Born Twice (Vintage International) (2 page)

“Well, hello! I didn’t know you were here!” my mother-in-law says, addressing her in the tone she reserves for unwelcome guests. “The baby, of course! Both of them, obviously!”

“You’re the ones who ruled out a cesarean, after all,” my mother says.

My mother-in-law turns sharply toward her. “What on earth are you saying? We didn’t rule out anything. We’d just like to avoid an operation, if possible. And who is this
you,
anyway?”

“You and your daughter, with your theories on natural childbirth,” my mother replies. Then she points at me. “Him too. It might look like he’s listening, but who really knows what’s going on in that head of his?”

“Why do you always have to be so sinister?” I ask, trying to hurt her.

I succeed. The insult seems to have hit home. She goes back to the window in a state of furious isolation. She was an amateur actress in her youth and has never forgotten it. Neither have I.

I remember isolated events, like movie stills, that I can’t quite piece together.

The nun, walking out of the birthing room at the end of the corridor, passing me by, pretending not to see me. I catch up with her.

“What’s going on in there?”

“Ask your doctor,” she says.

Dr. Merini, ever more bewildered, saying, “I never thought it would come to this.” Seeing an idiot in distress is far more disturbing than seeing a blissful one.

“What do you mean you
never thought
?” I ask, finally grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him, doing what I ought to have done twelve hours ago. Twelve whole hours have gone by and there’s been no delivery, just excruciating agony. “What the hell is going on in there?”

“We’re going to use forceps,” he announces, extricating himself from my grasp.

“Why not a cesarean?”

“It’s too late. The baby is already crowning.”

Me, making my way to the hospital chapel through a haze of colored lights, kneeling down to pray, feeling like an actor reluctantly playing his part. What am I doing here? This is not my role.

But it is. The comedy is over; the tragedy is about to begin. You’ve been through tough times before and now you’re finally being called to account. You knew it would come to this. Be strong, you’re dealing with God. Don’t see her for a month. No, that’s too long: three weeks. You shut your eyes. It’s not only the doctors’ fault, it’s your fault too. What on earth could you have been thinking? Never see her again. No, that’s not what’s being asked of you. Anyway, you’d be unhappy and that would just make things worse for everyone.

You hear a silent voice in your head. Yes. It’s as if someone’s head were nodding. Yes, you don’t deserve it, but this is how it is. You cross yourself and murmur your thanks.

I can’t remember now who mentioned that the baby didn’t cry right away. What does that mean? Is it serious? Yes, very serious. He was cyanotic. I remember one word:
catatonic.
The surgeon said it on his way out. The only question you want to ask is the one they don’t want to hear: What are the consequences? It’s too early to tell. Maybe nothing. Take care of your wife.

She’s lying in bed, staring out the window, pale, exhausted, troubled, and silent. Drops of rain slither down the glass. I take her limp hand in mine.

“You were amazing.”

She shakes her head.

“Don’t worry, everything will be all right.”

She doesn’t reply.

She tries to speak but her voice is hoarse. I lean down. My cheek brushes against her cold damp forehead.

“Have you seen the baby?” she asks.

“No.”

“Go see him.”

Whoever mentioned the joys of childbirth?

I’ll never forget that tiny purple face. I’ll never forget that fixed half-smile or his cone-shaped head. The image of a Mesopotamian divinity comes to mind. He’s frightening and homely at the same time. The nurse approaches with him in her arms.

“We’re going to place him in the incubator now,” she says.

“But his head—”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” she replies, leaning over the bed to show him to his mother.

Behind Glass

We walk through the room as if at an aquarium, observing the newborns in their sealed glass parallelepipeds. There’s a magnifying glass built into the top of his, a tiny porthole onto his small naked body. Through it I see his genitalia, enlarged. His left foot twitches as if an invisible electrical shock were pulsing through him at regular intervals. It was stronger before, the doctor with me says, but he’s under sedation now.

His small tense fingers extend and contract convulsively, like a fan that opens slowly and then snaps shut.

“Is he epileptic?” I ask, with surreal calmness.

We behave this way with doctors in order to gain their confidence; they know it as well as we do. By deceiving each other, no one ever has to say the truth.

“We’re still waiting for the results of the encephalogram,” he says professionally.

Overhearing

The choked-up voice talking on the pay phone belongs to my father-in-law. He doesn’t know I can hear him. He’s standing next to a plate-glass window in one of the corridors at the hospital, talking to his son, Marco.

“Do you understand what I’m saying? He might even be retarded.”

He’s furious; his eyes are glaring with anger. I feel like pushing him through the glass, but somehow I find the afflicted expression on his face reassuring. He’s exaggerating, I tell myself, like he always does. He magnifies danger, making everything seem much worse than it really is, so as better to accept an attenuated version. The thought of physical disability causes him enormous grief. He’s the athletic one in the family, a believer in preventive medicine, a proponent of healthy living. He’ll never succumb to old age.

“Don’t ask me any more questions. We don’t know—they don’t tell us a thing. We just have to wait!” he insists into the receiver.

Then he sees me. He turns away to avoid meeting my gaze. After he hangs up he looks at me, despair written on his face.

“Did you hear what I said on the phone?”

“Yes.”

He rubs his brow with the back of his hand. “How can you stay so calm at a time like this?”

“I’m not calm,” I tell him. “But you can’t lose sight of reason.”

He looks at me bitterly. “Don’t talk to me about reason.”

