Longing

by Espinosa, Maria

  “Antonio,” she said. “I’m too sick to go to that interview. Do you have a jeton for the phone? All this water just gushed out of me.”

  The patronne, a large woman in a black skirt and sweater who had borne six children, guffawed. “Your waters have burst,” she said. “This means the baby is coming. See, I told you it would be soon,” she said to Antonio. “I could tell the baby had descended just by looking at her.”

  “I’ve got to cancel that interview,” said Rosa, frustrated. Then to the patronne, “When is the baby coming? Does this mean right away?”

  “Oh, within the next twenty-four hours or so. You’ve got time. Go home and get some rest before you go to the hospital.”

  Panic arose, pushing through Rosa’s throat into a silent scream. She completely disregarded the men and women around her, intent only on Antonio, the patronne’s knowledge, and the fearful certainty that at last the baby was coming.

  “But it’s only been seven and a half months,” she said to Antonio. “Antonio, come home with me. I’m frightened.”

  “Go with her,” urged the patronne. “She needs you.”

  Antonio shrugged. “If you wish,” he muttered.

  They walked down the street. It was cold and overcast. She was wearing nothing but a jumper with a sweater underneath, having neglected to put on a coat. He had not touched her in bed for the last week. She wanted to shriek, Hold me. Damn you. Hold me. But she pressed her lips together and clenched her teeth as a knot of pain made itself felt right where the baby was. “I think it’s coming now,” she said. “Help me, Antonio, what am I going to do?”

  “You’ll go to the hospital when it’s time,” he said calmly, coldly.

  In the apartment he changed into a pair of old khaki trousers and a white ski sweater. “I’m going to connect the pipe with the main line,” he said. “I’ll have to knock a hole though the wall.”

  She thought it was as though he wanted to ignore the reality of what was happening. “The contractions are coming now,” she said. “I can feel them.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time,” he told her.

  He went into the makeshift bathroom to connect up the toilet with the main plumbing lines. When the pain came again, she sat down on the bed.

  All her knowledge about the specific process of labor came from books she had picked up at the American Bookstore on the Rue de l’Opéra several months ago. Conscientiously, she had practiced methods of breathing for natural childbirth. But somehow it had never been clear in her mind that when the waters burst, it meant the baby was beginning its passage through the birth canal.

  The pain came again, knotting her up, and she felt like a complete fool. Baby, come quickly. It felt like something was wanting to push out through her anus. She took a few steps and then squatted down again so as to push harder and ease the pain. Something she had read about primitive ways of giving birth flashed into her mind. Each time the pain came she pushed, and she screamed then because it lessened the pain and helped her push harder. She tried to remember what the books said about breathing. To open her mouth. Pant like a dog. It was useless to try to remember. She just breathed and screamed and kept pushing.

  “Don’t scream like that!” shouted Antonio.

  “It hurts!” she shouted.

  He emerged from the back room. His face flashed with a youthful, devil-may-care quality. “The way you’re screaming, the baby must be healthy,” he said.

  To ease the pain, she tried singing an old folk blues she had learned as a child.

  Black girl

  Black girl

  Don’t lie to me

  Tell me where

  Did you sleep

  Last night

  To her surprise, it did help ease the pain. The monotonous quality of the chant comforted her. Her own voice soothed her, helped her push harder with each contraction.

  He was hammering with a chisel at the plaster to open up a hole in the wall of the back room. She began to feel furious with him for doing this while he neglected her.

  She walked to where he was standing on a stepladder above the toilet. “Antonio!” she cried. “I want you to stop working and be with me. Hold me!”

  “Hold me,” he mimicked, with suppressed violence in his voice. He hammered harder, as if he were going to destroy the entire wall. His face grew mask-like. It was as though he wanted to ignore the baby’s coming existence, as though his muscles were turning rigid against this frightening new life.

  Tears sprang to her eyes. The room around her blurred with her rage. She wanted to hit him, throttle him, choke him, but she was giving birth to his damned brat, and as soon as the baby was born she hoped that she would have the courage to leave him.

