Читать книгу Resistance - Julián Fuks - Страница 8

2.

I don’t want to imagine an icy, gloomy, cavernous space, a silence made even more severe by the muteness of a skinny baby boy. I don’t want to imagine the strong hand that grabs him by the calves, the harsh slaps that don’t stop until you hear him crying in distress. I don’t want to imagine the shrillness of that crying, the desperation of the little boy drawing his first breath, longing for the arms of someone ready to receive him – arms he will not be granted. I don’t want to imagine a mother in agony, reaching out, one more sob muffled by the rumble of boots against the floor, boots that leave and take him with them: the child vanishes and what remains is the size of the room, what remains is the emptiness. I don’t want to imagine a son as a woman fallen. I prefer to let these images dissipate into the unheard-of world of nightmares, nightmares that inhabit me or that once inhabited a bed beside my own.

I wouldn’t know how to describe a happy childbirth. A white room, white sheets, and white for the gloves that receive the child, too, white and plastic, impersonal, scientific. No happiness, certainly, in the total asepsis. An obstetrician who takes him into his neutral hands and examines him: the child is intact, the child is breathing, his skin rosy, the flexing of his limbs is good, heart rate regular. Best for his mother not to see him, or rather, for the woman who gave birth to him not to see him. No point in the potential confusion of feelings, especially at such a susceptible moment, the pain of the labour fading, a weight being lifted, perhaps a slight sense of emptiness. Nothing to be gained from uncertainty like that. Being held in provisional arms will be of no benefit to him; better for him to meet his real parents as soon as possible, when they are open-armed and ready to receive him, eager and certain, for a full welcome.

Let me be honest with myself: I would rather not become too absorbed in the images of this birth. To tell of a child being born is to tell of a sudden existence, of somebody coming into being, and that moment doesn’t matter to anyone as much as it does to the child who is bursting into life. To bestow upon this birth the appropriate tone of joy, the tone I’d like it to deserve, that I’d like my brother to deserve just as all life deserves it, I would have to appeal to the smiles of those who would very soon find themselves before him, those who would at last be ready to call him son. They must have been wide, those smiles, a suitable fading of the nerves that comes with any longed-for relief. But a child is not born to bring relief, he is born and as soon as he is born he demands relief himself. A child doesn’t cry in order to enable a smile in others; he cries so that they pick him up, and protect him, and with their caresses soothe the implacable feeling of helplessness that has already begun to torment him. I don’t want to imagine a boy as the downfall of a woman, nor can I imagine him as the salvation of another family, of the family that would later be mine, an unreasonable salvation they should never have asked of him.