“I’m not thinking of leaving.” Gregory laughed.
“You never know. Without freedom, without money, what’s to do? Emigrate.” Balcescu sighed with a pathetic expression of nostalgia.
Samantha Ernst studied literature in her spare time, after her workouts and her sports. She had never held a job and never would. Her father had recently been ruined financially by producing a high-budget film on the Byzantine Empire that was such a monumental fiasco it destroyed his own empire in less time than it takes to tell. Like all her stepbrothers, stepsisters, and stepmothers, who until then had profited from the producer’s generosity, Samantha was forced for the first time to provide for herself; she never suffered any real want, however, because Gregory Reeves was there. They had planned to be married after he completed law school and found a good job, but the magnate’s ruin precipitated events and they had to set the wedding forward a couple of years. They were married in a ceremony so private it seemed secret, with Timothy Duane and Samantha’s tennis instructor as the only witnesses; after the wedding they called relatives and friends with the news. Gregory visited Nora and Judy Reeves once a year, at Thanksgiving time; they were semiestranged, and the mother and sister were not surprised not to be invited to the wedding, but the Moraleses were deeply offended and for a while stopped speaking to their “gringo son,” as they called him—-until Margaret’s birth softened their hearts and they forgave him. Gregory moved his belongings into Samantha’s house, including the wine barrels of roses, prepared to begin his dream of the perfect family. Married life was not as idyllic as he had imagined; marriage resolved none of the problems of courtship, it merely added new ones, but he did not lose hope and looked forward to better times once he received his law degree, found a normal job, and had fewer pressures. His baby-sitting enterprise provided enough money for his wife’s comfort, although he could not share any of the benefits. His schedule had deteriorated into a veritable marathon. He rose at dawn to do his chores, then traveled one hour to class. In the afternoon he took his charges to museums, parks, and entertainments, keeping one eye on them and another on his books. Once a week he went to the laundromat and the market; many nights he earned a few dollars helping Joan and Susan in their restaurant. By the end of the day he arrived home exhausted; he usually put some meat on the grill and ate while he continued to study. Samantha was revolted by the sight of raw meat and nauseated by the smell of it cooking, so she preferred not to be around at dinnertime. Their schedules never meshed anyway; she slept till noon, began her activities in the afternoon, and always had some class at night: African drums, yoga, Cambodian dance. While her husband outdid himself to meet all his obligations, she seemed perpetually confused, as if mere existence were a major challenge to her elusive nature. Conjugal life did nothing to increase her interest in games of love, and she continued to be as indifferent as ever in bed—with the added aggravation that now they had more opportunities to be together and fewer excuses for her coldness. Gregory tried to follow the advice in his manuals, even though he felt ridiculous performing the erotic gymnastics Samantha seemed not to appreciate anyway. Mulling over the meager results of his efforts, Gregory came to the conclusion that with the happy exception of Ernestina Pereda, women had no great enthusiasm for lovemaking. He was ignoring countless publications that proved the contrary, and as the Western world acknowledged an outburst of female libidos, he substituted patience for passion, although he never completely abandoned the hope that gradually he could lead Samantha into the sinful gardens of lust, which was how Duane, with his tormented Catholic conscience, referred to pure and simple sexual diligence.
When Samantha discovered she was pregnant, she was totally demoralized. She felt that her tanned body, which had never known a gram of excess fat, had become a loathsome receptacle housing a rapidly growing, gluttonous tadpole that she could not imagine had any connection with her. During those first weeks she wore herself out doing the most violent exercises in her repertory, subsconsciously hoping to be liberated from pernicious servitude, but then she was felled by exhaustion and did nothing but lie in bed staring at the ceiling, devoid of hope and furious with Gregory, who seemed enchanted by the idea of a child and responded to her complaints with sentimental platitudes—absolutely inappropriate behavior, as Samantha never failed to tell him, given the circumstances. It’s your fault, all your fault, she reproached him. I don’t want children, at least not yet. You’re the one who’s always talking about having a family—God knows where you got such a stupid idea—and from talking so much about it, now it’s happened. Damn you! She could not believe her bad luck; she had assumed she was barren, because in years of not taking precautions she had never been caught. She kept repeating to herself, like a spoiled child who always got her own way, If I don’t want it, it won’t happen. She suffered attacks of nausea brought on more by her revulsion toward herself and rejection of the baby than by her pregnancy. Gregory bought a natural foods cookbook and asked Joan and Susan to advise him how to prepare healthful meals, an empty exercise since Samantha seemed barely able to tolerate a stalk of celery or a slice of apple. Three months later, when she could see the changes in her waistline and breasts, she abandoned herself to her fate with a kind of rabid dedication. Her lack of appetite turned to voraciousness, and contrary to all her vegetarian principles, she methodically devoured greasy pork chops and sausages that Gregory cooked at night and she nibbled cold all day long. One night while eating with a group of friends at a Spanish restaurant, she discovered the special of the day, callos a la madrileña, a concoction of tripe with the consistency of a wet towel soaked in tomato sauce. She went so often at odd hours to order the same dish that the chef took a liking to her and gifted her with plastic containers running over with his insalubrious stew. She gained weight and broke out in welts, she suffered severe depression, she felt ill and guilty, poisoned by putrid food and animal cadavers, but as if accepting some form of punishment, she could not stop eating. She slept too much and the rest of the time watched television from her bed, surrounded by her cats. Reeves, who was allergic to cat hair, moved to a different room, without ever losing his good humor or his patience. He would smile to himself and say, She’ll get over it; she gets these whims because she’s pregnant. Even though Samantha despised housework, her house had once been presentable; now relative order had turned to chaos. Gregory tried to do some cleaning, but however much he tried, the odor of cat urine and Spanish tripe permeated the house.
