I had feared your presence, Mother, would bring misfortune. Now as we embrace, your cheek is soft against mine, but your lips barely touch my face. I sniff your familiar scent of violet cologne. You’re wearing a dark woolen cloak, a gray cashmere sweater and skirt, a Hermes scarf. Your hair is held back with a broad black velvet band.
“How lovely to see you again,” you say in your soft voice. You seem nervous. Your voice quivers slightly.
I cling to Antonio, hugging him tightly against me, not wanting to let him go.
“I’m so very tired,” you said. “It was a long trip from Le Hâvre. … I’m so tired I can barely think …. The hotel is charming. …”
The way you glance at him fills me with discomfort.
“Will I get to see the baby?”
“They’ll bring her in a little while.”
I’m wearing a white hospital gown, my hair is pulled back, and my ears hurt because they’re swollen and infected from the silver posts of pearl earrings I haven’t taken off in days. They’re from you. The only gift of real jewelry you’ve ever given me.
All around us visitors are chatting with the mothers, who sip beer to help their milk flow. We each get four bottles a day. The visitors have brought delicacies: Algerian couscous and almond pastries. Sausages. Camembert. Fresh bread. Antonio has brought me baklava, dripping with honey and nuts.
You set down a miniature magenta rose bush in a pot wrapped in silver foil. It’s exactly like the one that Antonio brought me yesterday.
“Curious,” he remarks, gazing at the two identical pots. We’re all speaking French. Your accent is remarkably good, even better than mine.
Someone turns on a radio, and strains of Middle Eastern music come from the corner, where a group of Algerians surround a very young girl and her baby.
“We walked along the Seine … so beautiful at night … We walked across the Pont Neuf … This afternoon we’re going to the Galeries Lafayette … Au Bon Marché … shopping for a crib … baby clothes … a refrigerator….” Your voice trails off.
A nursing aide places Isabel in my arms, wrapped in a white blanket. “Voilà, ta petite cochonne.”
“Little piglet! Oh, how precious she is!” When you grasp her tiny fingers, she actually seems to smile, although newborn babies aren’t supposed to be able to do this. Then she whimpers, but grows quiet after I loosen my gown and place my nipple to her tiny lips. The nipple is too large for her mouth. In vain, I support her downy head, trying to guide her. After a while she gives up, lets go of my breast, and falls asleep, her head tilted a little to one side.
If only she’d been born full-term. Then she would have been big and strong enough to suckle. But I think she sensed the dread I felt about your visit. Sensed the tension between Antonio and me. And decided that now was the time to enter the world.
The aide returns with a bottle filled with my own milk, which I pumped this morning. The bottle has a very small nipple at which Isabel sips hungrily.
“She’s lazy,” says Antonio, flicking the air in a gesture all his own. He’s wearing black leather gloves.
“No, she isn’t!” I cry, outraged.
“She likes to play,” he says. He watches her gurgle and make miniature bubbles. How can a tiny creature who weighs barely four pounds do this? But she does. Now that she has drunk her fill, she seems to be enjoying the process. After a few minutes, she dozes off.
“How sweet she is,” you say. Your face is suffused with tenderness. “Your grandchild, Madame.”
“Ah, yes, she has your coloring … your eyes, Antonio.”
“This is what you like, yes?” He smooths my hair. “She is very beautiful, your daughter.”
You rustle with jealousy.
“Yes, she is.”
“She looks like a boy. A handsome boy with her hair pulled back.” He strokes my hair. “What do you think?”
“No, I never thought of her as a boy. Not at all!” Your eyes meet his as he lights your cigarette, and his hand lingers on yours. You’re smoking his brand. Caporals Filtres. Your chairs are touching.
I push down my realization of what’s happening between the two of you. We spend so much energy hiding from the truth. I realized this clearly when I took mescaline about a month before I met Antonio. A white crystalline substance. Three tablets in a hotel room on Rue Gît le Coeur. An Australian artist was with me. Our backpacks lay in a corner. We were ready to take off for Morocco, Nice, or London, wherever the impulse led us.