  “You are never kind to me!” she shouted.

  “Merde alors!” he shouted. “Leave me alone!”

  “Bastard! How can you work at a time like this?”

  “How do I know the baby is even mine? God knows who you’ve fucked.”

  “It’s yours, it’s yours, it’s yours!” she shouted, overcome with anger and with a black fear in the pit of her stomach.

  “Leave me alone,” he said, “or I’ll walk out right now and you’ll never see me again. Then you’ll be bien foutue. You’ll be nothing at all. Your parents will destroy you, and God help the baby.”

  She clamped her lips together, clamped down on the scream, swallowed back her tears.

  But beneath her rage she rejoiced, because she did not judge people so much by their actions as by the energy that emanated from them. Somehow, in attacking her so monstrously he was sending her good energy. Yes, he loved her. While people like her mother, who offered clothes, layettes, money, often sent bad energy.

  The baby would be born before her mother arrived, she exulted. She was sure the birth would go better without her mother. Rosa feared her mother, felt guilty at fearing her, guilty at judging her mother’s energy to be malevolent.

  She sang again. Another contraction came harder, harder than any that had gone before. She squatted down over the cold red tile floor. Push harder, harder, the baby seemed to be telling her.

  In the pines

  In the pines

  Where the sun

  Never shines

  I shivered

  With cold

  Deadly cold

  The old folk blues. It was a black blues. She felt black. African. The rhythm soothed her; the singing helped her forget the pain.

  For a while she kept this up, singing, moving, pushing to relieve the knots of pulsating pain, while she could hear Antonio’s hammer blows.

  She decided that she must go to the American Hospital, although it was on the other side of the city in Neuilly, and although she had registered at a French hospital not far from the apartment. Perhaps the French had no incubators. Although she had gone for prenatal checkups at the Hôpital Hôtel-Dieu, she had never asked, never investigated. There the walls were dingy, the people poor. She was on some sort of public assistance which Elena had recommended.

  “Come with me,” she yelled to Antonio. “I’m going to the hospital now. The American Hospital.”

  “As soon as I’ve finished putting in this pipe I’ll call an ambulance,” he said.

  She sat down on a chair. Now it was harder for her to walk. A force, almost palpable, thick and yellow, seemed to surround her, told her to go now, while she could still walk, while there was still time.

  “They don’t have incubators at the Hôtel-Dieu, do they, Antonio?”

  “Of course they do.”

  She did not believe him.

  “I’m going now! Will you get me a taxi?”

  “Wait for the ambulance. I’ll go downstairs and telephone for one.”

  “There’s no time.”

  Panic so filled her that her thoughts were disordered, illogical, governed entirely by this voice running through her that told her she must go now, while she was still strong enough to walk.

  She grabbed her coat and pur
se. Not now, the voice cautioned. Wait a moment longer. She knew this voice. She had heard it before. Once a year ago when Antonio and she had broken up, the voice guided her to him inside an obscure shop in a neighborhood which was unfamiliar to her. Then as now, the voice told her when to linger, when to hasten. Her conscious mind, her reasoning faculties were overwhelmed by this voice of panic, which was frighteningly clairvoyant. People would think her insane if she talked about it. Only Antonio understood about the voice.

  Secretly she was relieved that he would not get her a taxi. What taxi driver would stop for him in his dirty, baggy old clothes? She would fare better alone.

  Go now, now, now! the voice inside screamed. She bolted, almost falling down the four flights of wooden stairs. It was dusk. As she ran across the courtyard, a slender woman in a black coat was just closing up her mailbox.

  “Help me!” she screamed in French at the woman. “Help me find a taxi to get to the hospital! I’m having a baby!”

  “Yes I’ll help you,” the woman replied in English with a British-sounding accent. She looked about thirty years old. She had dark hair and a calm manner.

