The Cleft. Doris Lessing

talking with me and listening to me because ‘I learn such a lot, you see’. She was almost completely ignorant.

      And now something unexpected. I had taken it for granted that this fresh, plump girl (‘my little partridge’) would bring forth children easily, but her first pregnancy was difficult and the birth worse. She told me it was because she had bad illnesses as a child, and sometimes the family didn’t get enough to eat. If she had asked me to let her renege on the second half of our bargain – the second child – I would have been ready to forgive her. I had not enjoyed seeing her discomfort, and then the difficult birth. But she was an honest girl, the partridge, and she went ahead for the second child, though she had a bad enough time with that one, too.

      The two infants once born were handed into the care of the slave girls working in the children’s wing – and I don’t think she thereafter ever thought of them. It had not occurred to me to make part of our bargain ‘Give me two babes and be a mother to them’. But when I did tax her about her indifference to her children she said, ‘Bad enough having to be a child without having to look after them too.’ I learned that she was the eldest of the children, with a sickly and worn-out mother, and she had had to be a mother to her siblings, with the help of one inadequate slave girl, a runaway slave from some great estate, where they treated slaves badly. Julia’s helper could hardly speak our language – she was Greek. Julia had sworn that when she got to maturity she would refuse to marry a man who could not provide her with slaves. A pretty big oath to swear, if you are very poor, from a small country town. But that explained why she agreed with her mother to come and offer her services to me.

      Her delay in agreeing to ‘make a deal’ with me was explained. I could not have asked her to do anything more difficult than to have a child, let alone two.

      She said, too, that she did not have motherly feelings, she never had them. She had asked her mother why she was always ordered to feed and wash the babies but her brothers were not. Her mother simply said that this was how things were. It is not recorded what the Greek slave thought about it all, but no one would be interested in her.

      Julia’s uninhibited remarks were thought most original and daring, but she did not understand why people laughed at them and commended her. At first I am sure she did not intend to shock or surprise, though she was acquiring a reputation for her wit and boldness. Soon she was in circles whose prevailing tone was a world-weary cynicism, and then she did play up to it: what had been fresh and natural to her became a style; she fitted in with people I didn’t like, and there was not much left in her of the small-town girl with her own view on life.

      I did say to her that her generation struck people of mine as selfish, self-indulgent, amoral, compared with the women like my mother, who were virtuous and famed for their piety and strength of character. Julia seemed interested in my strictures, but as if they could have nothing at all to do with her; as if I had said, ‘Did you know that in Britain there are tribes who paint themselves blue?’ ‘Fancy that,’ she could have said, as a cloud of doubt crossed her face. But she knew I did tell her the truth, so decided to believe me. ‘Blue, eh? They must look funny, then.’ Her characteristic expression was open and frank, and she smiled her appreciation of this brave new world. When, soon, she became notorious for her immorality, her self-indulgence, like all the women of her circle, I would imagine her, with her honest face, her look of friendly interest in everything, hearing from some fellow accomplice in an orgy that now she must try this or that, saying, ‘Oh, really? People do this, do they? Well, fancy that. Let’s have a go.’

      If Julia never went near the nursery wing, I could hardly be got away from it. I have never been more intrigued, not even by some great affair of state.

      Even when the babes were infants, I found plenty to astonish me and when they became three, four, five, every day was a revelation. I never interfered with the management by the nursery slaves, took no part unless some little thing came up for an embrace or to be noticed. I heard one girl say to the other, ‘They don’t have a mother, but their grandfather makes up for it.’

      While I was being daily amazed by what I was observing, the thick package of the history of the Clefts and Monsters, of the very early birth of the male from the female, was given to me by a scholar who had before suggested I might tackle this or that topic. I had had things published, had been noticed, but never under my own name – which might astonish you, did you hear it. This enterprise quite simply frightened me. First, the material, ancient scrolls and fragments of scrolls, loose and disordered scraps of paper, in the old scripts that were the first receptacles of the transfer of ‘the mouth to ear’ mode of the first histories. A great pack of the stuff, and while there was some kind of order in it, it was not necessarily how I would have arranged it. Every time I took it up to consider my place in the story I was dismayed, not only by the scale of the task but because this tale was so far from me that I did not know how to interpret it.

      And then I watched, in the nursery, this little scene. The girl, Lydia, was about four, the boy younger, perhaps two. Lydia must have observed a hundred times the protuberances in front of her brother, Titus, but on this day she stared at him and said, ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ Her face! She was intrigued, shocked, envious, repelled – she was gripped by strong contradictory emotions. I watched, and so did the slave girls. We knew that this was a momentous event.

      At this Titus pushed forward his equipment, and began wagging his penis up and down, looking at her with lordly air. ‘It’s mine, it’s mine,’ he chanted and said, ‘And what have you got? You haven’t got anything.’

      Lydia was standing looking down at her smooth front with the little pink cleft. ‘Why?’ she demanded of the girls, of me, of her brother. ‘Why have you got that, and I haven’t?’

      ‘It’s because you are a girl,’ says the little lord and master. ‘I am a boy and you are a girl.’

      ‘I think it’s ugly, you are horrible,’ she states, comes nearer to him, and says, ‘I want it.’

      He swings his hips about, evading her probing hand, singing, ‘You can’t, you can’t, and so that’s that.’

      ‘I want to touch,’ she demands, and this time he leaves his protuberances just within reach, but withdraws them suddenly as her hand approaches.

      ‘Then I won’t let you look at mine,’ she says and turns herself round, hiding herself.

      At which he sings, ‘I don’t care, why should I care, you’re just silly.’

      ‘I’m not silly,’ she half screams, and runs to the girls. ‘Why, why, why?’ she demands, as one whisks her up in her arms.

      ‘Don’t cry,’ says this nurse. ‘Don’t give him that satisfaction.’ ‘It’s not fair,’ sobs the child, and the other girl says, ‘But if you had that you wouldn’t know what to do with it,’ sending me a great wink, and a laugh. (But I have never been that kind of Master: perhaps she wished I were.)

      And at that moment I knew I would at least try and take on this task, my history of that ancient, long-ago time. Scenes I had pondered over, thinking, but after these ages, how can you really understand what it meant when females and the males were together in that valley, while the eagles watched them, not knowing anything – and we Romans know so much – about why the girls were shaped like this, and the boys like that, let alone what it all meant.

      They were driven by powerful instincts – and we do know how strong they are, nothing has changed there – but I keep coming back to a thought: that the boys seemed to be hungering for something, wanting something, needing – but did not know what it was their squirts wanted – forcing all the rest of themselves to want, to need.