Alain meditates on the navel

Photograph by Eric Ogden

It was the month of June, the morning sun was emerging from the clouds, and Alain was walking slowly down a Paris street. He observed the young girls: every one of them showed her naked navel between trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short. He was captivated, captivated and even disturbed: it was as if their seductive power resided no longer in their thighs, their buttocks, or their breasts but in that small round hole at the center of the body.

This provoked him to reflect: if a man (or an era) sees the thighs as the center of female seductive power, how does one describe and define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer: the length of the thighs is the metaphoric image of the long, fascinating road (which is why the thighs must be long) that leads to erotic achievement. Indeed, Alain said to himself, even in mid-coitus the length of the thighs endows woman with the romantic magic of the inaccessible.

If a man (or an era) sees the buttocks as the center of female seductive power, how does one describe and define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer: brutality, high spirits, the shortest road to the goal, a goal that is all the more exciting for being double.

If a man (or an era) sees the breasts as the center of female seductive power, how does one describe and define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer: sanctification of woman, the Virgin Mary suckling Jesus, the male sex on its knees before the noble mission of the female sex.

But how does one define the eroticism of a man (or an era) that sees female seductive power as centered in the middle of the body, in the navel?

So: ambling along the streets, he would often think about the navel, untroubled at repeating himself, and even strangely obstinate about doing so, for the navel woke in him a distant memory: the memory of his last encounter with his mother.

He was ten at the time. He and his father were alone on vacation, in a rented villa with a garden and a swimming pool. It was the first time that she had come to see them after an absence of several years. They closed themselves into the villa, she and her former husband. For miles around, the atmosphere was stifling from it. How long did she stay? Probably not more than an hour or two, during which time Alain tried to entertain himself in the pool. He had just climbed out when she paused there to say her goodbyes. She was alone. What did they say to each other? He doesn’t know. He remembers only that she was sitting on a garden chair and that he, in his still-wet bathing trunks, stood facing her. What they said is forgotten, but one moment is fixed in his memory, a concrete moment, sharply etched: from her chair, she gazed intently at her son’s navel. He still feels that gaze on his belly. A gaze that was difficult to understand: it seemed to him to express an inexplicable mix of compassion and contempt; the mother’s lips had taken the shape of a smile (a smile of compassion and contempt together); then, without rising from the chair, she leaned toward him and, with her index finger, touched his navel. Immediately afterward, she stood up, kissed him (did she really kiss him? probably, but he is not sure), and was gone. He never saw her again.

A woman steps out of her car

A small car moves along the road beside a river. The chilly morning air makes even more forlorn the charmless terrain, somewhere between the end of a suburb and open country, where houses grow scarce and no pedestrians are to be seen. The car stops at the side of the road; a woman gets out—young, quite beautiful. A strange thing: she pushes the door shut so negligently that the car must not be locked. What is the meaning of that negligence, so improbable these days with thieves about? Is the woman so distracted?

No, she doesn’t seem distracted; on the contrary, determination is visible on her face. This woman knows what she wants. This woman is pure will. She walks some hundred yards along the road, toward a bridge over the river, a rather high, narrow bridge, forbidden to vehicles. She steps onto it and heads toward the far bank. Several times she looks around, not like a woman expected by someone but to be sure that there is no one expecting her. Midway across the bridge, she stops. At first glance she appears to be hesitating, but, no, it’s not hesitation or a sudden flagging of determination; on the contrary, it’s a pause to sharpen her concentration, to make her will steelier yet. Her will? To be more precise: her hatred. Yes, the pause that looked like hesitation is actually an appeal to her hatred to stand by her, to support her, not to desert her for an instant.

She lifts a leg over the railing and flings herself into the void. At the end of her fall, she slams brutally against the hardness of the water’s surface and is paralyzed by the cold, but after a few long seconds she lifts her face, and since she is a good swimmer all her automatic responses surge forward against her will to die. She plunges her head under again, forces herself to inhale water, to block her breathing. Suddenly, she hears a shout. A shout from the far bank. Someone has seen her. She understands that dying will not be easy, and that her greatest enemy will be not her good swimmer’s irrepressible reflex but a person she had not figured on. She will have to fight. Fight to rescue her death.

She kills

She looks over toward the shout. Someone has leaped into the river. She considers: who will be quicker, she, in her resolve to stay underwater, to take in water, to drown herself, or he, the oncoming figure? When she is half-drowned, with water in her lungs and thus weakened, won’t she be all the easier prey for her savior? He will pull her toward the bank, lay her out on the ground, force the water out of her lungs, apply mouth-to-mouth, call the rescue squad, the police, and she will be saved and ridiculed forevermore.

“Stop! Stop!” the man shouts.

Everything has changed. Instead of diving down beneath the water, she raises her head and breathes deeply to collect her strength. He is already in front of her. It’s a young fellow, a teenager, who hopes to be famous, to have his picture in the papers. He just keeps repeating, “Stop! Stop!” He’s already reaching a hand toward her, and she, rather than evading it, grasps it, grips it tight, and pulls it (and him) down toward the depths of the river. Again he cries, “Stop!” as if it were the only word he can speak. But he will not speak it again. She holds on to his arm, draws him toward the bottom, then stretches the whole length of her body along the boy’s back to keep his head underwater. He fights back, he thrashes, he has already inhaled water, he tries to strike the woman, but she stays lying firmly on top of him; he cannot lift his head to get air, and after several long, very long, seconds he ceases to move. She holds him like that for a while; it is as if, exhausted and trembling, she were resting, laid out along him. Then, convinced that the man beneath her will not stir again, she lets go of him and turns away, toward the riverbank she came from, so as not to preserve within her even the shadow of what has just occurred.