Life Is Elsewhere (2 page)

Admittedly, before she met the engineer she had gone out with a young medical student, the son of friends of her parents, but this relationship had been incapable of giving her body much self-confidence. The morning after being initiated by him into physical love in a summer house, she broke up with him with the melancholy certainty that neither her feelings nor her senses would ever experience a great love. And since she had just finished high school, she announced that she wanted to find the meaning of her life in work and had decided to register (despite her father's practical man's disapproval) in the faculty of arts and letters.

Her disappointed body had already spent four or five months on the wide bench of a university lecture hall when it encountered an arrogant young engineer in the street who called out to it and three dates later possessed it. And because this time the body was greatly (and to its great surprise) satisfied, the soul very quickly forgot its ambition of a university career and (as a reasonable soul always must) rushed to the body's aid: it gladly agreed with the engineer's ideas and went along with his cheerful heedlessness and charming irresponsibility. Even as she knew that they were foreign to her family, she wanted to identify herself with the engineer's qualities, because in contact with them her sadly modest body ceased to doubt and, to its own astonishment, began to enjoy itself.

Was she then happy at last? Not quite: she was torn between doubt and confidence; when she undressed before the mirror she looked at herself with his eyes and sometimes found herself arousing, sometimes vapid. She handed her body over to the mercy of another's eyes—and that caused her great uncertainty.

But even though she fluctuated between hope and doubt, she had been completely torn away from her premature resignation; her sister's tennis racket no longer demoralized her; her body finally lived as a body, and she understood that it was beautiful to live like that. She wanted this new life to be more than a deceptive promise, to be a lasting reality; she wanted the engineer to tear her away from the lecture-hall bench and from her parental home and turn a love adventure into a life adventure. That is why she welcomed her pregnancy with enthusiasm: she saw herself, the engineer, and her child as a trio rising to the stars and filling the universe.

I've already explained this in the previous chapter: Mama quickly realized that the man who sought a love adventure dreaded a life adventure and wanted no change at all like the image of a duo rising to the stars. But we also know that this time her self-confidence did not crumble under the pressure of the lover's coldness. Something very important had in fact changed. Mama's body, recently still at the mercy of the lover's eyes, entered a new phase of its history: ceasing to be a body for the eyes of others, it became a body for someone who could not yet see. Its outer surface was no longer so important; the body was touching another body by means of an internal membrane no one had ever seen. Thus the eyes of the external world could only perceive its inessential aspect, and even the engineer's opinions no longer meant anything to the body, for they could have no influence over its great destiny; the body had finally attained total independence and autonomy; the belly, which kept growing bigger and uglier, was for that body a steadily increasing supply of pride.

After the delivery, Mama's body entered a new phase. When she first felt the groping mouth of her son sucking at her breast, a sweet shiver radiated from her chest through her entire body; it was similar to her lover's caress, but it had something more: a great peaceful bliss, a great happy tranquillity. She had never felt this before; when her lover had kissed her breast, it had been a moment that should have made up for hours of doubt and mistrust; but now she knew that the mouth pressed against her breast brought proof of a continuous attachment of which she could be certain.

And then there was something else: when her lover touched her naked body, she always felt ashamed; their coming close to each other was always a surmounting of otherness, and the instant of embrace was intoxicating just because it was only an instant. Shame never dozed off, it exhilarated lovemaking, but at the same time it kept a close eye on the body, fearing that it might let itself go entirely. But now shame had disappeared; it had been done away with. These two bodies opened to each other entirely and had nothing to hide.

Never had she let herself go in this way with another body, and never had another body let itself go with her in this way. Her lover could play with her belly, but he had never lived there; he could touch her breast, but he had never drunk from it. Ah, breast-feeding! She lovingly watched the fishlike movements of the toothless mouth and imagined that, along with her milk, her son was drinking her thoughts, her fantasies, and her dreams.

