A Ghost in the Throat
Page 3
—
My third son begins to walk, begins to talk, and I continue to dash through my hours, singing to him over a shoulder while distracted by the stewardship of another load of laundry, by typing new poems, clearing out cupboards, or kissing his brother’s bumped head. The milk bank prefers donations from mothers of younger babies, so I slowly reduce my time at the pump until I could post my final box. Tick.
Once the burden on my breasts diminishes, my inner clockwork clicks back to its usual configuration, bringing with it a hormonal swerve I hadn’t expected. Desire returns, slamming open the door. Desire flings me to my knees, makes me tremble and beg, makes me crawl and gasp in the dark. Desire leaves me sprawled over beds and over tables, animal, throbbing, and wet. Every time I come, I weep. I missed it, desire, blissful and ordinary. I can’t remember a time when I felt so relieved, or so happy.
Too soon, the landlord makes it known that a relative requires a place to live, and sends us on our way with yet another exceptional reference. I set to work immediately, finding what will become our fifth home in as many years. Weeks after we move out, a friend sees our old house advertised online at a much higher rent. I don’t care. I find myself pregnant again, joyful and dusting, painting and decluttering. I can’t imagine how, with four children under six, I will find time to brush my teeth, to read old poems or drink my morning tea, let alone donate milk to the babies of strangers. Twice, I lift my bag of pumping paraphernalia and consider giving it away.
Twice I put it back again.
Just in case.
—
In choosing to carry a pregnancy, a woman gives of her body with a selflessness so ordinary that it goes unnoticed, even by herself. Her body becomes bound to altruism as instinctively as to hunger. If she cannot consume sufficient calcium, for example, that mineral will rise up from deep within her bones and donate itself to her infant on her behalf, leaving her own system in deficiency. Sometimes a female body serves another by effecting a theft upon itself.
3. to breathe elsewhere
chuiris parlús á ghealadh dhom,
for you set a parlour gleaming for me,
—Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill
a body holds so much beyond the visible. Before it was ever transcribed or translated, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire was preserved in oral folklore, reverberating through a succession of female bodies, from female mouth to female ear, over years and years and years. Decades after its composition, it shifted through bodies again, this time from voice to hand to paper, and eventually into the literary canon. In Peter Levi’s inaugural address as Oxford Professor of Poetry, he called it the ‘greatest poem written in these islands in the whole eighteenth century’. What is it about this poem that evokes such passionate pronouncements, and such devotion?
I know I should be grateful to the many translators and scholars who have lent their time to Eibhlín Dubh’s work – if it weren’t for such acts of attention, her words may never have reached me – but a selfish part of me itches to despise them, and to curse their rickety translations. Having listened to every cover version, not only do I feel certain that no one could ever be as devoted to her as I am, but I find myself wanting to sing, too. I know how unqualified I am to attempt my own translation – I hold no doctorate, no professorship, no permission-slip at all – I am merely a woman who loves this poem. The task of translation itself, however, does not feel unfamiliar to me, not only due to translating my own poems, but because the process feels so close to homemaking. In Italian, the word stanza means ‘room’. If there are times when I feel ill-equipped and daunted by the expertise of those who have walked these rooms before me, I reassure myself that I am simply homemaking, and this thought steadies me, because tending to a room is a form of labour I know that I can attempt as well as anyone.
In the small gap between dinner and the children’s bedtime, my husband clears the table while I rush upstairs, taking the steps two by two, leaving my own home behind in order to hoist myself into that of a stranger. I snap open my laptop, tip-tap the document in which Eibhlín Dubh’s words wait, and hurry through the door of a new stanza, measuring furniture and carpets, feeling the textures of fabrics between thumb and finger, and testing their weight. Then I set to replication. If I am to conjure her presence, I must first construct a suitable home for her, building and furnishing room after careful room, in which each mirror will catch her reflection.
