Welcome back to my Wednesday literature segment. Today I feature a four-page excerpt from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, a novel I’m still early into and already finding quite intriguing. As usual, if you enjoy dabbling in books, feel free to join me on Goodreads [here].

My local library here in Bogotá, Colombia (image inset) houses an impressive collection of English literature. I’ve decided to read alphabetically by the authors’ surnames, arranged left to right along the shelves. I need to have at least some interest in the book to choose it, but I’d consider myself open-minded.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel set in the near future, describing life in what was once the United States and is now called the Republic of Gilead, where a strict religious government controls society because many people can no longer have children. Women lose their rights, and some, called Handmaids, are forced to have babies for powerful families. The story follows Offred, who is placed in the Commander’s home – strictly controlled and closely watched, almost like a prison -. as she quietly struggles to survive and hold onto her sense of self.

To set the scene for you, the four-page extract below from Chapter 9 of The Handmaid’s Tale:

Offred is alone in her bare, controlled room – the only place where her thoughts can wander. As she slowly examines the space, she reflects on her past relationship with Luke, remembering their secret hotel meetings, which now feel full of freedom and desire compared to her current life. When she notices faint stains on the mattress, she reads them as traces of past intimacy left by others, a reminder that real human connection once existed in this same room.

So if you have 10 minutes to kill, go pour yourself a cuppa and enjoy this quietly sensual and compelling short chapter. I know I did.

As always, thank you for reading.

Chapter 9

My room, then. There has to be some space, finally, that I claim as mine,
even in this time.
I’m waiting, in my room, which right now is a waiting room. When I go
to bed it’s a bedroom. The curtains are still wavering in the small wind, the
sun outside is still shining, though not in through the window directly. It has
moved west. I am trying not to tell stories, or at any rate not this one.
Someone has lived in this room, before me. Someone like me, or I prefer to
believe so.
I discovered it three days after I was moved here.
I had a lot of time to pass. I decided to explore the room. Not hastily, as
one would explore a hotel room, expecting no surprise, opening and shutting
the desk drawers, the cupboard doors, unwrapping the tiny individually
wrapped bar of soap, prodding the pillows. Will I ever be in a hotel room
again? How I wasted them, those rooms, that freedom from being seen.
Rented licence.

In the afternoons, when Luke was still in flight from his wife, when I was
still imaginary for him. Before we were married and I solidified. I would
always get there first, check in. It wasn’t that many times, but it seems now
like a decade, an era; I can remember what I wore, each blouse, each scarf. I
would pace, waiting for him, turn the television on and then off, dab behind
my ears with perfume, Opium it was. It came in a Chinese bottle, red and
gold.
I was nervous. How was I to know he loved me? It might be just an affair.
Why did we ever say just? Though at that time men and women tried each
other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

The knock would come at the door; I’d open, with relief, desire. He was
so momentary, so condensed. And yet there seemed no end to him. We would
lie in those afternoon beds, afterwards, hands on each other, talking it over.
Possible, impossible. What could be done? We thought we had such
problems. How were we to know we were happy?
But now it’s the rooms themselves I miss as well, even the dreadful
paintings that hung on the walls, landscapes with fall foliage or snow melting
in hardwoods, or women in period costume, with china-doll faces and bustles
and parasols, or sad-eyed clowns, or bowls of fruit, stiff and chalky-looking.
The fresh towels ready for spoilage, the wastebaskets gaping their invitations,
beckoning in the careless junk. Careless. I was careless, in those rooms. I
could lift the telephone and food would appear on a tray, food I had chosen.
Food that was bad for me, no doubt, and drink too. There were Bibles in the
dresser drawers, put there by some charitable society, though probably no one
read them very much. There were postcards, too, with pictures of the hotel on
them, and you could write on the postcards and send them to anyone you
wanted. It seems like such an impossible thing, now; like something you’d
make up.

So. I explored this room, not hastily, then, like a hotel room, wasting it. I
didn’t want to do it all at once, I wanted to make it last. I divided the room
into sections, in my head; I allowed myself one section a day. This one
section I would examine with the greatest minuteness: the unevenness of the
plaster under the wallpaper, the scratches in the paint of the baseboard and the
windowsill, under the top coat of paint, the stains on the mattress, for I went
so far as to lift the blankets and sheets from the bed, fold them back, a little at
a time, so they could be replaced quickly if anyone came.
The stains on the mattress. Like dried flower petals. Not recent. Old love;
there’s no other kind of love in this room now.

When I saw that, that evidence left by two people, of love or something
like it, desire at least, at least touch, between two people now perhaps old or
dead, I covered the bed again and lay down on it. I looked up at the blind
plaster eye in the ceiling. I wanted to feel Luke lying beside me. I have them,
these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head.
Sometimes it can hardly be borne. What is to be done, what is to be done, I
thought. There is nothing to be done. They also serve who only stand and
wait. Or lie down and wait. I know why the glass in the window is
shatterproof, and why they took down the chandelier. I wanted to feel Luke
lying beside me, but there wasn’t room.

I saved the cupboard until the third day. I looked carefully over the door first,
inside and out, then the walls with their brass hooks – how could they have
overlooked the hooks? Why didn’t they remove them? Too close to the floor?
But still, a stocking, that’s all you’d need. And the rod with the plastic
hangers, my dresses hanging on them, the red woollen cape for cold weather,
the shawl. I knelt to examine the floor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite
fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner
where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
I didn’t know what it meant, or even what language it was in. I thought it
might be Latin, but I didn’t know any Latin. Still, it was a message, and it was
in writing, forbidden by that very fact, and it hadn’t yet been discovered.
Except by me, for whom it was intended. It was intended for whoever came
next.

It pleases me to ponder this message. It pleases me to think I’m
communing with her, this unknown woman. For she is unknown; or if known,
she has never been mentioned to me. It pleases me to know that her taboo
message made it through, to at least one other person, washed itself up on the
wall of my cupboard, was opened and read by me. Sometimes I repeat the
words to myself. They give me a small joy. When I imagine the woman who
wrote them, I think of her as about my age, maybe a little younger. I turn her
into Moira, Moira as she was when she was in college, in the room next to
mine: quirky, jaunty, athletic, with a bicycle once, and a knapsack for hiking.
Freckles, I think; irreverent, resourceful.
I wonder who she was or is, and what’s become of her.
I tried that out on Rita, the day I found the message.
Who was the woman who stayed in that room? I said. Before me? If I’d
asked it differently, if I’d said, Was there a woman who stayed in that room
before me? I might not have got anywhere.
Which one? she said; she sounded grudging, suspicious, but then, she
almost always sounds like that when she speaks to me.

So there have been more than one. Some haven’t stayed their full term of
posting, their full two years. Some have been sent away, for one reason or
another. Or maybe not sent; gone?
The lively one. I was guessing. The one with freckles.
You knew her? Rita asked, more suspicious than ever.
I knew her before, I lied. I heard she was here.
Rita accepted this. She knows there must be a grapevine, an underground
of sorts.
She didn’t work out, she said.
In what way? I asked, trying to sound as neutral as possible.

But Rita clamped her lips together. I am like a child here, there are some
things I must not be told. What you don’t know won’t hurt you, was all she
would say.