The Belly of Aphrodite
by Alana Friend Lettner
I was eighteen and living in a small flat in Argenteuil, a forlorn-looking suburb of Paris that had, in a past life, been a favourite place of Monet and Renoir. I was staying with a woman who, over e-mail and across the Atlantic, had expressed a willingness to learn English, but who demonstrated an utter indifference to me—her teenaged instructor—once I arrived. Her name was Anaïs, and though she seemed much older than I was, I think she was actually only twenty-five. She worked for a large perfume company in Paris and left me alone early each morning to begin her long commute by car into the congestion of the city, where she worked all day. I’d assumed that by inviting a young stranger into her home for six weeks, Anaïs was also inviting me to occupy a particular position in her life, a position at its centre. Like a new sun suddenly appearing in her private cosmos, I believed that my arrival would impose a new gravity, altering the course of her usual orbit. But Anaïs did not seem to desire alteration. Or at least not from me: a few days into my stay with her, she found a boyfriend, and so I was often alone all night, too.
Every morning around ten o’clock I walked the short distance from the flat to the TGV station and caught the train to the Gare Saint-Lazare. My first day in Paris I was too intimidated by the metro—its incomprehensible, arterial map—to take it anywhere, and so I spent hours circling the train station, as if following the hands of an inscrutable clock around an arbitrary perimeter. Eventually I became an expert at the metro, armed with a guidebook my mother had bought for me which I had openly scorned upon receiving, but that I would end up counting as one of my most treasured possessions. So it is with mothers and their children. Too insecure to speak French, I opted for activities that offered little opportunity for conversation, spending my hours alternately at the gardens and the art galleries. I loved the gardens best for their proliferations of flowers and fountains, but I considered the galleries a duty. I found the experience of viewing art both over- and under-whelming. Overwhelming because there was so much of it, underwhelming because I expected revelation and was, more often than not, disappointed by my lack of reaction. After spending an afternoon in the tiny, subterranean Salvador Dali museum in Montmartre, I wrote in my journal: So much of it escapes me. I feel like when I look at a piece, I’m only seeing a quarter of what is there. I need to grow more eyes!
In the galleries, looking at art, I wanted so badly to be genuine in my emotions and searched for evidence of sincerity everywhere in myself. Perhaps it goes without saying that any possibility of sincerity was intercepted by this relentless self-consciousness. I noticed an unusual colour and heard myself sigh; I lingered in front of a preliminary sketch and registered my interest in the process. I tried to emulate how other people moved through the galleries, how they first approached a canvas from a distance and then moved closer, observing some minute detail, only to step back again as if confirming that they had, in fact, gained a critical perspective. This dance of approaches and retreats reminded me of a series of little waves breaking against a shore. I often wondered what the effect of so much looking had on the paintings themselves, whether being subjected to such prolonged observation might actually hasten their erosion, or whether paintings—like pianos or houses—benefit from use. I admired especially the people who sat on the benches in the middle of the room, as if taking rest was the ultimate expression of deep feeling. I imagined that these people were so moved by what they had seen that they had become paralyzed, maybe even permanently, and though I am certain that this could not have been possible, I never once saw any of them stand up again, no matter how long I watched them, waiting.
In consultation with my guidebook, I made a list of the important places in Paris where art was housed and endeavoured to visit them all, crossing them off as I went along. I went to the Musée d’Orsay, to the little Picasso museum in the 3rd arrondissement, to the Musée Rodin. I went twice to the Musée de l’Orangerie to see Monet’s water lilies on the walls of the oval rooms, though I can no longer remember what I saw in those paintings that compelled my return, and no reactions about these visits exist in my journal. I also went to the churches, art galleries of the religious. I hated Notre-Dame, with its permitted use of flash photography and its ceaseless, noisy crowds; this was years before it caught fire and was closed to the public for restoration. By contrast, I loved Sacré-Coeur for its darkness and silence and atmosphere of reverence that verged on danger; at any moment I expected all the people kneeling in prayer to turn around and look at me—already deflowered and eager to repeat the experience—until I burst into flames. Sitting in the pews I had an overwhelming urge to touch myself, as if doing so would in fact stimulate God Himself, He whose anger is so easily aroused by the wilful bodies of young women. But also, confusingly, there has been no other time in my life that I have desired God’s love more than as I sat among His worshippers, imagining putting my hands—instruments of prayer, of ascendence—up my dress.
And so it was not as if I was never moved. But it was in the Louvre that I felt myself moved without willing it; there was, for once, an absence of commentary. Instead of the usual seriousness with which I approached most other artworks, I experienced an involuntary rush of elation. It was a particular work of art and figuration of beauty: it was the Venus de Milo rendered from two blocks of Parian marble.