It was an Edenic state: the body could be fully body and had no need to hide itself with a fig leaf; they were plunged into the limitless space of a calm time; they lived together like Adam and Eve before they bit into the apple of the tree of knowledge; they lived in their bodies beyond good and evil; and not only that: in paradise there is no distinction between beauty and ugliness, so that all the things the body is made of were neither ugly nor beautiful but only delightful; even though toothless, the gums were delightful, the breast was delightful, the navel was delightful, the little bottom was delightful, the intestines—whose performance was closely overseen— were delightful, the standing hairs on the grotesque skull were delightful. She watched o\er her son's burps, pees, and poops not only with concern for the child's health; no, she watched over all the small body's activities with passion.

This was an entirely new thing because since childhood Mama had felt an extreme repugnance for physi-cality, including her own; she thought it degrading to sit on the toilet (she always made sure that no one saw her going into the bathroom), and there were even times when she had been ashamed to eat in front of people because chewing and swallowing seemed repugnant to her. Now her son's physicality, amazingly elevated above all ugliness, purified and justified her own body. The droplet of milk that sometimes remained on the wrinkled skin of her nipple seemed to her as poetic as a dewdrop; she would often press one of her breasts lightly to see the magical drop appear; she caught it with her index finger and tasted it; she told herself that she wanted to know the flavor of the beverage with which she nourished her son, but it was rather that she wanted to know the taste of her own body; and since her milk seemed delectable to her, its flavor reconciled her to all her other juices and secretions; she began to find herself delectable, her body seemed as pleasant, natural, and good to her as all natural things, as a tree, a bush, as water.

Unfortunately, she was so happy with her body that she neglected it; one day she realized that it was already too late, that she had a wrinkled belly with whitish streaks, a skin that didn't adhere firmly to the flesh beneath but looked like a loosely sewn wrap. The strange thing is that she wasn't in despair about this. Even with the wrinkled belly, Mama's body was happy because it was a body for eyes that still only perceived the world in vague outline and knew nothing (weren't they
Edenic
eyes?) of the cruel world where bodies were divided into the beautiful and the ugly.

Though the distinction was unseen by the eyes of the infant, the eyes of the husband, who had tried to make peace with his wife after Jaromil's birth, saw them all too well. After a very long interval, they began again to make love; but it was not what it had been: for their embraces they chose covert and ordinary moments, making love in darkness and with moderation. This surely suited Mama: she knew that her body had become ugly, and she feared that caresses too intense and passionate would quickly lose her the delectable inner peace her son gave her.

No, no, she would never forget that her husband had given her pleasure filled with uncertainties and her son serenity filled with bliss; and so she continued to search nearby (he was already crawling, walking, talking) for comfort. He fell seriously ill, and for two weeks she barely closed her eyes while she tended the burning little body convulsed with pain; this period, too, passed for her in a kind of delirium; when the illness began to subside, she thought that she had crossed through the realm of the dead with her son's body in her arms and had brought him back; she also thought that after this ordeal together nothing could ever separate them.

The husband's body, swathed in a suit or in pajamas, reserved and self-enclosed, was withdrawing from her and day by day losing its intimacy, but the son's body at every moment depended on her; she no longer suckled him, but she taught him to use the toilet, she dressed and undressed him, arranged his hair and his clothes, was in daily contact with his gut through the dishes she lovingly prepared. When he began, at the age of four, to suffer from a lack of appetite, she became strict; she forced him to eat and for the first time felt that she was not only the friend but also the sovereign of that body; that body rebelled, defended itself, refused to swallow, but it had to give in; with an odd satisfaction she watched this vain resistance, this capitulation, this slender neck through which one could follow the course of the reluctantly swallowed mouthful.

Ah, her son's body, her home and her paradise, her realm . . .

3

And her son's soul? Was that not her realm? Oh, yes, yes! When Jaromil uttered his first word and the word was "Mama," she was wildly happy; she thought that her sons intellect, still consisting of only a single concept, was taken up with her alone, and that although his intellect would grow, branch out, and bloom, she would always remain its root. Pleasantly inspired, she meticulously followed all of her sons attempts to use words, and knowing that life is long and memory fragile, she bought a date book bound in dark red and recorded everything that came from her son's mouth.