Although I felt nauseous, I didn’t vomit. As the chemical took effect, I began to perceive energy in the form of white intestinal-like tubes that flowed between us. I saw clearly how one person can leach another’s energy, whether waking or sleeping. Under the spell of the drug, we were able to control the flow. First he took from me. Then the process would reverse. Who was the stronger? Words, like stones, were too gross to capture nuances of reality.
Around one a.m. we walked outside. Streetlights shone with radiance. We visited a friend of his, another painter who kept late hours. I could discern the thoughts that lay beneath our voices. At that moment I realized with a shock that we’re all psychic. But we insert a thick layer of darkness between what we actually sense and what we allow ourselves to be aware of perceiving.
The painter had stacked some canvases against the walls. When I looked at the brilliant-hued shapes painted in oil, I realized that as a young child, a visual opening had closed down in me. I thought of Dad and his sculpture. When Dad was four or five, that visual channel opened.
An ear for music. A visual pull. A pull toward words. All these possibilities are fluid, but in very early years they crystallize. Echoes of Blake’s inlets of perception.
A few days later, the Australian and I parted ways. Although I wasn’t in love with him, I blamed myself—my ineptness with any intimate relationship—for the separation. It was very cold. At night I heaped blankets and sweaters over me to keep warm. I had never felt so lonely and at the edge of what I could bear.
That was when the Dream Woman first appeared. “I am your real mother,” she whispered. “I am your mother in spirit.” In the cold darkness she was luminous in flowing garments, with long black hair and gentle features. Tranquillity and strength added to her beauty. “I am with you always,” she said. “I love you. I am who you will become. I am who you always were. I will take care of you and give you the love you crave.”
She’s been with me ever since.
The Dream Mother comforted me. It was she who gave me the strength to survive. Shortly after this, I met Antonio. “The time to have a baby is now,” she whispered. “Now or never in this life.” I heard Isabel’s cry. I heard her crying out to be born. Antonio heard it too.
“They’re going to keep her in an incubator until she weighs two and a half kilos,” I said now. “That’s about five pounds. They’re keeping me here with her.”
“How nice that you’ll be close to the baby. It’s really extraordinary. This would never happen in an American hospital.”
I caress Isabel’s sparse hair. She’s giving soft, fretful cries.
“You burp her like this,” says Antonio, placing his hand over mine. He raises the baby upright against my shoulder. “She has gas.” Gently he taps my hand against her back.
Isabel, comforted, dozes off.
“Did you teach Rosa how to care for babies, Madame?”
“We never had any occasion to do so.”
“Ah, in South America, we have so many babies. We all know how to care for them.”
“How sweet she is,” you repeat tenderly.
The aide takes Isabel from me and carries her back to the nursery. My arms feel empty without her.
“Paris,” you muse. “I haven’t been here since I was a girl…. We met a poet from Chile while we were walking here … and a very thin gray-haired Italian sculptor…”
“Giacometti!” said Antonio. “The famous Giacometti.”
“Ah, yes,” you say. “Emaciate
d like his work. So often artists resemble their work. But Aaron doesn’t. On the other hand, he does….” Your voice drops, and the words dangle, unfinished.
“What about him?” I ask, annoyed.
“Oh, what I was going to say? I can’t remember. Something Aaron said about Rodin…. We must visit the Rodin Museum…. I’m so tired I cannot think.”
Obfuscation is your way of fooling the enemy. Camouflage is your armor.
Just as the two of you are about to leave, I grab Antonio and pull him close again. “Don’t be jealous, petite oiseau,” he says. “Your mother is going to help us.”
Afterwards I sob uncontrollably. “Assez. Assez. Tu n’êtes pas une enfante,” the nurses scold. But I can’t stop my tears. To calm my nerves, I try to knit. The ball of yarn rolls onto the dark speckled linoleum floor. That night when I pumped my breasts, there was less milk, and I was in despair. I wanted to leave you both. But then what would I do? I visualized Isabel forlorn, neglected among a row of infants in cribs inside a French orphanage while I searched for work. My inheritance was nearly gone. What would I do for money when it ran out? How would I care for Isabel alone?
