Click here<\/a> to see Charlotte Coombe read from the book.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n <\/p>\n
The problem was the kids, that\u2019s what Pablo told the therapist.<\/p>\n
Five years earlier, Luc\u00eda had paid for a very expensive session for him.<\/p>\n
Or rather, it wasn\u2019t the kids, he corrected himself: it was his wife\u2019s relationship with them. She\u2019d been so obsessed with being a mother that, as part of the fantasy, she imagined her children as parts of her body. After giving birth, she morphed into a person with two increasingly heavy appendages, which ended up making her neither happy nor unhappy. Pablo remembered spying on her a few times, while she played with them in their room; or in the kitchen, as she fed them that thick vegetable mush, with a look of suppressed impatience. He spied on her to find out if she perhaps regretted having them. She probably did, but she had the decency and, above all, the compassion never to admit it.<\/p>\n
They\u2019d managed to get through the years of uncertainty: a) Luc\u00eda didn\u2019t know if she wanted to be a mother; b) Luc\u00eda didn\u2019t want to be a mother; c) Luc\u00eda did want to, but she also wanted to be other things and she couldn\u2019t be everything, or could she?<\/p>\n
Once it was finally decided, there were a lot of failed attempts, until they felt tired, almost aged, persisting with something that, in theory, nobody had asked for.<\/p>\n
During that period, Luc\u00eda had started writing for Elle <\/i>magazine. Her column was printed in all the Latin American issues. One day she received an email from a woman in Paraguay who said she was a member of the Ayoreo people: \u201c…your writing is the constellation we all want to be part of.\u201d That made Luc\u00eda feel like some kind of icon for women in developing countries. The column was a mixture of light-hearted women\u2019s issues with some gender theory thrown in to ease her conscience, which was hung up on\u2014fearful of \u2014the reaction of her peers at Yale, who were highly unlikely to be reading that kind of magazine anyway. What Have You Done to Me, Betty Draper? <\/i>was a column in which she revealed her suppressed desire to be a mother and housewife, and her frustration\u2014\u201cthrobbing and painful, like a pulled muscle\u201d\u2014at not having achieved it. \u201cThere are things that I am good at choosing, like handbags, or peaches; and there are things that I am bad at choosing, like husbands.\u201d That was one of the confessions she made, which she then expanded into an argument portraying him as a weak male who didn\u2019t know how to put his foot down and demand that she do \u201csomething other than belly dancing\u201d with her belly. After the email from the Paraguayan woman she had significantly dialled up the melodrama in her writing. Even so, Pablo was deeply hurt by it, treating it as the height of injustice. He always approached the subject of children sensitively, because he didn\u2019t want to pressure her, because he thought it was more her decision than his, and because he wanted to show that he was supportive and understanding. \u201cI write what my readers want to hear,\u201d Luc\u00eda said in her defence. And nobody wanted to hear about supportive and understanding husbands, which would only highlight how lousy their own husbands were.<\/p>\n
Then the children came along.<\/p>\n
But they appeared in a cloud of concepts and fickle choices: 1) Luc\u00eda wanted a boy. She\u2019d decided that her contribution to the deplorable human race would be to raise a good man. To increase the likelihood of it being male, they had to have sex on the day she was ovulating, because the \u2018Y\u2019 sperm live fast and die young. 2) Luc\u00eda wanted a girl. It was increasingly clear that the future would belong to strong, powerful and courageous women. In this case, sex had to happen between day ten and day twelve of her cycle, because the \u2018X\u2019 sperm are slow and heavy. They take a long time to get there, because they take a long time to die.<\/p>\n
Pablo was thirty-eight and Luc\u00eda forty by the time they gave up on sex and resorted to IVF treatment. They implanted four eggs. \u201cWhat if all four stick?\u201d asked Pablo, who saw that as a horrendous prospect. He hoped she\u2019d say that she\u2019d abort one of them, but that wasn\u2019t part of her plan. By that point, Luc\u00eda wanted children, and she wanted children to spare, to reduce the likelihood of disappointment.<\/p>\n
Two stuck, and from that moment, she decided that they were hers alone: the ones that stuck and the ones that didn\u2019t. She chose two names, Tom\u00e1s and Rosa. He didn\u2019t really like the names, but what could he do? He acted pleased. Then Luc\u00eda hired a woman called Doris who had more to do with her pregnancy than he\u2014or probably even Luc\u00eda\u2014did. That\u2019s when Pablo went on the offensive; he didn\u2019t understand why he had to live with a stranger who fondled his wife, and with her approval: every day she massaged her toes, her calves, her tits and her scalp, in that order. \u201cWhat gives her the right? What did Doris contribute to the test tube?\u201d Luc\u00eda didn\u2019t even bother to answer him.<\/p>\n
