Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [42]
I read the passage over again, my eye always stopped by the words “an invisible hand.” Even so long ago God deserted woman, I thought, staying by her just long enough to illustrate to man the cutting to be done. And what if pain wasn’t what she felt at the moment of parturition? After all, pain was what I felt, having given birth, and I did not have a clitoris for it to be concentrated in.
I read further: “The dual soul is a danger; a man should be male, and a woman female. Circumcision and excision are…the remedy.”
But who could bear to think of this for long? I closed the book, wandered unsteadily across the room, flopped heavily onto the couch, and lost myself in a rerun of “HeeHaw” on TV.
ADAM
IT SADDENS ME that Pierre has never married, and that he seems content to pursue his career as an anthropologist and to spend much of the time he has for himself with Benny. This petit (for a man) curly-haired, teak-colored person is my son! I am as astonished as he approaches middle age as I was when he was two. Though his voice is deep, deeper than mine, a person of color’s voice, it still seems at times, because of his accent, the voice of a stranger. I see his mother in him. Lisette, who took so long to die, bravely determined to hold on to her dignity, her self, to the end; her thick, fierce French neck wasting away as she struggled. Only to beg, finally, for morphine and more and more morphine. Seeing her in Pierre makes the memory of my last visits with her bearable, and reactivates happier thoughts of our earlier days.
Pierre laughs at my concern, gracefully refraining from observing aloud that my own marriage has been hellacious.
I am married to my work, he says.
But your work does not produce children, I counter.
He smiles. Mais oui, he says, my work will produce children! Children who will at least understand why they are afraid. How can a child be a child if she is afraid?
I cannot argue. Since the moment, as a small boy, Pierre heard of Tashi’s dark tower and her terror of it, he has never put her suffering out of his mind. Everything he learns, no matter how trivial or in what context or with whom, he brings to bear on her dilemma. The conversations we have as adults predictably include some bit of information that he has stored away to become a part of Tashi’s puzzle.
The only girl he ever loved, for instance. A Berkeley student with whom he often went horseback riding.
She rode bareback, always, he tells me, as we sit on a boulder in the park in the middle of an afternoon hike. She experienced orgasm while riding the horse.
Are you sure? I ask.
Yes, he says. She swooned. And when I asked her, she admitted it.
I am speechless at the thought that any woman’s pleasure might be found so easily, I stammer; so, in a sense, carelessly.
The word you are looking for, says Pierre, is wantonly. Loosely. A woman who is sexually “unrestrained,” according to the dictionary, is by definition “lascivious, wanton and loose.” But why is that? A man who is sexually unrestrained is simply a man.
Well, I say, was she loose?
Pierre shifts his weight on the boulder and frowns up at the sky. Now, he says, in the scholarly tone that still strikes me as amusing in one so childlike in size, we can begin to understand something about the insistence, among people in mutilating cultures, that a woman’s vagina be tight. By force if necessary. If you think of being wanton, being loose, as being able to achieve orgasm easily.
How did this happen? I ask. To your friend, I mean.
She’d been brought up by pagan parents, earth worshippers, on a little island somewhere in Hawaii. She could experience orgasm doing almost anything. She said that at home there were favorite trees she loved that she rubbed against. She could orgasm against warm, smooth boulders, like this one we’re sitting on; she could come against the earth itself if it rose a bit to meet her. However, says Pierre, she’d never been with a man. Her parents had taught her early on that it wasn’t absolutely