Life Is Elsewhere Read Free

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