None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer

Author:Nadine Gordimer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1994-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

Without a man.

Bereft.

To imagine that state.

Why, if Renoir could say he painted with his prick, has no woman ever had the guts to say I live by my vagina? Love affairs as a neat motif, a sprig recurring woven in the textile of her life—it’s been nothing like that. She is the one who, she understands, sent her soldier husband a photograph ringed in revenge—that was it; she has never forgotten or forgiven him premature ejaculation. That’s the fact of it. The only time he didn’t end up by himself like an excited little boy was after they had parted for divorce. A lover only in name; a father who has never known he is one. Wasn’t that the real reason for abandoning him, never mind all the others more acceptable she gave to all around her: his conservatism, his love of sport that she didn’t share, the mistake, for which neither was to blame, of wartime marriages between people too young to commit themselves.

Wasn’t that the real reason for the passion for Bennet; not his remarkable beauty nor his attraction as an artist, a creator in clay, but his ability discovered on the mountain holiday to sustain what the other had failed at, to stay within her and exchange the burden of self.

Make the beast with two backs.

The emblem under which her Hitler Baby remains with her is that of the first image that drew her attention to his flesh. As he sat in her office one of his gestures brushed against a wire letter basket and loosened a scab from a scratch; he ignored it while she was aware of a trickle of blood below his rolled-up sleeve tracing a hieroglyph down his forearm—a warm message to her.

Spending on silk shirts and gold weights while the schoolgirl is kept short of clothes and once from a school camp wrote a pleading note because she hadn’t had money to buy toothpaste and was ashamed to keep using other girls’; she must understand her parents are not rich, she must not be indulged.

And then to come home fucked out.

The shower in One-Twenty-One, the dousing with perfume, the careful rearrangement of the hair (still so long, then, she could caress his breast with it)—nothing could disguise sexuality. A sign of life. Without knowing it, she had ringed herself just as she once ringed a photograph.

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