““Listen to me, Monsieur Chaucer screwing La Princesse de Cléves . I hope he tears you to pieces and exposes you for the shallow, bungling petit con you've always been, even, and especially, in bed. I curse you and your children if they're unlucky enough to have you as a father. A curse on you — did you hear me? — a curse!" And out came a string of words in Farsi, tears, yelps, followed by an endless series of French words sobbed out of her lungs, as though she were talking not to me, not to her lover, but to her mother, pleading first, then cursing again, then apologizing for cursing, and cursing all over again. "I curse you." As in some of her most passionate moments, she had turned to Old World-speak, and if my heart was racing as she kept heaping curses upon me and on the children of my children, it was because I too, like her, came from a world where curses, like blessings, like pledges, like all protestations of enduring love are, even when you don't mean a word you're saying, binding legal tender, the currency of the soul, because once spoken, they cannot be taken back, dispelled, or parleyed with; they will hunt you down, find you, and carry out their sentence.””
