Ghosts by Daylight

by Janine di Giovanni

  She then gave me small round yellow pills to dry up the milk. I popped one in my mouth while she was watching, but instictively spit it out after she left, like a patient interned in a mental hospital. I decided the minute they released me from the hospital, I was going to do it, whether or not they approved.

  It wasn’t just that response that changed my mind. I began to realise that I was missing out.

  My editor phoned from London, and I told her.

  ‘Oh no . . .’ Gill said. ‘Listen . . . you have to try . . . you’ll miss out on the experience.’

  My friend Sam called. ‘Did he latch on?’ Why was I being asked this by a man, I wondered, and one of my most macho friends, a man I had crouched under fire with in Afghanistan? Why was even he judging me for not breastfeeding? ‘Because they’re like lambs when they’re born . . . they do it naturally,’ he continued.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I’m not breastfeeding. It’s not really part of the culture here.’

  Crushing silence. ‘Oh.’

  I hung up the phone and felt worse.

  I was missing the experience of motherhood, and I was not sure why. Somehow it was racing past me like a wild horse and I was unable to grab the reins and jump on. Yet everyone else was able to. Passing the other rooms of other mothers, I peeked in and saw them bouncing their tiny babies between their knees. They were feeding them with little bottles of formula with confidence and with no tortured feelings that they were a failure for not breastfeeding. Huge families, small children carrying balloons, grandparents with beaming smiles, husbands opening bottles of champagne surrounded them.

  Only an Indian woman who had a room at the end of the hall looked as lost as I did. Her skinny, worried husband had asked the nurses to push a cot into the room so that he could sleep next to his wife. Bruno stayed as long as he could, but I was in Paris, not London. I did not have many visitors.

  ‘Don’t leave me alone here,’ I begged him the first night. ‘Please don’t leave me alone.’

  ‘But you’re not alone!’ he said, pointing to the glass box where the baby slept. ‘There’s this little creature here!’

  Two days after giving birth, on Valentine’s Day he brought me champagne and small pastries filled with creamed chicken and smoked salmon, caviar, and blinis, and roses and chocolates. He stayed with me and told me how much he loved me, and held the baby and fell asleep in the chair with him.

  At 10 p.m., he got up to leave. I felt, as I always felt when I was left alone with the baby, in a general state of alarm. Bruno took my hand as he was leaving, ‘You’re going to be a great mother. Just do what you feel is right. You won’t do anything wrong.’

  ‘There’s so much I could do wrong . . . the wrong amount of formula, I don’t know how to mix it, how to sterilize the bottles, I could drop him in the bath, I might stand too close to the window . . .’

  ‘Not the window again. You’ll be fine.’ He went back to Paris. ‘I’ve got to sleep, baby, I’ve got to sleep. I feel like I’m going to collapse.’ He had been awake for thirty-six hours, sitting by me while I slept.

  After he left, I picked up the baby and I stared at him hard. He had slanted eyes, like his father, and his fingers were long and slender, like mine, but they were still tiny. If I squeezed them, they would break. He had white dots on his nose, that the nurse explained had something to do with coming into contact with the air when he came out of me, into the world. All he did was sleep.

  I put him back in the glass box that was his crib, and sat at the edge of the bed, watching him. The crazy thoughts came back into my head. What if he chokes? How do I feed him? How do I change him?

  The nurse, the fat one who was friendly and had a suburban accent, arrived and took him away. ‘You need to sleep,’ she said, looking at my chart. ‘You’re overwrought.’ She gave me a huge blue pill, which was some kind of sedative, and took the quiet baby to the nursery. This time I did not fight the pill or hide it in the crook of my bed. I gulped it down with water, not caring if it was Thorazine or Prozac or something stronger. I just wanted the anxiety, the fear and the sense of dread to go away.

  She wheeled the baby away down the hall in his glass box, the creaky wheels making annoying noises. They’re taking my baby away, I thought dimly through the drug haze, and I don’t even care.

