G. Read Free Page B

never bow to the demands of conventional morality. Indeed she will enjoy demonstrating her defiance as she did when she married against her family’s wishes at the age of seventeen, and as she did when, two years later, she told her husband in public to leave and never come back.
    She lies in Umberto’s arms, content to be held but indifferent to his passion. If he lies still, she is pleased. She finds it acceptable for him to cherish her; she finds it absurd for him to desire her. She has never before been able to ignore Umberto’s advances because they have offered her an opportunity to show him the intricate sexuality of her body which has always seemed to her to be as unpredictable, as delicate and as pure as an almond hidden in its two shells. Her immunity now surprises her. Her child has already offered her the gift of self-sufficiency.
    To the physical well-being of the mother of his son Umberto is prepared to make every concession. He lies quiet. Confusedly his mind returns again and again to the mechanics of the forthcoming event. Within them, he feels, is the solution to all problems.
    He lies with his hand between her legs, a finger between the lips of her vagina. Warm mucus encloses his finger as closely as if it were a ninth skin. A little earlier he felt with his hand on her stomach, a little below the navel, a small lump.
    Instead of his entering her, his son will come out of her. It occurs to him that the very form of the vagina, which he had always assumed was as it was in virtue of his function, has in fact evolved to meet the exigencies of the outward journey of a third person. He is reluctant to withdraw his finger. There is no change to be felt. He moves his finger to confirm this. Not since he first heard about it as a child has the phenomenon of birth seemed more surprising to him.
    One minute in the life of the world is going by. Paint it as it is.
    What has been conceived are the essentials of the character about whom I wish to write.
    Umberto pulls her violently towards him, holding her far shoulder and rubbing his face against her hair. He realizes how violently they are now exposed to the world, bereft of every exception. He is ignorant of all the details of childbirth, but his premonition of the rough, violent outward journey of the small lump grown large and human forces him to recognize how similar they are to other couples.
    In the last gesture of tenderness she will make towards him, she holds his head in her hands.
    Lie still, she says, think of the child.
    He remembers a morning when he visited a friend who deals in flowers and has a number of large greenhouses on the road to Pisa. The glass of these houses is painted over with a green wash (the turquoise colour of the sea) to diminish a little the power of the sunlight for the flowers inside. This wash is painted on the outside and any passer-by can draw with his finger on the glass because the wash when dry rubs off at the slightest touch. As Umberto walks past the greenhouses, away from the road, he notices the drawings. At first they depict lovers’ hearts with arrows throughthem and initials, then came crudely drawn naked figures standing upright, then a woman lying on her back, legs apart, slit visible. Finally, drawn larger and bolder than all the preceding ones, a cunt with hair above it and below it a cock with hanging balls. It is inconceivable that he himself would ever draw like that. But he recognizes that the two of them have become the subject for such a drawing.
    Previously every part of her—like their liaison—has seemed to him to be secret and exclusively for the two of them: the secret has now been divulged: there is a third person involved, his son.
    Donna mia! Donna mia!
he cries into her hair.

    I did not sleep well. What you told me, our news—you can say that? like what we read in the newspapers—this was beating in my heart all night. Laura, I want to make change in my life, I want to make space in my life