That was the year the aquatic childbirth technique came into vogue, an original combination of breathing exercises, balms, Eastern meditation, and common, everyday water. Some training was necessary if one was to accomplish a delivery in a bathtub, supported by the baby’s father and accompanied by friends and anyone else who wanted to participate; the baby was ushered into the world without the trauma of being ejected from the warm, silent, liquid ambience of the maternal womb into the horror of a delivery room blazing with lights and bristling with surgical instruments. It was not a bad concept but in practice was rather complicated. Samantha had refused even to discuss the subject of the birth, faithful to her theory that if she did not want something it would not happen, but toward the seventh month she had no choice but to face reality because within a finite period of time the baby would be born and she, inevitably, would play a role in the event. To give birth in a warm tub under soft light, assisted by a pair of beatific midwives, seemed less threatening than the same process carried out on a hospital table, given into the hands of an aproned and masked man no one could recognize; she was not agreeable, however, to turning the moment into a social event—despite the midwives’ promises that she needn’t worry about anything and the price included drinks, marijuana, music, and photographs. We were married in private, so why would I have the baby in public? And I certainly don’t want anyone taking my picture with my legs spread apart. Samantha’s mind was made up, putting an end to the dilemma of her nonparticipation. She got up from her bed and began a
ttending the classes with Gregory; there she saw other women in the same condition and discovered that pregnancy is not necessarily a disgrace. She noticed with surprise that other women seemed content and even exhibited their bellies with pride. That had a healthy effect; she partially regained respect for her body and determined to take care of herself; she did not forgo the tripe a la madrileña, but she did add vegetables and fruit to her diet, take long walks, and rub almond oil and sage-and-mint lotion into her skin. She bought clothes for the baby and for a few weeks seemed her old self. The extensive preparations for the delivery included installation of an enormous wood tub in the living room; in principle it could be rented, but they were persuaded to buy it. After the baby was born it could be used in other ways, they were told; this was also the time when friends were beginning to sit naked in large tubs to enjoy a communal soak in steaming hot water. The purchase turned out to have been for naught, however, because five weeks before the baby was due, Samantha gave birth to a girl; they named her Margaret, after the maternal grandmother who died in the rosy foam. Gregory had come home one evening to find his wife sitting in a puddle of amniotic fluid, so befuddled it had not occurred to her to call for help, to say nothing of practicing the seal breathing she had learned in the childbirth courses. Gregory helped her into the bus he used for his work and sped to the hospital, where a caesarean was performed to save the baby. Margaret did not enter the world in a wood tub, lulled by soporific chants and clouds of incense, but prematurely began life in an incubator, a pitiable, solitary fish in an aquarium. It was two days later, as Samantha was taking her first tentative steps down the hospital corridor, that Gregory remembered to call the spiritual midwives, relatives, and friends to tell them the news. He regretted that Carmen had not been by his side, the only person with whom he would have wanted to share the trials of those moments.
