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The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana :: Эко Умберто
Страница: 60 из 286I instinctively looked around for peach trees, but I saw none. Strange, I had read in some novel that between the rows-but you have to walk barefoot among them, your heels calloused since childhood-are yellow peaches that grow only in vineyards and split in half at the pressure of your thumb, the pit popping out almost by itself, as clean as if it had been chemically treated, except for an occasional fat little worm of white pulp left hanging by an atom. You can eat them almost without noticing the velvet of their skin, which makes you shiver from tongue to groin. For an instant, I felt that shiver in my groin.
I hunkered down in the great midday silence-broken only by the voices of a few birds and the stridulations of cicadas-and I defecated.
Silly season. He read on , seated calm above his own rising smell. Human beings love the perfume of their own excrement but not the odor of other people’s. It is, after all, part of our bodies.
I was feeling an ancient satisfaction. The calm motion of the sphincter, among all that green, seemed to summon up my muddled past. Or was it an instinct of the species? I have so little that is individual and so much that is specific (I have the memory of humanity, not of a human being) that perhaps I was simply enjoying a pleasure that went back to Neanderthal man. His memory must have been worse than mine-he did not know the first thing about Napoleon.
When I finished, it occurred to me that I should clean myself with some leaves; that must have been an automatism. But I had the newspaper with me, and I ripped out the page with the TV schedule (it was six months old, after all, and in any case we have no TV in Solara).
I stood back up and looked down at my feces. A lovely snail-shell architecture, still steaming. Borromini. My bowels must be in good shape, because everyone knows you have nothing to worry about unless your feces are too soft or downright liquid.
I was seeing my own shit for the first time (in the city you sit on the bowl, then flush the toilet right away, without looking). I was now calling it shit, which I think is what people call it. Shit is the most personal and private thing we have. Anyone can get to know the rest- your facial expression, your gaze, your gestures. Even your naked body: at the beach, at the doctor’s, making love. Even your thoughts, since usually you express them, or else others guess them from the way you look at them or appear embarrassed.
I hunkered down in the great midday silence-broken only by the voices of a few birds and the stridulations of cicadas-and I defecated.
Silly season. He read on , seated calm above his own rising smell. Human beings love the perfume of their own excrement but not the odor of other people’s. It is, after all, part of our bodies.
I was feeling an ancient satisfaction. The calm motion of the sphincter, among all that green, seemed to summon up my muddled past. Or was it an instinct of the species? I have so little that is individual and so much that is specific (I have the memory of humanity, not of a human being) that perhaps I was simply enjoying a pleasure that went back to Neanderthal man. His memory must have been worse than mine-he did not know the first thing about Napoleon.
When I finished, it occurred to me that I should clean myself with some leaves; that must have been an automatism. But I had the newspaper with me, and I ripped out the page with the TV schedule (it was six months old, after all, and in any case we have no TV in Solara).
I stood back up and looked down at my feces. A lovely snail-shell architecture, still steaming. Borromini. My bowels must be in good shape, because everyone knows you have nothing to worry about unless your feces are too soft or downright liquid.
I was seeing my own shit for the first time (in the city you sit on the bowl, then flush the toilet right away, without looking). I was now calling it shit, which I think is what people call it. Shit is the most personal and private thing we have. Anyone can get to know the rest- your facial expression, your gaze, your gestures. Even your naked body: at the beach, at the doctor’s, making love. Even your thoughts, since usually you express them, or else others guess them from the way you look at them or appear embarrassed.