Each day while I was in the hospital you came to visit, sometimes by yourself and sometimes with Antonio. From the light that gleamed in your eyes when you were with him, I realized your true feelings. Take him, he’s yours, I wanted to say. I wanted to heal the lifelong sadness and hunger in you. You would watch the baby with a tender expression. Your face softened when you held her, which you did with a certain tentativeness. She would cling to you like a kitten.
Often Antonio brought friends. The Spanish girl was among them. She was staying with him for a few days because she had nowhere else to go. “He hasn’t made love to me,” she whispered, fingering her necklace. “It’s strange. We lie in the same bed. There’s something very cold about him.” Perhaps she was lying to relieve my feelings. Who knows? Then there was the poet’s wife, a beautiful woman with shiny hair cut perfectly straight beneath her ears. She would flirt with Antonio, while her husband, dark-eyed and brooding, held long conversations with him about literature and politics. There were others, too. They joked and laughed, fussed over the baby, spilled crumbs and wine on my bed. You seemed to think the presence of these girls with Antonio was normal.
When you told me about shopping expeditions with Antonio, afternoons and evenings with him, meeting with friends, your face glowed. “Your mother adores cafés. She is like a young girl. She is charming,” said Antonio. “Did you know that she and Heinrich are lovers?”
“No!” I was shocked. It was one of the things I had kept hidden from myself, as though in obedience to an invisible sign “STOP. DO NOT ENTER.” Of course, now it was obvious.
He told me other things about you that I had only sensed. Through him, I obtained a vicarious intimacy with you. “Your mother looks down on you. But now that you are with me, you will gain her respect. She is a provinçale frivole. You are a true artist. You are driven in a way that she is not.”
“Why does she look down on me?”
“It’s because of your father. You are part of him. He is like a child, completely self-centered. She is angry with him. So she takes it out on you and your brothers.” He lowered his voice. “It is her anger and contempt for him that she expresses towards you. Now that you’re with me, she will have to respect you. I will make her do so, because she respects me.”
He confirmed my intuitions about the tangled underbrush of your emotions, which no one else had ever done. In this way, he helped me realize that I was not crazy after all.
“Your mother will love Isabel,” he mused one day, “because of me.”
“What’s going on between you and my mother?” He looked me in the eyes. I was trembling. Putting his arm around me, he held me close and kissed my hair. “Je t’aime, petite. Who knows what will happen to the two of us.”
After each visit from you, I was shaken to the core, and I sobbed as I paced the hospital corridor, mindless of those around me. My milk diminished. By the end of a week only a few drops oozed out of my breasts. If the Dream Mother had not comforted me, I would have cracked.
CHAPTER 25
ELEANOR AND ANTONIO
Fire and smoke and a bone stuck in the throat. A mote in the eye. A boulder on his shoulder. Antonio overwhelmed me with his intensity. Heinrich, how did you know what would happen? Despite the fact that the two of you look so different—Antonio is slender, nervous, with penetrating blue-grey eyes, and a dashing smile that reminds me of Frank’s—while you are portly and your manner is that of the understanding father—inside you’re like the screaming, anguished rat you used to sketch over and over again.
All my life I’ve searched for someone to provide magical filaments of connection and understanding. To decipher who I am and who I might become. When I met Antonio, perhaps unconsciously I hoped he could do this.
Rosa, you believe in karma, in reincarnation. What would you make of all this? I’m ashamed, frightened. Yes, I loved him and feared and pitied him.
Years later his words would sift themselves out. Once the whirlpool of his presence was gone, the words settled like stones in the clear water of a stream.
I took photos of you all in Paris. Once I forgot to move the forward lever, and two snapshots of Antonio merged into a double image. One was angelically handsome. The other was sinister.
