2
FOR THOSE MEN who were not moved by Motherhood, Em acted Eve. She wore a mask of gormless innocence which was as challenging to them as the pouting and the paint upon the faces of the bar girls who sold real sex for cash. The market traders who passed her frequently and saw the way her expression seemed to fluctuate haphazardly between Eve and Motherhood thought — preferred to think, in fact — that Em was none too bright. They said she hadn’t got the sense that God gave lettuce. They labelled her ‘the Radish’. That was the nickname that they used for girls red-faced and odorous and from-the-soil like her. These traders had good cause to doubt the sharpness of her intellect, besides the permutations of her face. She muttered to her baby all day long, and in those slow and well-baked country tones which stretched the vowels and squashed the consonants and made the language sound like morse. Yet there was cunning just below the widow’s skin. Alms-givers welcome gormless gratitude. They do not give to people who seem wiser than themselves, no matter whether it be Eve or not. No, Victor’s mother was no fool, despite appearances. A fool would have an empty palm, but Em’s was always slightly curled and buttoned heavily with the copper brown of coinage.
Her looks, of course, were helpful there. She was a radish with a round and childish face. Her breasts were high and firm with milk. Her throat and shoulders were vulnerable and bare. Her knees were spread to make her lap a cradle for the child. Her feet and lower legs protruded from her apron skirts with the unselfconsciousness of a small girl sitting in shadow at the harvest edge. Any man who paused to drop some coins in her palm had paid for time to stare at her — though if he stepped too close the parasol would block his view. She did not lift her face to look these men directly in the eye. A look from her would make them hesitate, or return the coins they had found for her in the pockets of their coats. For women, though, the radish turned its chin and caught their eyes and smiled. Most shopping women are too timid and too sociable to fail to match a freely given smile. And having smiled themselves at Em, what could they do? What else but mutter phrases about the weather or the child, and buy escape from smiles and platitudes with coins in Em’s palm?
Sometimes the crowds which walked between the market and the garden were too dense for smiles to work. The shoppers simply dropped their eyes and let the beggar woman’s beams slip by. But Em soon learnt the trick of targeting her smiles with words. ‘God Bless the Cheerful Giver,’ she would say. Or, ‘Lady, Lady!’ spoken urgently, as if she’d spotted danger on the street or recognized a family friend. If Em could only stop the first one in a crowd and embarrass her to pause and give, then she could count on gifts in streams. The first fish leads the shoal.
So Victor and his mother lived beneath the parasol by day, and slept at night wherever they could find a place amongst the dozing market baskets or at the back of bars. They were not rich. Of course they were not rich. How could they be on gleanings? But they survived, sustained by charity, by the prospect of Em’s sister chancing by, by the certainty that the city would provide abundantly, by the sense of awe they felt at being at the centre of such a boisterous web, by the dislocated optimism of those whose lives are trembling at the gate.
Was Victor happy? So far, yes. He fed contentedly. He slept. His domain was his mother’s lap. Her nipples were his toys. But then the muscles strengthened in his neck and arms. He grew bored with suckling. He wanted to lift his head to look around at all the movement and the colours in the streets. He fell back startled from the breast when he heard Em calling out, ‘Lady, Lady!’ or when the hubbub of the crowd seemed more eloquent and urgent than the beating of his mother’s heart. He found he liked those moments best when he was upright on his mother’s knee and she was belching him, separating the suckling oxygen from the milk that he had swallowed and which was causing jousting mayhem in his gut. She had one hand flat on his chest, supporting him. The other tapped and played a gentle bongo on his back between his fragile shoulderblades. Or else she beat her tune, not with her fingers on his back, but with the cracked and greying candle stub which she would only light again when she had somewhere to call home. Her son’s short neck was creased in tidal ripples of baby fat. His mouth was hanging open, waiting for the upward storm of warm and milky wind. Some passing men made clicking noises with their tongues for him, or comic, pouting kisses with their lips. Sometimes a dog ran by. Or older children. Always the market offered entertainment to the child — a porter with teetering crates of onions on his wooden cart, an argument, a snatch of song, some shoving between friends, and, almost constantly by day, the casual, tangled flow and counter-flow of citizens in search of romance, fortune, pleasure, food. At times the street around the parasol was quiet and empty, but then Victor found a butterfly to watch or sharp-edged sunlight winking on a broken neck of glass or the flexing toes of his own feet, or spilt water — parting, joining in its halting, bulbous progress through the cobblestones.
Once he’d belched he would have stayed most happily, his head laid back upon Em’s chest, his hands encased in hers, a dozing spectator. But there was money to be earned. His mother’s breasts were Victor’s lathe, his workbench, the family spinning wheel. Em put her small son to her breasts. She put his mouth onto her nipple and she held him there, whispering and pigeoning into his ear to make him calm. It was a hopeless task. A growing child will not stay calm and supine all day long. A child is put upon this earth to raise its head and stretch its legs and grab. Em sang him lullabies. She told him country tales. She reminisced about her husband, Victor’s dad. But Victor did not care. The docile, suckling infant grew less tractable. His stomach became distended and would not clear with belches. His testicles and inner thighs became encrusted with a bitter rash, its scaling plaques and lesions made angrier by the baby’s water and his stools. He cried when he was wrapped inside his swaddle clothes. He thrashed his legs and pushed his fists into himself.
Em knew what should be done. A nappy rash is not the plague. It only takes a little air, some white of egg, and patience for the rash to clear. She begged an egg and broke it into the half-skin of a discarded orange. She put tiny poultices of orange pith, glistening with albumen, onto her son’s sore thighs and testicles. She stretched his legs and let him lie, naked from the waist down, across her lap. The sun and breeze were free to sink and curl between his legs. Young Victor — his flaming gonads patched in orange pith — looked as if the madders and the ochres of a peeling fresco had settled in his lap. So much for Eve and Motherhood. This sculpture was not good for trade. Em’s outstretched hand was hardly troubled by the weight of coins now. Nobody caught her eye. The squeamish men no longer paid to stare at Victor on Em’s breast.