As soon as I finish the first verse, I step back to admire the room I have conjured. Despite my best efforts, the door won’t shut properly and the floorboards are so uneven that a reader could suffer a splinter if they were to enter in bare feet. Regardless, the first verse is complete. Thirty-five more remain. My translation begins as it will continue: it is far from flawless, but it is mine. I feel confident, as I assess this first imperfect stanza, that I will not regret taking on this work. The following evening, I turn to the second verse and take it as a good omen when I find the opening phrase ‘Is domhsa nárbh aithreach’, or ‘And never did I regret it’. This verse builds into a list that details how Art prepared a marital home for Eibhlín Dubh:
for you set a parlour gleaming for me,
bedchambers brightened for me,
an oven warming for me,
plump loaves rising for me,
meats twisting on spits for me,
beef butchered for me,
and duck-down slumbers for me
until midday-milking, or beyond
if I’d want.
In every translated line of this verse, I feel that I am mimicking the homemaking actions of centuries before, stuffing quilts with duck-feathers, painting walls and kneading dough. For months I work methodically, deliberating between synonyms, stitching and re-stitching the seams of curtains until they fall just so, letting my eye move back and forth between verbs, straightening the rugs, and polishing each linguistic ornament. Like my housework, the results of my translation are often imperfect, despite my devotion. I forget to swipe the hoover under a chair, or I spend hours washing windows and still leave smears. I often ignore cobwebs. I often stumble. I continue anyway. This work allows me a sense of purpose for many beautiful verses, and many absorbing months. As I approach the end of the poem, however, I feel something close to dread. I don’t want it to to end.
In attending so closely to Eibhlín Dubh’s words, I have come to know her speech in ways I couldn’t possibly have otherwise. Such a methodical undertaking requires a deliberation, a decelerated reading, and a kind of repetitive looping: back, and back, and back again. I have spent hours frowning at my screen, struggling against myself as I try to capture a phrase of hers and re-create it within the strictures of another language. Such dedication, if nothing else, has permitted me to grow in slow intimacy with the poet herself, to discover the particular swerve of her thoughts and the pulse of her language. I am saddened to leave Eibhlín’s rooms behind, and saddened to omit her name from my lists. Even when I know for sure that my translation is finished, I often return to visit – straightening the angle of a mirror here, polishing an empty brass keyhole there – but despite my pains over each syllable and verse, despite my conscientiousness in the pursuit of fidelity, my finished text feels slight to me, as lopsided and as flawed as myself. I have grown fond of my translation, but this fondness, I know, is rooted in the twin intimacies of familiarity and closeness, rather than in artistic satisfaction. I slam the laptop shut and run downstairs to sob to my husband that my attempt has failed in all the same ways as the other translations I’ve been complaining about. Mine, like theirs, has not come close to the timbre of her voice – or at least, not as close as I had hoped. He wraps his arms around me.
My document doesn’t hold her voice and as such, I judge it a failure – an inevitable failure, but a failure nonetheless. I try to accept this fact while showing myself compassion. I have gained so much from my work. For one thing, I have learned that the element I cherish most of all in Eibhlín Dubh’s work does not lie
in any of the rooms I spent hours deliberating over. No, my favourite element hovers beyond the text, in the untranslatable pale space between stanzas, where I sense a female breath lingering on the stairs, still present, somehow, long after the body has hurried onwards to breathe elsewhere. If I have left something of myself within this translation, it is only the weary sigh that leaves my lungs when, at last, I make myself close the document and move on.
4. in the milking parlour
Do bhuaileas go luath mo bhasa
is do bhaineas as na reathaibh
Fast, I clapped my hands,
and fast, fast, I galloped,
—Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill
a family calendar scrawled with biro and pencil marks, each in the same hand – this is a female text. Month after month after month of appointments, swim lessons, half-days, bake sales, fundraisers, library returns, a baby’s due-date, birthday parties, and school holidays. Tick. Tick. Tick. Each November, I choose a new calendar from the supermarket. By January, the old one will be added to the stack: these are my sweetest years, archived in paper and ink, in white and black.
2012.
2013.
2014.
2015
At 7.46 am on a Tuesday in June, an ultrasound wand slithers the slope of my belly. It dawdles, then slowly reverses. The slower the wand, the faster my pulse; it speeds from canter to gallop as I lift my head to watch the wand move slower still. Slower. Slower. Stop.
