Doris Lessing - The Cleft

Have you ever thought how strange it is that you have nipples on those flat places in front there? You can’t call them breasts, can you? Why have nipples at all when they aren’t good for anything? You can’t feed a babe with them, they are useless.

Yes, I am sure you have thought, because you are always noticing things and asking questions. Well, what is your reply, then?

Next, an Old She said we should keep one of the Monsters, one of you, and let it grow and see if it was fit for anything.

It was hard to do because the eagles watched us all the time, and we had to keep the baby Monster out of their sight.

I don’t really like to think of what happened to that babe. Of course I only heard about it all, it was part of the story, it was told again and again by the Memories, and what I am telling you now is only some of what we called the story.

There is a bad feeling about that part of our story. There were disagreements, worse, bad quarrels. It is in the story that there had never been that kind of quarrel before. Some Old Shes wanted not to tell about the first monstrous babe and how it was treated. Others said what was the point of the story if it left bits out? I believe a lot was left out. What we all know is that, first of all, no one wanted to feed the Monster. It was never fed enough and it was always hungry and crying. That meant that the eagles were always hovering about trying to see where we kept the babe. It did get fed, but the one feeding it would tease and torment it as it fed. That first Monster babe had a bad time.

Then one of the Shes said it must stop, either we decided to let it live and look after it, or not, but what was happening now would kill the babe. What did we do to it? The thing you all have in front, the lumps and the tube was what everyone wanted to play with. The little Monster screamed and screamed and its lumps were swollen and became sick and full of matter and bad-smelling water. Then one of the Old Shes said that the Monsters were really like us, except for your thing in front, and your flat breasts. It was like one of our babies. Cut off the thing in front and see what happens – well, they did cut it off and it died. All the time it screamed and howled and when another Monster was born and it was kept, it was a little better treated but I don’t want to tell you everything about how these little Monsters were treated. And I think that some of us became ashamed. We are not cruel people. There is no record of any of us doing cruel things – not until the Monsters were born. The Monster we were trying to bring up strayed outside the cave we kept it in and a watching eagle swept down at once and took it over the hill to the others. How they survived, those babes, we have no idea.

Then there were quite a few Monsters born all at once. Some of the Old Shes wanted us to keep another for a plaything, others not. But the story goes that quite a few of the babes were put out on the Killing Rock at the same time and instead of one eagle, or two, as many came as there were little Monsters, and we watched as the babes were carried off and over the hills. How did those babes live? Babies need milk. There is a tale that one of our young Clefts became sorry for the hungry babes, and went by herself over the hills and found the new babes crawling about and crying, and she fed as many as she could. There is always milk in our breasts. Our breasts are useful. Not like yours.

And she stayed there with the Monsters, but no one knows now what really happened. We want to believe it, I think, because we are ashamed of the rest of the story, but there is also the question, how did those babies live when they were not fed?

There is a tale that two of us were sitting by the sea, watching the waves and sometimes sliding in for a little swim, then they saw two of the fish we call breast fish, because that is what they look like, big puffy jellies, and they have tubes sticking out, like the Monsters, and one of them stuck his tube into the other, and there were little eggs scattering through the water.

That was when the idea first happened to us that the Monsters’ tubes were for making eggs, and if so why and what for?

This tale, I think, is fanciful, but something like that, I suppose, happened.

The Old Shes began to talk about it, because we told them – by ‘we’ there I mean the young ones, who found something intriguing about those tubes and the eggs. Some of the young ones went over the hill and when the Monsters saw them, they grabbed them and put their tubes into them, and that is how we became Hes and Shes, and learned to say I as well as we – but after that there are several stories, not one. Yes, I know what I am telling you doesn’t add up to sense but I told you, there are many stories and who knows which one is true? And some time after that, we, the Clefts, lost the power to give birth without them, the Monsters – without you.

This account, by this Maire, was later than the first document we have. Much later – ages. Ages is a word to be distrusted: it means there is no real knowledge. It is a smooth tale, told many times and even the remorse for cruelty has something well-used about it. No, it’s not untrue, it is useful, as far as it goes, but a lot has been left out. What that is, is in the first document, or fragment, which is probably the very first attempt at ‘the story’. It is crude, unaccomplished, and told by someone in shock. Before the birth of the first ‘Monsters’ nothing had ever happened – not in ages – to this community of first humans. The first Monster was seen as an unfortunate birth fault. But then there was another, and another … and the realisation that it was all going to continue. And the Old Females were in a panic, raging, screaming, punishing the young females who were producing the Monsters, and their treatment of the Monsters themselves – well, it does not make for pleasant reading, Maire’s account, but I cannot bring myself to reproduce that other fragment here. It is too unpleasant. I am a Monster and cannot help identifying with those long-ago tortured infants, the first baby boys. The ingenuity of the cruelties thought up by the Old Females is sickening. Even now, the period of putting the newborn out to die, then keeping a few, and mutilating them – well, it went on much longer than the account above suggests. Very much longer.

Something like a war developed between the eagles and the first females, who could not possibly win. Not only were they unused to fighting, or even aggression, they were unused to physical activity. They lay around on their rocks and they swam. That was their life, had been for – ages. And suddenly here were these great angry birds, who watched every move they made, and tried to wrest the Monsters from them as they were born. Some of the females, the young ones attending to the Monsters, were killed – swept into the sea and then kept from climbing out because the eagles hovered above them and pushed them under until they drowned. This war could not go on for long but it created the females’ first enemy. They hated the eagles, and for a time tried to hurt them by throwing stones, or beating at them with sticks. Not only fear, but elementary forms of attack and defence began in this sleepy (Maire’s word) community of the very first humans, the very first females. And this was in itself enough to throw the Old Females, who ruled them, off balance. They became almost as much to be feared as the eagles, and the young women banded together and threatened their elders with harm. After all, it was they who gave birth to the Monsters, had to feed them, if it was decided this one or that would be kept, or whether to get rid of them. It was they who were given that nasty task. The Old Females lay shrieking or moaning on the rocks, railing at anything and everything.