Second Place

by Rachel Cusk

Not to have been born in a woman’s body was a piece of luck in the first place: he couldn’t see his own freedom because he couldn’t conceive of how elementally it might have been denied him. To beg was a freedom in itself – it implied at least an equality with the state of need. My own experiences of loss, I said, had merely served to show me the pitilessness of nature. The wounded don’t survive in nature: a woman could never throw herself on fate and expect to come out of it intact. She has to connive at her own survival, and how can she be subject to revelation after that?

I saw in a flash that she had nothing at all, and that her intrusive and uninhibited manner was simply her means of survival. She was like one of those climbing plants that has to grow over things and be held up by them, rather than possessing an integral support of her own.

I told her she would always be able to find a white man to be obliterated by, if that was what she decided she wanted.

What I think I represented to him was mortality, because I was a woman he couldn’t obliterate or transfigure with his own desire. I was, in other words, his mother, the woman he had always feared would eat him and take away his form and life just as she had created it.