Pablo\u2019s mother couldn\u2019t travel to be there for the birth. She\u2019d had a cyst the size of a billiard ball removed from her breast and was in recovery. In her place came Meredith, the only one of his three sisters who had a US visa. She also had three children, and she got on wonderfully with the babies, with Doris and with Luc\u00eda\u2019s parents who\u2014on their daughter\u2019s orders\u2014had the good grace to leave a few days after the birth, taking with them half the gifts they\u2019d brought, because Luc\u00eda deemed them inappropriate.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut what exactly does that woman do?\u201d Pablo asked Meredith one day, when Luc\u00eda and the babies had shut themselves away with Doris in the bedroom. They were drinking coffee in the kitchen, passing the time for nearly two hours with forced reminiscences about relations he couldn\u2019t remember, feigning a closeness that was long-expired, or downright imaginary. \u201cShe shows her what to do and comforts her,\u201d replied his sister, slightly annoyed, as if brushing off a pesky child. Fortunately, shortly after Meredith left, Doris followed suit. Pablo thought it might, at last, be his turn to get involved. And what happened? Luc\u00eda latched a baby onto each boob and they withdrew into a thick-walled bubble, impenetrable to the rest of the world, but especially to him.<\/p>\n
She spent two years in the same position.<\/p>\n
Then came the weaning process which, fortunately, the children accepted without the inevitable trauma she\u2019d predicted.<\/p>\n
But he couldn\u2019t shake that image of his wife and his children coupled organically in a kind of domestic matrix; it disturbed him somewhere deep inside his brain. He\u2019d grown used to her contempt (at first concealed, then vocal, and finally silent). It wasn\u2019t even that they didn\u2019t have sex; they either had it or didn\u2019t, but nobody complained. Something else in the relationship had gone to ruin; something that the children had compensated to a certain extent for her, but not for Pablo. This was essentially because she consumed most of the children\u2019s time, draining their lifeblood, and all he got were the residual moments, the times when the children were so exhausted that all they were good for was giggling at burps and farts. It was during those moments that Pablo had to construct his fatherhood. Was he satisfied with that? It was all he knew.<\/p>\n
The therapist listened to him in silence for the whole session. Pablo was surprised at how much he\u2019d been able to say, and, feeling a physical sense of relief, he waited for him to respond in some way. He waited with an anxiety that gradually diminished; he felt cocooned in a silky silence that gave him hope. Luc\u00eda had been right, he needed that: to offload, to cleanse himself. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, to fill the emptiness inside with oxygen. He heard the therapist\u2019s voice, cold and dismissive:<\/p>\n
\u2018We\u2019ll carry on at our next session.\u2019<\/p>\n
Then the guy stood up, shook his hand, and guided him to the door.<\/p>\n
There was no next session.<\/p>\n
Translated by Charlotte Coombe<\/p>\n
Visit our Bookshop page and support local bookstores.<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Luc\u00eda and Pablo are Colombian immigrants who\u2019ve built their lives together in the US yet maintain conflicting attitudes toward their homeland and the extent to which it defines their identity. After undergoing fertility treatment, Pablo finds himself excluded from raising their twins, and the new family situation seems to question the very nature of their relationship and of who they believed they were. In search of respite and time to reflect, Luc\u00eda takes the kids to her parents\u2019 apartment in Miami. Meanwhile, Pablo learns he is suffering from a syndrome known as \u201cHoliday Heart.\u201d But is this just a break, or is it really the final days of their marriage?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3879,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[4449],"genre":[2022],"pretext":[],"section":[2365],"translator":[2748],"lal_author":[3059],"class_list":["post-11384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-numero-15","genre-preview-es","section-translation-previews-and-new-releases-es","translator-charlotte-coombe-es-2","lal_author-margarita-garcia-robayo-es"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11384"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11384\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11384"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=11384"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=11384"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=11384"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=11384"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=11384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}