Letter to a Child Never Born

by Oriana Fallaci

  Then I understood how deep and irreparable was the evil I had inflicted on you and on myself, on the things in which I force myself to believe: to be born to be happy, free, good, to fight in the name of happiness, of freedom, of goodness, to be born to venture, to know, to discover, to invent – so as not to die. In the grip of panic, I kept hoping this was all a dream a nightmare from which I’d emerge to find you alive, a child inside me, and begin all over, without getting frightened, without showing impatience, without renouncing the faith called hope. I shook the cage, telling myself it didn’t exist. The cage resisted. It was really a cage and really a court, a trial had really been held and you had judged me guilty because I judged myself guilty. You had convicted me because I convicted myself. All that remained was to decide the penalty, and this was obvious: to reject life and return to nothingness with you. I held out my arms to you. I begged you to take me away with you at once. And you came close to me, and said: ‘But I forgive you, Mother. Don’t cry. I’ll be born some other time.’

  Splendid words, Child, but only words. All the sperm and all the ova on earth united in all possible combinations could never create a new you, what you were and what you might have been. You’ll never be reborn. You’ll never come back. And I go on talking to you out of pure desperation.

  * * *

  For days you’ve been locked inside there, lifeless but without departing. The woman doctor is puzzled and frightened. I might die, she says, if you’re not removed. I understand completely and, what’s more, I have no intention of punishing myself to that extent, using you to apply the self-condemnation of that absurd trial. The harshness of my regret is enough for me. At the same time, however, I’m in no hurry to remove you and it would be difficult to single out the reason. Is it perhaps the habit of our being together, falling asleep together, waking up together, while knowing myself to be alone without being alone? Perhaps the illogical suspicion that it’s all a mistake and that it would be a good idea to wait? Or perhaps because to go back to being what I was before you doesn’t interest me any more? I had so yearned to become once again the master of my fate. Now that I am, I don’t care. Here’s one more reality that you lost the chance to discover: you wear yourself out in the pursuit of wealth or love or freedom, you do everything to gain some right, and once it’s gained, you take no pleasure in it. Either you waste it or ignore it, often thinking how you’d like to go back, start the battle and torment all over again. To have realized your dream makes you feel lost. Blessed is he who can say: ‘I want to go forward, I don’t want to arrive.’ Cursed is he who insists: ‘I want to get there.’ To arrive is to die, all you can allow yourself are some stops along the way. If you could at least persuade me that you’ve been only a stop, that one death doesn’t stop life, that life had no need of you, that this pain served some purpose for something or somebody. But whose purpose is served by a child who dies and a mother who relinquishes being a mother? Moralists, jurists, theologians, reformers? In that case, one might ask who will make the most of this story and what will be the verdict of their court. Do I deserve people’s solidarity or their insults? Have I performed a service for moralists or jurists, theologians or reformers? Have I sinned by driving you to suicide and killing you? Or have I sinned by attributing to you a soul that you didn’t possess? Just listen to them discussing it, hear how they shout: she’s offended God, no, she’s offended women; she’s belittled a problem, no, she’s made a contribution to it; she’s understood that life is sacred, no, she’s made it a joke. Almost as though the dilemma, to be or not to be, could be resolved by one court sentence or another, one law or another, as though it weren’t up to every creature to resolve it by and for himself. Almost as though to divine one truth did not open up the possibility of an opposite truth, and that both weren’t valid. What’s the purpose of all their trials and litigation? To find out what’s permissible and what isn’t? To decide wherein lies justice? You were right, Child: it lies in all of them. There are also many kinds of awareness: I am that doctor and his woman colleague, my friend and the boss, my mother and father, your father and you. I am what each of you said I was. And before me stretch valleys of sadness where pride blooms in vain.

  * * *

  Your father has written me again. This time it’s a letter that makes me think. He says: ‘I know you well enough not to try to console you by saying that you did well to sacrifice the child for yourself rather than yourself for the child. You know better than I do (it was you who shouted it when you threw me out) that a woman is not a hen, that not all hens hatch their eggs, that some abandon them and others drink them. Nor do we condemn them for this, or no more than we condemn nature for killing by earthquakes and disease. I also know you well enough not to remind you that the cruelty of nature and hens contains an element of logic and wisdom: if every possibility for existence became actual existence, we would die for lack of space. You know better than I that no one is indispensable, that the world would have kept going just the same if Homer and Icarus and Leonardo da Vinci and Jesus Christ had not been born: the child you wanted to lose leaves behind no empty space, his disappearance does no harm either to society or to the future. It wounds only you, and beyond all measure, because your mind has magnified a tragedy that may not even be a tragedy at all. (My poor darling, you’ve discovered that to think means to suffer, that to be intelligent means to be unhappy. Too bad a third fundamental point has escaped you: pain is the salt of life and without it we would not be human.) So I don’t write to console you. I write to congratulate you, to acknowledge that you’ve won. But not because you’ve shaken off the slavery of a pregnancy and maternity, but because you’ve succeeded in not yielding to the need for others, including the need for God. Just the opposite has happened to me. Oh, yes. Envy of those who believed in God so assailed me these last months that- it became a temptation, and I yielded to that temptation. I recognize it when I see how tired I am. God is an exclamation point by which all the broken fragments are glued back together: if one believes, it means he’s tired and no longer able to get along by himself. You’re not tired for you’re the apotheosis of doubt. God for you is a question mark, or rather the first question mark in an infinite series of question marks. And only those who torture themselves with questions can go forward; only those who don’t give in to the comfort of believing in God can begin again: contradict themselves again, be unworthy of themselves again, give themselves over once more to sorrow. Our friend tells me the child is still inside you and you refuse to do anything about it, almost as though you were making use of it to punish yourself for inconsistency and forbid yourself to live. I suppose she’s told me so that I might urge you not to persist in this folly. Rather than urging you, I’m just telling you that you won’t persist for long. You love life too much to be deaf to its call. When the call comes, you’ll obey it like that dog of Jack London’s who goes howling after the wolves to become a wolf among them.’