The consultant is ringing the maternity hospital even as I scoop her gel from my bellybutton, negotiating how soon she can arrange a caesarean section. Although only one side of the conversation is audible, my muscular sense of dread soon sets to filling the gaps. Hanging up the phone, she explains that she has seen a number of calcifications on my placenta, white blotches that indicate the occurrence of infarcts, or strokes. In these areas, the placental tissue has died and is incapable of sustaining a baby who is now much, much smaller than anticipated, and struggling to survive in decreased amniotic fluid. A baby. My baby.
I find myself in the hospital soon afterwards. I must have driven myself but I don’t recall the journey. A nurse tugs down my leggings and stabs my buttock with steroid injections, hoping to hasten the baby’s lungs. I am given an arrival time for a C-section the following day. If I notice any change in the baby’s movements, they say, any change at all, I am to rush straight in from home – no waiting room, no checking at reception, ‘Just run past security and straight to the midwives’ station.’ ‘But they’ll stop me,’ I say, laughing. My laugh is not returned.
‘No they won’t, they’ll know.’
‘Should I show them my file?’
‘No, they’ll know by your face.’
My thumb shakes when I text my husband to tell him what has happened, wanting to reassure him, as I reassure myself, as I attempt to reassure you now in your distance. I write ‘everything’s ok. baby will come maybe tomorrow. off to the shops for a few things.’ Then I text my mum, ‘Can you come to mind the boys? Dr thinks baby might come soon. xx’ Each message I send takes the information I have been given and communicates an impression that allows me to loiter safely around Penneys for ten minutes, because nothing can truly be wrong if I am ambling through racks of cartoon slippers and hoodies, my fingers idly patting layers of fleece and lace and brushed cotton pyjamas. My phone beeps in reply with the wordless dots, dashes, and ellipses of grinning text-faces. The baby is quiet as I stroll the aisles, and I imagine it snoozing, lulled by my momentum.
At home, I tell my husband that it could all be a fuss over nothing, smiling and shoving him out the door and back to a factory where phones are prohibited. He believes me; I believe myself. I set to my chores. If I am washing dishes, everything must be fine. If I am scrubbing scrambled egg from a pot, everything must be fine. My friend Amy rings and I try to convince her that ‘yeah, I’m definitely fine’. If I am hanging wet clothes in the sun, that means everything is fine, doesn’t it? I hoover the sitting room, and the bodily repetition of that mundane back-and-forthing is the same as it has always been – surely nothing can go wrong in a person’s life if they are hoovering. My cousin Saoirse texts: ‘Baby moving?’
I reply: ‘Not now but everything is fine.’ Smiley face. Delete the smiley face. Delete the letters one by one. I shower and then try to blow-dry my hair, but my attention stumbles when the phone vibrates in my pocket. Saoirse again.
Baby moving yet?
Not now but we’re fine! Just had a shower. xx
Getting worried. When will you go in?
Everything is ok :-)
Call the doc! Pls!!
No matter how chirpy I try to sound, she resists my tellings, she sees right through me, and her reading of the situation is beginning to get to me. I lie on the sofa and make myself eat a Cornetto, willing the baby to squirm against the cold ice-cream, to kick in protest, as it always has. Nothing. I wait, staring at the speckled ceiling. Still nothing. It all thunders down on me and suddenly I can’t breathe.
The baby is no longer moving.
The baby has stopped moving.
What the fuck am I doing?
My parents still haven’t arrived, so I jostle the three boys into the car – I’ll leave them with Amy. Grabbing my hospital bag, I fling my tattered photocopy of the Caoineadh in too, then accelerate through the estate in tears, trying to hide my face from the children.
