The Cleft by Doris Lessing Page A

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 unlesssome 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 beganwagging 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?’
    â€˜It’s because you are a girl,’ says the little lord and master. ‘I am a boy and you are a girl.’
    â€˜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 .’
    â€˜I want to touch,’ she demands, and this time he leaves his protuberances just within reach, but withdraws them suddenly as her hand approaches.
    â€˜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,