The smile was

75 The smile was Dannie Abse one thing I waited for always after the shouting after the palaver the perineum stretched to pain the parched voice of the midwife Push! Push! and I can't and the rank sweet smell of the gas and I can't as she whiffed cotton wool inside her head as the hollow stones of gas dragged her down from the lights above to the river-bed, to the real stones. Push! Push! as she floated up again muscles tensed, to the electric till the little head was crowned; and I shall wait again for the affirmation. For it is such: that effulgent, tender, satisfied smile of a woman who, for the first time, hears the child crying the world for the very first time. That agreeable, radiant smile— no man can smile it no man can paint it 76 as it develops without fail, after the gross, physical, knotted, granular, bloody endeavour. Such a pure spirituality, from all that! It occupies the face and commands it. Out of relief you say, reasonably thinking of the reasonable, swinging, lightness of any reprieve, the joy of it, almost helium in the head. So wouldn't you? And truly there's always a torture of the unknown. There's always the dream of pregnant women, blood of the monster in the blood of the child; and we all know of generations lost like words faded on a stone, of minds blank or wild with genetic mud. And couldn't you smile like that? Not like that, no, never, not with such indefinable dulcitude as that. And so she smiles with eyes as brown as a dog's or eyes blue-mad as a doll's it makes no odds whore, beauty, or bitch, it makes no odds illimitable chaste happiness in that smile as new life-in-the-world for the first time cries the world. No man can smile like that. No man can paint it. Da Vinci sought it out yet was far, far, hopelessly. 77 Leonardo, you only made Mona Lisa look six months gone! I remember the smile of the Indian. I told him Fine, finished, you are cured and he sat there smiling sadly. Any painter could paint it the smile of a man resigned saying Thank you, doctor, you have been kind and then, as in melodrama, How long have I to live? The Indian smiling, resigned, all the fatalism of the East. So one starts again, also smiling. All is well you are well, you are cured. And the Indian still smiling his assignations with death still shaking his head, resigned. Thank you for telling me the truth, doctor. Two months? Three months? And beginning again and again whatever I said, thumping the table, however much I reassured him the more he smiled the conspiratorial smile of a damned, doomed man. Now a woman, a lady, a whore, a bitch, a beauty, whatever, the child's face crumpled as she becomes the mother, she smiles differently, ineffably. 78 As different as the smile of my colleague, his eyes reveal it, his ambiguous assignations, good man, good surgeon, whose smile arrives of its own accord from nowhere like flies to a dead thing when he makes the first incision. Who draws a line of blood across the soft, white flesh as if something beneath, desiring violence, had beckoned him; who draws a ritual wound, a calculated wound to heal—to heal, but still a wound— good man, good surgeon, his smile as luxuriant as the smile of Peter Lorre. So is the smile of my colleague, the smile of a man secretive behind the mask. The smile of war. But the smile, the smile of a new mother, what an extraordinary open thing it is. Walking home tonight I saw an ordinary occurrence hardly worth remarking on: 79 an unhinged star, a streaking gas, and I thought how lovely destruction is when it is far. Ruined it slid on the dead dark towards fiction: its lit world disappeared phut, through one punched hole or another, slipped unseen down the back of the sky into another time. Never, not for one single...