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desires be beaten down?’
    â€˜Are you sure you want to carry on like this in front of the child?’
    â€˜I am not ashamed of what I am saying. There is nothing in it that a child needs to be protected from. If a child can sleep outdoors on the bare earth, then surely he can hear a robust exchange between adults.’
    â€˜Very well, I will give you robust exchange back. What you want from me is something I don’t do.’
    He stares in puzzlement. ‘What I want from you?’
    â€˜Yes. You want me to let you embrace me. We both know what that means: embrace . And I don’t permit it.’
    â€˜I said nothing about embracing you. And what is wrong with embraces anyway, if you are not a nun?’
    â€˜Refusing desires has nothing to do with being or not being a nun. I just don’t do that. I don’t permit it. I don’t like it. I don’t have an appetite for it. I don’t have an appetite for it in itself and I don’t wish to see what it does to human beings. What it does to a man.’
    â€˜What do you mean, what it does to a man ?’
    She glances pointedly at the child. ‘You are sure you want me to go on?’
    â€˜Go on. It is never too early to learn about life.’
    â€˜Very well. You find me attractive, I can see that. Perhaps you even find me beautiful. And because you find me beautiful, your appetite, your impulse, is to embrace me. Do I read the signs correctly, the signs you give me? Whereas if you did not find me beautiful you would feel no such impulse.’
    He is silent.
    â€˜The more beautiful you find me, the more urgent becomes your appetite. That is how these appetites work which you take as your lodestar and blindly follow. Now reflect. What—pray tell me—has beauty to do with the embrace you want me to submit to? What is the connection between the one and the other? Explain.’
    He is silent, more than silent. He is dumbfounded.
    â€˜Go on. You said you would not mind if your godson heard. You said you wanted him to learn about life.’
    â€˜Between a man and a woman,’ he says at last, ‘there sometimes springs up a natural attraction, unforeseen, unpremeditated. The two find each other attractive or even, to use the other word, beautiful. The woman more beautiful than the man, usually. Why the one should follow from the other, the attraction and the desire to embrace from the beauty, is a mystery which I cannot explain except to say that being drawn to a woman is the only tribute that I, my physical self, know how to pay to the woman’s beauty. I call it a tribute because I feel it to be an offering, not an insult.’
    He pauses. ‘Go on,’ she says.
    â€˜That is all I want to say.’
    â€˜That is all. And as a tribute to me—an offering, not an insult—you want to grip me tight and push part of your body into me. As a tribute, you claim. I am baffled. To me the whole business seems absurd—absurd for you to want to perform, and absurd for me to permit.’
    â€˜It is only when you put it that way that it seems absurd. In itself it is not absurd. It cannot be absurd, since it is a natural desire of the natural body. It is nature speaking in us. It is the way things are. The way things are cannot be absurd.’
    â€˜Really? What if I were to say that to me it seems not just absurd but ugly too?’
    He shakes his head in disbelief. ‘You cannot mean that. I myself may seem old and unattractive—I and my desires. But surely you cannot believe that nature itself is ugly.’
    â€˜Yes, I can. Nature can partake of the beautiful but nature can partake of the ugly too. Those parts of our bodies that you modestly do not name, not in your godson’s hearing: do you find them beautiful?’
    â€˜In themselves? No, in themselves they are not beautiful. It is the whole that is beautiful, not the parts.’
    â€˜And these parts that are not