For Samantha Ernst, the wind of disaster had begun to blow on the very day of her birth, when her aristocratic mother had placed her in the hands of a nurse and forever renounced responsibility for her, and the moment her own daughter was born, that wind had turned into a hurricane that swept Samantha beyond the bounds of reality. Much later she would confess to her analyst, with absolute sincerity, that the only feeling she had for the tiny creature gasping for breath in the glass cage was denial. Secretly she was grateful she did not have milk to nurse the infant and was not obliged to hold her in her arms. Nothing she had learned during the courses was of any use to her; she was never able to accept her daughter, dismissing her as one more baby girl among the thousands born on the planet at that hour of that day. Nor could she absorb the idea that she had the basic care of that tiny wormlike creature. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw a long incision across her belly, once smooth and tanned and now flabby and covered with stretch marks, and she wept inconsolably for her lost beauty. Her husband tried to comfort her, but every time he came near she repulsed him with undisguised venom. She’ll get used to it, it’s all very new, she’s upset, Gregory thought, but after three weeks, when they were ready to release the infant from the hospital and the mother had not stopped examining herself in the mirror and sobbing, he had to ask his sister for help. Perhaps his mother would have been the logical person in a crisis of that nature, but Samantha could not bear her mother-in-law; she had never perceived any of her virtues and thought of her as a weird old woman who would drive a turtle out of its mind. Gregory also thought of Olga, who truly enjoyed babies and bringing them into the world, but he knew that if his wife could not tolerate Nora, she would have even less patience with Olga.
Gregory called Judy and pleaded with her. “I need your help. Samantha is depressed and ill, and I don’t know anything about babies. Please come.”
“I’ll ask for the day off Friday and spend the weekend with you, but that’s all I can do,” she replied.
Weary of the drunken sprees of the gigantic redhead Jim Morgan, by whom she had two children, Judy had divorced him and gone back to live with her mother in the old cottage. Nora looked after the two grandchildren, one of whom was still a babe in arms, while Judy supported the family. Jim Morgan loved his wife and would love her till the day he died, regardless of the fact that she had become a harpy who chased him screaming through the house, stood at the door of the factory to insult him before his workers, and prowled the bars looking for him in order to create a scene. When she threw him out of the house once and for all and filed for divorce, he felt as if his life were over; he had gone on a monumental bender from which he awakened behind bars. He could not explain how the tragedy had occurred; he did not even remember the person he had killed. Some witnesses said it was an accident, that Morgan had not meant to kill the man—he had polished off his hapless victim with one punch—but the circumstances did not favor the accused. The victim was, by all lights, a sober, mild-mannered featherweight who when the altercation began was standing on a corner ringing a bell for the Salvation Army. Once in prison, Jim Morgan could not contribute to the children’s support, but Judy was happy with that, convinced that the less contact her children had with a criminal father, the better it would be for them. Since she did not make enough money to live in her own house, she went back to live with her mother.
When Gregory met his sister at the airport, he was shocked to see how much weight she had gained. He could not hide his feelings, and she noticed immediately.
“Don’t say anything. I know what you’re thinking.”
“You need to go on a diet, Judy!”
“That’s easy to say; and the proof of that is how often I’ve done it. I must have lost two thousand pounds in all.”
With difficulty she climbed into Gregory’s bus, and they drove to the hospital to pick up Margaret. They were handed a small bundle wrapped in a shawl, so light they looked inside to be sure she was there. Among the folds of wool they found a tiny infant, calmly sleeping. Judy bent down to her niece and began to kiss and nuzzle her like a bitch with her whelp, transfigured by a tenderness Gregory had not seen in decades but had not forgotten. All the way home, she talked to Margaret and petted her, while Gregory observed from the corner of his eye, amazed at Judy’s transfiguration: the unsightly layers of fat disappeared, revealing the radiant hidden beauty below. At home they found the cats sleeping in the cradle and Samantha in her room standing on her head, seeking relief from her emotional anxiety in a fakir’s acrobatics. Gregory shook the cat hair from the baby’s bedding while Judy, short-tempered from the trip and from hours on her feet, jolted her sister-in-law from nirvana with one shove, turning her right side up and returning her to the hard facts of reality.
“Come let me show you how to sterilize the bottles and change the baby’s diapers,” she commanded.
“You’ll have to explain it to Greg. I’m not any good at those things,” Samantha stammered, retreating.
“It’s better if he doesn’t spend too much time with the baby; you don’t want the same shit from him I got from my father,” Judy grumbled testily.
“What are you talking about?” asked Gregory, who was holding the child.
“You know damn well what I’m talking about. I’m not a cretin; do you think I haven’t noticed that you always have kids around?”
“Kids are my job!”
“Your job, sure. Of all possible jobs, you had to choose that one. I wonder why. I bet you look after little girls too, don’t you? All men are perverts!”
