Letter to a Child Never Born

by Oriana Fallaci

  The girl never found out if the thief had been executed, but from that day on she was always suspicious of the word tomorrow. And since her mind had connected the word tomorrow with the word friends, from that day on she was also suspicious of friends. After the British army came the American army. Everyone said the Americans would be kinder and more cordial, and the girl hoped this was true since many of them gave great bursts of laughter brimming with humanity. But she soon realized that even with their great bursts of laughter and humanity, they too raped and corrupted and behaved like masters; the famous tomorrow was only a new fear. And the hunger was the same. To appease their hunger, some women prostituted themselves; others washed clothes for the new masters. Every terrace, every courtyard was a showplace for hanging uniforms and socks and undershirts, a boast by those who were doing the most washing. Six pairs of socks, a loaf of American bread. Three undershirts, a can of pork and beans. One uniform, two cans of meat. The girl’s father wouldn’t allow his wife and daughter to touch these dirty clothes. He said that for better or worse the tomorrow had begun and must be defended with dignity. And to prove it, he invited some of the ‘friends’ for a meal and gave them his ration of fresh food. One evening he even gave them his gold watch and delivered a fine speech recalling the prisoners he had aided for the tomorrow that was still their common cause. The friends took the gold watch and, in reply, offered to let his family wash clothes. The girl felt offended. But hunger is a beast full of temptations: a few days later, without telling her father, she thought about it and asked to wash the clothes. Two bags arrived. One contained dirty clothes and the other food. The one with food got opened at once and out came three cans of pork and beans, two loaves of bread, a jar of peanuts, and a whole bottle of strawberry jelly. The one with dirty clothes got opened later. And when the girl dumped it in the sink, she flushed with anger. They were all dirty underpants.

  It was while washing the dirty underpants of others that I realized it: our tomorrow hadn’t come and perhaps never would. We would always be deceived by promises: in a rosary of disappointments lightened by false consolations, pitiful gifts, wretched comforts to keep us quiet. Will my tomorrow ever come for you? I doubt it. It’s been hundreds and thousands of years, and people are still bringing children into the world trusting in some tomorrow, hoping that tomorrow their children will live better lives than themselves. And that better life ends up at best with the acquisition of a miserable central heating system. Central heating is a fine thing when you’re cold, but it can’t give you happiness or protect your dignity. Even with central heating you still have to endure arrogance, afflictions, blackmail, and the tomorrow remains a lie. I told you in the beginning that nothing is worse than nothingness, that grief should not arouse fear, not even the fear of dying, because if one dies it means one was born. I told you it’s always worthwhile to be born, since the alternative is silence and the void. But was that right, Child? Is it right for you to be born to die under a bomb or the rifle of a hairy soldier whose mess ration you’ve stolen out of hunger? The more you grow, the more frightened I become. The enthusiasm with which I rejoiced in the beginning has almost completely disappeared; I have lost the glorious certainty of having plucked the truth of life, I am more and more consumed by doubt. A doubt that rises and falls like the tide, now covering the beach of your existence in waves, now retreating and leaving only debris. Believe me, I’m not trying to discourage you or induce you not to be born: I only want to divide my responsibility with you and clarify yours for you. You still have time to consider, or rather to reconsider. As far as I’m concerned, be it high tide or low tide, I’m ready. But you? I’ve already asked you if you’re ready to see a woman flung down on a magnolia tree, to watch chocolate being rained down on those who don’t need it. Now I ask if you’re ready to run the risk of washing the underpants of others and discovering that tomorrow is a yesterday. You for whom every yesterday is tomorrow, and every tomorrow a conquest. You still don’t know the worst of realities: the world changes and remains the same.

