reports (gaming and betting) made musical with the names of horses, and the transcripts of divorce cases spread over several columns. From the vast tracts of such rubbish that cluttered her mind from early, she developed the ability to think in balloons, distinguish between decrees nisi and decrees absolute, guess the results of horse racing, and foretell the significance of dreams.
At first her father was not bothered by the fact that she was an unusually silent child. For him it was enough satisfaction that she was a more-than-apt pupil, but as her words increasingly dried up and finally ceased altogether unless she was made to read aloud, he came to blame himself for his indulgence and lack of supervision that had nourished the indiscriminacy of her reading, which he now sought, when it was too late, to quell. He did not know how it came about. All he knew was that seven months before she went to the big school, she stopped speaking, as if her ferocious absorption of the words of others had driven her own underground, like a river that hides its head on its way down to the next district or the sea. He grieved that he had added to his daughter's handicaps a worse desolation, the remission of speech.
Tumela wisdom, the wisdom of far districts, counseled a visit to Madda Penny or Bredda John. "Is enchantment, Baba! Smaddy put guzzum pon di child! Carry her out before it too late!"
Even poor Miss Purity came in for suspicion. "Fi all me know, might be di wicked stepmodda. Jealousy. Dem stepmodda type can be wicked, yu know."
"A true. Snake under cool shady!"
But the one thing George and Dulsie had in common, apart from their daughter and an insatiable appetite for sex, was their scorn of superstition. They chose doctors instead. The doctors saw that something was wrong, though it was nothing physiological. They could propose no solution. George was a man devoid of superstition, a genuine atheist, but after the various doctors failed to get Arrienne to talk, in desperation he allowed himself to try the skills of Bredda John, who told him his daughter was reading too much.
Arrienne could have told her father, though she had no idea how she knew this, that the real culprit was not her entire reading repertoire, but the great book of embroidered secrets in the glass cabinet. The Book of Things. It had stolen her words and become an enchantment she could not cast off until she was able to translate its mysteries or find some other way to release herself from the spell that pulled her to kneel, helpless, every evening now, before the cabinet.
"Gimmi back mi talkin," she admonished the book, fiercely, angrily, inside her head.
The book laughed, a cackling, malicious laugh like Mama Mai's, not the graceful gurgling she thought would have emerged from among its lyrical illustrations.
And it spoke, "이 멍청아, 이 세 가지 수수께끼를 먼저 풀어야만 해!" [1]
Of course, the princess had no idea what the book was saying. This made her more angry, but still, every day, she found herself kneeling before the cabinet as if in prayer, helpless, pulled.
She was afraid to tell her father what she knew.
Being only a child, she could not have known that her words dried up because she was aware, by pure instinct, in some still-inaccessible part of herself, that to understand anything that was worth understanding about her own life, she would have to discover a vaster language than was at that time available to her. Neither could she have known that such a language, even the search for it, was possible only at great cost—the cost of suffering. She could not know that her encounter with impotence in front of this book was because of this instinctive knowing and the lack of words-which-are-enough.
(Years later, she received a low mark from a teacher of English for writing a fanciful story instead of a real one: The little mermaid bled on her feet so she could love enough, and become human, and be able to speak. Because she loved the prince. She also lost a mark for a full stop after a sentence fragment. Then further, she lost the remaining marks for a story that was stolen, for as you can see, the story was written by someone else, in another language and country, but she was trying to find through it a way to save her soul. It would not be the first nor last time Arrienne became a word thief, in desperation.
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