A small dog is sauntering along the road. I brake and ask some passing teenagers to hold him for a minute. They grab his collar and pet his soft head. There. Everything is fine, everything is under control. I accelerate, and, in every one of my vertebrae, I feel the wheels run over the dog. In the mirror the teenagers are hurrying towards his crumpled body, but I am still driving. I haven’t stopped. Why haven’t I stopped? My children ask, ‘What was that sound?’ ‘Nothing,’ I lie. The eldest looks out the back window, and the youngest asks, ‘Will you bring the doggy to the hospital too?’ ‘I’ll come back for him later,’ I say. ‘Why are you crying?’ ‘No, not crying. I’m fine.’ I imagine dog blood on the wheels. I imagine brains. Mush. My baby is not moving. My breath comes rough and jagged, my throat hurts. I lift the children from the car to Amy, haul their car seats out, and point my car towards the maternity hospital. Alone, I howl.
The baby still won’t move. What can I put right? I return to our housing estate and drive around until I find the teenagers. They point me towards its owner’s house. I am a mess. The baby still isn’t moving, but ‘the dog is fine’ she says, gesturing towards a basket whose occupant holds a paw to me with sad eyes. I cry. The woman shoos me to the hospital.
—
The journey along the motorway unspools itself fast, so fast that even the furze turns blurred and reckless. I park my car at a wonky angle and run, wheezing through the corridors. Every security guard, every nurse and patient I encounter steps aside. I am soon hooked to machines, watching a long paper scroll unravelling under the machine’s finger, scraping a story of struggle and fall. The curtain tugged around my bed is a flimsy boundary, and though I can’t make out their words, I guess the nurses are talking about me, as the rhythm of their female voices reveals concern. I long for my husband. I want to see him more than anyone. My finger shakes as I text him: ‘Don’t panic but I am in hospital. Come quick.’
Hours pass.
No movement.
Then, a weak kick. My husband arrives in his motorbike pants, helmet under his elbow. I am unspeakably relieved to see him. ‘Everything’s OK,’ I say, ‘I have it under control.’
—
The nurses prepare me for the first C-section of a new day. Many people enter the room in scrubs, speaking to each other urgently. The anaesthetist checks that my legs have gone numb. My doctor enters, warm and reassuring, eyes smiling over her mask. A sheet is raised between us. I imagine the blade held over my body for one trembling moment. Then, she brings it down. She cuts me open. My husband presses his lips to my hand, and holds my gaze.
Beyond the sheet, there is much tugging and pulling, a sudden sensation of pressure, of lift, followed by a weird lightness. The sheet is lowered. I watch the baby emerge from my body.
I see her, a girl. A tiny girl.
I am so fuzzy with spinal morphine, with joy, excitement and adrenaline, that her extreme smallness doesn’t seem frightening at all. She looks perfect to me. She is lifted quickly to an incubator at the far end of the room, where a huddle of doctors begin to work on her. The smell of barbecue, of burning, I realise slowly, is me: it is coming from my body. The consultant smiles as she works, says how glad she is to have gotten my daughter out when she did, that things were far worse within than she could have imagined from the scan. My baby had not grown in weeks, and both placenta and umbilical cord had failed to such an extent that that she would have been stillborn had she waited any longer. I can think of nothing to say in response. I try to smile. My daughter is here, and she is alive – I hear her mewling from the corner.
In the recovery room, the baby’s eyes open when she latches to my breast and sucks fiercely. A new doctor introduces himself and insists that she be given a bottle of formula. I grin tightly. I refuse. ‘None of my children has ever been given artificial milk,’ I say, ‘and anyway, she will be fine, everything is fine now.’ The doctor grows cold and strong: this is not a suggestion, it is a necessity. My calcified placenta had failed to provide the baby with sufficient nutrition; this is why her movements slowed. The doctors now suspect that her blood sugar levels might be worryingly low; a test before and after the consumption of a specific volume of milk would allow them to confirm whether her body is capable of processing sugars efficiently. The output of my breasts cannot be calibrated, so they need to feed her a bottle immediately. I nod, and then I watch my daughter feed in the arms of a stranger; my baby, holding a plastic nipple between her tiny lips. I laugh at how easy it is, and how uncanny. My world feels slightly askew, surreal and yet eerily normal – like one of those old sitcoms where characters turn off the lights at bedtime, and suddenly everything glows blue. We are in the same recovery room where I lay with all my newborns, but this time it has been cast in a different light.