Birth is a rupture, an accident.
I look at myself in the mirror and I don’t recognise the person I see.
She’s twenty pounds lighter, has ill-fitting translucent skin and a line that divides her in two. She has dead eyes. We’re swollen, cut, wet. My body screams. My nipples are scorched nerves. There is a web of taut threads under my breasts that burn and wrap around me, almost strangling me. My ovaries are funnels of hollow pain, starting wide and then intensifying at the point where they end.
My body is pain, a funnel of pain.
Mateo was born six days ago. We’re living in the flat my grandmother Pilar owned when she was alive: Andrés, my mother, the baby, me, and an unbearable humid heat that comes in through the windows and burrows into my body, leaving only the floor tiles untouched. I survive by being two people. A cold mother with apathetic legs who’s lost a lot of blood, and another who gives orders: I’m going to stand up, I’m going to pick up the bucket and I’m going to take it to the kitchen and I’m going to fill it with hot water. I’m going to carry the baby and I’m going to walk ten steps. I’m going to sit down next to the cradle, I’m going to dry him and I’m going to put his head inside his pyjama top. A person who is a useless body, and a person who is a voice of command.
It’s nine o’clock. I’ve already washed and dressed the baby and put him in the bouncer in the living room. I’ve had the same button-up pyjamas on since the day before yesterday. They were Pilar’s, bought in Madrid, old but pretty and comfortable. I walk through the flat carrying huge, overheated breasts. I reach the laundry room. I put the bucket in the sink and I throw Mateo’s dirty pyjamas in the washing machine. Sweat trickles from underneath my breasts and runs in drops down the lines of my belly before reaching my white cotton knickers. The verbs “to wash,” “to pick up,” “to walk,” “to hang up” don’t take long to write, but each one demands an order from the Susana who commands to the Susana who is incapable. It’s exhausting.
I stay in the laundry room, leaning on the washing machine. I hear a noise and sense that the baby is about to start crying. Don’t let him cry don’t let him cry don’t let him cry, I pray-recite. My legs feel anaesthetised. My mother comes from the kitchen with a mug.
“How are you doing today, Susi?”
“Fine, ma.”
The baby is crying. I walk to the sofa next to the bouncer, but I don’t pick him up. I close my eyes. My mother doesn’t pick him up either.
“Have you had breakfast yet? Would you like a coffee? Shall I hand you Mateo?”
“OK.”
My mother unstraps the baby and passes him to me, and then brings me a flask of water and a coffee with milk. I clamp him to my breast. My nipple hurts once more as if it were a scorched nerve, but while I feed, I don’t feel the threads wrapping or strangling me. I close my eyes, I touch his hair, I smell him. He smells of camomile and operating theatre. I love you very much, Materile, I love you very much, I say without speaking. I open my eyes. I look at the yellow wall of the living room and see an imperfection that looks like the right-hand edge of the map of Colombia. Hold on, Susi, hold on, concentrate on something, let’s count. It’s the only time, despite the pain, that I feel connected to something. I hold Mateo with one hand and drink my coffee with the other. It’s boiling and I imagine it running down inside me and heating my legs. Because I’m both cold and hot. Outside, it’s unbearably hot, and inside, my muscles and bones feel cold and abandoned.
“Merce and Cecilia are coming for lunch. Or should I tell them not to, Susi?”
“Yes, better tell them not to.”
After a while I move Mateo to the other side.
“Would you like to come shopping with me?”
“Didn’t we have to take Mateo to the paediatrician?”
“We can take him and go shopping in Carulla on the way back.”
“OK, I’ll get changed and we can go.”
I leave the baby with my mother to burp him. I put on some light blue American Apparel trousers and a pink T-shirt. I’m thin, I don’t recognise myself. It’s quarter to eleven. I pick up the Maxi Cosi, we put the baby in and we strap it on. I’m going to carry the baby and I’m going to walk. I walk to the lift. He weighs a lot, my legs weigh a lot. We hook the Maxi Cosi into the back seat and close the doors, I get in the front. We take the Avenida del Poblado. I can feel myself shivering and regret not bringing my jumper. My mother asks me if she should leave me at the lift or if we should park together. Better stay together, I tell her. When we take the Maxi Cosi out of the car, Mateo starts crying intensely loud. We get into the lift with the screaming baby. There are two women and a lad who looks about fifteen. We press floor ten.
“The baby must be feeling hot.”
“Pick him up.”
“Or he’s hungry.”
“Take him out, poor thing, he needs his mum.”