Their heels clicked against the pavement. Eleanor shivered in the cold. She pulled her fur coat more tightly around her and adjusted her silk scarf. A few drops of rain were falling. Midnight at Les Halles. Streetlights illumined everything with a pale greenish-golden glow. Vendors were setting up their wares for the early morning. Huge mounds of green and purple cabbages. Gleaming apples. Brilliant oranges and grapes. Enormous wheels of cheese. Wagons heaped with lettuce, carrots, radishes. Raw slabs of meat hanging on hooks. Smells of fresh bread, onion soup, and wine. How earthy it all was. A cry of happiness escaped Eleanor.
Men were unloading trucks and pushing carts full of produce. They shouted and laughed and cursed each other. Whores with hair tinted red and peroxide blonde lined the streets, purses clutched in their hands. Full-breasted like pigeons, Eleanor thought. They stood on fragile high heels, calves swelling above their ankles in the bitter cold.
“Workmen fuck the putains standing up in the doorways if they’re in a hurry. A quickie à I’Americaine it’s called.” Antonio gave an exultant laugh. “Everyone. All the putains, the people of Paris, they accept sensuality here. They are not like the American Puritains! Your daughter is foutue, Madame. Foutue with the American puritanism!”
“Oh, what lovely asparagus!” Eleanor cried.
“You are folle, Eleanor. More folle than Rosa. You want to pretend everything is fine.” He laughed raucously again. “That is how people get fucked up.”
He lurched along, gripping her arm, and led her into an all night café. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. Mirrors hung on facing walls, as they did in most Parisian restaurants. She could see both of them reflected in the mirrors. His high cheekbones, she thought, were like a Slavic dancer’s. A shock of hair fell across his forehead as he lit his cigarette and then hers. The waiter brought them a carafe of red wine. Ruddy-faced men spooned soup into their mouths. One with a thick mustache winked and smiled at her. She smiled back.
“Do you have a lover?” asked Antonio.
“That’s a private matter.”
“Tell me about him.”
“How do you know I have one?”
“A woman as complex as you must have a lover.”
“You raped me.” She spoke the word for the first time.
“I perceived that for you the way to communicate is through sex.”
She downed the rest of her wine. The room swirled around her. She felt nauseous. “Was it money you wanted? To be able to blackmail me?”
“Bah! Money is energy.”
“You are diabolic. Afterwards, I wanted to kill myself.”<
br />
“Eleanor, is nothing for to kill yourself. Bodies are only sacks of skin.”
“It must not happen again.”
“Is not necessary,” he said. “When we fucked—baiser—to kiss as they say in French, we broke down the barriers to communicate.”
“Rosa must never know.”
“Bien sûr. She needs to be tranquil.”
Eleanor sighed. Inhaled on her cigarette. “She is difficult.”
“Madame, perhaps I am only passing through her life. But you are her mother. Why you not defend her?”
“She has always been…” Eleanor’s words became inaudible. A swarm of thoughts arose within her. Rosa shouting at her. Rosa as a child, who shrank from people’s touch. Rosa saying things no one wanted to hear.
“You are angry with her because she is the daughter of Aaron.”
“I don’t understand”
“You do not have orgasms with him very often, no?”
“He climaxes too quickly,” said Eleanor, not repressing her words.
Antonio stubbed out his cigarette.
“He thinks only of himself.”
“How can you say that?” She was angry. “You’ve never met him.”
“I know.” He was emphatic. “You are married to a child. As for Rosa and your sons, I think they have no real father.”
“Of course they do!”
“Rosa has no idea of her possibilities. I begin to show her. She has talent from you … all the poems you do not write. You have the spirit of an artist, but you do not create.”
“I beg you, Monsieur, to be more quiet,” said the manager, who suddenly appeared at their table.
“Excuse me, Eleanor. I have to piss.”
When she thought about it afterwards, his harsh judgment of her husband very much disturbed her. Yet there were kernels of truth. She felt a sense of enormous relief that at last someone—although he hadn’t even met Aaron—perceived aspects that lay beneath the surface.
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