Maria hadn’t read Ada or Ardor, and wouldn’t have understood if it she had. Where she came from, you didn’t frolic in the grass around the castle with your cousin. The walls of her house hadn’t been built by the first white farmers in southern Africa, her father hadn’t been an important official or a lover of racehorses, her mother didn’t make hoerewers in the morning while wondering what the weather was going to be like today, the window of the kitchen didn’t look out on a meadow, or the bedroom window on a little wood that made you forget the electrified gates around the property. Maria didn’t have stables, or horses, or a hi-fi, or LPs, the Clash, Led Zeppelin, the Plimsouls, she didn’t know anything about rock bands who encouraged a sense of rebellion, or about the broken hearts to be found in books, or subtle desires, or transgression, she had never heard of Nabokov, or the ardor of love. Maria couldn’t read.
– Zulu by Caryl Ferey