If the grass is short, she may grasp it directly between her teeth and her lip; if the grass is longer, she may capture it first with a sideways sweep of her tongue, in order to bring it into her mouth.
Their large tongues are not pink. The tongues of two of them are light gray. The tongue of the third, the darkest one, is dark gray.
One of them has given birth to a calf. But in fact her life is not much more complicated than it was before. She stands still to let him nurse. She licks him.
Only the hours of the birth itself, on that day (Palm Sunday), were much more complicated.
Today, again, the cows are positioned symmetrically in the field, but now there is a short stray line of dark in the grass among them—the calf sleeping.
There used to be three dark horizontal lumps on the field when they lay down to rest. Now there are three and another very small one.
Soon he, three days old, is grazing, too, or learning to graze, but so small, from where I stand watching him, that he is sometimes hidden by a twig.
When he stands still, a miniature, nose to the grass like his mother, because his body is so small and his legs so thin, he looks like a thick black staple.
When he runs after her, he canters like a rocking horse.
They do sometimes protest—when they have no water or can’t get into the barn. One of them, the darkest, will moo in a perfectly regular blast twenty or more times in succession. The sound echoes off the hills like a fire alarm coming from a firehouse.
At these times, she sounds authoritative. But she has no authority.
A second calf is born, to a second cow. Now one small dark lump in the grass is the older calf. Another, smaller dark lump in the grass is the newborn calf.
The third cow could not be bred because she would not get into the van to be taken to the bull. Then, after a few months, they wanted to take her to be slaughtered. But she would not get into the van to be taken to slaughter. So she is still there.
Other neighbors may be away, from time to time, but the cows are always there, in the field. Or, if they are not in the field, they are in the barn.
I know that if they are in the field, and if I go up to the fence on this side, they will, all three, sooner or later come up to the fence on the other side, to meet me.
They do not know the words person, neighbor, watch, or even cow.
At dusk, when our light is on indoors, they can’t be seen, though they are there in the field across the road. If we turn off the light and look out into the dusk, gradually they can be seen again.
They are still out there, grazing, at dusk. But as the dusk turns to dark, while the sky above the woods is still a purplish blue, it is harder and harder to see their black bodies against the darkening field. Then they can’t be seen at all, but they are still out there, grazing in the dark.
The Exhibition
story from Flaubert
Yesterday, in the deep snow, I went to an exhibition of savages that had come here from Le Havre. They were Kaffirs. The poor Negroes, and their manager too, looked as if they were dying of hunger.
You paid a few pennies to get into the exhibition. It was in a miserable smoke-filled room up several flights of stairs. It was not well attended—seven or eight fellows in work clothes sat here and there in the rows of chairs. We waited for some time. Then a sort of wild beast appeared wearing a tiger skin on his back and uttering harsh cries. A few more followed him into the room—there were four altogether. They got up on a platform and crouched around a stew pot. Hideous and splendid at the same time, they were covered with amulets and tattoos, as thin as skeletons, their skin the color of my well-seasoned old pipe; their faces were flat, their teeth white, their eyes large, their expressions desperately sad, astonished, and brutalized. The twilight outside the windows, and the snow whitening the rooftops across the street, cast a gray pall over them. I felt as though I were seeing the first men on earth—as though they had just come into existence and were creeping about with the toads and the crocodiles.
Then one of them, an old woman, noticed me and came into the audience where I was sitting—she had, it seems, taken a sudden liking to me. She said some things to me—affectionate things, as far as I could tell. Then she tried to kiss me. The audience watched in surprise. For a quarter of an hour I stayed there in my seat listening to her long declaration of love. I asked the manager several times what she was saying, but he couldn’t translate any of it.
Though he claimed they knew a little English, they didn’t seem to understand a word, because after the show at last came to an end—to my relief—I asked them a few questions and they couldn’t answer. I was glad to leave that dismal place and go back out into the snow, though I had lost my boots somewhere.
