That March 25, the trees in the hospital park were barely holding back their buds. Pinned, dreamlike, at the tips of the linden branches, speckling the brick buildings with a baby green. We were at the birth of spring.
It was my right, a child had been promised to me. A prophecy I gulped down like a fanatic before the altar of the god of fertility. I had accepted all the sacrifices—the hormone injections, egg retrievals, artificial inseminations; the tests, evaluations, assessments, procedures: the slew of metallic, cold, and abrasive words.
My children: eternally liquid, created at the lab bench, in vitro. Prisoners of a dead language, relics from pre-life—unimplantable, they decided; my uterus faulty, a poorly assembled cavity, a bad mother. Fragments of life and death. Submerged in a sheet of ice for five years, along with hundreds of other wishes for a child. A frigid flow that still burns me.
I passed by the mother. She left her room, headed for the showers. Her body still weighty, not fully delivered from the infant—perhaps it never would be—but sated, at least for a while. An overwhelming presence: gliding along with the reassured step of someone who has claimed her share of eternity. I was a distant vibrato, a deafened note. She was staying in the maternity ward—full wombs, fulfilled mothers. On the opposite side, the wing for empty wombs—taut, pale skin, no trace of hormone-filled flesh. The wing for the barren, the infertile ones—dried up before they had given, their pain squeaking beneath their small, unpowerful steps. I was very familiar with the arrangement of closed doors and silent rooms, rooms filled with the shrill sounds of the television. I had spent time in those rooms on multiple occasions. Once I had ventured into the beginning of the hallway that led to the maternity ward, to inhale its odors of breastmilk and creams, indistinct and moist vapors. I had gone to glimpse the shifting figures that moved behind the frosted glass doors. They scattered into soft, sky-blue colors, into quilted words and mysterious cries.
I opened the door of her hospital room in disbelief. Maybe there wouldn’t be a baby; I was paralyzed by fear. Maybe life hadn’t taken, hadn’t held, hadn’t clung to the viscous linings of its creator. Maybe it had rejoined the cohort of those unfortunate ones: empty embryos, nipped in the bud.
The baby was in a clear bassinet, completely motionless and alone. A gift, perhaps? A small, compact mass, faceless, yet more real than real. I seized the offering, torn between ecstatic joy and absolute fear. I passed through the doorway of the room, with this baby stolen from someone else. I held the infant against me, unsure of where to rest the small body, as if my womb had already unfurled a protective shroud to allow me to take the child away, to be shaped and crafted like a piece of silver. I walked down the hallway to the exit; I heard nothing except the deafening pulse of my womb, interrupted by the pounding of my injured heart. I was afraid that the baby would be woken by the chaos inside me. In this beige hall with its soft, tender light, I carried the child back to where I had come from. Sheltered from the collision of gametes, from the senseless chaos of reproducing bodies.
I immediately nestled the baby into my neck; I breathed in the infant’s scent, letting our skins melt into one another. I wanted us to become one, absorb one another; I wanted to make this child mine through the forces of osmosis. The child’s unimaginable sweetness, almost beyond my senses, a pure nectar. Without appearing to, the baby lived—life came naturally to it, no effort, no over-the-top, crude demonstrations. Already the child knew life by heart, having been steeped in it for nine months. I loved it, this contour of a life. It was a far cry from the blinding reflection of my womb, its musty spectacle of lunar craters, in submission to the probe. I was a fibrous mass, the chalky smudge of a raging, clumsy hand.
In the car, I removed the baby’s ID wristband. I didn’t read the name; I would choose one later. This was my future child. I didn’t even know if it was a girl or a boy—I didn’t want to know yet, I needed time to find out. I put the baby in the car seat that I had purchased months ago, trying to manifest my desire for a child. I used to spend hours in baby stores. The irrefutable presence of gleaming, solid gear—manifestations of reproduction, full of the potential of future babies—was a counterweight to absence. I examined the items one by one, comparing their virtues at length, caressing the fabrics, playing with the fastenings, the clips, the zippers. I reveled in the plumpness of new buttons, the debilitating softness of velvet, terry cloth, cotton. I would be overcome by hysterical joy, something solidifying in me like dry cement.
I stopped the car on a side road. Here, too, spring was noticeably gaining strength. It was animated by secret exchanges: particles, pollen and insects devising their plan to overtake an aging winter. Everything that nature had held at bay was now being reinstated, restored at any cost. The branches were fat with buds, ready to succumb to an ephemeral green. The light took on a sour, hostile hue: it was tasked with delivering the good news, the long-awaited and feared resurrection. Light drew from its last resources in service to life, and passed beyond the windshield.
Inside the car, I brooded with my stolen child. The windows were slowly being covered with mist, the membranes joining together at the center. Enclosed in the egg. All around the car, like living flesh that expands to absorb and eradicate a foreign body, was a frantic swarm of flying, buzzing insects.
