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and
believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a
mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a
daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.
6
    Of course, Tereza
did not know the story of the night when her mother whispered "Be
careful" into the ear of her father. Her guilty conscience was as vague as
original sin. But she did what she could to rid herself of it. Her mother took
her out of school at the age of fifteen, and Tereza went to work as a waitress,
handing over all her earnings. She was willing to do anything to gain her
mother's love. She ran the household, took care of her siblings, and spent all
day Sunday cleaning house and doing the family wash. It was a pity, because she
was the brightest in her class. She yearned for something higher, but in the
small town there was nothing higher for her. Whenever she did the
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    clothes, she kept a
book next to the tub. As she turned the pages, the wash water dripped all over
them.
    At home, there was no such thing as
shame. Her mother marched about the flat in her underwear, sometimes braless
and sometimes, on summer days, stark naked. Her stepfather did not walk about
naked, but he did go into the bathroom every time Tereza was in the bath. Once
she locked herself in and her mother was furious. "Who do you think you
are, anyway? Do you think he's going to bite off a piece of your beauty?"
    (This confrontation shows clearly
that hatred for her daughter outweighed suspicion of her husband. Her
daughter's guilt was infinite and included the husband's infidelities. Tereza's
desire to be emancipated and insist on her rights—like the right to lock
herself in the bathroom—was more objectionable to Tereza's mother than the
possibility of her husband's taking a prurient interest in Tereza.)
    Once her mother decided to go naked
in the winter when the lights were on. Tereza quickly ran to pull the curtains
so that no one could see her from across the street. She heard her mother's
laughter behind her. The following day her mother had some friends over: a
neighbor, a woman she worked with, a local schoolmistress, and two or three
other women in the habit of getting together regularly. Tereza and the
sixteen-year-old son of one of them came in at one point to say hello, and her
mother immediately took advantage of their presence to tell how Tereza had
tried to protect her mother's modesty. She laughed, and all the women laughed
with her. "Tereza can't reconcile herself to the idea that the human body
pisses and farts," she said. Tereza turned bright red, but her mother
would not stop. "What's so terrible about that?" and in answer to her
own question she broke wind loudly. All the women laughed again.
    7
    Tereza's
mother blew her nose noisily, talked to people in public about her sex life,
and enjoyed demonstrating her false teeth. She was remarkably skillful at
loosening them with her tongue, and in the midst of a broad smile would cause
the uppers to drop down over the lowers in such a way as to give her face a
sinister expression.
    Her behavior was but a single grand
gesture, a casting off of youth and beauty. In the days when she had had nine
suitors kneeling round her in a circle, she guarded her nakedness apprehensively,
as though trying to express the value of her body in terms of the modesty she
accorded it. Now she had not only lost that modesty, she had radically broken
with it, ceremoniously using her new immodesty to draw a dividing line through
her life and proclaim that youth and beauty were overrated and worthless.
    Tereza appears to me a
continuation of the gesture by which her mother cast off her life as a young
beauty, cast it far behind her.
    (And if Tereza has a nervous way of
moving, if her gestures lack a certain easy grace, we must not be surprised:
her mother's grand, wild, and self-destructive gesture has left an indelible
imprint on her.)
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    8
    Tereza's
mother demanded justice. She wanted