lizoanca at the age eleven


Doina Ruşti		Patru bărbaţi plus Aurelius	Cămaşa în carouri	Lizoanca	Fantoma din moară	Zogru	Omuleţul roşu

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Lizoanca
at the age of eleven

The Prize of Romanian Academy/2009

I read this horrendous headline in a newspaper: Eleven-year-old prostitute infects entire village with syphilis. Then I saw the same story in all the rest of the press. The girl, who had parents and an average standard of living, was held responsible for almost all the cases of syphilis in her village. The tone of the newspaper articles, the unanimity of the accusations, and the repetition of the same headline from one newspaper to the next determined me to investigate the situation and to write this novel.

In Romania around two hundred cases of child abuse are covered by the media every year. Apart from these cases there are, of course, many others that go unreported. The novel Lizoanca at the age of eleven is based on this factual situation. (Doina Rusti)

The subject
The main character, Lizoanca, is a young girl (eleven years old) disgusted at the way her parents treat her. She takes refuge at the edge of the village, together with another three children, and they begin to lead a libertine life, which, in fact, presupposes the complicity of adults. Once the girl is discovered to have syphilis, public opinion treats her as a danger to society. At the same time, a number of events take place at the foreground of which are the abused children that society ignores. Also against this background a number of characters involved in Lizoanca's life recollect their experiences at the age of eleven, a taboo age which during the course of the novel becomes a threshold difficult to cross. It is beyond this age that adult life begins.

LIZOANCA

at the age of eleven

by Doina Ruşti

1. The man’s hand had grasped her by the ear and some tufts of hair, and now he was dragging her through the pales of the fence. But she was struggling with all her might, pressing herself against the concrete post and bawling:

“Fuck you, you ox! You maggoty corpse! What do you want with me? Fuck you and your ma and your pa and the whole lot of you!”

The man smacked her across her livid tear-smeared face, which was jerking about in the hole in the fence, and clouted her with his fist over the top of her head. Then he caught her mouth between his fingers, like in a vice, and at last dragged her half onto the grass in the yard.

“Fuck you and fuck the day you were born! It was I that made you and it’ll be I that kills you, you fucking slut!”

Lizoanca raised her eyes from the grass and glimpsed the sole of his boot, the toecap of which had just punted her, leaving her winded. She couldn’t feel her left jaw, but she knew she was drooling into the blades of couch grass. After that there followed five or six more kicks, and if she played dead she might survive. She shielded her head with her free hand, while trying to free her other from underneath her, and began to count the blows, one-two-three, then the iron hand of her father grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and hauled her up. She opened her eyes and saw the worm-like vein throbbing on his temple. He was unshaven and his eyebrows loured over his gaze:

“Where’ve you been, you damned tart?!” He glanced at her savagely, and Lizoanca cast poisoned darts back at him, which enraged him all the more: two stares born of the most ferocious scorn.

“That’s right, look at me like the good-for-nothing you are! Is that why I fathered you and fed you! Is that why I made you, girl, so that you’d defy me and shit on my word?”

Lizoanca knew that it would be best just to bawl with her head lowered, but she couldn’t – at the back of her throat a dragon’s head had already sprouted, which could hardly wait to dart at her deadly foe and grind him in its molars.

. (trans: Alistair Ian Blyth)

critical references