Читать книгу Undressing Emmanuelle: A memoir - Sylvia Kristel - Страница 18

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‘I hate penetration! Do you understand?’

My mother is drunk. She has taken me by the shoulders and is staring at me fixedly, repeating: ‘I hate penetration. I can’t stand your father coming back from hunting or wherever, reeking of alcohol, sweat and blood, slipping into my bed while I sleep and wanting to penetrate me. I’m sleeping, tired, and he is all dirty and excited and wants to penetrate me. I don’t want it, I can’t do it. I’m too tight, do you understand?!’

‘No, I don’t understand, Mummy.’

‘You do, you do understand! And anyway, there isn’t just penetration, there are other things you can do …’

I wriggle out of her arms, put my hands over my ears and shout, as I run away: ‘I don’t understand! I don’t understand what you’re talking about, so stop talking to me like this, leave me alone, Mummy!’

When she is drunk, lost and abandoned, when my father has gone off, when she has refused herself to him, my mother talks to me without any concept of the child I still am. She is confiding in a human being, perhaps the closest one to her, confessing her pain. I run away. I cannot hear these adult words, nor contemplate that my father and mother can no longer stand each other.

My mother insists that she has never made love with my father. She denies any physical relationship, any contact. She doesn’t know how we were born; not from her body in any case.

I am the eldest. I have two years on Marianne and four on my brother, but I still can’t remember my mother pregnant. Perhaps she hid her round belly under artfully loose homemade dresses? She must have bound her belly, smoothing it out like a mouldable paste, moulding us too, rejecting this evidence of the other’s body, this visible proof of her penetration, her lack of restraint. I have no memory of childbirth, or preparations, or a wait, or her absence; just squalling, ugly newborns who scared me and were presented by Aunt Alice as holy marvels.