Restless Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\n <\/p>\n
Over these past months, nine, to be exact, I\u2019ve come to think that pleasure and pain always have something to do with things either entering or exiting your body.<\/p>\n
Nine months ago I didn\u2019t know that a series of events related to those entrances and exits would converge that November, the same month I turned thirty. My father was diagnosed with colon cancer, Adriana committed suicide by throwing herself from a hotel window, and I was lying in a Spanish National Health Service hospital bed, recovering from major surgery. I returned home, devastated by the news, and physically very weak. I can scarcely remember the days following my operation, two weeks during a particularly cold winter, during which I\u2019d needed J\u2019s help for almost everything. To cut my meat, to brush my teeth, and to clean my incisions.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d had some excess mammary glands removed from beneath my armpits and I could barely move my arms. I had two enormous scars from which catheters emerged, draining dark blood. I\u2019d decided to have the glands removed because, aside from being unattractive and annoying, the doctors had assured me that, one day in the remote future when I decided to have children, they would fill with milk and cause me terrible problems. And so I decided that I should amputate what I saw as a deformity, even though my mother, with her magical worldview, insisted on reminding me that in other times, women with supernumerary breasts were burned as witches: for her, my two extra breasts could have held supernatural powers.<\/p>\n
The surgery went off without complications but the recovery was turning out to be very difficult. On top of that, the antibiotics they had prescribed to prevent infection seemed to be burning a hole in my stomach.<\/p>\n
On J\u2019s birthday, just a few weeks later, I was still feeling so uncomfortable that I decided to stay home. I don\u2019t tend to miss my spouse\u2019s birthdays, so this was unusual. Now, in addition to intense stomach pain, I was nauseated. The next day, when it was time for me to go back to the office, I couldn\u2019t get out of bed. I was too tired. I threw up the entire morning. At noon, J called to see how I was doing, but also to give me some news.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t panic. Okay? The magazine\u2019s closing. It\u2019s done.\u201d<\/p>\n
My father\u2019s prognosis unknown.<\/p>\n
My friend throwing herself into the void. My mammary glands hacked off. And now I had lost my job.<\/p>\n
J came through the door with a pregnancy test in his hand. We\u2019d been toying with the idea for a few months, in a perpetual coitus interruptus. The true vow, before the \u201cI\u2019ll love and respect you forever\u201d part, is: \u201cI promise not to come inside you.\u201d It\u2019s the first promise that gets broken.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a secret rebellion, maybe a stupid one, but a rebellion nonetheless, against the adult world, or against anything, in never having a condom in the bedside table. I\u2019ve always thought the hottest thing is that familiar scene when the lovers are just about to climax and something interrupts them. Cut short, what could have been a good orgasm becomes the best orgasm. No complete orgasm can exceed a perfectly incomplete one. Pulling out is like retiring at the peak of your career, like writing a masterful volume of short stories and then disappearing, like killing yourself at the age of thirty.<\/p>\n
We fell silent for a few seconds looking at the indicator; it\u2019s like looking at the gun you\u2019re going to use to kill yourself. A pregnancy test is always an intimidating presence, especially if you\u2019re freshly unemployed.<\/p>\n
I had to pee in a vial, sprinkle a few drops on that white thingy while J read the instructions and finally figured out that two stripes means yes and one stripe means no. According to the box, a home pregnancy test is 99 percent accurate if the result is positive, while, if it\u2019s negative, there\u2019s a greater margin of error and the test should be repeated in a few days. I don\u2019t know how many times I\u2019d taken that test in my life, the result almost always negative.<\/p>\n
Women play all the time with the great power that has been conferred upon us: it\u2019s fun to think about reproducing. Or not reproducing. Or walking around in a sweet little dress with a round belly underneath that will turn into a baby to cuddle and spoil. When you\u2019re fifteen, the idea is fascinating, it attracts you like a piece of chocolate cake. When you\u2019re thirty, the possibility attracts you like an abyss.<\/p>\n
On the leaflet it also said that pregnancy tests measure the presence in urine of a hormone called Human Chorionic Gonadotropin. This hormone, let\u2019s call it by its first name, Gona, appears in the blood approximately six days after conception, when the fertilized egg implants in the uterus. In the five minutes it took the gadget to decide what would become of my life, I scrolled in slow motion through every time I\u2019d made love during the past month, trying to identify the fatal day. Finally, the two red bars quickly appeared, like the words \u201cThe End\u201d in a movie.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the last time we ever work together at the same place,\u201d I said to J.<\/p>\n
Because now we could actually say that an entire family was about to be out on its ass, and facing the coldest Christmas in years, according to the weatherman. Although the weatherman is usually wrong.<\/p>\n
Two gametes form a zygote. I like the way the fertilization formula sounds. It\u2019s pure math. The most powerful feelings upon discovering that you\u2019re pregnant have to do with the unreality of the math. They\u2019ve told you it\u2019s there, that it will multiply in size, that now it\u2019s the shape of a peanut, and then a cherry, and so on, but you don\u2019t see it, you don\u2019t feel it. I could have opted to pay two hundred euros for one of those ultramodern sonogram machines that show you what\u2019s inside, but for now, I would limit myself to consulting direct testimonies. To one woman, a four-week-old embryo looked like a shrimp, to another, it was a pea, to another, a little fish, and to another, a spot in the distance. Why should maternity draw us immediately into lyrical digressions and take us to the edge of inanity? Could the mere possibility of having a baby with the face of a frightened monkey in our arms be enough to trigger that unbridled tenderness? I decided to write my own zoological turn of phrase: \u201cAt four weeks, a child is like the ghost of a seahorse.\u201d<\/p>\n
