Ghosts by Daylight (14 page)

I was, I realized as I stroked him, slowly, completely and utterly in love for the first time in my life. Terrified, but in love.

We had a car seat, a gift from the baby’s godfather, one of my dearest male friends who was chosen because he was not a war correspondent, and because he was a grown-up, wore a suit to the office and was responsible. We had a car seat, but no car, which was typical of us. I thought it might be useful to carry the baby around in – I had seen other mothers doing it.

On leaving day from the hospital, Bruno and the taxi driver guided me into the back seat with the baby in the crook of my arm. The driver said it was safer that way, as the baby was too small to fit into the seat, and so he motioned for me silently to hold the sleeping baby tight. Luca’s mouth was open and resting on the skin of my neck. He breathed lightly. He hardly ever cried, or opened his eyes, and I would often place my finger under his nose to see if I could feel his breath. In the car, I wound the seat belt around and around us, and locked the door.

I was leaving the hospital a different person than when I had arrived two weeks before, and everything around me seemed intensified. The taxi smelled strongly of the driver’s lunch, which sat in a waxy bag on the front seat. The metallic grey of the February sky seemed frostier; the softness of the baby’s cheek rubbing against my own; and how easily I cried when people were kind to me. The driver was North African and young and he took care not to stop short; not to brake or run through red lights. Bruno rode alongside on his motorcycle. At stop signs, he peered into the window of the taxi and waved. Behind the glare of his eyepiece I saw him smile. We passed the suburban pizza parlours run by Tunisians, the small brick cottages, the discount groceries with boxes of carrots and onions piled outside, and finally the roundabout near Porte d’Orleans, around the lions at Denfert-Rochereau, down Boulevard Raspail with school children coming home for lunch, across the river and alongside the Tuileries, dusted lightly in frost. He drove up rue des Pyramides and across rue Saint-Honoré and left on to rue du 29 Juillet. Then he opened the doors, unloaded my case, and helped me out with the baby while Bruno parked his moto. We were home.

Part Two

‘Since dark is what brings out your light’

Robert Frost,

‘Choose Something Like a Star’, 1947

9

The Domestic Life

I would like to say it was easy, but it was not. I had thought, in my chaotic way, that everything would fall into place the way it did when I wandered into a foreign country or a conflict I had never been in before. But this too was a foreign country, the strangest one that I had ever visited.

When I was seventeen, my parents dropped me and my trunks off at my university dormitory and drove away. ‘Goodbye, darling,’ my mother said. ‘Everything will be fine.’ And it was. From that moment on, I was alone in my life and somehow I always found the right people, the right place, the right job or bed to sleep in or papers to fill out that would help me not be lost in the world. In the past, I never wanted, or needed, anyone to hold my hand. But in the past, I always reckoned it was just me fighting it out against the world.

The pregnancy and the birth had been new assignments. But now there was a tiny, squirming creature who needed his umbilical cord cleaned and who peed in my face when I took off his nappy. And I did not know how to attach his nappy properly, not as well as Bruno did, who cheerfully whistled as he fed him, bathed him and changed him.

I wanted to protect him from everything. So when I held him, I held him very tight, so tight that any other baby would have flinched. But he seemed, in his instinctual and utterly new way, to understand how desperate I was, and he seemed to love me even more for it.

That night, at home, before he tried to sleep, Bruno wrote to his friends to announce the birth. The translation was:

For nothing in the world would I miss the Rugby World Cup of Six Nations 2004 . . . So I decided on Thursday, 12 February at 4.27 a.m. to wake up my parents, who were sleeping deeply, and get them to help me with my intention to proudly sing ‘La Marseillaise’ as quickly as possible!

After crossing Paris at 132 kph, (the speedometer went crazy!) and some insults directed at hospital personnel who did not understand my mother’s demands for an epidural (those of you who know my mother’s character will understand . . .) and then, I was among you in the world, warm and welcoming (Papa doesn’t always believe this but we can talk about it later).

OK, let me introduce myself . . . Luca Costantino Pinocchio (the first one who makes fun of me gets a punch in the nose) Girodon di Giovanni, son of Bruno and Janine, born 12 February 2004 at 2.59 p.m. and not 3 p.m.

Born into a world sweet and tough, honey and vinegar, tender and merciless . . . that’s life!

Please don’t hesitate to give me any words of advice that I might need. After all, I am only two days old!

Nice to meet you!

Luca

And then one day, a maternity nurse from England – whom Bruno called Mary Poppins – arrived on the train from London, and on day ten after the birth, miraculously, despite the fact that I had not breastfed since he popped out, my milk suddenly appeared.

Mary Poppins was really called Lesley, and she was a maternity nurse that I had arranged – my one bit of organization – before I was whisked into the confusion of the hospital. She had grey-blonde hair and kept cats, and seemed not to eat at all; she was dieting, she told me. She lived in the south of England and had grown-up children. Bruno went to collect her at Gare du Nord, so she would be with us when we arrived home from the hospital, and she loved the motorcycle ride through Paris. She slept with the baby in the same room, in the canopy bed from Kerala, and she brought with her a device to place under him to monitor his breathing.

‘Cot death,’ I muttered ominously to Bruno. ‘Something else to worry about.’

She brought Luca to me every few hours. She taught me to change his nappy and clean his umbilical cord. She made me cups of tea, she showed us how to mix formula and heat it, and she wrote in her notebook: ‘Mother teary.’

And she got me to breastfeed, effortlessly. It took five minutes of her guiding the baby’s head towards my swollen breast and he latched on. It was that easy. Lesley took out a notebook and made two columns: Left Breast/Right Breast. We wrote down how much he drank, how long, and from which breast.