Interfering cows I can’t handle it what do you know about it I don’t know what to do I can’t handle it shut up. I roll my eyes and stare at them angrily. We step out of the lift. Mateo is crying his head off, we arrive at the clinic, we unstrap him and I try to feed him but he doesn’t latch on. He cries for ten minutes during the consultation, he cries while my mother carries him in the corridor, he cries when the paediatrician picks him up and says he’s a chubby rascal, he cries while they weigh him, he cries while they measure him, he cries when the paediatrician tells me he has a spirited temperament and while we talk about feeding and my weakness. He cries when I try to feed him again. He cries when the paediatrician asks me if I’ve been back to the gynaecologist and I say yes, I’m no longer anaemic but I feel as if I still were. He cries while he explains that there are babies that cry more, that he has a healthy weight and height. He cries in the corridor while I’m paying, I cry when I finally manage to feed him in a little room before getting back in the car.
“Don’t cry while you’re feeding, it’s not good for the baby,” another interfering woman says to me.
My mother takes me by the hand. This time the pain doesn’t abate, it’s a twenty minute funnel of pain. I squeeze her hand. Mateo falls asleep, we put him in the Maxi Cosi, my mother carries him to the car. We don’t talk at all on the way home, and we don’t shop. When we open the apartment door, it smells like Rosalinda is there. She comes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to help.
“Wow, Rosalí, that smells fantastic.”
She takes some onions out of the vegetable drawer.
“Put the boy down, love, and sit and keep me company while I finish the sauce.”
“Coming.”
I pull up a chair. She sits on a wooden bench as if it were the kind of little step that kitchens have in the patios of old country houses, and we talk about when she was working in our beach house in Arboletes and I was fifteen years old. Mateo starts to wake up. I turn to look, my mother takes him on her lap and I hear “Materile, Materile, Materile rile ro.” She’s waving the doll with black and white spots at him. Rosalinda cuts white onions in a plastic bowl without looking. I remember Pilar, three years ago, when the first baby in this family was born, cutting red onions in a plastic bowl without looking in a house in Galicia. My clothes are different, the climate is different, the colours, the faces of Rosalinda and Pilar are different. Rosalinda’s is big, Pilar’s petite. Rosalinda’s knife is big with a white handle, Pilar’s small with a black handle. The bowls are different: today’s is huge and white—you can barely see the onion in the bottom—and Pilar’s was pale blue and small. And even so, the scenes are alike, what I see is almost identical: women who are nearly seventy cutting onions without looking. They know by feel how far to push the knife in, where the vegetable ends and the palm begins, and they stop there. Half chatting to me, half muttering a lullaby. Rosalinda singing, “At your mami’s breast you’re fed and your papi brings you bread.” Pilar singing, “Sleep little baby warm and tight or the vivi may eat you up tonight.” Why do they cut onion the same way? Why do they sing to themselves while they do it? I begin to think that there are things that must come from far away, to think of the lovely and almost poetic thing that is that mesh of transparent, half white, half purple squares that both of them make with their hands. Of the lovely, almost poetic thing that is the short life of those squares that are uprooted and thrown into the void seconds after being created. And that nobody sees.
“Do you know if Miss Mercedes is coming to lunch in the end, love?”
“No, they’re not coming.”
“Ah, are they coming in the evening?”
“I don’t think so.”
“They’re not coming today,” my mother calls out, “Leave food in the microwave just for the two of us.”
Your papi brings you bread, at your mami’s breast you’re fed. The squares that fall into the void seconds after being created. The size of families.
Rosalinda finishes, we stand up. She scrapes into a frying pan with oil the onion, together with the tomato and spring onion that she’s cut on a board, with a sprinkle of salt, a pinch of cumin and a spoonful of tomato sauce. She stirs it with a wooden spoon, rests, stirs again. The kitchen smells delicious and Mateo is calm. It’s a thin slice of happiness. Lunch is rice soup, mince, ripe plantain, cornbread and avocado. My mother and I sit to eat at a round table with five seats. I want to eat, but when I have food in my mouth I want to throw up. Old people must feel like this when they’re not hungry. I’m thinking that Pilar would be sitting to my left if she were still alive. Before dying she used to tell me she would give anything to be hungry. I’m going to eat, I have to eat, just a spoonful. Mateo becomes restless and my mother takes him on her lap. Just a bite, a sip of juice. I cut the avocado in two, take out the stone with a knife, scoop it out of its skin with a spoon, cut into squares and sprinkle on some salt. I have salty grease in my mouth that doesn’t taste of anything else. I put some of the sauce on my cornbread. A tiny bit of mince in the soup. Another spoonful.
“Susi, you need to eat more.”
I look at my mother, she knows I’m not hungry. I look at the clock, it’s two o’clock. I pick Mateo up. Another bite, another sip, another spoonful, more avocado. I stop eating. When I stand up, he starts to fuss. I hand him to Rosalinda while I go to the toilet to pee.
