The dreams would begin as soon as I fell asleep. I hadn’t dreamed in years. But now I dreamed of the baby. It was angry at me and I didn’t know why. It was trying to tell me something. It would make a sharp gesture with the thumb of its right hand: no.
—I don’t want you! I would shout in my sleep.
—Whether you want me or not, I’m here now, and I’m all settled in. Then it would laugh, a little sadly. Of course it’s a little cramped in here, and the heat makes me sweat.
The dreams were always exactly the same, the same words, coming in the same order in the course of each night.
Late at night, I always dreamed that the baby was hanging in my womb like a gigantic centipede, grasping on with its thousands of legs, about to slip out onto the sheets. Its little eyes were full of fear as it slipped further and further down, and tears flowed down its cheeks. Then I would wake with a start, bathed in sweat, my nightgown drenched, sticking to my body.
Whenever I woke in the middle of the night I would remember Alkis, the morning he left for England.
—Be careful, darling, he had said. For our baby’s sake. Make sure you walk for two hours every day, and go swimming, and don’t smoke. I want this baby more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. I dream of it every night, laughing in your womb, happy because you love it. It’s always the same dream: your baby smiles and waves to you with its little hand as if it were far away. “I’m coming!” it cries, “I’m coming! Wait for me!” And you smile back and say, “I can’t wait for you to get here!” Darling, I’m so happy! It’s part of you, part of the woman I adore, your blood, your flesh. I hope it has my eyes and your hair—I’m insanely happy!
On the morning Alkis left I went out and bought five cartons of Dunhill Reds. All day I sat in the sun and smoked.
How deep is your love… The music and the heat would rush over me. I would slather tanning oil on my body and hair and lie like that until night fell. Then I would take Lyn for her walk, and then I would go to bed. I did each of these things every day, at exactly the same times. During all of August I didn’t go for a single swim.
I felt deeply happy that Alkis was away. Every day we talked on the phone from four to five in the afternoon.
—Are you going swimming? Alkis’s voice sounded distant on the telephone. England seemed like another planet.
—Yes, I answered.
—I want this baby.
Every day he told me that on the phone.
—I want it like nothing else in the world.
I stopped going to the gynecologist.
At the beginning of September, during one of his phone calls, Alkis said:
—Let’s go to Ireland after the conference and stay there for the rest the month. As a second honeymoon. It’ll be good for the baby. I’m so in love with you both.
—Alkis, I’ve decided not to come. A trip right now might be a strain on the baby, and I don’t want anything to upset my pregnancy. Besides, I have a schedule here that I’d rather not upset: an hour of swimming in the morning, a two-hour siesta in the afternoon, a two-hour walk with Lyn in the evening. I’m always in bed by nine. I’m doing everything I can to be a good mother, and that’s all I want to concentrate on, even now, before the baby is born.
—Whatever you want, Alkis answered, laughing. Whatever you want, darling. I know how obsessive you are about your schedules. I’ll be home at the end of September. We’ll go to Ireland next year, with the baby. It’ll be a year old. We’ll show it the North Sea, how it merges with the green of the mountains at the horizon. At night we’ll take it with us to pubs, give it a little beer. I’m so happy! You’re going to be such a wonderful mother.
—I’m happy too. This baby means everything to me.
That night I dreamed that I vomited the baby. Like a miscarriage, except it came out my mouth. My mouth flooded with blood and pieces of flesh, tender, sweetsmelling flesh, and I thought I would choke. The baby’s hands fastened themselves around my neck, and it screamed: “No, mom, no! Don’t do it! I want to live!”
In my dream, I grabbed the two hands that were clutching my neck and pulled with all my strength. I managed to get them off. They were tiny little hands, white and plump, and despite the blood that was choking me, they seemed to smell of jasmine.
Am I crazy? I want this baby, I suddenly thought. But it was already too late. The room had filled with the scent of jasmine from the baby’s hands. I woke up with a start, bathed in sweat.
On September nineteenth I was two months pregnant. That evening, on my nightly walk with Lyn, I passed through all the parks in Glyfada, looking at the toddlers. They were playing on seesaws and swings, or with pails in the sand, running and chittering like birds. They plunged their little hands deep into the water of the fountain and laughed—they were always laughing. And their mothers were so beautiful! Even the ones who were ugly or old. They all shone with happiness, as if they had absorbed something of their babies’ glow. I took a piece of kaseri out of my pocket—I always craved that particular kind of cheese at precisely that hour of the day—and chewed it slowly. I let Lyn off her leash and she ran to play with the kids. I sat on a bench and watched. The mothers were exquisitely beautiful now that the sun was setting. Their eyes were fixed on their children, in case they fell or started quarrelling. A few of the kids were more lively than the rest. One fat little girl with a pink bow in her hair gave a sharp blow to a puny little boy with red hair and a freckled nose—and while his mother shouted at the fat girl’s mother, who looked like an enormous velvet butterfly, the boy pushed himself between them and yelled:
—I want more! I want more punches!
