The Beast Read Online Free Page B

beautiful, and Venezuela had been beautiful … She had had so much beauty in her life—Mirko being the most beautiful thing of all—but what had happened to it? What good had it done her? None. None at all. It had just served to conceal the beast who was always waiting to spring out and destroy. And perhaps that was the real reason why, beautiful though she found Mirko’s paintings—strange, almost abstract yet deeply real landscapes, though of no land ever seen by man—she couldn’t entirely take them seriously; couldn’t help viewing them with an ironic eye. For they were only beautiful, and she wanted something more. She expected something more of her son. She wanted beauty, yes; but she wanted beauty that didn’t conceal the beast. She wanted a beauty that included the beast; that showed it in all its loathsome ugliness, in all its bloody foulness, in all its horror. She wanted to see a very portrait of the beast; yet a portrait that, with its beauty, transformed the horror and made it not the whole, nor even the essential subject of the picture, but merely a condition of it. An appalling condition, maybe; but a condition that could be accepted—indeed had to be accepted—and a condition that by being accepted, became if not harmless, at least bearable. Yes, that was what shewanted of her son’s paintings, and that was what she didn’t, couldn’t see in them. They were lovely landscapes; but they were landscapes without the beast. And it wasn’t enough.
    What was going to happen to them both, she wondered.
    It was only much later that night, as she lay awake in her bed still trying to answer this question, that an idea came to her. It was an absurd idea, a ridiculous idea—and at first she tried to dismiss it from her mind as the pathetic fantasy of an unhappy woman. But then, as she thought about it more and more, it more and more took hold of her, until she was positively trembling, shaking, sweating with it in the darkness. Yes, of course it was ridiculous, of course it was absurd—but it was so very, so absolutely right that it was somehow inevitable.
    She had told Mirko’s father that she was dead; and she had, in a way, been right. Only now, now she was going to resurrect herself. Now, for the sake of her son—in order that he might do what she longed for him to do, and get away from her baleful, disbelieving presence—she was going, once again, to live …
    She started the next day; and for the following six months she kept at it. And it involved, this return to life, the eating of the bare minimum to keep herself, just, on her feet, and of working, though starved as she was it cost her twice the effort it formerly had, as much as she possibly could; drumming up any and every sort of order and commission from her regular clients and friends. She ate nothing to be thin again; and she worked hard in order to have enough money to pay, at the end of six months, for plastic surgery to remove the stretched and hanging flaps of skin from a body that no longer had the fat to fill them.She went at it with a passion, reducing all her thoughts and energies to this one aim, of being thin again; and with such a passion that Mirko, though he guessed, more or less, what she was doing—and though he attributed her motives to wounded vanity after his father’s visit— somehow drew back from her, and left her alone with her obsession; and behaved, with one or two exceptions, like an awed little boy waiting, throughout a long religious ceremony, for the sacrifice he knew would come at the end.
    It wasn’t easy for her, naturally; apart from the physical discomfort, she had periods—aggravated by the lack of food—of extreme depression; whole days when she would despise herself for what she was doing, and when she longed to fill herself with, and let herself drown in, a torrent of sugar and chocolate and sweet things. Yet she never, not even once, gave in; and in spite of her depressions she was never, really,