My skinny body housed a host of uncommonly intense emotions, and my inexorably analytical mind was often pulled in strange directions by sudden transports of passion. As I had been surrounded with extraordinary tenderness and affection from my birth, I reacted to every less than friendly expression in an elementary way, with primitive ferocity, ready for immediate revenge. We had a foolish relative who was forever boasting about her plump, fattened offspring. Once, after presenting me with a ball which I'd been hankering after for some time, she blurted out in my presence what a plain, unattractive little creature I was, every rib showing, so sickly I might never live to see adulthood; for here I was, laid up in bed yet again. I understood what she meant. She was implying that I too would end up in the cemetery, where I always felt fierce anger mixed with perplexity at the sight of the graves of relatives. For a while I just blinked at our fat relative with measles-stricken, inflamed eyes, then, like a diminitive awe-struck Caesar at Pompey's Pillar, I pulled my coverlet over my face, and lowered the ball to the floor. What would an ugly thing condemned to die want with a toy? The ball was picked up and placed beside me again, they thought I had dropped it. I flung it away from me then, that couldn't be misunderstood. "She's feverish, poor child", my mother said, trying to excuse my behaviour, "she's not well." "Even so," said the relative, "what kind of child would do such a thing, she can't be that feverish, throwing her toys about like that!" She picked the ball up again, and wiped it. Later, my mother often recounted to me how my face, finally surfacing from beneath my quilted coverlet, looked wizened, blotchy from fever, and full of undisguised, uncurbed hatred, like a savage's, preparing to take revenge.

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