Bruno lit fires, made dinner, did the night shift with the baby. He made the home that he called
la nid de oiseau
– the bird’s nest. When I cried, he rubbed my back. He told me over and over how everything would be all right. He called my friends in London one by one and told them to come over to Paris as soon as they could. ‘She needs you,’ he said.

He sent my mother a plane ticket. When she squabbled about flying alone, he said he would fly to America and collect her. In the end, she arrived alone. During all this time, he did not sleep. He stayed awake with Luca. When we heard the baby stir, he would gently push me down in bed and go to the room where Lesley was. Later, after she left, he would not let me get up in the night. I was coping as best I could during the day, never letting the baby out of my arms. At night, I collapsed.

‘Stay and rest,’ he would whisper, and pad silently away, taking the baby to the kitchen, laying him on a blanket on the floor, and playing jazz on the radio and singing to him while he made his bottle. I think he feared for my sanity. He told me to go outside, which I resisted. When, a few weeks after birth, I did not fit into any of the tiny tiny clothes in French boutiques, he told me that I was beautiful: ‘May I remind you that you just had a baby?’

He bathed the baby in the big claw-footed tub and was not afraid he would drown. He also bathed him in the kitchen sink. He took three months off work. He knew how to burp the baby perfectly, while I struggled and was frightened of hitting him too hard. He was the champion nappy-changer – he could do it in cafés, on aeroplanes, on his lap.

We went to Normandy and drank martinis in the bar of a grand old hotel, the baby in a basket next to us. We drove to Bordeaux to see Bruno’s parents and the baby slept in a suitcase nestled in blankets. We drove together to Thalasso therapy in the south-west, and he helped me into salted tubs of water as I held the baby in my arms. And we drove through Basque villages, stopping for
saucisse
and wine. He took me, always, to churches. As I lit endless candles, praying for protection, he hovered near the door. On Easter Sunday, he took me to a famous church built in the 1500s in St Jean de Luz to hear the male Basque singers, their voices deep, low and haunting. The baby slept through the whole thing.

Mary Poppins had helped me back into the world. Partially, it was all the equipment that terrified me – the fold-up
poussette
– pushchair – that never closed when I needed to get into a taxi, and more mysteriously, the kangaroo sling. She helped me understand the mechanics of each, speaking slowly to me as if I were the child, and once I mastered it by myself, we took Luca outside for the first time, to Monoprix on the Avenue de l’Opera.

‘What if he cries?’ I said.

‘Then you rock him and he stops.’

‘What if we need to change him, and we’re outside?’

‘Then we find a place and we change him. Darling,’ she said, ‘you aren’t the first woman in the world to have a baby.’

‘And if he’s hungry?’

She reached into the nappy bag and pulled out a bottle of formula. ‘You sit and breastfeed him. No one is going to arrest you.’

Still, it would be two years before I could get on a moving escalator with a
pousette
, and three before I could board a plane alone with Luca without having to take Valium.

Mary Poppins left one day in March with a note. Although she had never seemed particularly warm with Luca – she called him ‘baby’ rather than use his name – she told me she thought he was one of the best babies she had ever cared for. The note said this:

THINGS TO CONSIDER

Feeding

1. Sitting in a more upright position when feeding, and have everything to hand before you start, mobile phone, drink, TV controls.

2. Persist with a feed when baby ‘appears’ to have finished i.e. winding, changing position, until you’re certain that he’s done.

3. If you think baby is still hungry after breast is empty, offer 2nd breast and/or formula. Ideally, feed from one breast at each feed.

4. Allow baby to be hungry before offering feed. I.e. completely awake by either talking to him, playing with him or letting him cry a little.

5. Don’t feel guilty if after a struggle to latch him on you want to give him a bottle. If you’re in a state he will pick up your vibes and become unsettled.

6. As long as your baby eats it doesn’t matter by which means he does it.

Winding

1. One burp may not be enough, carry on for a short while, but no longer than ten mins.

2. Burping may make way for more food.

3. He can lie down even if he appears windy, he will either rectify the problem by himself by squirming and grunting, or let you know by crying. In which case usually picking him up out of his crib will cause him to burp.

Going out

1. Be ready to go before your baby feeds so that you can leave as soon as he’s finished. If you wait till after he’s eaten time will fly past and before you know it it’s time to feed him again.

As Luca gets bigger, his time awake will increase and you may find that he eats and then will play for a little time and then fall asleep.

He is probably one of the best-behaved babies I have worked with. I am sure that life will be full of joy and surprises.

Have faith in yourself and your judgements. There is no right or wrong way to bring up your baby, just your way.

Don’t listen to anyone else, go with what you feel is right. Your baby is an individual and not meant to be the same as anyone else’s baby.

You and Bruno make wonderful parents. Enjoy.

10

Mother

Mary Poppins left and my mother, whose name is Kathryn but whom we always call Cat Cat, arrived. Her face when she saw me holding the baby was an expression I had never seen before: a mixture of surprise, joy, sadness, longing, shock and exhaustion from her ten-hour journey. My mother was eighty-four years old when Luca was born, a great-grandmother five times over already, and the mother of seven children, six of them living. She was, and is even as I write this, the most extraordinary woman I have ever met, even if she can be difficult. ‘And you are not difficult?’ she would retort.

Her generation of mothers did not talk openly to their children about their anxieties. Nor did they play with us in the way that parents now play with children. We were meant to behave, to act a certain way, and above all, to conform.

As a mother, she did all the right things: baked cookies, did not work, dressed us in the best clothes and picked us up from music and ballet and football and cheerleading practice. But she was distant to me when I was growing up, particularly in my adolescence, as far away as a creature in the Arctic.