Читать книгу Die, My Love - Ariana Harwicz - Страница 4

I’m in my son’s room, lit by a faint blue light. I watch my nipple satisfying him with every slurp. My husband – I’ve got used to calling him that by now – is smoking outside. I hear the puffs at regular intervals, fffff, fffff. The baby chokes on my milk and I lean him against my chest to burp him, ridding him of the air that gets trapped in his stomach, air from my milk, air from my chest, air from my insides. After he burps he becomes a dead weight. His arms hang by his sides, his eyelids thicken, his breath grows sluggish. I lay him down, wrapped up in my scarf, and while I swaddle him: Isadora Duncan. Who gets which life. What body do you end up in. I can no longer hear the smoke slipping between my husband’s teeth. I throw out the heavy nappy and walk towards the patio doors. I always toy with the idea of going right through the glass and cutting every inch of my body, always aiming to pass through my own shadow. But just before I hit it, I stop myself and slide it open. Outside, my husband is pissing a stream the colour of the mate he was drinking earlier. I can see the hot, greenish-yellow drops cascading down the garage’s corrugated metal. He turns and smiles at me with his hands on his limp, dripping member. Want to go and look at the stars? I’ve never been able to make him understand that I’m not interested in stars. That I’m not interested in what’s in the sky. That I don’t care about the telescope he’s now struggling to carry to the bottom of the garden, where it slopes down into the woods. I don’t want to count the stars, look at their shapes, see which is the brightest, learn why they’re called Orion’s Belt or the String of Pearls or the Big Dipper. He busies himself setting up his precious three-legged device. My husband’s an enthusiastic kind of guy. Do you see the String of Pearls? Yes, dear. Look at those bright twinkling specks, don’t you just want to eat them with your eyes? They’re so tiny, and to think they’re actually huge masses. No, I thought, I don’t like illusions. Not optical illusions or auditory illusions, not sensory, olfactory or cerebral illusions. I don’t like black objects in the sky. They make me feel alive, he says. Look at that constellation and try to jump from one star to the next as though you were crossing a rickety wooden bridge… And look at that face, it’s like a skeleton! His elation hurts me. He hugs me, puts his arms around my shoulders. It’s been months since we’ve hugged. We don’t hold hands either, we’re always pushing the buggy or carrying the baby instead. Do you see the Great Bear and the Little Bear? Yep, I say, and hug him, but my eyes linger in the starless space, in the absence of light. We face the threat of the dark sky above us, every night… A meteor! he shouted, letting go of me in his excitement. I missed it. You have to pay attention, you can only see them when they’re close to the sun, and only for a split second. Didn’t you see its trail? he asked, annoyed. Then he lit a cigarette and said, It’s about getting your bearings in the sky. Look at that group of stars and follow an imaginary line, okay? It’s no more difficult than reading a road map and following the dotted line so you don’t end up in the sea. I thought the child might be crying, but I hear him crying every night and when I go to him I find absolute silence, as though a few seconds of his cries had been recorded and were playing back of their own accord. But sometimes I don’t hear anything. I’m sitting on the sofa, a few feet from his room, watching a programme about wife-swapping or super-nannies, or painting my nails, when my dear husband appears, his underwear hanging low, and says: Why won’t he stop crying? What does he want? You’re his mother, you should know. But I don’t know, I say, I haven’t the faintest idea… Don’t you find the moon relaxing? Go on up to the lens, take a look at the moon right now because it won’t be the same tomorrow. Those grey craters, they make me want to eat it, smoke it even! I did look at the moon, but all I could think about was the sound of the baby crying, my body secreting, impatient for him to stop. The advice I was given by that young social worker who came to our house when my mother-in-law called, alarmed: ‘If your child cries so much that you feel like you can’t go on and you’re about to lose control, get out of there. Leave the child with someone else and find a place where you can regain composure and calm. If you’re alone and there’s no one to leave him with, go somewhere else anyway. Leave the child in a safe place and take a few steps back.’ If only there were santiguadoras living in these parts, those village women who for a flat fee will pray away your guy’s indigestion and your toddler’s tantrums, simple as that. I’d have liked to be aboard the Apollo, are you listening? Or any mission to outer space… Are you even paying attention? On the Apollo, watching the earth grow distant… Shhh! Is he crying? What do you mean, is he crying? I’m talking to you about the moon! The moon is just like you lot, come to think of it, he says. You all have your dark side. But I’m thinking about pacing up and down with the baby in my arms, hour after hour of tedious choreography, from the exhaustion to screaming, screaming to exhaustion. And I think about how a child is a wild animal, about another person carrying your heart forever. My husband got fed up, decided he’d had enough, closed the telescope and took it to the garage to store with his tools, my father-in-law’s tractor, and the canoe and paddles. The little man, as my in-laws call him, wasn’t crying, and it was so silent in his bedroom that I had to poke him to see if he was still alive. I went back into the room with the patio doors, walked straight towards my reflection, and slid the door open just before I crashed through. My husband was smoking another cigarette, he’d started a second pack while insulting the moon, women and me in equal parts. I saw the smoke surround him and felt afraid. The most aggressive thing he’d said to me in seven years was ‘Go and get yourself checked out’. I’d said to him ‘You’re a dead man’ during the first month of our relationship. We were standing side by side in the freezing cold, the water in the grass dyeing us. Our feet soaking wet. The earth churned into craters by the moles. He wasn’t looking at the sky any more, and neither was I, of course. But I thought a meteor passed above us, fleeting like everything else in life. Later, we went to sleep, each in our own bed. I’d already grown used to sleeping alone, stretched out diagonally across the bed in this house that was once a dairy farm, whatever that might mean. Any old group of people can make up a family, I said suddenly, letting my eyes wander.