Soy rubia. Rubsima.

Soy tan rubia que me dicen: "Mona, no es sino que aletee

ese pelo sobre mi cara y ver que me libra de esta sombra que me acosa". No
era sombra sino muerte lo que le cruzaba la cara y me dio miedo perder mi
brillo.
Alguien que pasara ahora y me viera el pelo no lo apreciara bien. Hay que
tener en cuenta que la noche, aunque no ms empieza, viene con una niebla
rara. Y adems que le hablo de tiempos antes y que... bueno, la andadera y el
maltrato le quitan el brillo hasta a mi pelo.

"No puedo", pens, "anoche estuve en lugar cerrado, humo. Si cojo por
costumbre ir a grill todas las noches (era una broma que me haca, una
posibilidad imposible) tengo que lavarme el pelo mnimo da de por medio, con
tanto humo".
No se ve bien, en un pelo tan rubio como el mo, ese olor. Una nia que tenga
pelo como ala de cuervo, es distinto. As que me dije: "me lavo el pelo.
Cuarenta minutos".

Quera cerrar la cortina y, tal vez s, dormir. Pero no lo hice: mir de cara al da
(sana fue esa accin), sabiendo que bien malo iba a ser, sobre todo bordeado
por esas montaas de pelos crespos. Abra las piernas el negro?
Esto de ver de rodillas donde hay montaas, lo supondr el lector, es porque la
muchachita ha probado ya sus drogas...

Sobreexpuse (uso el trmino porque mi pap es fotgrafo) a las montaas, los

pelos de la montaa y el azul cielo. Azul porque sobre expona o porque de
veras mejoraba el da? No, era la aridez y la congoja ms terrible despus de
un ao completo que no llova sobre esta tierra buena. "A m no me importa
me decan si la veo a usted, con ese pelo, me refresco".

. Maringela me pidi que la acompaara por vino a la cocina, y all lo que hizo
fue mirarme de frente y tan duro y tan fijo y era realmente tan bella, de pelo
como el mo y con esa cara de saber a la perfeccin lo que estaba haciendo,
que yo le permit que desabotonara mi vestido y almohadillara ambas manos
sobre mis senos

Amigos, mi pelo perdi brillo. De oro pas a ceniza, No es el que alguien

pudiera ver ahora, mientras narro, este pelo tiene ms historia. Mi piel, antes
permanentemente bronceada, cobr trminos azulosos, como escamas.

Me abraz, y mi pelo se anud al de l, color avellana madura. Al intentar

separarnos para mirarnos en nuestra pasin, no pudimos, pues se haban
anudado nuestros pelos, con lo cual no quiero hacer una figura literaria sino
describir fielmente la abundancia de nuestras fuerzas. Este pelo que yo aleteo
frente a un desprevenido transente no es ni la sombra de lo que era. O digo
mal, es precisamente eso: la sombra. Pero con este pelo a cualquiera le
dispenso claridad en esta noche tan oscura.
Edward J. Geisweidt. Horticulture of the Head: The Vegetable Life of Hair in
Early Modern English Thought. Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 19
(2009) 6.1-24 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-19/geishair.html>.

For the early modern English, the fundamental similarity between humans and
plants was the possession of life. The English understood life to derive from the
vegetative soul, one third of the Aristotelian tripartite soul that, along with the
animalistic sensitive and the distinctly human rational souls, comprised the
human essence. The vegetative soul and natural spirits promoted and
sustained life through their threefold function: generation, nutrition, and growth

The idea that plants and landscapes share a relationship homologous to that
between hair and body parts demonstrates a salient connection between
human bodies and the plant kingdom, one that early modern literary authors
picked up on. In a particularly bawdy instance of corporeal topography in Venus
and Adonis, Shakespeare draws on the homologies of plants (or plant parts)
and hair. Venus proffers her hair to shelter Adonis from the weather (as in lines
190-91) and to afford him (sexual) sustenance:

Within this limit is relief enough,

Sweet bottom-grass, and high delightful plain,
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest and from rain. (ll. 235-38).

