Mammoth by Eva Baltasar

Highlights from "Mammoth" by Eva Baltasar

Reducing life to an Excel spreadsheet felt like a crime. I hated my tool, the specialist axe I used to cut up emotions and memories, the experience and suffering of those people who, at the end of the day, had somehow persuaded life to put up with them all those years.

No luck. I discovered that sociologists are experts in vacuity. When I was on the last of my savings, I took a job as a server at a chain café.

I lasted a few days at each job and left just as I was starting to get the hang of it, terrified I would become used to the exploitation. As far as I was concerned, the job market, the legal one anyway, was a scam. When I worked for someone else, I gave them the most precious thing I had, more precious than my time or body, more precious even than the meaning of the word itself: my dignity.

Every time I signed a contract or agreed to a trial period, I got the sense I was selling myself to an intermediary who confiscated my passport and got fat at my expense.

Although outwardly my body is still, inside me is a thundering arena, and I’m at the point where I have no idea what I want, but I do know what I need. Right now, any one of my species would do.

To reach this place is to step onto a giant’s palm and touch infinity. It’s more than just a square white farmhouse with a stone barn attached to it. The whole property is huge. The sky above me, colossal. The landscape dips at the end of the field and vanishes into the sea, shedding everything, only to resurface a great distance later, blue mountains rising up seemingly without end. I will live up here, cleaved to the rock like a root, sucking up nutrients until every finger, every tooth, every last one of my thoughts is worn through.

I’ve decided not to wait until I need bread before making some. I’m going to bake a loaf every day. The thought of never having to go to another bakery fills me with joy. The phrase to do without may be the thing that frees me.

Gout is a snake that slithers into his joints and rubs up against them to change skin

I wait for the tornado as if I were going to marry it. I want life to mow me down, to feel its hand on the nape of my neck. For it to make me swallow dirt while I breathe. Because – because feeling alive means shouldering the burden, now that I know I can bear the weight

I love that she’s not from here, she has the same air of abandonment as a wounded soldier without a flag.

A woman’s mouth is a powerful thing – it can either set you right or set you free. Hers is the artery that calls the body to order. I’m helpless against it.

Nothing is mine, except for me

call for everything that was once mine to be turned over to life, for it to find a path of its own in this bitter, inhuman life, because it isn’t mine anymore