Guilt

We meet at the same café in the rotunda in the park where we’ve been meeting for the past five months. We used to meet at this very same café fifteen years ago, when we were young. I had been incapable of expressing my feelings for her then, and she, though attracted to me, had misunderstood my silence. There’s something both obvious and absurd about choosing to meet here now: a repetition that is both cyclical and maniacal, as unquestionably circular as the very roof over our heads.

“When do you think we can be together again?” she asks, adding quickly, “I’m sorry, but I have to ask. I think I have the right to know.”

Tears come to her eyes; her expression is tormented yet determined. It is the most complicated of moments, the kind she feels offer her the chance to overcome both herself and her enemy.

“You mean
there
?” I ask, trying to gain time.

“Of course. What do you think?”

There
is a studio apartment on the top floor of a nondescript building on Viale Campania with no doorman and no name on the buzzer. It has low sloping ceilings and looks out on a landscape of rooftops. We started paying rent on it three months ago. We’d meet there at the oddest hours, whenever we could, in the morning when it was my free day at school and any time she could get away from her family.

“I did what you said; I haven’t gone there since last time,” she says slowly. “Even though I honestly can’t see any connection between what has happened and us.”

It’s a prepared speech. She’s moving delicately through previously explored terrain.

“It’s been almost a month now. You could have asked me how I felt about it,” she says.

“I thought I knew.”

“You should have asked.” The trepidation in her voice introduces one of those discussions I so fear. “It’s hard for me too, you know. I have two children. My situation is very complicated.”

“I know.”

“I felt rejected by you. What did I do wrong?”

“You’re not the guilty one,” I say.

“Guilty?” She blanches with anger. “Go on, say it!”

“I just did.”

“I’m warning you, don’t talk to me like that!”

“Lower your voice! People will hear you,” I whisper.

The woman at the next table who has been watching us turns away.

“Why should I? I know exactly what’s going to happen to us! You, victim of your own guilt, and me, somehow part of it too!”

“I don’t have the guilty conscience you think I do,” I say to her in a low voice. “Nor do I go to analysis to free myself of one. It might work for you, but my story is different.”

“How?” She looks at me, her eyes brimming with tears.

“My guilt is not imaginary, like yours. Mine doesn’t stem from childhood traumas, nor is it rooted in my unconscious. I’m guilty on several counts.”

“Like what? The baby was born this way because of the doctors’ mistakes, not yours!”

“I made mistakes too.”

“When?”

“When she was pregnant and you reappeared in my life.”

“I knew you’d say it was my fault! I could have bet on it,” she says bitterly.

“I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about me.” She waits for me to go on. “If I had been more present, maybe things would have been different.”

She is startled. “Where, at the hospital? What could you have done? You couldn’t have changed anything!”

“No, before. During the pregnancy. I’m referring to how upset she was about us.”

She clutches the metal armrests of the chair.

“You told me she didn’t know!”

“She guessed.” I’m not sure if that’s completely true; it just comes to me.

“All you do is lie—to her and to me!”

“The doctors asked her whether she suffered during the pregnancy.”

“What did she say?”

“She said no, but I think she said it to protect me.”

“I’m amazed by how much you’ve hidden from me!” she says angrily. “Why are you saying this now, to make yourself feel better?”

“No, because I need to know if it had any effect on the baby. The doctors don’t rule it out.”

“Did they say anything specifically?” she asks uneasily.

“No, just in general.”

“They say all kinds of things! Don’t torture yourself like this.” Then, with the streak of brutality that has always surprised me, coming from that youthful face of hers, she adds, “Think about babies born in wartime.”

I have no reply. Ours has been a kind of war: a war of suspicion and betrayal, with traps and defeats, located somewhere between tenderness, hate, and fear.

“You think that by confessing you’ll be able to make amends,” she says. “But you have to look at things differently. You’re not as guilty as you would believe. You share the guilt.”

“With whom—you?”

“No, her.”

“Is that what your analyst would have you believe?”

Colleagues

A colleague of mine, a teacher of math and physics, recently had a growth removed from his armpit. The operation seems to have made him particularly forthcoming on medical matters. He asks me about Paolo. I tell him the baby’s been discharged, the tremors have ceased, and though there is no local epileptic center—he devours my every word—the cortex has suffered some indirect damage. Still, according to the pediatrician who’s been following his case, the symptoms may never come back. The case studies are reassuring, though there is a slight chance that the symptoms will return briefly during adolescence.

“Never again!” he exclaims, shaking his finger in a gesture that is both threatening and prophetic. “You’ll never be able to rest easy again. There’ll always be this sword of Damocles over your head!”

I look at him in bewilderment. I don’t know how to react. I don’t understand what he’s trying to tell me. And yet it really is quite simple.

“Once there have been cerebral lesions, even indirectly, there will always be”—and here he shakes his finger again— “the risk of a seizure.”

“Thank you for telling me,” I say, in a voice not my own.

“Not at all, my friend,” he says. “I know it seems harsh, but it’s always better to know things than to ignore them.”

“Yes, of course,” I reply.

My eyes glaze over. I head for the door. I’ll never forget this, I think to myself. And, in fact, I never have.

The Crystal Ball

It’s an image favored by doctors who say they don’t have one when they really don’t want to comment on the future. “If only I had a crystal ball!” they say with a sigh, frowning in what they think of as wise perplexity. Or, rudely and authoritatively, they’ll say, “We don’t use crystal balls, you know!”