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🦋 El libro de Eva: anatomically correct
Éramos de un material resistente, como las hojas de higuera que guardaron las brasas por meses. Al ir perdiendo las pezuñas, nuestros músculos se volvieron más firmes. Los tendones, más tensos. (p. 111 III§27)[We were made of a tough material, like the fig leaves that conserved the embers for months. As our hooves wore away, our muscles firmed up; our tendons tightened.]
In books III and IV of Eve's writings, her body and Adam's are becoming more like the reader's. They get assholes in Book III when she accidentally scratches one into Adam's backside and he poops out a "bagasse"; seeing how it benefits him she does the same to herself. (My initial reaction, beyond "ew", was to wonder how it connected to his digestive tract, and whether they had buttocks at the top of their legs; then I remembered I was not reading science fiction. Is this book "magical realism" though? not sure, I'm thinking no, need to think more about what the genre is. "Fable" seems insufficient and "Scripture" is not quite right either. Elements of both, certainly.) After they start pooping, they begin to feel hunger -- they had already been urinating and feeling thirst, though no mention is made until later of the mechanism for urination.
Book IV is mostly about their acquisition of sexual organs. Beginning in Book II bees have played an important (if not too clearly defined) role in their journey; in IV§32, Eve eats honey for the first time and has an extremely dark dream in which she envisions sexual intercourse as a male hyena eating female carrion. She wakes up and eats the seed which she saved from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (She has been carrying the seed tangled in the hair of her armpit) -- the seed travels through her body to the "duct for the exit of urine" between her legs, where it blossoms forth like a flower. Again the fruit from Eden, which has given her gender, now gives her sex.
Adam gets no Edenic seed, and is left to his own devices to give himself a penis by means of rubbing himself in IV§34-35... I have not yet understood a lot of this portion and am engaged in rereading.
posted morning of Sunday, December 13th, 2020
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