I was hot. The baby must have been there, behind me, in the back seat. I couldn't hear anything, not the smallest murmur. I could have ignored it, continued living as if I didn’t have a child. When the mist, our mist, closed around us, delicately blocking out the world, I went to sit beside the baby. I looked at the child’s face, the face of this human not yet defined. A fleeting inventory of an entire species of faces with the baby’s superimposed, a tentative outline. Eyes, nose, mouth: none of which seemed to have yet become aware of their existence and functions. An expansive silence reigned on this face, the calm of untouched waters.
I leaned in to catch a whiff of the baby’s breath; after a few seconds, I felt a warm spot form on my cheek. A slow and sweet flutter, the child’s first word. I would never feel the miraculous waves that—all those women said—move inside a pregnant belly, but I had this soft and rhythmic breath on my skin. I didn’t yet dare take the baby in my arms. The child was becoming mine little by little, born to me through small touches, signals. The baby’s furrowing brows, jerky arms—as if climbing from the recently departed, still-beckoning void—reaching at last toward me, toward who else in this car? The dampness was thickening; I felt the air warm my nostrils and a liquid slide from my throat to my lungs. Sweat rushed down my back, found its way between my breasts, ran to my buttocks and pelvis. The stifling heat enveloped us, brought us together. Spring and its acidic sun delivered us gently. I began to worry about the little one’s health. The baby needed to breathe fresh air. I decided to lower the window a little. A clear exhalation passed through the car.
Sitting next to the baby, I suddenly heard a cry, a single, hemorrhaging howl. The baby had the hoarse, demanding voice of all newborns. I was stunned. I didn’t turn around; I was afraid to catch the baby’s eye. I no longer knew anything, neither the baby’s desire nor mine. I would have liked for this newborn to have passed from my belly through my vagina and been received by a midwife’s warm hands; for her to have placed the baby in my arms, trembling and astounded; for us to have shared an intense recognition, our skins joined, a moment beyond words or time. Later, we would be separated, overcome by love, perhaps tears. But inside this car parked in the deserted countryside, the baby was one step ahead of me; the small creature’s need to be loved had already been satiated. I hadn’t had time for anything. The child had come to me by breaking and entering. I didn’t recognize these cries. I was paralyzed, less of a mother than ever. The child continued to wail while I remained silent. I hadn’t been able to give the baby a name, so how would I be able to offer comfort with my voice?
I suddenly realized that I was going to kill the infant by holding it captive with my barren silence. I took my place behind the wheel and started the car. I drove along the bumpy road, my view blurred by the tangle of insects swarming furiously outside the windshield. Then I rejoined the highway, and the sun, now behind us, pushed us toward the soft shadows of late afternoon. The baby was still crying with that faint, insistent voice. All of a sudden, I heard the cries flow toward me, fading into a moan that swept me along with them. I accelerated, stepping down on the stiff gas pedal of the old car. I pulled into the entrance of the hospital where I had kidnapped the baby, in front of the security booth. What was I going to say to the security guard to convince him to let me inside? The baby’s cries answered for me. Without hesitating, the guard opened the gate, convinced that it was an emergency.
I parked the car in front of Labor & Delivery, lowered the car windows, got out and began to run. All of the hospital buildings were darkening with the iridescent shadows of the emerging night. Wrapping myself in this protective gauze, I continued running, my breath broken by sobs. I passed only one hospital worker, a pressed white coat who took no interest in me.
I had failed in becoming a mother, even for a few hours, even of a harmless infant. I returned the baby because I couldn’t speak to it, name it or hear its cries; I could only care for the baby like a cat cares for its kitten; I hadn’t protected the infant, didn’t really desire it, this small bit of flesh, outside of my own story. This wasn’t the child I had been longing for all these years, wasn’t the one who had occupied my dreams, the one I had imagined expanding inside of me, pushing my limits, laying claim over me to live—conflating our hearts in the process.
The hard days of late December, birthed beneath a white glaze. The untouchable, bruised vegetation turns in on itself, lies fallow. Nothing stirs it, no embrace, no glimpse of the sky. Everything is exhausted by this act of avoidance: the birds fly alone, the trees are thorny, the air sharp. The earth seems to swallow everything in a colorless and odorless savagery. A slow, methodical breakdown of life.
This morning I received a letter from the hospital. The Department of Fertility Care asks me what I want to do with my untransferred frozen embryos. There are three of them in ice, awaiting their destiny. I can choose to destroy them, donate them to an infertile couple or to medical research. In any case, I’ll have to abandon them. I would like to let my babies float, eternally pre-born, suspended in time. A cinching pain in my stomach. Deeply stowed, no risk of detaching. Everything I have left from this disastrous adventure. A fiasco.
I decided to give them life. I’m going to unite them with some perfect strangers, no guarantee of a future or even love. And all I will have left is the memory of my desire to become a mother.
Another March 25. Finally the progression of days is no longer seized by ice. In the veiled light of morning, I walk through the city. This obsessive desire for a child is with me like a refrain; I pass dozens of other faces who all wear its trace. An infinitesimal part of myself has been donated to the human race, has created life somewhere among these small, fertile bodies. They march before my eyes and will never stop.
