The Cleft Page 5

  I asked Julia to marry me, saying that we must agree on a deal. She would give me two children, and I would ask nothing of her beyond that, and she and the children would be well provided for. She agreed, but not without hesitation, having learned that young men were desiring her in plenty. But they weren’t rich, like me. And she did like me, as a friend. Or perhaps as a tutor? She told me she enjoyed 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.

  And the girls: organs they did not know they had drove them across the mountain to the boys, and even when they knew that mating meant later births, they did not know why. Or for a long time they didn’t.

  It was because of my observations in the nursery wing that I decided to attempt this history, despite the difficulties. I am sure that certain exchanges between the males and the females would not have altered all that much, in spite of the long ages (and ages – etc.). That scene I saw in the nursery was enacted then, or something like it. Must have been.

  And how about the scene I saw when the boy Titus, waking in the morning with an erection, slowly stood up, grasping the sides of his bed, looking down, and shouting, ‘Mine! It’s mine! Mine, mine, mine, mine …’

  So much I believe has not changed. But if those old people could come back, and observe, and see, and find so much unchanged, then other things they would not understand at all.

  My account of my marriage, my Julia, my first and second families, they would not recognise. The old senator and his young wife? No. Why not? A very simple reason: they did not live long. It was a hard and dangerous time and not even the ‘Old Shes’, the ‘Old Ones’, could have been very old. An ‘old female’ we hear and what do we see? Some grey-haired, wrinkled, bent old crone. Nothing in any of the records describes an aged person.

  No one I have ever met, or have heard of, would not at once understand ‘The old senator and his very young wife’. They might smile, or grimace, or look condemning, but they would know what is involved here. And so I begin this history, this present history, even when I was daily in the nursery, watching the children, and while Julia was off, mostly with her new friends.

  She never lied to me, except by omission. It was assumed she had a lover, and she encouraged me to think that. What need did I have of more information when the material was at my disposal of Rome’s secret services? She was now an intimate of some very highly placed circles: parties that can only be called orgies went on every night. She was friends with infamous women, and with others who did not survive into the next emperor’s reign.

  I did say to her, when she was sitting there after some great party or other, watching me, as if she expected me to reprimand her, ‘Julia, you are flying too high.’ I waited for her to defend herself but she didn’t. Perhaps she was herself troubled. ‘The higher you fly the further you fall,’ I said, smiling, so as not to seem judgemental. ‘Be careful, Julia.’

  And she was, for she is still alive.

  And the two lovely children, who I can say truthfully have been the best blessings of my life?

  The girl, Lydia, is now much with her mother. How could she not have admired the elegant woman, so beautiful, that Julia had evolved into? Lydia goes to parties and – I don’t know how much worse – with her mother. She announces she intends to make a great marriage. The boy is energetic, brave, full of manly games and feats and endurances – and everything we would expect of a Roman boy at his best. He wants to go into the army. He thinks perhaps he could be one of the Praetorian Guards. And why not? The Guard is made up of handsome young men like him.

  It occurs to me that perhaps it may be said of me, ‘He gave three of his sons to die for the empire, he was a true Roman.’ It will probably not be remembered that once I fancied myself as a serious historian.

  The others stood around, staring. She saw that as they leaned and stared, restrained by knowing how they had hurt the other girl, their tubes were all pointing at her, like a question. She wanted to get away; wanted to do what was natural to her, which was to slide into water and lose herself in it. She got up, conscious all the time that what she did was provoking the boys, and went to the banks of the river, where they had made a little bay and the water was shallow. She knelt in it and splashed, though this cold water was not like the balmy sea water she was used to. When she rose from the water and faced them, crowding there after her, she saw one of the great shell containers they had made. She picked one up, and they told her its name. They had made knives of the sharp shells: she learned that word too. They kept at her, saying sentences and words in that childish speech of theirs, while she replied to them, and they copied what she said, not for its sense but its sound.