  * * *

  Ten weeks. You’re growing with amazing rapidity. Two weeks ago you measured less than an inch and a quarter and weighed just over a tenth of an ounce. Now you measure two and a half inches and weigh almost three-tenths of an ounce. You’re all there. Nothing is left of the tiny little fish but the fact that you inhale and exhale fluid through your lungs. Your human skeleton is formed, with bones replacing the cartilage. Your ribs are cementing themselves at their ends almost as though your body were being buttoned up like an overcoat. And your egg, though expanding, is becoming more and more confining. Soon you’ll find it uncomfortable. You’ll toss around, you’ll stretch, your arms and legs will make their first movements. Here you’ll strike with your elbow, there with your knee. That’s what I’m waiting for. The first blow will be a sign, an assent. I did the same when I told my mother not to drink any more medicine. And so she threw it away. But my hope diminishes as you grow: the faster you grow, the more I feel my hope slipping away. It reminds me of the friendly army that took so long to arrive. It’s all because of this immobility. Two motionless weeks in bed are too much for me. How do women do it who have to lie in bed even seven or eight months? Are they women or larvae? The only point I agree on is that it does help. The cramps, the stabbing pains below the stomach, have gone. The nausea has gone, and my leg isn’t swollen any more. But it’s been replaced by a kind of fatigue, an anxiety that’s like anguish. Where does it come from? Maybe from inactivity, boredom. I’ve never known inactivity, never had to put up with boredom. I can’t wait for these last two days to be over – you’d think they were two years. This morning I quarrelled with you. Are you offended? I was seized by a kind of hysteria. I told you that I too had my rights, that no one was entitled to forget it and that meant you as well. I shouted that I was exasperated with you, that I couldn’t go on. Are you listening? Ever since I’ve known that you’ve closed your eyes, I have a feeling that you’re not paying attention to what I tell you, that you’re cradling yourself in a sort of unawareness. Come on, wake up. You don’t want to? All right then, come here, next to me. Rest your little head on this pillow; we’ll sleep together, our arms around each other. You and me, me and you … no one else will ever get into our bed.

  * * *

  He’s come. I never thought he would. It was in the evening, the key turned in the lock, and I thought it was my friend. Usually it’s she who comes up to see me before supper. In fact I called out hello to her, expecting to see her come in panting with her little package: excuse-me-I’m-in-a-hurry-I’ve-brought-you-a-little-cold-meat and-some-fruit-see-you-tomorrow. Instead it was he. He must have tiptoed in, I turned and there he was, tight-lipped and with a bunch of flowers in his hand. The first thing I felt was a pang in the belly. Not the usual knife stab but a pang: almost as though you were frightened to see him and had grasped me with your fists to take shelter and hide behind my womb. Then I couldn’t breathe and felt benumbed by an icy wave. Did you feel it too? Did it hurt you? He was standing there in silence, with his tight-lipped expression and his flowers. I hated his face and his flowers. Why should he descend on us this way, like a thief in the night? Doesn’t he know that pregnant women are supposed to avoid sudden stress? ‘What do you want?’ I asked him. He put the flowers on the bed, in silence. I removed them immediately, saying that flowers on the bed bring bad luck, you put flowers on deathbeds. I put them on the night table. They were yellow flowers, clearly brought at the last moment, with no care and no sincerity. He stood quiet and still, a tall, dark shadow against the white of the walls. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at your photograph on the wall: the one showing you at two months, enlarged forty times. You could almost say he couldn’t tear his eyes away from yours; and the more he looked at you, the more his head sank between his shoulders. Finally he covered his face with his hands and burst into tears. Softly at first, without making any noise. Then louder. He even sat down on the bed so as t
o cry more comfortably, and at each of his sobs the bed shook. I was afraid it would disturb you. ‘You’re shaking the bed. The vibrations are bad for it,’ I said. He took his hands from his face, dried his eyes with a handkerchief, and went to sit in a chair. The one under your photograph. It was strange to see you both together. You with your steady, mysterious pupils, he with his flickering pupils, devoid of secrets. Then he said: ‘It’s mine too.’

  Rage overwhelmed me. I sat up in bed and shouted at him that you were neither mine nor his: you were your own. I shouted that I detested this melodramatic rhetoric, this silliness from popular songs, and that I was supposed to stay quiet, under doctor’s orders. What had he come here for, to kill you without an abortion so as to save money? I even slammed the bunch of flowers against the night table: three or four times, until the petals came off and fluttered in the air like confetti. When I fell back on the pillows I was perspiring so much that my pajamas stuck to my skin, and the pain in my womb was so bad I could hardly bear it. Still he didn’t move. He bowed his head and murmured, ‘How can you treat me like this? How can you be so cruel?’ He then began a long harangue centring on the fact that I was wrong, that you were both mine and his, that he’d thought about it so much, suffered so much, that for two months he’d been torturing himself over you, that he’d finally understood how noble and right my choice was, that a child should never be got rid of because a-child-is-a-child-not-a-thing. Then more banalities. I interrupted him. ‘You don’t have it inside your body, you don’t have to carry it inside your body for nine months.’ And his jaw dropped in surprise: ‘I thought you wanted it, that you were doing this willingly.’

  Then something happened that even I don’t understand: I started to cry. I had never cried, you know, and I didn’t want to, because it was humiliating and made me ugly. But the more I tried to hold back the tears, the more they gushed out, almost as though something inside me had broken. I even tried to light a cigarette. But the tears wet the cigarette. And so your father left the chair and came towards me and timidly caressed my head. Then he murmured, ‘I’ll make some coffee,’ and went into the kitchen. When he came back, I’d regained control of myself. But he had not. He held the cup as if it were a jewel, with exaggerated solicitude. I drank the coffee. I kept waiting for him to leave. He didn’t leave. He asked me what I wanted to eat. And then I remembered that my friend hadn’t come, and I realized it was she who had sent him. And my rage was directed at her, at all those who think they can help you with the laws of the ant heap, their arbitrary concept of right and wrong. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Why Joseph? Mary’s doing well with only her baby. The only thing acceptable in the whole legend is just this rapport between the two of them: the marvellous lie about an egg that gets filled by parthenogenesis. Why is Joseph there all of a sudden? What good is he? To lead the donkey that’s too stubborn to move? To cut the umbilical cord and make sure the whole placenta has emerged? Or else to save the reputation of an irresponsible girl who got pregnant without having a husband? Unless he’s just following after her like a servant so that she’ll forgive him for having asked her to have an abortion. I watched him kneeling on the floor to gather up the scattered petals and couldn’t feel the slightest friendship towards him. By coming here he’d thrown everything off balance. He’d broken a symmetry, disturbed a complicity: the one that existed between you and me. A stranger had arrived, you see, and placed himself between us, and it was as though someone had brought a piece of furniture that isn’t needed, that clutters the room, shuts out light, takes up space, and gets in the way. Maybe if he’d been with us from the beginning, his presence now would have seemed normal and even necessary: we wouldn’t have been able to conceive of any other way of preparing for your arrival. But to see him descend like this – out of nowhere, with the inappropriateness of the intruder who joins two people when they want to be alone, the indiscretion of someone who sits down at your table though you’ve neither invited nor encouraged him – was almost offensive. I would have liked to say, ‘Please go away. We have no need of you, nor Joseph, nor God Almighty. We don’t need a father, we don’t need a husband, you’re one too many.’ But I couldn’t. Maybe I was held back because I am timid, a person who doesn’t know how to get rid of someone who sits down at her table without asking permission. Maybe I was held back by a sense of pity that little by little became understanding, regret. Beyond his weakness, his cowardice, who can say how much he had really suffered, he too? Who can say how much it had cost him to keep silent, to force himself to come here with a lousy bunch of flowers? No one is born by parthenogenesis; the drop of light that had pierced the egg was his, half of the nucleus that had started your body on its way was his. And the fact that I had forgotten it was the price we were paying for the only law that no one acknowledges: a man and a woman meet, they like each other, desire each other, perhaps love each other, and after a while they no longer love each other, no longer desire each other, no longer like each other, and may even wish they’d never met. I’ve found what I was looking for, Child: what people call love between a man and a woman is a season. And if, at its flowering, this season is a feast of greenery, at its waning, it’s only a heap of rotting leaves.

  I let him fix supper. I let him open that absurd bottle of champagne. (Where had he hidden it when he came in?) I let him take a bath. (He kept whistling in the bathroom as though everything had been settled.) And I allowed him to sleep here, in our bed. But this morning, as soon as he left, I felt a kind of shame. And now I feel as though I’ve failed in some duty, as though I’ve betrayed you. Let’s hope he never comes back.

