I am residing next to a hunting club. Every day, since I arrived, groups of men go past my window early each morning, busy with preparations for a midday feast that took place today. How could I not attend.
It was a barbeque feast of wild deer and wild boar. . .
lots of wine . . lots of talk . . . and lots of hunting still going on.
Suffice it to say that a male stag of a certain age saw me as American game and relentlessly hunted me. But he did not bank on my stubborn armor of silence and words and my intolerance for male machismo that acts as a narcissistic mirror: he desires her and only sees the reflection of his own desire in her—a fatal projection.
Then the men (mostly, though there were one or two women) went on to play a kind of bocce ball that here they call petanque. The small ball, which they try to get as close to as possible without hitting it, is supposed to symbolize a small piece from the side of the wild boar. Today I resisted becoming the deer or the sow.
