'Is that what you believe?' asks Mrs Garrard cautiously.
'And God said: Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you,' his mother quotes. 'It's convenient. God told us it was OK.'
Silence again. They are waiting for her to go on. She is, after all, the paid entertainer.
'Norma is right,' says his mother. 'The problem is to define our difference from animals in general, not just from so-called unclean animals. The ban on certain animals – pigs and so forth – is quite arbitrary. It is simply a signal that we are in a danger area. A minefield, in fact. The minefield of dietary proscriptions. There is no logic to a taboo, nor is there any logic to a minefield – there is not meant to be. You can never guess what you may eat or where you may step unless you are in possession of a map, a divine map.'
'But that's just anthropology,' objects Norma from the foot of the table. 'It says nothing about our behaviour today. People in the modern world no longer decide their diet on the basis of whether they have divine permission. If we eat pig and don't eat dog, that's just the way we are brought up. Wouldn't you agree, Elizabeth? It's just one of our folkways.'
Elizabeth. She is claiming intimacy. But what game is she playing? Is there a trap she is leading his mother into?
'There is disgust,' says his mother. 'We may have got rid of the gods but we have not got rid of disgust, which is a version of religious horror.'
'Disgust is not universal,' objects Norma. 'The French eat frogs. The Chinese eat anything. There is no disgust in China.'
His mother is silent.
'So perhaps it's just a matter of what you learned at home, of what your mother told you was OK to eat and what was not.'
'What was clean to eat and what was not,' his mother murmurs.
'And maybe' – now Norma is going too far, he thinks, now she is beginning to dominate the conversation to an extent that is totally inappropriate – 'the whole notion of cleanness versus uncleanness has a completely different function, namely, to enable certain groups to self-define themselves, negatively, as elite, as elected. We are the people who abstain from A or B or C, and by that power of abstinence we mark ourselves off as superior: as a superior caste within society, for instance. Like the Brahmins.'
There is a silence.
'The ban on meat that you get in vegetarianism is only an extreme form of dietary ban,' Norma presses on; 'and a dietary ban is a quick, simple way for an elite group to define itself. Other people's table habits are unclean, we can't eat or drink with them.'
Now she is getting really close to the bone. There is a certain amount of shuffling, there is unease in the air. Fortunately, the course is over – the red snapper, the fettucine – and the waitresses are among them removing the plates.
'Have you read Gandhi's autobiography, Norma?' asks his mother.
'No.'
'Gandhi was sent off to England as a young man to study law. England, of course, prided itself as a great meat-eating country. But his mother made him promise not to eat meat. She packed a trunk full of food for him to take along. During the sea voyage he scavenged a little bread from the ship's table and for the rest ate out of his trunk. In London he faced a long search for lodgings and eating houses that served his kind of food. Social relations with the English were difficult because he could not accept or return hospitality. It wasn't until he fell in with certain fringe elements of English society – Fabians, theosophists, and so forth – that he began to feel at home. Until then he was just a lonely little law student.'
'What is the point, Elizabeth?' says Norma. 'What is the point of the story?'
'Just that Gandhi's vegetarianism can hardly be conceived as the exercise of power. It condemned him to the margins of society. It was his particular genius to incorporate what he found on those margins into his political philosophy.'
'In any event,' interjects the blond man, 'Gandhi is not a good example. His vegetarianism was hardly committed. He was a vegetarian because of the promise he made to his mother. He may have kept his promise, but he regretted and resented it.'
'Don't you think that mothers can have a good influence on their children?' says Elizabeth Costello.
There is a moment's silence. It is time for him, the good son, to speak. He does not.
'But your own vegetarianism, Mrs Costello,' says President Garrard, pouring oil on troubled waters: 'it comes out of moral conviction, does it not?'
'No, I don't think so,' says his mother. 'It comes out of a desire to save my soul.'
Now there truly is a silence, broken only by the clink of plates as the waitresses set baked Alaskas before them.
'Well, I have a great respect for it,' says Garrard. 'As a way of life.'
'I'm wearing leather shoes,' says his mother. 'I'm carrying a leather purse. I wouldn't have overmuch respect if I were you.'