  * * *

  To walk in the street after all those days in bed! To feel the wind on your face, the sun in your eyes, to see other people, to look at life! If the doctor’s office hadn’t been so far, I would have gone on foot, singing. I hailed a taxi instead. The driver was a bastard. He was smoking a big fat cigar that nauseated me; he jolted me around by needlessly applying his brakes. We had hardly started when I felt a cramp, and my joy evaporated in the usual nervousness. In the doctor’s office there was a row of women with swollen bellies. When the receptionist asked me to wait, I became irritated. I didn’t care to take my place in line with a lot of women with swollen bellies. I had nothing in common with them. Not even the belly. Mine isn’t swollen, you can hardly tell. Finally I went in, undressed, and lay down on the table. The doctor tortured you with his finger, pressing and probing, then he took off his rubber glove and asked in an icy voice: ‘Do you really want this child?’ I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘Of course. Why?’ I answered. ‘Because many women say they want it but subconsciously they don’t want it at all. Even without realizing it, they do everything to keep it from being born.’ I was indignant. I wasn’t there to have my good faith put on trial nor even to discuss psychoanalysis, I said; I was there to find out how you were doing. His tone changed and politely he explained what he meant. There were things he didn’t understand in this pregnancy. He thought the egg seemed well placed, in a normal position. He thought the growth of the fœtus was proceeding well, in a regular manner. And yet something was wrong. The uterus, for instance, was too sensitive, it contracted much too easily, and this gave rise to the suspicion that blood wasn’t flowing properly to the placenta. Had I stayed immobile as he had ordered? I answered yes. Had I abstained from alcohol and cut down on smoking, as he’d recommended? I answered yes. Had I perhaps exerted myself too much, become fatigued? I answered no. Had I had sexual relations? Again I answered no. And it was true: I hadn’t let your father get close to me the other night, though he had kept repeating how cruel I was. Then the doctor looked perplexed: ‘Are you worried about anything?’ I answered yes, ‘Have you had some kind of psychological shock, any trouble?’ I hesitated this time before answering yes, and he stared at me without asking what kind of shock, what kind of trouble. Then he explained. Sometimes worries, anxieties, shocks are more dangerous than physical fatigue, since they lead to cramps, uterine c
ontractions, and seriously threaten the life of the embryo. One mustn’t forget that the uterus is connected with the pituitary gland, that any stimulus is immediately transmitted to the genital organs: a violent surprise, pain, rage can provoke a partial detachment of the egg. Even constant nervousness, a perpetual state of anxiety, can do it. One could speak, and far be it from him to overstep the boundaries into science fiction or parapsychology, of a thought that kills. At the unconscious level, of course. For this reason, he said, he absolutely insisted that I stay quiet. I must strictly avoid all emotion, all dark moods. Serenity, placidity were the watchwords.

  ‘Doctor,’ I answered, ‘you might as well ask me to change the colour of my eyes: how can I be placid if it’s not my nature to be so?’ Coldly he looked me up and down again. ‘That’s your business. You’ll have to manage it. Put on some weight.’ Then he prescribed some pills against cramps, as well as other medication. If by chance a drop of blood appeared, I was to run to him.

  I’m frightened. And also angry at you. What do you think I am: a container, a jar where you put some object for safekeeping? I’m a woman, for God’s sake, I’m a person. I can’t unscrew my head and keep myself from thinking. I can’t erase my emotions or keep myself from showing them. I can ignore a feeling of rage, or joy, or sorrow. I have my own reactions, sometimes astonishment, sometimes dismay. Even if I could suppress myself, I wouldn’t want to be reduced to the state of a vegetable or a physiological machine good for nothing but procreation! What a lot of demands you make, Child. First you lay claim to my body and deprive it of its most elementary right: to move around, Then you even pretend to control my heart and mind atrophying them, blocking them, robbing them of their capacity to feel, think, live! You even accuse my unconscious. That’s too much, I can’t accept it. If we’re to stay together, Child, we’d better come to terms. I’ll make you a concession: I’ll put on weight, I’ll give you my body, but my mind, no. My reactions, no. Those I keep for myself. And along with them I claim the reward of my own little pleasures. In fact, I’m now drinking a good slug of whisky and smoking a pack of cigarettes, one after another, and getting back to my work, my existence as a person and not as a container, and crying, crying, crying: without asking you if it hurts. Because I’m fed up with you!