Estimates suggest that the Venus de Milo was sculpted sometime around 100 BC. I stood in front of her in 2010 AD. In those intervening two millennia, one version of idealized feminine beauty had been supplanted by another. Unlike the conventionally beautiful women of my time, Venus was large, big-boned, thick-thighed. Even without the platform upon which she stood, she measured over six feet tall. Her hair, I noticed, was styled like mine on days when I could not be bothered to wash it, the front strands pulled back and over the ears, pinned at the nape of the neck. Her face especially suggested a different spectrum of aesthetics: she had neither the chiseled jaw nor the high cheekbones I was accustomed to seeing on models but rather a slight roundness to all her features, with the exception of her nose, which protruded dramatically in profile. She looked, actually, a little old.
But the belly: the belly was a revelation. Unlike the bellies of modernity, the classical belly was actually there. The belly was present. And the belly was my belly: small, not significant proportionally, protruding from the lower abdomen subtly, a little cup of butter. Since puberty I had considered my belly to be the main hindrance to my achievement of beauty. I was always looking at my belly in the mirror to see if it had disappeared; I was always hiding my belly with my clothes. I thought about my belly all the time: before and during and after every meal or shower or party, sitting in chairs or walking down the street or walking around my own apartment. Despite exercise and stringent eating habits that verged on disordered, my belly never went away—where, exactly, would a belly go?—and though my perceived excess was probably some five pounds at most, my greatest grief was that I appeared to be so close to an acceptable body and yet I only just failed, and failed perpetually. It was so boring, thinking about my belly, and yet I could not stop. I did not understand that in my obsession with its disappearance, there was in fact no part of my body I was more attached to or that defined me more than my belly. As with any true obsession, I hid it from everyone I knew and persevered in my life’s great performance of a person without inhibitions.
The Venus de Milo is popularly believed to be Aphrodite, a goddess. I stood in front of Her, my belly immortalized in marble. I experienced, then, the lifting of a veil. The presence of the belly exposed a cultural falsehood that I’d been fed all of my adolescent life: with a shock, I understood that the perceived beauty of a body was neither universal nor ahistorical. In fact, beauty had a history of which I had never known, a history in which a belly like mine had once been deemed worthy of statuary. In Paris, at the Louvre, my belly was recognized. It was seen. It was not being airbrushed or sucked in or starved off. I was looking at Aphrodite and I was looking at myself. I was, for the first time since my arrival in Paris, paying attention not from a feeling of obligation but of desire.
I felt like a pilgrim who, having traveled an incomprehensible distance through hostile lands, arrives at the holy site to be healed of her affliction. O Aphrodite, lay thy hands on me. In reality I was an eighteen- year-old girl with a savings account and access to air travel, supplicating at the feet of a statue best known for Her missing arms. I was so young and so willing to be transformed. But I was also not yet able to trust in the strength of my revelations. Before long the Louvre guards—whose severe expressions could be interpreted as either devotion to, or disdain for, their professional duty—indicated that my time with Aphrodite was over. So, too, my time with myself: it would be many years until I saw my own beauty again with such clarity, as if the cost of this moment of vividness was a period of blindness, like looking too long at a point of light.
And so I left Her, as all other tourists did and do, leaving no votive offerings. I took the train back to Argenteuil. The route had, by then, become familiar: whenever the train passed over the Seine I knew my stop was close. When I got back to the flat I found Anaïs home and cooking dinner for us. After many days alone, this gesture of inclusion felt as intimate as if she had knifed open the palm of her hand and suggested that we take a blood oath. I stood in the kitchen and tried to make conversation with her in French, exchanging my humiliation for the chance at friendship; she asked me to pass her le persil. Just as the soup came to a boil, and as the ensuing silence became unbearable, I heard a motorcycle pull up outside. I realized my mistake: dinner was not for me but for the boyfriend. Though I, too, had hunger.
*
Several years after my time in Argenteuil, I came across a theory regarding the Venus de Milo’s arms, the mystery of Her missing gesture. During the initial archaeological excavation, a marble hand was discovered alongside Her body. This hand holds a round object thought by some to be a fruit: the Apple of Discord. In the myth of the Judgment of Paris, Eris, goddess of strife, brings a golden apple as a gift to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. In fact, Eris has not actually been invited. Seeking recompense for this exclusion, the apple is a vengeful gift. The fruit bears the provocative inscription to the fairest, which incites an argument among some of the wedding’s guests—the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite each believe herself to be the apple’s rightful recipient. The struggle between these divine women to assert a hierarchy of feminine beauty eventually leads to the Trojan War.
And so the absence of Aphrodite’s arms, hands, and whatever flawed mythology of female vanity they may have held brings me a sense of relief. It is as if by their removal She has been exempted from making any kind of argument for beauty. She simply stands there, towering, a body at rest.
Yet their absence also saddens me. For She has no hands, no fingers.
Photo Credit: Aaron Friend Lettner
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Photo Credit: Kat Merks
Alana Friend Lettner is a writer and poet whose work explores the convergence of ecology, embodiment, and the ethics of relation. Her essays have been shortlisted for the Malahat Review’s Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, the Fiddlehead’s Creative Nonfiction Contest, and a Digital Publishing Award by the National Media Awards Foundation. She has been published in the Malahat Review, the Tyee, and PRISM international, among others.