Life is Elsewhere...'The Poet is Born'

After delivery, Maman's body entered upon still another phase. when she first let her son's groping mouth attach itself to her breasr, a wave of sweet vibration thrilled deep inside and radiated to all parts of her body; it was similar to love, but it went beyond a lover's caress, it brought a great calm happiness, a great happy calm; when her lover had kissed her breast, it had been a brief moment that was supposed to have made up for hours of doubt and mistrust; but now she knew that a mouth was attached to her breast with unending devotion, a devotion of which she could be perfectly certain.

Something else was different now, too. In the past, whenever her lover touched her naked body, she had felt ashamed. Mutual drawing together was always an overcoming of strangeness, and the moment of closeness was intoxicating precisely because it was only a moment. Shame never slept, it made love-making more exciting but it also watched over the body to prevent its plunging into full surrender. But now shame had disappeared; it was gone. The two bodies opened to each other with full abandon, and there was nothing to hide.

She had never given herself to another body in this way, and nobody had ever so given itself to her. Her lover had used her belly but he had never lived there, he had touched her breast but never drunk from it. Ah, the joy of suckling! She lovingly watched the fishlike motions of the toothless mouth and she imagined that with her milk there flowed into her little son her depest thoughts, concepts and dreams.

It was a paradisiac state: the body was allowed to be a body, and had no need to cover itself with a fig leaf; mother and son were submerged in infinite tranquility; they lived together like Adam and Eve before they had tasted of the fruit of knowledge; they lived in their bodies beyond good and evil. And more, in paradise there is no distinction between beauty and ugliness, so that the body's components were neither ugly nor beautiful but pleasurable. the toothless gums were delightful, and so were the belly button and the tiny rear end. Delightful was the intestine, the workings of which were carefully followed, delightful were the tiny hairs budding on the comical skull. She zealously watched over her son's burping, peeing, and kakamaking, and this was not just a matter of conscientious concern for the infant's health- no, she occupied herself in all the processes of his body with passion.

This was an entirely new attitude, because ever since her childhood Maman had felt an intense aversion towards all physicality, including her own; she abhorred herself whenever she sat down on the toilet ( she tried to make sure that nobody saw her going to the bathroom) and at one time she had been ashamed to eat in public because the process of chewing and swallowing seemed disgusting to her. Now, the elevation of her son's physicality beyond any taints of ugliness had a peculiarly cleansing effect on her, and served to legitimize her own body as well. The dribble of milk which occasionally appeared on the wrinkled skin of the nipple seemed as poetic as a droplet of dew. Se would often reach out for her breast and squeeze it slightly in order to produce the magic droplet. She wet the tip of her little finger with the white liquid and tasted it: she told herself that she was doing so in order to learn more about the fluid that nourishes her son, but actually she was curious about the taste of her own body, and the sweet taste of milk reconciled her to all the body's other juices and excretions. She began to think of herself as tasty; her body had become as agreeable and legitimate as any other object of nature-a tree, a bush, a lake.

Her husband's body, robed in a suit or in pajamas, discreetly self-enclosed, was moving away from her, day by day losing more of its intimacy, while her son's body continued to depend on her; she was no longer suckling but she was teaching her son to use the toilet, she dressed and undressed him, fixed his hair and chose his clothes, and was in daily touch with teh insides through the food which she lovingly prepared for him. At four years of age, when he began to show signs of a lack of appetite, she became strict with him, forced him to eat, and for the first time felt that she was not only his body's friend but its ruler as well. The body resisted, did not wish to swallow, but it had to yield; with a peculiar pleasure she watched this vain rebellion, this submission, this fragile neck through which she could trace the passage of the unwanted morsel.

Ah- her son's body, her paradise and home, her kingdom...

Life is Elsewhere, 'the poet is born'- Milan Kundera