The truth is you still can\u2019t see anything. Just the premature gestational sac, less than ten centimeters in diameter, the bag inside which the fetus will grow. What an awful word \u201cfetus\u201d is. It\u2019s so ugly. An embryo looks like something that could only be aquatic. It doesn\u2019t look human. It has a tail. It\u2019s four millimeters long and its eyes are like the pair of black dots that you sometimes find in a raw egg before putting it in the skillet.<\/p>\n
In my old encyclopedia of the human body, I read that in an embryo you can already make out the spinal column, the lungs and the rest of the organs, all on a minuscule scale. However, a four-week-old baby is not a human being, it\u2019s hundreds of species all at once. Up until recent decades, it was thought that the human baby passed through every stage of evolution inside the mother\u2019s womb, that it had the gills of a fish and the tail of a monkey. It seemed plausible. Then it was proven that those weren\u2019t really gills and that wasn\u2019t really a tail, but, in seeing the images of a fetus\u2019s evolution, one might well conclude that pregnancy is the trailer for the movie of life. Would you like to see the whole film?<\/p>\n
Books don\u2019t prepare you for what\u2019s coming. Manuals for pregnant women must have been written by mothers completely drugged by love for their children, without the slightest pinch of critical distance. They all say: you\u2019ll feel slight nausea in the morning, your breasts will become full and tender, you\u2019ll feel tired and the frequent need to urinate. Ah, and of course: \u201cdon\u2019t smoke, don\u2019t drink coffee or Coca-Cola, don\u2019t take drugs, avoid X-rays.\u201d How the hell am I supposed to bear all this stress without even a can of Coca-Cola? How is it that no one has yet created a designer drug for pregnant women? Prenatal ecstasy, LSD for expectant mothers, something like that.<\/p>\n
To start with, it\u2019s not just nausea; the fundamental malaise that seizes you when you wake up in the morning is like waking up with a hangover and a guilty conscience all at the same time, like waking up after a loved one\u2019s funeral or seeing dawn break on the day after losing the love of your life. The nausea would attack me in the most inopportune places and times. I started to think that it revealed a certain psychology in my relationship with things. For example, I always got nauseated when I had to do something that I didn\u2019t want to do, like go out to buy bread very early in the morning in the middle of winter. It also appeared when I was with a certain, very beloved friend. Every time I saw her I would have to run to the bathroom.<\/p>\n
Don\u2019t even get me started on my breasts; they hurt at the slightest touch. They weren\u2019t the only sensitive things. It was all of me. I never imagined that I could cry watching one of those horrendous talk shows hosted by some snake in the grass who interviews children searching for their mothers and neighbors who hate each other; but cry I did, oceans of tears, especially at stories like: \u201cHer husband cheated on her with the ninety-nine-cent-store clerk. . . . Let\u2019s bring out the huuuuusband!\u201d I, a person with advanced degrees, raised in a home where we listened to Silvio Rodri\u0301guez and Quilapayu\u0301n, would find myself curled in a fetal position under a blanket, the remote control my only umbilical cord to the world. And someone had pressed the slow-motion button.<\/p>\n
I spent long hours watching trash TV, sleeping and dreaming that I was giving birth to a monkey.<\/p>\n
My sister and I had a game. We would announce: \u201cLet\u2019s play mother and daughter.\u201d We were always mothers and we were always mothers to daughters. The maternal world was a world for women alone. It was very easy to be a mother: it consisted of naming our dolls, covering them with a blanket, and combing their hair. And when I was the scriptwriter, some sort of tragedy always had to occur, a devastating earthquake, for example, that would infuse a little drama into the maternal role. Our dolls would cry and we would protect them from the hurricane-force winds and take them somewhere safe. It was lovely to be a mother when we were in danger. It made us better mothers.<\/p>\n
Translated by Jessica Powell<\/p>\n
Visit our Bookshop page to buy books by this author and support local bookstores.<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gabriela Wiener is not one to shy away from unpleasant truths or to balk at a challenge. She began her writing career by infiltrating Peru\u2019s most dangerous prison, going all in at swingers clubs, ingesting ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle. So at 30, when she gets unexpectedly pregnant, she looks forward to the experience the way a mountain climber approaches a precipitous peak.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3729,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[4450,2984,2954,2987],"genre":[2022],"pretext":[],"section":[2365],"translator":[3136],"lal_author":[3057],"class_list":["post-11391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-numero-14","tag-peru-es","tag-translation-es","tag-translation-es-2","genre-preview-es","section-translation-previews-and-new-releases-es","translator-jessica-powell-es","lal_author-gabriela-wiener-es"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11391","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=11391"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33252,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11391\/revisions\/33252"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11391"},{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=11391"},{"taxonomy":"pretext","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pretext?post=11391"},{"taxonomy":"section","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/section?post=11391"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/translator?post=11391"},{"taxonomy":"lal_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericanliteraturetoday.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/lal_author?post=11391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}