  Meanwhile, the two eagles had finished their meal and lifted off on those great wings, and gone back up to the mountain. The sun was going down. She was afraid, alone in this strange place, with these strangers … People was the word the Clefts used for themselves, but these must be people too, for every one had been born to a Cleft. She might herself have given birth to one of these staring Monsters … she knew she had made a Monster, snatched away from her as it appeared, put out to die, taken away by the great birds.

  But they didn’t die. None of them had died. Here they all were, and like Clefts, except for those flat chests where nipples appeared, uselessly, and the bundles of tubes and balls there in front.

  A shadow was creeping towards them from the mountain. She was becoming afraid, and she had not been until now. They were still crowding around her, and the need and hunger for her was so evident that again she did as some need inside her she knew nothing about was telling her. One after another she held those stiff tubes in her hand until they emptied themselves, and then just as she had been brought here by a need, now she had to leave … had to, and followed by them all, she walked towards the mountain. She did not run. Running was not what Clefts did. But it was a fast walk, propelled by fear. Of what? The Monsters – so close? The night – so near? She reached the foot of the mountain as dark came and it was a heavy dark, without a helping moon. She found what she needed, a cave, and there she sheltered. She did not sleep. Her mind was too full of thoughts, all new to her. Very early, in the dawn light, she left the cave, and saw that down in the valley no people were visible. They were inside those shelters they made of shining river reed.

  As fast as she could, up the mountain she went, this girl who had scarcely taken more than a few steps together in her life, and to the top and past the great eagles, motionless and asleep on their tall rocks, and down the other side, and reached the shore where her people were, lying about as they always were, singing a little, spreading out their long hair. They had scarcely noticed she had been away.

  The Old Shes were all together on a big flat rock, their place. She saw as if for the first time those vast loose laps and dewlaps of flesh, enormous loose breasts, the big slack faces with eyes that seemed to see nothing, bodies half in, half out of the warm waves. She saw it all and disliked what she saw.

  She had to tell them what had happened, and it was not that they didn’t listen, they didn’t seem able to take in what she said. Over the mountain were living the Monsters they had put out to die – that was the very first fact, and she might as well not have spoken at all. The younger Clefts were almost as bad, except a girl, one of those who had tried to tell the Old Shes about the Monsters’ tubes, did hear her and wanted to know everything. These two girls were always together now, talking, speculating. In due time a babe was born – a Cleft. She knew and her friend knew that this babe was different, and they looked for signs of the difference. Nothing to see, but it was a restless, crying babe and it crawled and swam and then walked early.

  This first babe born to the Clefts, with a Monster for a father, was, these two girls knew, different in its deepest nature. But saying this poses a question, does it not? How did they know? What was so different in them that made it possible for them to know? Something had happened to these two Clefts, but they did not know what it was. All they knew was that when they talked together about the new babe, about the Monsters over the mountain, they were using language and ideas they could not share with anyone else on that shore.

  The girl who had gone over the mountain, because she had been forced to by a new inner nature, was one of the Water Carers. She saw to it that the trickles of water that come down the cliffs were kept clean, and directed into a rocky pool made
for that purpose. She was known as Water, but one day, summoned by the Old Shes for some task or other, she said, not having thought or planned it, ‘My name is Maire.’ Which is what they called the half moon, before it became full moon. Her friend, the other girl, who was one of the Fish Catchers and, therefore, Fish, said, ‘And my name is Astre.’ Which is what they called the brightest star at evening.

  The Old Shes seemed annoyed, if they had actually heard what the girls said. As long as the young Clefts tended them and gave them food, they could call themselves what they liked – this was what the girls suspected was felt.

  This kind of critical thought about the Old Shes was new: so many new dangerous thoughts in their heads.

  Maire thought a good deal about the Squirts over the mountain. She felt them as wanting her. It was not how she had handled their squirts that was in her mind: rather the hunger in their faces as they looked at her, a need that was like something pulling at her.