So if we were to look at Mama's diary we would notice that the word "Mama" was soon followed by other words, and that "Papa" was seventh, after "Grandma," "Grandpa," "Doggie," "You-you," "Wah-wah," and "Pee-pee." After these simple words (in Mama's diary the date and word were always accompanied by a brief commentary) we find the first tries at sentences. We learn that well before his second birthday he proclaimed: "Mama nice." A few weeks later he said: "Mama naughty." For this remark, made after Mama had refused to give him a raspberry drink before lunch, he was smacked on the behind, upon which he shouted, in tears: "I want other Mama!" A week later, however, he gave his mother great joy by proclaiming: "I have pretty Mama." Another time he said: "Mama, I give lollipop kiss," by which he meant that he would stick out his tongue and lick her entire face.

Skipping a few pages, we come upon a remark that catches our attention with its rhythm. His grandmother had promised Jaromil a pear, but she forgot and ate it herself; Jaromil felt cheated, became angry, and kept repeating: "Grandmama not fair, ate my pear." In a certain sense, this phrase is like the previously cited "Mama naughty," but this time no one smacked his behind because everyone laughed, including Grand-mama, and these words were often repeated in the family with amusement, a fact that of course didn't escape JaromiFs perspicacity. He probably didn't understand the reason for his success, but we can be certain that it was rhyme that saved him from a spanking, and that this was how the magical power of poetry was first revealed to him.

More such rhymed reflections appear in the following pages of Mama's diary, and her comments on them clearly show that they were a source of joy and satisfaction to the whole family. This, it seems, is a terse portrait: "Maid Hana bends like a banana." A bit farther we read: "Walk in wood, very good." Mama thought that this poetic activity arose not only from JaromiFs utterly original talent but also from the influence of the children's poetry she read to him in such great quantities that he could easily have come to believe that the Czech language was composed exclusively of trochees. But we need to correct Mamas opinion on this point: more important here than talent or literary models was the role of Grandpapa, a sober, practical man and fervent foe of poetry, who intentionally invented the most stupid couplets and secretly taught them to his grandson.

It didn't take long for Jaromil to notice that his words commanded great attention, and he began to behave accordingly; at first he had used speech to make himself understood, but now he spoke in order to elicit approval, admiration, or laughter. He looked forward to the effect his words would produce, and since it often happened that he didn't obtain the expected response, he tried to call attention to himself with outrageous remarks. This didn't always pay off; when he said to his father and mother: "You're pricks" (he had heard the word from the kid next door, and he remembered that all the other kids laughed loudly), his father smacked him in the face.

After that he carefully observed what the grown-ups appreciated in his words, what they approved of, what they disapproved of, what astonished them; thus he was equipped, when he was in the garden with Mama one day, to utter a sentence imbued with the melancholy of his grandmother's lamentations: "Life is like weeds."

It's hard to say what he meant by this; what is certain is that he wasn't thinking of the hardy worthlessness and worthless hardiness that is the distinctive feature of self-propagating plants but that he probably wanted to express the rather vague notion that, when all is said and done, life is sad and futile. Even though he had said something other than what he wanted to, the effect of his words was splendid; Mama silently stroked his hair and looked into his face with moist eyes. Jaromil was so carried away by this look, which he perceived as emotional praise, that he had a craving to see it again. During a walk he kicked a stone and said to his mother: "Mama, I just kicked a stone, and now I feel so sorry for it I want to stroke it," and he really bent down and did so.

Mama was convinced that her son was not only gifted (he had learned to read when he was five) but also that he was exceptionally sensitive in a way different from other children. She often expressed this opinion to Grandpapa and Grandmama while Jaromil, unobtrusively playing with his tin soldiers or on his rocking horse, listened with great interest. He would look deeply into the eyes of guests, imagining rapturously that their eyes were looking at him as a singular, exceptional child, one who might not be a child at all.