  The baby has a guardian angel, Rosa thought. The guardian angel has protected it through all this terrible pregnancy. What luck the woman spoke English! Although Rosa was fluent in French, it was easier for her to speak English.

  “I’ll fetch you a taxi,” the woman said with comforting calmness.

  She took hold of Rosa’s arm. They walked to the end of the block onto the Boulevard Henri Quatre, where lines of cars inched along for miles. It was the height of the evening traffic jam.

  While Rosa rested on a bench underneath a bare willow, the Englishwoman ran along the lines of cars, searching for a free taxi. At last one stopped.

  Amidst honking of horns, the noise of traffic, the driver asked “Are you protected? I don’t want my seats stained with blood.”

  Rosa gazed at the woman in amazement. Her expression did not change until she winked. “Yes,” Rosa lied.

  “Do you need me anymore?” asked the woman.

  “No, I can manage now. Thank you very much.”

  As the taxi drove off, panic again surged through her. “Follow that woman!” she cried to the driver. “I need her!” Half a block later they flagged her down, just as she was about to turn into the courtyard. Rosa had rolled down the window. “Please!” she cried. “Can you come with me? I need your help.”

  For a moment the woman hesitated, while an expression of frustration crossed her face. She brushed her hair back from her forehead, then walked towards the taxi.

  “Yes, certainly I’ll come if you need me,” said the woman. Her eyes were a clear hazel. “I had a dinner engagement, but it will be all right if I’m late.”

  She got into the back seat and looked intently at Rosa who was curled up in the far corner, continuing to push in rhythm with the ever-increasing pain.

  “You’re in the last stage of labor,” declared the woman in crisp, clear tones. “I can tell because I’ve had three children myself.”

  “Then we don’t have time to get to the American Hospital, do we?” asked Rosa.

  “No, not with all this traffic. You must go to the very nearest hospital.”

  “But that’s the Hôtel-Dieu. Thank God I’ve already registered there. Will they have incubators?”

  “Of course.”

  She believed the woman, who seemed so competent and down-to-earth. It was all so crazy. She had been totally inadequate, and yet, in spite of her stupidity, it was all falling into place.

  Finally, after what seemed forever to Rosa (it felt as if her body were somehow trying to hold back so that the baby would not emerge right here in the taxi) they pulled up at the Emergency Entrance.

  “Do you still need me?” asked the woman.

  “Yes.”

  Thank God she registered here months ago, but still she was apprehensive as they went through the sign-in procedures. With all their bureaucratic formalities, if she hadn’t already registered, she might have given birth on the floor of the damned waiting room.

  Finally they placed her on a stretcher.

  “I’ll go now,” said the Englishwoman. “You’re in good hands. I’ll be in to see you tomorrow.”

  In a small antechamber outside the delivery room they measured the baby’s heartbeat. It sounded like a boy, they said, because it was so strong. Boys’ hearts, they told her, beat with more strength. Again Rosa panicked. It was so little. It was being born so terribly early. If it were a boy, she feared it could not live because they were frailer than girls at birth. She prayed that it be a girl. Antonio had foreseen a girl. Laughing, he had said, “I can see her at fifteen with blonde hair and blue eyes— she will be wearing glasses—reading a book, terribly serious.”

  When they reached the delivery room and she was placed on the table with its stirrups, Rosa was glad that she had arrived no earlier. This contraption seemed designed to halt the process of delivery. How on earth could she push effectively with her feet up in the air inside these stirrups? Of course, she thought with rage, it had been designed by men. All those dumb romantic novels about women and children dying in childbirth! How in hell could the babies get born while their mothers were lying helpless in the bed and when the only effective way was to squat down? No wonder there were births that lasted for days. So many birth complications were needless, she realized in that instant of shock.

  But where was the doctor? She feared doctors. Male doctors at the hospital on Long Island, who had never begun to understand her, who analyzed her as if she were a butterfly impaled on a pin. They had nearly killed her. Only there had been one woman doctor, a warm, comforting, overweight woman who seemed to realize exactly what was going on. A pity that woman had not been able to talk with her more than once.

