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two or from a basic situation. Tomas was
born of the saying "Einma! ist keinmal." Tereza was born of
the rumbling of a stomach.
    The first time she went to Tomas's
flat, her insides began to rumble. And no wonder: she had had nothing to eat
since breakfast but a quick sandwich on the platform before boarding the train.
She had concentrated on the daring journey ahead of her and forgotten about
food. But when we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it. She
felt terrible standing there in front of Tomas listening to her belly speak
out. She felt like crying. Fortunately, after the first ten seconds Tomas put
his arms around her and made her forget her ventral voices.
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    Tereza
was therefore born of a situation which brutally reveals the irreconcilable
duality of body and soul, that fundamental human experience.
    A long time ago, man would listen
in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what
they were. He was unable to identify himself with so alien and unfamiliar an
object as the body. The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something
which looked, listened, feared, thought, and marveled; that something, that
remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.
    Today, of course, the body is no
longer unfamiliar: we know that the beating in our chest is the heart and that
the nose is the nozzle of a hose sticking out of the body to take oxygen to the
lungs. The face is nothing but an instrument panel registering all the body
mechanisms: digestion, sight, hearing, respiration, thought.
    Ever since man has learned to give
each part of the body a name, the body has given him less trouble. He has also
learned that the soul is nothing more than the gray matter of the brain in
action. The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific
terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice.
    But just make someone who has
fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul,
that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.
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    Tereza
tried to see herself through her body. That is why, from girlhood on, she would
stand before the mirror so often. And because she was afraid her mother would
catch her at it, every peek into the mirror had a tinge of secret vice.
    It was not vanity that drew her to
the mirror; it was amazement at seeing her own "I." She forgot she
was looking at the instrument panel of her body mechanisms; she thought she saw
her soul shining through the features of her face. She forgot that the nose was
merely the nozzle of a hose that took oxygen to the lungs; she saw it as the
true expression of her nature.
    Staring at herself for long
stretches of time, she was occasionally upset at the sight of her mother's
features in her face. She would stare all the more doggedly at her image in an
attempt to wish them away and keep only what was hers alone. Each time she
succeeded was a time of intoxication: her soul would rise to the surface of her
body like a crew charging up from the bowels of a ship, spreading out over the
deck, waving at the sky and singing in jubilation.
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    She
took after her mother, and not only physically. I sometimes have the feeling
that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother's, much as the
course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the
player's arm movement.
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    Indeed, was she not
the principal culprit determining her mother's fate? She, the absurd encounter
of the sperm of the most manly of men and the egg of the most beautiful of women?
Yes, it was in that fateful second, which was named Tereza, that the botched
long-distance race, her mother's life, had begun.
    Tereza's mother
never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything.
Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a
woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen