Letter to a Child Never Born

by Oriana Fallaci

  Loved him? One day you and I will have to have a little talk about this business called love. I still don’t understand what it’s all about. My guess is that it’s just a gigantic hoax, invented to keep people quiet and diverted. Everyone talks about love: the priests, the advertising posters, the literati, and the politicians, those of them who make love. And in speaking of love and offering it as a panacea for every tragedy, they wound and betray and kill both body and soul. I hate this word, which you find everywhere, in every language. I-love-to-walk, I-love-to-drink, I-love-to-smoke, I-love-freedom, I-love-my-lover, I-love-my-child. I try never to use it. I don’t even ask myself if what is troubling my heart and mind is this thing they call love. Indeed I don’t know if I love you. I don’t think of you in terms of love. I think of you in terms of life. As for your father, the more I think of it, the more I’m afraid I never loved him. Admired him yes, desired him yes, but loved no. The same goes for those who came before him, disappointing ghosts in a search that always failed. Failed? Not completely. It was worth something after all: to understand that nothing threatens your freedom as much as the mysterious rapture that a human being can feel towards another, a man towards a woman, for instance, or a woman towards a man. There are no straps or chains or bars that can hold you in a blinder slavery, a more desperate sense of helplessness. Beware of giving yourself to someone in the name of that rapture: it only means forgetting yourself, your rights, your dignity, and thus your freedom. Like a dog floundering in the water you try vainly to reach a shore that doesn’t exist, a shore whose name is Loving and Being Loved, and you end in frustration, scorn, disillusionment. At best you end up wondering what drove you to throw yourself in the water: dissatisfaction with yourself, the hope of finding in another something you didn’t see in yourself? Fear of solitude, of boredom, of silence? A need to possess and be possessed? According to some, that’s love. But I’m afraid it’s something much less: a hunger that, once satisfied, leaves you with a kind of indigestion. A wish to vomit. And yet, there must still be a way that would show me the meaning of this damned word, Child. There must still be a way for me to find out what it is and that it exists. I have such a hunger and need for it. And it’s this need, this hunger, that leads me to think: maybe it’s true, what my mother has always maintained, that love is what a woman feels for her child when she takes it in her arms and feels how alone, helpless, and defenceless it is. At least for as long as it remains helpless and defenceless, it doesn’t insult you, doesn’t disappoint you. What if you should be the one to make me discover the meaning of that absurd four-letter word? You who are robbing me of myself and sucking my blood and breathing my breath?

  I can see a sign of it. Lovers enduring separation console themselves with photographs. And I always have your photographs in my hand. By now it’s become an obsession. The minute I come home I seize that magazine, I calculate the days, your age, and I try to find you. Today you’ve completed six weeks. Here you are at six weeks, seen from the back. How cute you’ve become! No longer a fish, no longer a larva, no longer something formless, you already look like a human being: with that big bald pink head. The spinal column is well defined, a white strip securely in the middle. Your arms are no longer confused protuberances nor fins, but wings. You’ve grown wings! I am overcome by the wish to caress them, to caress you. What’s it like there in the egg? According to the photographs, you’re suspended in a transparent egg that looks like the glass egg in which one puts a rose. In place of the rose, you. From the egg extends a cord ending in a remote white ball, with veins of red and spots of blue. Seen in this way, it looks like the earth, observed from thousands and thousands of miles away. Yes, it’s just as though an endless thread, as long as the idea of life, were extended from the earth, across that distance, to arrive at you. In such a logical, meaningful way. So how can they say human beings are an accident of nature?

  The doctor told me to come back at the end of six weeks. I’m going tomorrow. And needles of anxiety pierce my soul, each alternating with a flush of joy.

  * * *

  In a tone wavering between the solemn and the cheerful, he lifted a sheet of paper and said: ‘Congratulations, Madam.’ Automatically I corrected him. ‘Miss.’ It was as though I’d given him a slap. Solemnity and cheerfulness disappeared, and staring at me with-calculated indifference, he replied, ‘Ah!’ Then he took his pen, crossed out Mrs, and wrote Miss. Thus, in a cold, white room, through the voice of a man coldly dressed in white, Science gave me its official announcement that you existed. It made no impression on me, since I’d already known long before it did. But I was surprised that my marital status should be emphasized and that a correction had to be made on a sheet of paper. It smacked of a warning, a complication for the future. Even the way Science then told me to undress and lie down on the table was anything but cordial. Both the doctor and the nurse behaved as though I were somehow disagreeable to them. They didn’t look me in the face. On the other hand, they exchanged meaningful looks. Once I was on the table, the nurse became upset because I hadn’t spread my legs or put them in the two metal stirrups. Irritably she did it herself, saying, ‘Here, here!’ I felt ridiculous and vaguely obscene. I was grateful to her when she covered my naked body with a towel. But the worst was when the doctor put on a rubber glove and angrily stuck his finger inside me. With his finger he pressed, he pried, he pressed again. Not only was he hurting me, I was afraid he wanted to crush you because I wasn’t married. Finally he took his finger out and announced: ‘All’s well, completely normal.’ He also gave me some advice, telling me that pregnancy is not an illness, it’s a natural state; therefore, I should go on doing what I did before. It was important not to smoke too much, not to over-exert myself, not to bathe in water that was too hot, not to consider any criminal decisions. ‘Criminal?’ I asked, in astonishment. And he: ‘The law forbids it. Remember that!’ To reinforce the threat he even prescribed some lutein pills and told me to come back every two weeks. He said it all without a smile, then told me to pay on the way out. As for the nurse, she didn’t even say good-bye. And as she was closing the door, I had the impression that she shook her head disapprovingly.

  We’ll have to get used to such things, I’m afraid. In the world you’re about to enter, and despite all the talk about changing times, an unmarried woman expecting a child is most often looked on as irresponsible. At best, as an eccentric, a troublemaker. Or a heroine. Never as a mother like the others. The chemist from whom I bought the lutein pills knows me and is well aware that I have no husband. When I gave him the prescription, he raised his eyebrows and stared at me with dismay. After the chemist, I went to the tailor, to order an overcoat. Winter is coming, and I want to keep you warm. With his mouth full of pins to fasten the cloth, the tailor began taking measurements. When I explained that he should make them generous because I was pregnant and would have a big stomach by the time winter came, he blushed violently. His jaw dropped and I was afraid he’d swallowed the pins. He hadn’t, they had fallen on the floor. He also dropped his tape measure, and I felt sorry to have caused him such embarrassment. The same with my boss. Whether we like it or not, my boss is the one who buys my work and gives us money to live on: it would have been dishonest not to tell him that in a little while I wouldn’t be able to work as before. So I went in his office and told him. He was speechless. Then he found his voice and stammered that he respected my decision, or rather admired me for it; he thought me very courageous, but it would be wiser not to talk about it to everyone. ‘It’s one thing to talk between ourselves, we’re worldly people, but another thing to say it to those who can’t understand. And anyway you might change your mind, right?’ He kept dwelling on the possibility of my changing my mind. At least up until the third month I had plenty of time to think about it, he kept repeating, and it would be a good idea to think about it: I was so well launched on my career, why interrupt it for sentimental reasons? It isn’t a matter of interrupting my work for a few months or a year, it is a
matter of changing the whole course of my life, he said. I’d no longer be so available, and I shouldn’t forget that it was on my availability that the company had counted in launching me. Also, he said, he had so many fine projects in store for me. Should I reconsider, all I had to do was tell him. And he would help me.

  Your father has telephoned a second time. His voice was trembling. He wanted to know if I’d had any confirmation. I told him yes. He asked me a second time when I would ‘get it taken care of’. I hung up a second time without listening to him. What I can’t understand is why, when a woman announces that she’s legally pregnant, everybody starts making a fuss over her, taking the packages out of her hands, and begging her not to exert herself, to rest quietly. How wonderful, congratulations, sit down here, take a rest. With me they keep still, silent, or make speeches about abortion. I’d call it a conspiracy, a plot to separate us. And there are moments when I feel anxious, when I wonder who will win: we or they? Maybe it’s because of that telephone call. It revived bitter thoughts that I hoped were forgotten, injuries I thought were overcome. The ones inflicted by those men before your father, those ghosts through whom I understood that love is a hoax. The wounds are healed, the scars barely visible, but a phone call is enough to make them ache again. Like old broken bones when the weather changes.

  * * *

  Your universe is the egg wherein you float, huddled up and almost devoid of weight, now six and a half weeks old. They call it the amniotic sac and the fluid that fills it is a saline solution that serves to cushion you against the force of gravity, to protect you from blows provoked by my movements, and also to feed you. Up until four days ago it was even your sole source of nourishment. By a complicated and almost unbelievable process, you swallowed one part of it, absorbed another, expelled still another, and produced it again. For the past four days, however, it’s I who’s become your source of nourishment: through the umbilical cord. So many things have happened in these days: I feel exalted and admire you when I think of it. The placenta has been strengthened, the number of your blood cells has increased, and everything goes forward at a mad pace: the structure of your veins is now visible. Your arteries, too, are perfectly visible, and the vein of the umbilical cord that brings you my oxygen and the chemical substances you need. What’s more, you’ve developed a liver, you’ve sketched out all your internal organs: even your sex and your reproductive organs have begun to bloom! You already know whether you’ll be a man or a woman. But what exalts me the most, Child, is that you’ve even made yourself a pair of hands. One can now see your fingers. And you also have a tiny mouth, with lips! You have the beginning of a tongue. You have the openings for twenty little teeth. You have eyes. So tiny, hardly more than half an inch, so light, a tenth of an ounce, and yet you have eyes! To me it seems almost impossible that all these things can happen in the span of a few weeks. It seems unreal. And yet the beginning of the world, when that cell and everything that is born and breathes and dies to be reborn again was formed, must have happened just as it’s happening with you: in a swarming, a swelling, a proliferation of life, increasingly complicated, ever more difficult, ever more rapid and ordered and perfect. How hard you’re working, Child! Who says you’re sleeping, rocking quietly in your fluids? You never sleep, you never rest. Who says you’re at peace amid a harmony of sounds arriving at your softly padded membrane? I’m sure that for you it’s a continual rinsing, a continual pumping, panting, rustling, an explosion of brutal noises. Who says you’re inert matter, little more than a vegetable that can be extirpated with a spoon? If I want to be free of you, they insist, now is the moment to do it. Or rather the moment begins now. In other words, I was to wait for you to become a human being with eyes and fingers and a mouth in order to kill you. Not before. Before, you were too small to be singled out and torn away. They are crazy.

  * * *

  My friend, a married woman, says I’m the one who’s crazy. She’s had four abortions in three years. She already has two children and for her it would have been inadmissible to have a third. Her husband earns little, she has a job she likes and can’t do without, her mother-in-law takes care of the children and, poor thing, you can’t ask her to open a kindergarten! It’s all very well to be romantic but reality is something else, says my friend. Even chickens don’t bring into the world all the babies they might: if a chick were hatched from every fertilized egg, the world would be a henhouse. Don’t you know that lots of hens drink their eggs? Don’t you know that they hatch them out only once or twice a year? And rabbits: do you know that some female rabbits eat the weakest in the litter so as to be able to nurse the others? Wouldn’t it be better to eliminate them in the beginning than bring them into the world to eat or be eaten? In my opinion, it would be still better not to conceive them at all. But the minute I bring up that argument, she loses her temper. She answers that she took the pill, of course. It made her sick, but still she took it. Then one night she forgot, and hence the first abortion. With the probe, she tells me. I don’t understand exactly what this probe is. A needle, I guess, that kills. On the other hand, I do understand that many women use it, knowing it can cause infinite suffering and even send them to prison.

  Are you wondering why this is all I talk to you about these days? I don’t know why. Maybe because others keep harassing me about it and hoping. Maybe because at a certain point I thought about it myself without realizing it. Maybe because I don’t want to admit to anyone else a doubt that’s poisoning my soul. Today the mere idea of killing you kills me, and still the thought occurs to me. I’m confused by that talk about the chickens. I’m confused by my friend’s anger when I show her your picture and point out your eyes, your hands. She answers that to see them truly, your eyes, your hands, it would take more than a microscope. She yells that I’m living a fantasy, that I’m trying to rationalize my sentiments, my dreams. She even exclaimed: ‘So what about the tadpoles you take out of the pool in your garden so they won’t become frogs and keep you up all night with their croaking?’ I know. I go on mercilessly telling you about the infamies of the world you’re getting ready to enter, about the daily horrors we commit, and I bring up concepts that are too complicated for you. But little by little I have a growing certainty that you understand these things because you know everything already. It began on the day that I was racking my brain trying to explain to you that the earth is round like your egg, the sea composed of water like that in which you float, and I didn’t succeed in explaining what I meant. All of a sudden I was paralyzed by the realization that my effort was useless, that you knew everything already and much more than I, and now the suspicion of having guessed right never leaves me. If there’s a universe in your egg, why shouldn’t there also be thought? Hasn’t it been said that the subconscious is the memory of an existence lived before coming into the world? Is it? Then tell me, you who know everything: when does life begin? Tell me, I beg you: has yours really begun? For how long? From the moment when the drop of light they call sperm pierced and split the cell? From the moment you developed a heart and began to pump blood? From the moment you grew a brain, a spinal column, and were on your way to assuming a human form? Or else is the moment still to come? Are you only a motor in the making? What wouldn’t I give, Child, to break your silence, to penetrate the prison surrounding you and which I surround, what wouldn’t I give to see you and hear your reply!

  We surely make a strange couple, you and I. Everything in you depends on me and everything in me on you: if you get sick, I get sick; if I die, you die. But I can’t communicate with you nor you with me. In what’s perhaps your infinite wisdom, you don’t even know my face, how old I am, what language I speak. You don’t know where I come from, where I live, what I do in life. If you tried to imagine me, you would have no way of knowing whether I’m black or white, young or old, tall or short. And I’m still wondering whether you’re a person or not. We are two strangers tied to the same destiny, two beings united in the same body, unknown to each other, dist
ant.

  * * *

  I’ve slept badly and had pains in the lower part of the stomach: was that you? I kept thrashing around in bed, haunted in sleep by absurd nightmares. Your father was in one of them, and he was crying. I’d never seen him cry, I had no idea he was capable of it. His tears splashed heavily in the pool in my garden and the pool was full of endless gelatinous ribbons. Inside the ribbons were little black eggs that extended into a kind of tail: tadpoles. I paid no attention to your father. My one concern was to kill the tadpoles so they wouldn’t become frogs and keep me awake all night with their croaking. The method was simple: all I had to do was lift the ribbons out with a stick and spread them on the lawn, where the sun would kill them by drying them out. But the ribbons were slippery and wriggled away, spiraling back rapidly into the water and sinking into the slime: I wasn’t able to spread them on the grass. Then your father stopped crying and started helping me, and he had no trouble. He drew the ribbons out of the water with the branch of a tree, and they didn’t slip away from him; he piled them on the grass. Calmly and systematically. And this made me suffer. Because it was like seeing dozens, hundreds of babies gasping and drying up in the sun. In my anguish, I tore the branch out of his hands, crying, ‘Let them alone! You were born, weren’t you?’