pers. I saw women stooping, then disappearing
with their arms full of linen.

* * * * *

My baby! My baby!

His father, exultant, held him out to me. I became fully conscious. But
goodness, how ugly he was! The shrivelled face of an old woman, the
profile of a vulture, a forehead covered with plushy mucosities, cheeks
smeared as with the yolk of an egg, hands on the outside exactly like a
bird's and on the inside creased and red. And real nails!

At the fontanelle the pulse beneath the skin throbbed terrifyingly, and
the fuzz on his skull was skimpier than pin-feathers on a fledgling.

I took him in my arms, stiff and long in his swaddling-clothes. His eyes
opened half way and showed a glassy violet with milky gleams.

Our child? We both in turn dropped timid solemn kisses on his downy
cheeks made of a sweet smell, and I dared not say anything.

* * * * *

Well?... The call of the blood, the rejoicing of the flesh, the issue of
love, the instinct, the lurid mother-instinct at last?

No!

XIV

I should like to hold these things fast, for always.

I see them now as they really are, just as I see my son in his present
form. But it is not enough to say: "I see them." I have carefully
preserved all my pictures of him; I want to keep intact the memory of
the heart he gave me.

This is not difficult to tell. Other feelings are too bound up with self
for description. You'd have to explain a person's whole nature to
understand them. Love is indefinable, grief is indefinable, but a
mother's heart can open up like a book. It is uniform and simple, free
from all alloy, and its very infiniteness is like finiteness.

My little boy is near me, awkwardly assaying his first steps in the
garden. Without raising my eyes from my work I watch him and I thank
him.

It is he. Although he changes from day to day, I know his ways by heart:
the big curl in which the sunlight lies coiled, the almost imperceptible
arch of his eyebrows, mere shades of lines, the red pollen blown on the
petals of his cheeks, his profile of curves, his neck of
mother-of-pearl, the spreading fan of his fingers, his unique form which
is unique only to me.

I must rack my brain in order to force into my memory that once he lay
hidden in my warm womb and I carried him as though he were one of my
organs, as though he were a secret, that I carried him as one carries a
joy or a pain. I no l