I had used these same menus in the as-yet unpublished novel Swimming Home I had written two decades later, the novel in which the cabin crew on LOT airlines had morphed into nurses from Odessa, but I did not want to think about this. I closed the notebook. After a while I placed it on the small writing desk and then I rearranged the chair.
The next morning, when I woke up at 8am I could hear Maria shouting at her brother who was shouting at the cleaner. I had forgotten how everyone shouts in Southern Europe and how doors bang and dogs bark all the time and from the valley there is always the sound of more banging from the building of stone walls, the mending of sheds and chicken coops and fences.
And another sound. Something so eerily familiar, I wanted to put my fingers in my ears. As I made my way down to the terrace for breakfast, I heard a woman sobbing. HUH HUH HUH. I did not want to hear that some of the HUHs were longer than others and that these carried the most sorrow for the length of the breath. The sobbing came from the utility room just above the terrace where the brooms and mops were kept. Maria was weeping into her arms that were resting on top of the washing machine. She saw me make my way to a table and turned her back on me.
Ten minutes later she brought out breakfast on a silver tray: small bowls of home-made yogurt and dark honey, warm bread rolls, a large cup of aromatic coffee with a jug of milk on the side, a glass of spring water with a slice of lemon in it, and two fresh apricots. As she unloaded the tray, Maria never once asked me about my life in London or I about hers in Majorca. I made sure I barely looked at her but I reckoned I was a detective gathering evidence for something neither of us could fathom.
Maria was one of the few women in this Catholic village who had neither married or had children. Perhaps she was wary of these rituals because she knew they would ultimately exploit her. Whatever, it was clear that she had other kinds of projects in mind. She had designed the irrigation system that watered the citrus orchard, and of course, the ambience of this inexpensive, tranquil hotel was designed by her too. If it mostly attracted solo travellers, it was possible that Maria had quietly and slyly constructed a place that was a refuge from The Family. A place that was also her home (her brother lived elsewhere with his wife) but a home she did not entirely own — all financial arrangements were handled by her brother. All the same, Maria had made a bid for a life that did not include the rituals of marriage and motherhood.
As I bit into the sweet orange flesh of the apricot, I found myself thinking about some of the women, the mothers who had waited with me in the school playground while we collected our children. Now that we were mothers we were all shadows of our former selves, chased by the women we used to be before we had children. We didn’t really know what to do with her, this fierce, independent young woman who followed us about, shouting and pointing the finger while we wheeled our buggies in the English rain. We tried to answer her back but we did not have the language to explain that we were not women who had merely ‘acquired’ some children — we had metamorphosed (new heavy bodies, milk in our breasts, hormonally-programmed to run to our babies when they cried) in to someone we did not entirely understand.
Feminine fertility and pregnancy not only continue to fascinate our collective imagination, but also serve as a sanctuary for the sacred. . Today motherhood is imbued with what has survived of religious feeling.
— Julia Kristeva, Motherhood Today (2005)
Mother was The Woman the whole world had imagined to death. It proved very hard to re-negotiate the world’s nostalgic phantasy about our purpose in life. The trouble was that we too had all sorts of wild imaginings about what Mother should ‘be’ and were cursed with the desire to not be disappointing. We did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicised by the societal system, was a delusion. The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother. All the same, we felt guilty about unveiling this delusion in case the niche we had made for ourselves and our much-loved children collapsed in ruins around our muddy trainers — which were probably sewn together by child slaves in sweatshops all over the globe. It was mysterious because it seemed to me that the male world and its political arrangements (never in favour of children and women) was actually jealous of the passion we felt for our babies. Like everything that involves love, our children made us happy beyond measure — and unhappy too — but never as miserable as the twenty-first century Neo-Patriarchy made us feel. It required us to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled — we were to be Strong Modern Women whilst being subjected to all kinds of humiliations, both economic and domestic. If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong.
Something strange had happened to the way a particular group of the women I met in the school playground used language. They said words that were childlike but not as interesting as the words children made up. Words like groany moany smiley fabby cheery veggie sniffy. And they made an uneasy distance between themselves and the working class mothers they called chavs. The chavs in the playground had less money and less education and ate more chocolate and crisps and other nice things. They said words like, Oh my God, I didn’t know where to look. In the balance I thought these were the more exciting words.
Oh My God
I did not know where to look
If the Oh My Gods were channelling William Blake, the language that came out of the mouths of the smiley sniffy groany cheery women was not so much grown up as grown down. I listened to all those mothers in a daze because I knew we were all exhausted and making the best of our new niche in the Societal System. This fact made us all a bit odd in my view.
Adrienne Rich, who I was reading at the time, said it exactly like it is: ‘No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.’ That was the weird thing. It was becoming clear to me that Motherhood was an institution fathered by masculine consciousness. This male consciousness was male unconsciousness. It needed its female partners who were also mothers to stamp on her own desires and attend to his desires, and then to everyone else’s desires. We had a go at cancelling our own desires and found we had a talent for it. And we put a lot of our life’s energy into creating a home for our children and for our men.
A house means a family house, a place specially meant for putting children and men in so as to restrict their waywardness and distract them from the longing for adventure and escape they’ve had since time began. The most difficult thing in tackling this subject is to get down to the basic and utterly manageable terms in which women see the fantastic challenge a house represents: how to provide a centre for children and men at the same time. . The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can’t help it — can’t help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.
— Marguerite Duras, Practicalities (1987)
There is no one who said it more ruthlessly, or kindly, than Marguerite Duras. There is no feminist critical theory or philosophy I have read that cuts deeper. Marguerite wore massive spectacles and she had a massive ego. Her massive ego helped her crush delusions about femininity under each of her shoes — which were smaller than her spectacles. When she wasn’t too drunk she found the intellectual energy to move on and crush another one. Perhaps when Orwell described sheer egoism as a necessary quality for a writer, he was not thinking about the sheer egoism of a female writer. Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over time to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December. I hear Duras’s hard-earned ego speaking to me, to me, to me, in all the seasons.