Elizabeth Costello полностью

I smiled and tried to reassure him and took up my pose again, and he went back to his easel, and all was as before, except that I could see he was not painting any more, just standing there with the brush drying in his hand. So I thought – at last I come to the point – I thought, What the hell, and I loosened the wrap and shrugged it off my shoulders and took off my brassiere and hung it on the back of the chair and said, 'How's that, Aidan?'

I paint with my penis – didn't Renoir say that, Renoir of the plump, creamy-skinned ladies? Avec ma verge, feminine noun. Well, I thought to myself, let's see if we can wake Mr Phillips's verge out of its deep sleep. And I gave him my profile again, while the pigeons went on in the trees as if nothing were happening.

Whether it worked, whether the spectacle of me in the seminude rekindled anything in him, I cannot say. But I could feel the full weight of his gaze on me, on my breasts, and, frankly, it was good. I was forty then, I had two children behind me, they were not the breasts of a young woman, but it was good nevertheless, I thought so and think so still, in that place of withering away and dying. A blessing.

Then after a while, as the shadows in the garden lengthened and it grew cool, I made myself decent again. 'Goodbye, Aidan, God bless,' I said; and he wrote 'Thank you' on his pad and showed it to me, and that was that. I do not think he expected me to come back the next Saturday, and I did not. Whether he finished the painting by himself I don't know. Perhaps he destroyed it. He certainly did not show it to Mother.

Why am I telling you this story, Blanche? Because I connect it with the conversation you and I had at Marianhill about the Zulus and the Greeks and the true nature of the humanities. I do not want to give up on our dispute yet; I do not want to vacate the field.

The episode I am telling you about, the passage in Mr Phillips's living room, so minor in itself, has puzzled me for years; it is only now, after getting back from Africa, that I think I can explain it.

Of course there was an element of triumph in the way I behaved, an element of boasting, of which I am not proud: the potent woman teasing the waning man, showing her body off yet keeping him at a distance. Cock-teasing - do you remember cock-teasing from the old days?

But there was more to it than that. It was so out of character for me. Where did I get the idea, I kept wondering? Where did I learn that pose, gazing calmly into the distance with my robe hanging about my waist like a cloud and my divine body on show? From the Greeks, I now realize, Blanche: from the Greeks and from what generations of Renaissance painters made of the Greeks. As I sat there I was not myself, or not just myself. Through me a goddess was manifesting herself, Aphrodite or Hera or perhaps even Artemis. I was of the immortals.

And that is not the end of it. I used the word blessing a moment ago. Why? Because what was going on revolved around my breasts, that I was sure of, around breasts and breast-milk. Whatever else they did, those antique Grecian goddesses did not exude, whereas I was exuding, figuratively speaking: I was exuding into Mr Phillips's room, I felt it and I would bet he felt it too, long after I had taken my leave.

The Greeks do not exude. The one who exudes is Mary of Nazareth. Not the shy virgin of the Annunciation but the mother we see in Correggio, the one who delicately raises her nipple with her fingertips so that her baby can suck; who, secure in her virtue, boldly uncovers herself under the painter's gaze and thence under our gaze.

Imagine the scene in Correggio's studio that day, Blanche. With his brush the man points: 'Lift it up, so. No, not with the hand, just with two fingers.' He crosses the floor, shows her. 'So.' And the woman obeys, doing with her body as he commands. Other men watching all the while from the shadows: apprentices, fellow painters, visitors.

Who knows who she was, his model that day: a woman from the streets? the wife of a patron? The atmosphere in the studio electric, but with what? Erotic energy? The penises of all those men, their verges, tingling? Undoubtedly. Yet something else in the air too. Worship. The brush pauses as they worship the mystery that is manifested to them: from the body of the woman, life flowing in a stream.

Does Zululand have anything to match that moment, Blanche? I doubt it. Not that heady mix of the ecstatic and the aesthetic. It happens only once in the history of mankind, in Renaissance Italy, when immemorial Christian images and observances are invaded by the humanists' dream of antique Greece.