Everyone in the park laughed, and I laughed too. I lit another cigarette and offered one to the woman sitting beside me on the bench. She looked at my belly and said:
—You really shouldn’t be smoking. You’ve smoked a dozen cigarettes in the past half hour. Shouldn’t you be thinking of your baby?
I was so ashamed that I got up and ran off. And I forgot to put Lyn back on her leash.
The second month of my pregnancy ended. I entered the third. At the end of the third month, I went back to the gynecologist.
—Where have you been? I was worried, he said.
—I want an abortion, I answered.
A deep silence fell in the office. My gynecologist, who was usually so friendly, looked at me coldly.
—Why do you want an abortion?
—Because I hate my husband, and I want to deny him the joy of having this baby.
I lit a cigarette.
—Smoking is not permitted in the office.
The gynecologist wouldn’t even look at me. He shuffled some papers on his desk. I kept smoking.
—Put out your cigarette at once. It’s bad for the baby.
—But I don’t want it, I don’t want Alkis to be happy, I said, lighting another.
—What about you? Do you want it? The gynecologist looked me in the eye, suddenly sweet and tender. He reminded me of Aunt Louisa.
—Yes, I said, and started to cry, silently, but so hard that before long the front of my shirt was completely soaked, as if I had just taken it out of the washing machine. The doctor let me cry for a long time. My appointment had been for seven, but by now the sun was setting, so I must have been crying for at least an hour. The doctor switched on the light, a beautiful antique lamp that was sitting on his desk.
—You’re entering your fourth month. He was speaking so softly that I had to lean forward to hear him.
—What you want is no longer just an abortion, at this point it’s a surgical procedure.
I remembered my dream, the one in which I’d vomited up the baby and its velvety hands, and the office filled with the scent of jasmine.
—Be at the hospital at a quarter to eight tomorrow morning. Don’t eat or drink anything prior to the appointment, not even a cup of coffee. We’ll operate at nine, but there are some preparatory procedures. I’ll give you my home number in case you
change your mind during the night. We can cancel tomorrow’s appointment at any point, it’s quite simple. Your husband adores you. I remember the first time you came here together, he asked you to go outside so he could speak to me alone. “Doctor,” he told me, “I don’t want anything to happen to my wife. I adore her, and I know how much she wants this baby. And I want it, too. Because it’ll be my wife all over again from the beginning, I’ll get to experience her as a baby, as a child, a teenager, and I’ll be so grateful. I hope it’s a girl. I hope she has my wife’s hair, and her laugh.”
The operation took place the next morning. I stayed in the hospital for five days, in a room with two other women, both of whom had just given birth. The nurses would bring their babies in to be fed. I watched them insatiably. The smell of milk filled the room, the babies’ mouths grasped the nipples like little suckers and drank greedily, their velvety hands resting on the white, swollen breasts. I lied to the two women, told them I’d had a miscarriage, so I could cry as much as I wanted. In the afternoon, during visiting hours, the room would fill with flowers, red roses, lilies, jasmine. Before that, around lunchtime, the three of us would watch The Bold and the Beautiful on the TV in the room. I cried constantly. Through my tears I could make out hazy figures moving on the screen, blondes in silk dresses who cried and collapsed into one another’s arms. The men all wore suits and striped silk ties. After the show, we’d fall asleep until late afternoon. I no longer dreamed.
They had Alkis come home from England.
—Your wife had a miscarriage, my gynecologist told him over the phone.
The doctor came to see me, bringing a bouquet of jasmine. He held my hand. We didn’t speak. Then he left, closing the door behind him carefully, like a thief.
Alkis brought me a huge bouquet of wildflowers, which he knew were my favorite.
—I picked them myself, he said as soon as he entered the room. I chose them for you one by one.
He didn’t put them in a vase. He scattered them on top of me, covering me in flowers from my feet to my chest. He didn’t say a word about the baby.
Does he know? I wondered. Alkis had an infallible intuition, surely he knew. He kissed me on the mouth and left.
—I’ll come again at the same time tomorrow.
That evening, with the two women who had become my friends, I watched a really great thriller on TV. It was called Dressed to Kill.
41.
After the abortion, I returned home. It was autumn. Glyfada was ugly and melancholy. The clouds turned the sea in front of our terrace the color of ink, of dirty blue velvet. I dreamed of babies every night. Blond babies, dark-haired babies, boys, girls—in my dreams they all looked at me, crying.
—But I didn’t kill you, I shouted at them in my dreams. It’s Alkis’s fault, he killed you, it was his sperm, I didn’t want it inside me. It’s Alkis’s fault, Alkis’s. Go be in his dreams, leave me alone.
In one of the dreams there was a baby who had Alkis’s purple eyes. It was a boy. He flew around the bed holding a knife, then suddenly swooped down to attack me. The knife left a mark on my chest. I knew right away that this was the baby I had killed with the abortion.
—Why did you let them chop me up? he cried, flying around my face with dizzying speed, like a monstrous mosquito. He looked like a warrior, wielding the knife above his head. His eyes looked exactly like Alkis’s, distant and metallic, only these purple eyes were filled with hate. He was pink and chubby, like an angel, unbelievably beautiful, which made the knife in his hand seem even more sinister.
