Confession of the Lioness Read Online Free

world.
    *   *   *
    The receptionist at the newspaper offices is a fat woman, unhurried in speech and gesture. She seems to have been born like that, sitting, her backside like a planet competing with the Earth.
    I’ve come to find out about the result of the contest.
    I wave the clipping of the advertisement in front of the glass partition. The receptionist’s shrill voice was made to seep out through the gaps in the broken glass:
    Are you the hunter in person?
    I’m the last of the hunters. And this is my last hunt.
    The woman gazes up at the ceiling like an astronomer gazing up at the noonday sky. She opens an envelope in front of me, while I start talking again excitedly. She clearly wants to bide her time disclosing the result.
    I don’t know why they published the advertisement. There aren’t any hunters anymore. There are people out there firing their guns. But they’re not hunters. They’re killers, every single one of them. And I’m the only hunter left.
    Archangel Bullseye? Is that your name?
    I’m the only one left, I repeat without answering her question. And I continue my feverish discourse. Soon, I assert, there won’t be any animals left. For these false hunters spare neither the young nor pregnant females, they don’t respect the closed season, they invade parks and reserves. Powerful people provide them with arms and whatever else they need.
    It’s all meat, it’s all nhama, I say with a sigh, despondent.
    Only then do I look again at the fat woman’s expressionless eyes, as she waits for my disquisition to end.
    Is your name Archangel Bullseye? Well, you’re going to be able to hunt to your heart’s content, you won the contest.
    Can I come into your office? I want to give you a kiss.
    With unexpected agility, the woman gets up, leans across the counter, and waits, her eyes closed, as if my kiss were the only prize she had won in her whole life.
    *   *   *
    I hurry away from the newspaper offices, dodging through the crowd of street vendors. I’m going to visit my brother, Roland, at the Infulene Psychiatric Hospital. He’s been in the hospital ever since the accident in which our father lost his life. It’s been a year since I last paid him a visit. Now I can’t wait to tell him about the contest. Roland deserves to be the first to know. Besides, I don’t have anyone else to share my happy news with.
    It’s a long bus ride. The hospital is quite a way beyond the suburban shanties. With my head leaning against the window, I watch crowds thronging the streets and sidewalks. Is there enough ground for so many people? And I hear my old man’s lament: Where I was born there’s more earth than there is sky! I close my eyes and, for a moment, I pretend that I come from somewhere else, full of earth and sky.
    I sometimes ask myself whether I shouldn’t be committed to the hospital as well. My brother’s girlfriend, whose name is Luzilia, is a nurse and is convinced I’m mad. I don’t argue—maybe I have gone mad. But then I ask: Can someone who no longer has a life also have his sanity? To tell you the truth, it was she, Luzilia, who made me lose my mind. It’s because of her that I’m writing this diary, in the vain hope that this woman will one day read my muddled scrawl. Moreover, it’s not the first time that I’ve embellished my handwriting for the sake of Luzilia. Once before, I addressed some brief but ill-fated lines to her. At the time, what I wrote was an invitation. What I’m scribbling now is my goodbye. A false farewell, like everything in a hunter’s life, is a charade. Where for others there are memories, for me there are merely lies and illusions.
    *   *   *
    Luzilia is right: My madness began on the day a gunshot tore through my sleep and I discovered my father in the living room, spread-eagled in his own