  I did not sleep right away, but lay on top of the sheets, stoned from the medication. The room was dark except for the blue light of the TV: five French channels and CNN. I watched the crisis in Haiti growing and saw a crowd of photographers in Port-au-Prince, and caught the back of the head of someone I knew well in the crowd: Tyler. I smiled, thinking of a long trip to Somalia we had taken for a magazine article. The trip when Bruno phoned and said, ‘Let’s get married. Let’s have a baby.’

  That was my old life. I dimly wondered how quickly I could get to the Caribbean, to Haiti, if I had to. In the old days, I would have gotten my passport from my bottom drawer, taken my summer clothes, then gone to the airport and bought a ticket. A flight to Miami from Paris was nine hours, then . . . Wait! I was a mother! I was not going anywhere for a while.

  And I was still so weak, and not used to being weak. I could barely walk from the after-effects of the epidural. I was sure the pretty Italian anaesthiologist had overdosed me, and I was grateful for her mistake. I had not felt a thing. My friend in London was horrified: ‘You mean you did not want to feel the pushing?’

  ‘No. Why should I?’ I’d had broken bones before, I told her. I don’t need to know what pain is. And the big blue pill did not put me to sleep, but it seemed to mellow me, as if my anxieties were wrapped in cotton wool.

  Someone brought dinner, an older woman who spoke incomprehensible French. She smelled bad and had ugly mousy brown hair, which seemed glued to her scalp. She muttered as she arranged the dishes of watery mashed potatoes and a flattened chicken breast and carrots floating in margarine. She seemed disturbed in some way, her movements violent. She frightened me, like one of the main characters in the big Beatrix Potter book someone had given me for Luca. A giant rat.

  ‘I can’t eat,’ I told her, and asked for tea. She looked startled, interrupted from her muttering.

  ‘Tea? No tea.’ She left, still talking to herself. Someone else came in and said under no circumstances should I get out of bed because I would fall.

  ‘You’re wobbly,’ they said. ‘But at least you don’t have stitches. The professor is a genius. You are lucky.’ Someone came in with another giant pill, this one green, and a glass of water. Someone else gave me an injection. I know I should have asked what they were for, but the truth was I did not care. The hours floated, the baby cared for by strangers in a nursery down the hall.

  ‘Now you really must sleep,’ said the night nurse. And I did.

  Sometime during the night the green pill wore off and I woke up. I was sore and the place where my drip was connected to my arm ached. I heard a baby crying, several in fact, in unison, but I instinctively knew that it was not my baby. I got out of bed, sliding the IV drip still attached to my arm along with me down the hall as though I was leading a dog on a lead. I found the nursery and looked for my baby. But they all looked alike, these strange creatures: small, wrinkled, dressed in too-large jumpsuits, topped off with either blue or pink knitted caps. Some were screaming and some had masses of black hair. Did my baby have hair? I had only seen him for a few hours. Was he the baby in the second cot? I peered at the name card which said, ‘Caresse-moi, but only with your eyes.’ No, that baby was called Adam. The next one was a girl called Chloe. Then there was a Gary – a decidedly un-French name – and a Roman.

  Then I saw my baby. All the other babies were lying down, but mine was sitting up in a kind of chair, because he had fluid in his lungs. The nurse had called it glare but no one could translate for me. I had called a French friend in London in desperation. ‘Glare,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I’m not sure there is a word in English. It’s a kind of thick thing in your throat . . . l
et me think . . . yes, phlegm! That’s the word: phlegm!’

  My baby was sitting up and was not crying. In fact, he was remarkably still, quiet, calm. Later, everyone would tell me how ‘sage’ he was. This baby was slightly cross-eyed and seemed to be staring at his fingers; his lips were pursed slightly, as if he was whistling. While the other infants howled and screeched around him, he seemed utterly content and quiet. It was my Luca.

  And then, at that second, I fell in love with my baby. He was really, really mine, and he was alive. He had lived. He had survived. We both had. I asked the nurse if I could hold him. She handed him to me. He cuddled near my broken collarbone, the one I had broken twice when I was eighteen, and instinctively found the broken bone that stuck up, as though he wanted to make it feel better. He nuzzled into my skin as though he wanted to go back inside me. He reminded me of a small chicken, a capon. For weeks after, Bruno and I called him the capon.

  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 duri
ng 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.