  No doctor appeared. Midwives, in smocks of pale blue with white blouses, massaged her abdomen with what seemed a magical understanding of exactly where this was needed.

  “Open your mouth wide,” they said. “Breathe out fast and hard.”

  “You use the Lamaze method?” she asked.

  “Yes. Keep breathing out.”

  They were even using the way of breathing she had learned from a book.

  But by now she was consumed with pain, and barely conscious of what she was doing, she cried out for an anaesthetic. They reacted with derision. “Americans,” one said, “are cowards about pain. We don’t use anaesthetics in this hospital for normal births.”

  “No?” she was grateful for the baby’s sake. Thank God for these women.

  “Push just a little harder,” they told her. “There! There’s the head just coming out!”

  “Don’t scream so loud,” they said. But Rosa ignored them and kept on screaming because it helped her to push out even harder. When she reached between her legs, she felt the tip of a soft, downy head. Someone grabbed her hand away. She bore down even harder then, until the pain became almost intensely pleasurable.

  Thirty minutes after Rosa’s arrival, the baby was born. It was ugly, red-faced, and cried loudly. It was a girl, they told her. The baby was in good health and apparently free of abnormalities, but she weighed so little that they would put her into an incubator.

  Such immense joy and bliss flooded Rosa that the difficulties in her life no longer seemed significant. Apart from the baby, her baby whom she had given birth to and who, thank God, was healthy, nothing else mattered.

  The next day Antonio was the first person to arrive on the ward during visiting hours. She had sent him a pneumatique last night, before falling into an exhausted sleep. He brought her overnight things and a pink azalea plant wrapped in silver foil. He looked penitent, she noted with a touch of amusement. She felt serene. The baby had been brought in to her just a short while ago. She had sparse blonde hairs on her head; her eyes were blue, as Antonio had predicted. She was still too weak to suckle, her mouth too small for Rosa’s nipple. So they had pumped milk from her breast.


  “Antonio!” she cried. He was wearing his dark flannel suit, a muffler, and black gloves. He set down the plant and the overnight bag and embraced her with a warmth he had not shown her in months.

  She bore him no ill will. She wanted to believe that from the time she left the apartment he was sending her good energy; all that time she felt buoyed up by the current of his energy; she was sure that he was praying for her and the baby. Furthermore, his behavior forced her to connect with power inside herself she had not known she possessed.

  It was always that way with him. The more outrageous his actions, the more she was forced to draw upon her own strength, rarely used before, and she grew continually stronger.

  The baby might have been born in a gutter, with her own stupidity, with Antonio’s passivity and anger, she reflected, but for the grace of God. She was sure Antonio had exerted all his strength for her protection—something she hazily thought he could do better in the back room of the apartment while hammering into the wall than by accompanying her to the hospital.

  He sat down on a chair beside her. Their hands lightly intertwined. As she gazed at him, at the angular planes of his face, at the lock of hair that fell over his brows, at his penetrating eyes, for the first time she felt indifferent as to whether he stayed with her or left her, as he had so often threatened. She had the baby. Everything else paled into insignificance.

  The Maternity Ward was a large, rectangular room. At one end were windows which took up the entire wall. There were eight beds, four on either side of the central aisle. The floor was linoleum; the walls were of peeling green-painted plaster. The slight odor of disinfectant permeated the place, along with fainter smells of babies, mothers’ milk, and talcum powder.

  Several days passed. Rosa made the acquaintance of other women in the ward. About half were unmarried. Antonio was right; for the French la maternité was the essential thing, with or without benefit of wedlock. She felt at home with this way of thinking.

  In the bed to Rosa’s left was a girl whose baby was also premature and had been born before she and her fiancé were able to marry. He would visit with her tenderly, lingeringly, in a way that aroused Rosa’s sadness, because Antonio was never intimate in that lingering, sensual way.