Summary

When she arrives at a seaside resort, the narrator tries to get some rest and to stop drinking. She starts to feel a bit of ease, in part because “with these people, the color of my passport wasn’t interchangeable with the smell of blood” (171). She finds, however, that she is unable to escape imaginings and dreams of the Englishman, whom she hallucinates as saying “‘I’m dying to meet you’” (170). It is not long before she finds herself resorting to alcohol again, but the hallucinations remain. She visits an open-air church in an attempt to confess and thereby gain some freedom from them, but then has a realization – that it is never enough to just observe suffering, and that it is necessary to recognize that suffering enables her to be free. “Either I’m Christ or I’m Judas,” she comments...