54

 54

LUISA HAD BEEN CONVINCED that she would be able to hold back her screams during labor, but she had yelled as her body behaved in a way that was at odds with what she knew about it. A band of muscles that had always been quiet in the past now squeezed to make space for the baby’s head, drawing it out of her uterus where it had been protected for months.

She smelled something bittersweet, like prawns boiling in their shells, and all she could feel was that her legs were pointing in different directions and remained rigid as sticks whenever they were moved or bent. Her waters gushed out rhythmically, and near the end they were tinged first with pink, then with red. At that point something hard forced her pelvis open. It was accompanied by a burning sensation, as if from an open wound. Her muscles pushed of their own volition and tried to release themselves in the pushing, and she couldn’t do a thing about it.

She stopped yelling only because they ordered her to stop. They told her she had to focus her energies. She gritted her teeth and groaned. Toward the end she vomited up the water she’d drunk. The obstetrician kept passing a finger over her labia, tight as a drum, saying that she could see the baby’s hair, “black as a raven’s wing.” Another push, and a brief flash of pain accompanied the first actual delivery in sixteen hours: the head emerged. Luisa then allowed herself to remember the home births of her relatives: no equipment, not enough disinfectant, kerosene lamps lit all night, tin stirrups, and mountains of sheets to wash by hand the next day.

She thought she’d done it. The rest of the baby slid out with a shudder like a large fish and she didn’t even notice the placenta: they’d shown it to her while she was thinking that the butcher’s block was the thing she found most like birth, with its wet, pink flesh, rumps and hindquarters, the rubbery bloom of small organs. She flopped back on her pillows and waited for them to restore her baby to her, clean and swaddled. Only the baby wasn’t breathing: perhaps the heart, a problem with its metabolism, or undeveloped lungs.

Anselmo held her close and cried. She found it hard to take in the fact that she now had to halt that convoy of love, germ cells, effort, imagination, vomit, preparations, and ligaments loosened to make room for a little person who had really existed and had had eyebrows, nails, the name they’d chosen for him, and the little blue bottom that she’d spied while he was still alive.

For a long time Luisa had continued to feel the baby hiccuping: regular taps around her navel. She wasn’t brave enough to try again, but neither did she have the courage to escape. Day and night, she fantasized about becoming a nun. At the time, she envied Silvia inside her shell—alone, free, perhaps a little sad but at least not panic-stricken, not pregnant. Silvia thought the same thing—Why should I bother? Why should she bother?—and they told each other so years later.

“And yet,” Silvia added, “look what beautiful children you have.”

“Yes, it turned out well for me in the end.”

“I wouldn’t have made it.”

Luisa had wanted to be sedated for Giulia’s birth so they could pull her out without Luisa’s being aware of it, and instead the same thing happened all over again. But the baby had cried instantly with the irritated bleating of a vexed creature. She was fat and beautiful and plastered with a newborn’s waxy white film, her cheeks rounded as bagpipes. She had grown up and was about to become a young girl. Silvia was gone—dead or alive, she’d decided to leave them. Luisa sat in the kitchen at night, trying to see herself through her daughter’s eyes and wondering what she was teaching her.