  Tomorrow indeed we’re going home. And though to me the word tomorrow seems like an affront to you, a threat to me, I can’t help looking around and realizing that tomorrow is a day brimming with opportunity.

  * * *

  They greeted me with great enthusiasm, as though I’d been sick with a foot or ear ailment and was now beginning to convalesce. They congratulated me for carrying my work through to the end despite-the-difficulties. They took me out to eat. And never a word about you. When I tried to say something, they assumed an expression between evasiveness and embarrassment: almost as though I were bringing up a disagreeable subject and they wanted to say let’s- not-think-about-it-any-more-what-has-been-has-been. Later my friend took me aside and, as though to remind me of an important appointment, told me she had consulted the doctor, who had said that I mustn’t count on your spontaneous departure: if I don’t get you removed, I’ll die of septicemia. I must decide; it would be paradoxical if, to right the scales, you were to kill me. I still have so many things to do. You never started any, but I
did. I have to go on with my career and prove I’m as good as a man. I have to fight against the comfort of those exclamation points, I have to get people to ask themselves the whys more often. I have to stamp out my self-pity and convince myself that pain is not the salt of life. The salt of life is happiness, and happiness exists: it consists in the pursuit of it. Finally I still have to clarify that mystery they call love. Not the kind that’s consummated in a bed by touching each other. I mean the kind I was about to know with you. I miss you, Child. I miss you as I’d miss an arm, an eye, my voice, and yet I miss you less than yesterday, less than this morning. It’s strange. One could say that hour by hour the torment fades, to be placed between parentheses. The wolves have already begun to call me and it doesn’t matter if they’re still far away: as soon as they get close, I know I’ll follow them. Have I really suffered so deeply and so long? I ask myself in disbelief. I once read in a book that we’re aware of the harshness of the suffering we’ve endured only when it’s over, and then we exclaim in astonishment: how was I able to bear such hell? It must really be like that, and life is extraordinary. Our wounds heal with astonishing speed. If we didn’t bear the scars, we wouldn’t even remember that blood had flowed. And eventually even the scars disappear. They fade away and finally vanish. That will happen to me too. Or will it? I must make it happen, because I have to, I need to. I’m taking down your portrait from the wall now; I’m going to stop frightening myself with your wide-open eyes. And I’m tearing up the other photographs. And this cradle that I kept like a coffin, I’m breaking it to pieces and throwing it in the incinerator. And putting away your wardrobe to give to someone else, or perhaps I’ll rip it to shreds. I’ll make the appointment with the doctor, I’ll tell him I agree, one of these days you’ll have to be removed. And I might even call your father or somebody, and go to bed with him tonight: I’ve had enough of chastity. You’re dead but I’m alive. So alive that I don’t regret it, and I don’t accept trials, I don’t accept verdicts, not even your forgiveness. The wolves are here, close by, and I have the strength to give birth to you another hundred times without imploring God or anyone else for help …

  God, what pain! I feel ill, all of a sudden. What is it? The knifelike stabs again. They go all the way to my brain to pierce it as they did before. I’m sweating. I feel feverish. Our moment has come, Child: the moment to separate us. And I don’t want to. I don’t want them to tear you away with a spoon, to throw you in the garbage with the dirty cotton and gauze. I wouldn’t want that. But I have no choice. If I don’t rush to hospital and have them tear you out of my insides where you go on clinging, you’ll kill me. And this I can’t allow. I mustn’t. You were wrong to say that I don’t believe in life, Child. I do believe in it. I like it, even with all its infamies, and I mean to live it at all cost. I’m running, Child. And I bid you a firm good-bye.

