fell to the earth. Sand was convenient to the mother as she needed a form to let her be constructed, destroyed, and walked upon. A kinder child may have realized that the form probably caused her the least pain. The daughter's heat incinerated her until all that remained was a mirror. The mother's portend was not to her liking. She said something along the lines of: "it's not my fault you have horrible taste in men; my (insert inbred's name here) isn't like that! And even if he was, I wouldn't be stupid enough to get pregnant!" And so, she broke the mirror and rejected a possible future.

Comedically, she would learn and avoid the true nature of men and strive to achieve mankind's platonic ideal: freedom. She never apologized. What would she have been apologizing to? a mirror? Forgiving herself? For being the first woman in the long line of rancheros to stand up for herself? for knowing she only had the strength to do so because she was fed her mother? that it did her soul good to call her father a racist and to leave him alone with her. Just some scraps, some sand, salty, like semen, the sea? But it did the soul good, some good dick; moving on, maybe she'd go to Hawaii; the brown ones made her skin look so good in comparison (their perspective), although, of course, they were prettier than her (her perspective); her father was darker than her mother, the irony, all it was, was one little woman, she would never be eaten after all, why even have kids? That's how you end the cycle!

Perhaps that's where her rage went into, fighting the cycle: rage on and on, fight for the piggies, or maybe she'd fight for the guerrilleros, find a lover, perhaps even a woman, fight more and more; it would make a nice story. All it was was one little woman; she got the courage because of her mother. That's how you tie a bow; she'd take her ambiguously gendered and ambiguously raced lover by the hand overlooking some cliff in Costa Rica that she bought with the pig money; I mean, it's cruel what they did to the pigs it's only fitting that I shut down the family farm. And it's only fair that I use the money to build a community with the natives (i.e., the mestizos, i.e., the ones that went to college to learn about Marx), but they grow their own food, and it's sustainable, see, the community can sustain itself and it only cost a couple of pigs, one pig could feed 50 people! But that isn't profit, obviously. This is the power she always wanted, the power to found this… sustainable community. Maybe she'd have kids, maybe she wouldn't, maybe one of them would trade just a little with the rest of the country, and maybe they'd get just a tiny debt financing, not pig money because there was no usury, of course, just pay a little bit extra for the seeds than if you had paid upfront (it's only fair), how much extra? What percent of the purchase price? And you paid over how many months? And maybe they'd have a kid, and maybe that kid would go to college, and maybe they'd come back to the community, and maybe they'd build a hotel, the food was so good after all, and we'd need someone to farm, why should the migrants get the spoils of those who founded the community? It's just a slightly bigger house, and they're so good at farming, and maybe they'd have a kid, this hotel living isn't for me (they didn't really like the expectations); the American ex-pat (it's all America), the light skin one who spoke Spanish and Quechua, well their father just died, leaving quite the inheritance, and they want me to... yes, I will yes! New management of the community. Management wants a larger piece of the pie; I mean, they put in the risk, and they got a few extra guns from the Americans. A foreign getaway, community living, locally sourced food, something more sincere: your hard-earned pig money. The founder of the community? An ambiguously gendered and ambiguously raced visionary who did it all on their own, the indigenous share in the wealth this time (after a management fee).

But who looks that far ahead? Or maybe at the third or fourth, or fifth step, something would go wrong, and they'd be back to fucking pigs. But what really mattered was that she stopped the cycle, that no harm was irreparable, and that she lived for something, and that she suffered for something, and that she saw that for something. That? A mother. But you know, we were all so traumatized. And her mother wanted better for her, so what was there to feel guilty about? And in fact, her mother's mother was whiter than her mother, so who is to even say? As long as her soul felt free... why should I feel bad? Men have been doing it since the beginning of time. My platonic ideal didn't hurt anybody. Why did my father do it? It's better not to get into the mind of a hick–– a hick will instantiate anything: memories, feelings, history, or otherwise to justify their raping and pillaging on their deathbed.