Each shamelessly outdoes the other. From the quantity and finished preciseness of the details narrated I infer that the story has been oft told. The least loquacious are the mothers who "have had a lot of them." These have nothing left but a vast, frequently refreshed memory in which their life merges in a blur with the life they have so many times carried beneath their hearts.
Which of them am I to believe? Many have broached the subject to me, many have discussed it, none has told me the secret of being a mother, the word that would reveal, the sign, flashing and disappearing, by which the treasure awaiting me would shine from afar, which would make me understand. I have heard them bemoan the misery of the months before childbirth and the sufferings of childbirth itself. I have heard them boast, with the reverence of fetich-worship, of the care they gave their little ones. But here their maternity stops. I still do not know. I have two months to wait.
I plunge my fingers into the milky mass of the little garments. "Do you," I say to my husband, "see the head of your child underneath this hood? Let us try to imagine...."
He smiles without answering, shaken in his flesh, so lucid and so well prepared for his approaching fatherhood that I feel myself a hundred leagues behind. He, at least, knows why he will love his child, why he already loves it.
As for me, my vision is obscured by the disconcerting pictures drawn by the other women. Perhaps also I am under the ancestral pressure exerted by the long line of my foremothers. Why should I be different? What quality would make me better?
The animal heaviness reasserts its rights. My body is an unwieldy sheath overspread with sleepiness, ramified by thick blood, its cells given over to contented, torpid well-being. My very heart is struck with stupor.
To lie at full length, on my bed beneath the weight of my breasts of rock, no longer to move or think, only to feel at momentary intervals a light stirring, a caress, which gently turns on its self and folds its wings.
XI
I scarcely dare to get up. She knew me in my slenderness of the previous summer, when I took the torrid paths like a goat leaping dangerous mountain tracks. It was from my brisk manner of ready, go! she told me, that she could tell how warm our love was.
We were living in the same inn. The very first day I was struck by the blooming youthfulness of this woman who so skilfully escaped the burden of the forties and constantly trailed a lover, a lover with a vindictive eye and bullish neck and forehead. Perhaps on close inspection you might suspect the fine tracery of wrinkles on her transparent skin. Nevertheless she shone resplendent as we younger women don't know how to shine.