Gregory deposited Margaret on the bed, took his sister roughly by one arm, and dragged her into the kitchen, closing the door behind them.
“Now you’re going to explain what the fuck you mean!”
“You have an amazing ability to play dumb, Gregory. I can’t believe you don’t know. . . .”
“I don’t know!”
And then the venom spilled from Judy, all that she had borne in silence from that night over twenty years before when she had not let Gregory crawl into her sleeping bag, the secret zealously guarded with the fear it was not a myst
ery and that everyone knew, the hidden theme of all her bad dreams and rancor, the unspeakable shame that she was exposing now only to protect her niece—an innocent baby, she said—to prevent the sin of incest from happening again in the family, because those things are in the blood, they’re genetic curses, what a black day it was when that piece of garbage brought us into the world, he was a filthy, sinful lecher, and if you need more details I can give them to you, because I remember everything, it’s burned into my memory, if you want me to I’ll tell you how he got me into the shed with a hundred excuses and made me open his fly and he put it in my hands and told me it was my doll baby, my sugar candy, to do it like that, like that, more, until—”.
“That’s enough!” screamed Gregory, clapping his hands over his ears.
• • •
Every Monday morning Gregory Reeves called Carmen Morales, something they do to this day. After the abortion that nearly cost her her life, Carmen had told her mother goodbye and disappeared without a trace. Her name was never spoken in the Morales house, but no one forgot her, least of all her father, who quietly dreamed about her but was too proud to admit he was dying of pain for his absent daughter. She did not communicate again with her family, but two months later Gregory received a postcard from Mexico with a telephone number and the drawing of a small flower, Carmen’s unmistakable signature. He was the only one to have news of her during that period, and through him Inmaculada Morales learned what her daughter was doing. In their brief Monday conversations, the two friends kept up-to-date about their lives and plans. Their voices were distorted by static and by the strain of talking long-distance; it was difficult to communicate in interrupted sentences, and their memories of each other began to dim: they were as if blind, with their hands outstretched in the darkness. Carmen had rented a sordid room on the outskirts of Mexico City and was working in a silver workshop. She spent so many hours traveling by bus across that huge accursed city that she had no time for anything else. She had no friends or lovers. The disillusion she had experienced at the hands of Tom Clayton had destroyed her ingenuous tendency to fall in love at first sight, and besides, being where she was, it was nearly impossible to find someone who would understand and accept her natural independence. Her father’s and her brothers’ machismo was pale compared to what she was encountering, and, prudently, she settled for solitude as the lesser evil. Because of Olga’s unfortunate procedure and the subsequent operation, she would never be able to have children; she was freer than before, but also sadder. She lived on the implicit boundary where the official city ended and the inadmissible world of the marginal began. The building she occupied consisted of a narrow passageway with a row of rooms on either side, a couple of water taps, a trough for laundry in the center, and communal bathrooms in the rear—always so filthy she tried to avoid using them. It was a more violent place than the ghetto where she had grown up: people had to fight for their minuscule space, and there were many quarrels and few hopes; she was in a nightmare world, unknown to tourists, a terrible labyrinth ringing the beautiful city founded by the Aztecs, an enormous conglomerate of wretched shacks and unpaved and unlighted streets suffocating in garbage that stretched toward an endless horizon. She walked among downtrodden Indians and indigent mestizos, naked children and starving dogs, women bowed by the weight of pregnancies and drudgery, idle men resigned to their fate but with a hand on the grip of a dagger, ready to defend their eternally threatened dignity and manhood. Now she could not count on the protection of her family and soon realized that as a young woman living alone she was a rabbit surrounded by a pack of hounds. She never went out at night; she slept with a bar across her door, another over the window, and a butcher knife beneath her pillow. When she went out to wash her clothes, the other women stared at her with distrust because she was different. They called her “gringa,” in spite of her having explained a thousand times that her family was from Zacatecas. Men she never spoke to at all. Sometimes she bought candy and sat in the alley, waiting for children to gather around her; those were her few happy moments. In the workshop she sat beside silent Indians with magic hands, who rarely spoke to her but taught her the secret of their art. The hours raced by unnoticed; she was absorbed in the laborious process of modeling the wax, pouring the metals, engraving, polishing, mounting the stones, and assembling each minute piece. At night she designed earrings, rings, and bracelets in her room; first she practiced with tin and pieces of glass; later, when she had saved a little money, she used silver and semiprecious stones. In her free hours she sold the pieces door-to-door, taking care that her employers never learned of their modest competition.