  * * *

  There’s a white ceiling above me, and alongside me you rest in a glass. They didn’t want me to see you, but I persuaded them by saying it was my right, and they put you there, with a frown of disapproval. I look at you, finally. And I feel cheated the child in the photograph. You’re not a child: you’re an egg. A grey egg floating in pink alcohol, inside which one can see nothing. You ended long before they realized it: you never arrived at having nails and skin and the infinite riches I attributed to you. Creature of my imagination, you barely succeeded in realizing the wish for two hands and two feet, something that resembled a body, the outline of a face with a little nose and two microscopic eyes. It was a little fish I loved, after all. And for the love of a little fish, I invented a calvary which has cost me the risk of dying myself. I won’t accept it. Why didn’t I get you removed before? Why did I waste so much time letting you poison me? I’m ill, they all look alarmed. They’ve put needles in my right arm and left wrist; from the needles slender tubes extend and rise like serpents up to the feeding bottles. The nurse stands by with wads of cotton. Every so often the doctor comes in with another doctor and they exchange remarks that I can’t make out but that sound like threats. I’d give a lot to see my friend or your father arrive, better still my parents. It seemed to me I heard their voices. Instead no one comes except those two in their white jackets: is one of them the doctor who condemned me? A moment ago he got angry. He said: ‘Double the dose!’ The dose of what? Of pain, of sorrow? I’d gone through it already, must I start again? Then he said: ‘Hurry up, don’t you see that it’s going?’ What’s going? A needle, a person, my life? Life can’t go away if you don’t want it to: no one dies here. Not even you; you were already dead. Dead without knowing what it means to be alive: without knowing colours, tastes, odours, sounds, feelings, thought. I’m sorry: for you and for me. I feel humiliated, because what good is it to fly like a seagull if you don’t produce other seagulls that will produce others and still others who may fly? What good is it to play like children if you don’t produce other children who will produce others and still others who will play and enjoy themselves? You should have fought and won. You gave in too soon, resigned yourself too quickly: you weren’t made for life. How can anyone get scared by a couple of fairy tales, over two or three warnings? You were like your father: he finds it comfortable to rest in God, you found it comfortable to rest by not being born. Which one of us has betrayed life? Not I. I’m very tired, I have no sensation in my legs, at intervals my eyes cloud over and silence envelopes me like a buzzing of wasps. And yet, look, I don’t give in. Look, I hold on. We’re so different. I mustn’t fall asleep. I must stay awake and think. If I think, maybe I’ll hold out. How long have you been in that glass? For hours, days, years? Days perhaps and to me it seems years: I can’t go on leaving you in a glass. I must find a more dignified place for you: but where? Perhaps at the foot of the magnolia. But the magnolia is far away: it belongs to the time when I too was a child. The present has no magnolias. Not even my home. I should take you home. In the morning, however. Now it’s night; the white ceiling is turning black. And it’s cold. Better put on your overcoat to go out. Come , on, let’s go: I’ll carry you. I’d like to hold you in my arms, Child. But you’re so tiny: I can’t hold you in my arms. I can rest you on the palm of one hand, that’s all. So long as a puff of wind doesn’t blow you away. Now there’s something I don’t understand: a puff of wind can blow you away, and still you weigh so much I’m staggering. Give me your hand, please: like this. Good. Look, now it’s you who’s leading me, guiding me. But then you’re not an egg, you’re not a little fish: you’re a child! You already come up to my knee. No, to my heart. No, to my shoulder. No, above my shoulder. You’re not a child, you’re a man! A man with strong and gentle fingers. I need them now, I’m an old woman. I can’t even go down the steps if you don’t hold me up. Do you remember when we went up and down these stairs, careful not to fall, each clinging to the other in an embrace of complicity? Remember when I taught you to go by yourself, you’d been walking for only a little time, and laughing we counted the stairs? Remember how you learned by , holding on to everything, panting, while I followed you with outstretched hands? And the day when we quarrelled because you wouldn’t listen to my advice? Later I was sorry. I wanted to beg your forgiveness but I couldn’t. I sought out your eyes and meanwhile you were seeking mine, until suddenly a smile appeared on your lips and I understood that you had understood. Then what happened? My mind is clouding, my eyelids are like lead. Is it sleep or the end? I mustn’t give in to sleep, to the end. Help me to stay awake, answer me: was it hard to use your wings? Did they all shoot at you? Did you shoot back in your turn? Did they oppress you in the ant heap? Did you give in to disappointment and rage or did you stand upright like a strong tree? Did you discover if happiness, freedom, goodness, love exist? I hope my advice was some help to you. I hope you never howled that dreadful blasphemy ‘why was I born?’ I hope you decided it was worth the trouble: at the cost of suffering, at the cost of dying, I’m so proud of having drawn you forth out of nothingness at the cost of suffering, at
the cost of dying. It’s awfully cold and the white ceiling is black. But here we are, here’s the magnolia. Pick a flower. I never suceeded in doing it, but you will. Stand on tiptoe, reach out your arm. Like this. Where are you? You were here, you were holding me up, you were tall, you were a man. And now you’re no more. There’s only a jar of alcohol where something is floating that didn’t want to become a man or woman, that I didn’t help to become a man or woman. Why should I have, you ask me, why should you have? Why, because life exists, Child! The cold goes away when I say that life exists, my drowsiness goes away, I feel I’m life itself. A light is on. I hear voices. Someone is running, crying out in despair, But elsewhere a thousand, a hundred thousand children are being born, and mothers of future children: life doesn’t need you or me. You’re dead. Maybe I’m dying too. But it doesn’t matter. Because life doesn’t die.