What is it that makes me so attractive to cretins, madmen, idiots, and savages? Do those poor creatures sense a kind of sympathy in me? Do they feel some sort of bond between us? It is infallible. It happened with the cretins of Valais, the madmen of Cairo, the monks of Upper Egypt—they all persecuted me with their declarations of love!
Later, I heard that after this exhibition of savages, their manager abandoned them. They had been in Rouen for nearly two months by then, first on the boulevard Beauvoisin, then in the Grande-Rue, where I saw them. When he left, they were living in a shabby little hotel in the rue de la Vicomté. Their only recourse was to take their case to the English consul—I don’t know how they made themselves understood. But the consul paid their debts—400 francs to the hotel—and then put them on the train for Paris. They had an engagement there—it was to be their Paris debut.
Letter to a Peppermint Candy Company
Dear Manufacturer of “Old Fashioned Chewy Peps,”
Last Christmas when my husband and I stopped in at an upscale country store that caters to weekenders as well as locals and has a lunchroom off to the side, and which is run by a couple who bicker constantly and snap at their help, after we had had lunch and were browsing, before we left, among the displays of packaged and freshly prepared gourmet foods, we were attracted to the festive bright red canister (what you call the “tin”) of your “Old Fashioned Chewy Peps” peppermints. I love peppermints, and when I read the ingredients list on your can and saw that these were made without preservatives or artificial flavors or colors, I decided to buy the peppermints, since it is hard to find pure candies. I did not ask the price of the can, because although I realized that in that particular store it would be expensive, I was willing to be a bit extravagant since Christmas was coming. When I went to pay, though, I was shocked at the price, which was $15 for the canister of peppermints, net weight 13 ounces (369 grams). After a moment of hesitation, I bought it anyway, partly out of embarrassment in front of the impatient and unsmiling young woman at the cash register and partly because I did not want to give up those peppermints. When we got home, I read your tongue-in-cheek warning on the can about letting the peppermint soften in one’s mouth before biting down. You said: “Your teeth will thank you!” Well, it is quite true that the peppermints appear soft but then have an iron grip when one bites down. When I did eventually eat one, I chewed cautiously and with great difficulty. The candy was quite awkward to hold in my mouth, since it kept sticking to one tooth or another. I will say right away, though, that the taste was excellent. What I am writing to you about is not the taste or the difficulty of chewing the mints but the quantity of mints in the canister. When I first opened it, before I ate any of the peppermints, I noticed that it did not seem to be very tightly packed with candies. They filled it to the top, but loosely. I looked at the ingredients list again. I saw that you reported a serving size of 6 pieces and then specified that there were “about” 121/3 servings per tin. I did the math and calculated that the tin should contain “about” 74 pieces. Frankly, I did not think there were 74 pieces of candy inside. After I pointed this out to my family, we decided to place bets on how many candies there were and then count them. My bet was 64 pieces. My husband, being more trusting of your claims, bet that there were 70. My son, being a teenager and more daring, bet that there were only 50 pieces. Well, I counted them out there on the dining table and who do you think won the bet? I’m sorry to say it was my son. There were only 51 pieces in the can (or tin)! I must say, I could understand it if there were 70 or even 66 pieces, but 51 pieces is only two-thirds, approximately, of the number of pieces you claim are in the tin. I don’t really understand why you would make such a false claim. I have just now, out of curiosity, done a calculation to see if your claim as to the net weight of the peppermints is also exaggerated. You claim that each piece weighs about 5 grams, and you claim a net weight of 369 grams. Yet that would also yield 74 pieces, rounding up, and since there were not 74 pieces but 51, the net weight of the peppermints would have been closer to 255 grams. I cannot verify this estimate by weighing the candies because by now we have eaten them all. They were delicious, but we are feeling shortchanged, or should I say … cheated? Can you please explain this discrepancy?
Yours sincerely.
P.S. This also makes my purchase even more extravagant. 13 ounces at $15 would have been about $18/pound; 8 ounces at $15 is $30/pound!
Her Geography: Illinois
She knows she is in Chicago.
But she does not yet realize that she is in Illinois.