—Why did you let them chop me up? he asked again. Why? I was a good baby and I really wanted to live.
—Babies don’t talk, I told him bitterly.
—In dreams they do. He looked at me wildly. In dreams babies do whatever they want. When you kill a baby, it goes back to where it came from, a big room high up in the sky, with a view down onto earth. From up there they can see all the parents, and they pick which ones to go to.
—And you picked me?
—Yes. But when you kill a baby the way you did, it knows how to talk better than the others, because it learned to talk in its mother’s belly. But instead of being born, it goes back up into the sky with a useless tongue, since it only has other babies to talk to, who don’t understand anything. All you taught me was to cry and to curse. And now that I’ve gone back to the other babies, they won’t play with me. They don’t understand anything I say, but I have this wild look that makes them scared of me. Besides, I’m the only one who’s ever come back after a willful murder—“abortion,” I think they call it down there—and in the place where I am now, that’s the ultimate sin and disgrace. The other babies still haven’t gone down into the bellies of the mothers they chose, so they’re fresh and pure, while I’m all butchered and polluted, blood still runs from my wounds, they still haven’t healed. At the hospital when you spread your legs and they put you to sleep they chopped me up into pieces, and now my right arm is missing, I have to crawl around with just the left one and I’m always falling and hitting my head on the ground. And there are lots of babies ahead of me in line, it’ll be ages before it’s my turn to go back down. I’ll be waiting for so long, with everything I learned on earth useless to me here. I’ll be here for ages, all hacked up in pieces, waiting my turn.
Suddenly the room filled with babies flying around like bees. They whirled in circles over the bed with terrifying speed, while others poured in through the open window, pink and chubby as cherubs. But their eyes were wild, murderous. They carried chains, axes, clubs, and saws, and flew down on top of me and started beating me with their weapons.
—Now we’ll kill you, we’ll chop you to pieces, butcher you, like you did to our friend.
When the first club hit me and broke my nose and the blood began to flow, I let out a howl. I woke with a start and sat up in bed, bathed in sweat. I was trembling like a leaf.
Alkis awoke.
—Darling, what’s wrong? You’re drenched in sweat. You must’ve had another nightmare.
—Alkis, I said, Alkis, make love to me.
That night I conceived. While we made love, I pleaded for the same baby to return, the baby with Alkis’s purple eyes, and the knife.
42.
Alkis made me go to a psychiatrist, because all day long I would shout:
—I hate you!
—And I adore you, Alkis would answer.
That was all we said to one another anymore, crying and shouting.
It was a Saturday, I think, when Alkis grabbed his head with both hands and started to cry like a child.
—If things keep up this way I’ll go crazy, and you’ll go on safe and unharmed as you always do, I’ll go crazy, I can feel it, there’s this humming in my ears like an earthquake is coming, and I keep seeing strange images as if I’ve taken some drug, I have to check a hundred times to make sure I’ve turned off the stove. Stop! Stop it right now!
I dressed very seductively for my first visit to the psychiatrist, in the black dress I’d worn to the casino with Vanessa. As soon as I put it on, it seemed as if ages had passed since that night. It had a high neckline and the back was open to the waist. I put on a pair of black high heeled sandals that fastened with a thin strap around the ankle. I left my hair down. It had grown all the way down to my waist, but I pulled it over my shoulder, alongside my right cheek, so my bare back would show. I put on lots of makeup, something I never did, and got out my grandmother’s old jewelry, a gold chain and a gold bracelet studded with diamonds. When I left the house at four that afternoon, passersby turned to stare at me, and one man whispered as he walked by, “You look like a Christmas tree. All that’s missing is the lights.”
I went into the office. The psychiatrist was smoking a pipe, and I was reminded of Vanessa and her slim tortoise-shell cigarette holder. I sat down in an armchair opposite him. A deep silence fell in the room. It was unbearably hot. The noise from the cicadas outside was deafening. I started rummaging aro
und nervously in my purse.
—Feel free to smoke, the psychiatrist told me.
I lit a cigarette. A second silence, even longer than the first, made me start sweating, or maybe it was just the heat. Finally the psychiatrist switched on the fan that was sitting on his desk. The breeze sent all the smoke into my face. My eyes welled up and tears began to roll down my cheeks, my mascara and rouge ran and I started to cough.
—Could you maybe turn the fan toward you? I asked.
Soon I was soaked in sweat, my face a mess of melted makeup. I took an elastic band from my pocket and pulled my hair back, took a tissue and wiped off all the makeup. Right away I felt better, and sat more comfortably in the chair.
The psychiatrist smiled.
—You have lots of different brands of cigarettes in your purse.
—Yes, I answered. I like the variety.
—But it must be tiring, always having to choose which brand to smoke.
I’d never thought of that before.
—Now that you mention it, I told him, I realize that it really does exhaust me.
—Wouldn’t it be better if you chose one brand and stuck with it?
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