“Must be because he’s hungry.”
“Can’t be hungry, he ate while we were at the paediatrician.”
“So he’s sleepy.”
“I’ll take him, Rosalí, I’ll get him to sleep.”
I will walk and carry him. I will be able to get him to sleep quickly.
“It’s fine, Rosalí, pass him over,” I say while I take Mateo by the arms.
The baby carries on fussing. I lull him. I whisper the song to him that Pilar sang while she cooked, but I change ‘vivi’ for ‘coco,’ we sing ‘coco’ here. I walk towards the bedrooms and sing and cry for exhaustion. Sliplittle bebywar mantight orthe co rru cu cú. In my head I am writing down what is happening to me. I stop singing and start walking like a clown with big slow steps.
Boom the baby calms down. Boom the baby starts crying. I go back to the kitchen.
“Take those clothes off him, love, I bet he’s feeling hot.”
I change the rhythm. I move my hands up and down in small movements bobbing the package up and down. Drops of sweat trickle down. The baby calms down. I sit on the white rocking chair. I’m a cold mother with freezing legs. Now I’m not singing the words of the song but la la la with the same rhythm. Lalalalala lalala lalalalalala lalalala. I remember Kim Thuy’s book in which she says that ‘la’ means different things in Vietnamese depending on how it’s pronounced: ‘la’ is ‘scream,’ ‘be,’ ‘foreigner,’ ‘faint,’ ‘cool.’ Lalalalala lalala lalalalalala lalalala. Scream, be, faint. I feel like I’m fainting. My feet float free in the hot air and the baby falls back asleep. I look at the imperfection on the yellow wall again. I look at the baby’s closed eyes. I think of the lovely, almost poetic thing that is the short life of those squares that are uprooted and thrown into the void seconds after being created. I say it with my eyes: I won’t let you fall. It hurts, my whole body hurts but it’s not your fault, it’s not. And I fall asleep.
Mateo wakes up, cries, I feel the web of taut threads that burn and wrap around me, I clamp him to my breast. My nipples are bleeding. I stretch both my legs and my feet and I start counting my toes and wiggling them as I count. The pain eases. He’s not so hungry, I hold him and burp him and then I put him in the bouncer. He doesn’t do anything. I take out the doll with black and white spots and a tortoise rattle. Materile, Materile, Materile rile ro. I don’t want to stand up. My legs are heavy. I don’t want to stand up, he’s going to cry. Don’t let him cry don’t let him cry don’t let him cry. My mother sits next to him and straightens his socks. I take a photo of him with my phone, he’s wearing a blue and white striped T-shirt and blue trousers, I upload it to Instagram. Mateo in stripes, I write, I delete it. Mateo the sailor, I write, I delete it. Materile, I write. Don’t let him cry. I lie back on the sofa. I’m going to stand up. I drink all the water in the flask. I’m going to stand up. One, two, three.
“Miss Olga, Susi, I’ve left you food there.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
I’m going to stand up. I stand up. I look at the clock, five past six. There are two plates side by side with dinner served. It’s steak, mashed potato and peas.
“Susi, will you be OK on your own?”
“Yes, ma.”
No ma no mo no more. I don’t think I can do it, I’m afraid, but I say yes, and she picks up the keys and she goes out to shop. I am very afraid of staying alone with Mateo. The verbs ‘to bathe,’ ‘to dress,’ ‘to pick up,’ ‘to walk,’ ‘to carry,’ ‘to reach out’ don’t take long to write, but each one demands an order from the Susana who commands. I lay Mateo down by my side on the sofa in his pyjamas and I switch on the TV with the plate of food on my lap. I’m going to stand up, I’m going to carry him, I’m going to feed him. I leave the plate untouched on the kitchen counter, I walk to my room, I lie down on the bed and I feel my nipples burning. I feed him in the dark, the pain doesn’t ease but I don’t cry, I lay him down in his cradle.
I look at my reflection again in the bathroom mirror. My eyes are dead. I can hear Mateo shifting in the cradle. He’s going to cry, he’s going to wake up. He doesn’t wake up. Susana and I are both tired. I close my eyes and I pray-recite Don’t let him wake up don’t let him wake up. I imagine I have the strength to walk, open the window, stand on the terrace wall and throw myself off. I imagine falling and hitting the floor and the floor isn’t concrete but water. I sink into the water and it’s a pool with dark blue tiles and my legs are not heavy. I hear the apartment door opening. I open my eyes, look at her and tell her: “It’s OK Susi, I won’t let you fall.”
Translated by Matthew Shorter