Venuss body parts shape the topography of her limit or bounded territory
(OED 3.a), with her breasts serving as the rising hillocks, and her belly the
high delightful plain. As for the plant life of her terrestrialized body, her hair
appears to be all that populates her body with life. The Norton editors gloss the
[s]weet bottom grass as pubic hair, and the brakes obscure and rough refer
also to Venuss pilosity. Noting the darker aspects of life in the poems setting,
Anthony Mortimer writes that Venus is offering Adonis a safer landscape than
the one in which he wants to hunt (73). Mortimer suggests that Venuss own
body presents a danger to the sexually reticent hunter. To Adonis, [b]oth the
real landscape and the real body are dangerous: only the landscaped body is
safe (73)

Indeed, Diemerbroeck acknowledges (without attempting to resolve) the

question of hairs status
as a human body part. Comparing it to the moss growing on a dead tree
suggests hair has but a peculiar vegetable life separate from the life of the
body that nourishes it (3C1v). Hair is denied status as a part when, as in this
example, part is defined as cohering with the whole, and conjoined by
common participation of Life. An alternate definition, however, designates hair
as a body part proper when a part is any Corporeal Substance, making it
complete and entire with others. Though it may not participate in the common
life with the rest of the body (hair lives on after the vital organs), yet

Hair may be said to be a Part of the Body; for that really and indeed together
with other Parts, compleats and perfects the Body of Man; as Leaves make a
Tree, and Feathers a Bird. For as a Tree without Leaves, and a Bird without
Feathers, can neither be said to be perfect, so a man without Hair, cannot be
said to have all his Accomplishments, though he may live without it. (3C1)
Diemerbroecks claim is based on the assumption, prevalent in the period, that
hair continues to grow after the bodys death. But this assumption of continued
growth suggests a vegetative function, guided by a rudimentary soul in each
hair. Diemerbroeck also draws an Aristotelian analogy between leaves,
feathers, and hair, one that suggests anatomical continuity between forms of
life. No matter the definition of part, hair shares a kinship with plant lifebe it
moss or leavesthat provides a material, as opposed to moral, understanding
of the human body, embedded in a natural world teeming with homologous
forms of life.

Thomas Dekker also criticizes the gallants hair styles with satiric humor in The
guls horne-booke (1609), drawing the familiar comparison between hair and
bushes. Dekker encourages gallants not to visit the barber but to cultivate their
bushy hair:

[L]et thy haire grow thick and bushy like a forrest, or some wildernesse, lest
those sixe-footed creatures that breed in it, and are Tenants to that crowne-
land of thine, bee hunted to death by euery base barbarous Barber; and so that
delicate and tickling pleasure of scratching, be vtterly taken from thee. (C3v)

As Twyning points out, by taking an ironic stance and encouraging gallants to

grow their hair out further, Dekker also takes a stab at the moralists of his day,
particularly John Stubbes and Stephen Gosson (118-19). Dekker figures the
gallants head as an ecosystem unto itself. Lice, assumed to be endemic to
long hair, are forest denizens who, in the punning crowne-land of the head,
are both the game and victims of the barber-hunter, whose barbarousness
makes him an unsuitable sportsman for the regal game in a gallants hair. As a
hunter, the barber would be an indiscriminate marksman, killing the six-footed
creatures by deforestation, destroying a whole habitat rather than marking
specific game. Dekker draws an explicit comparison between barbering and
deforestation:

If then thou desirest to reserue that Fee-simple of wit, (thy head) for thee and
the lawfull heirs of thy body, play neither the scurvy part of the Frenchman,
that pluckes vp all by th[e] rootes, nor that of the spending Englishman, who to
maintaine a paltry warren of vnprofitable Conies, disimparkes the stately swift-
footed wild Deere: But let thine receiue his full growth that thou maiest safely
and wisely brag tis thine owne Bush-Naturall. (C4)

Dekkers advice to the gallant takes on mock-urgency, for he stands to lose his
head, his Fee-simple of corporeal land over which he ought to have
unassailable ownership for himself and his (no doubt punning) heirs. Threats to
the gallants head/land come in the forms of disease and deforestation. Dekker
alludes to one telltale symptom of syphilishair lossequating balding or
barbering to trees removal through another shared feature of plants and hairs
anatomy, roots. He also comments on the early modern English deforestation,
lamenting the destruction of deer habitat for the open land and underground
tunnels of man-made rabbit warrens.15