“Let’s get this over with,” the doctor said, contemplating the conspicuous display of reports on his desk. “A round of insemination and the problem is solved.”
First, however, it was necessary to go through ovarian stimulation. A strict schedule of times and administrations: for that too, Sanfelice had a preprinted sheet ready, which he handed me with an encouraging smile.
During that same period, Bern decided to rebuild the treehouse in the mulberry, exactly where it had been before. Our little girl would like it, he said. He talked about the project as if it were a top priority. It was useless to try to make him see reason, to remind him that in the best of cases our daughter wouldn’t climb that tree until she was four or five years old. He would turn up at the masseria with a load of wood planks, then disappear into the fields for hours, looking for flexible branches with which to construct the roof.
In reality, he couldn’t stand being idle while I was urging my ovaries to produce more, and still more, until I reached the point of collapse. And while he soared up there in his dream of fatherhood, I was crushed to the ground by my fattened stomach, my hard breasts, the patches of cellulite that appeared overnight on my thighs.
“Don’t look at me,” I’d say when it was time to get undressed in the evening.
“Why shouldn’t I? I always look at you.”
And yet I knew he couldn’t prevent his gaze from analyzing me, from registering every one of those signs of deterioration.
“Just don’t look at me, that’s all.”
His solicitude got on my nerves at least as much as it supported me. It made me feel even more trapped, even less desirable.
“I wish it were me undergoing the treatment,” he said.
“But it isn’t.” Then, remorseful, I added: “Be satisfied with your vitamins.”
Sanfelice had prescribed them to improve the quality of his semen. I doubted they really did anything, but Bern took them scrupulously, as if our whole mission depended on them.
* * *
—
ONE DAY Nicola showed up at the masseria. We had lost touch some time ago. The only news I had of him came from the brief encounter I’d had with Floriana over the sale of the property, a couple of years back. She’d been laconic: he’s fine, she’d said, and I hadn’t dared insist.
He arrived on a bright Sunday morning in May. He got out of a shiny, smart-looking sports car, and he too was smartly dressed: he wore leather shoes and an immaculate white shirt, slightly open over his tanned chest. He had filled out since the last time I’d seen him, bulked up for the better, I thought. He looked more like Cesare, the same muscular good looks, even a trace of his glow.
Mentally, I listed how slovenly I must look to him: my hair tied back and a little dirty, Bern’s shorts that I wore for working in the garden, the film of sweat on my forehead, and the clearly visible stain under my armpits. My skin oozing gonadotropins.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” he said. “I was passing through the area.”
“I’m the only one here,” I replied, assuming he was there to see Bern.
Nicola looked around, hands on his hips and with a pleased expression. “Cesare said I’d find everything somewhat changed. But it doesn’t seem so different to me. Even the swing-chair is still there.”
“Don’t sit on it, it’s unsafe. We made some changes inside. And the vegetable garden, that part is all new. How about some lemonade? I’ll bring you some.”
When I came back out, Nicola was sitting at the table, typing a message on his phone. He put it away and finished the lemonade in one gulp. I poured him some more.
He pointed to something on the side of the house with an amused expression. The fertility mural had been there for so long that I didn’t even notice it anymore. We’d covered it with a coat of whitewash, but the dark outline had reemerged as soon as the paint had dried.
“A bet,” I explained, certainly turning crimson.
“A lost bet, I guess,” Nicola said.
I had never felt self-conscious in his presence. He had always been the awkward one. But in becoming adults there had been an imperceptible shift.
“Are you still with the police?” I asked.
“Special Agent Belpanno, at your service,” he said, showing me a tiny, gold-plated badge on his shirt. If Danco had been there, he would have laughed in his face.
Nicola revolved the glass a half turn, a gesture that reminded me of how he’d been as a boy.
“Cesare couldn’t accept it at the beginning. Because of the weapons, you know. But then he realized that weapons have little to do with it. It’s about having a certain kind of ideal.” He paused, as if reflecting on what he had just said. Then he shook his head. “I’m not cut out for the type of freedom that he preaches. And what about you? Do you like being here?”
I crossed my arms over my chest.
“It’s hard. Maintaining the masseria and all the rest. Sometimes I feel like I’ve become part of the landscape. Like a plant or an animal.”
Why was I confiding all this to him?
“But I can’t imagine a different life,” I added.
“You and Bern should come to the city once in a while. I even have a guest room. I’d like to introduce you to Stella.”
“Is she your girlfriend?”
“For two years now. But we don’t live together.”
He waited for me to accept the invitation, or turn it down, something. Bern and I in Bari, visiting him at his house.
“Do you mind?” he asked.
“About what?”
“About Stella. That we’re together.”
I straightened my chair. “Why should I mind?”
“There wouldn’t be anything wrong with it. It bothered me when I heard about you and Bern.”
“I’m happy for you,” I said. “Would you like some cookies? I’m experimenting with almond flour. They aren’t great, but they’re edible.”
Nicola waited quietly for me to bring them outside. He took one from the plate, and when he took a bite it fell apart.
“They’re too crumbly, I know.”
He smiled. “You just need to know the technique.”
All that time apart and we had already run out of things to say. No, that wasn’t it. There was the past to talk about: when we played cards on that same table, the intricate tangle of attractions that bound us as kids, the time he’d given me a coral bracelet that I had never worn yet still had, why I stopped answering his letters. But it was too dangerous, we both sensed it.
“Bern and I want to have a child,” I said.
It popped out all of a sudden, the words followed by a backwash of shame.
“I’m undergoing treatment. I’m taking hormones.”
“I’m sorry,” Nicola said in a soft voice.
Everything pent up in me suddenly came rushing out. Tears filled my eyes. “The test results are fine, but nothing happens.”
I had embarrassed him. And saddened him. And irritated him, probably.
“A colleague of mine had a varicocele and for that—”
“Here comes Bern,” I interrupted him.
Nicola turned in his chair. He raised a hand to him, but Bern did not respond to the greeting. We watched him walk up the dirt track. The tears kept coming; I couldn’t stop them, and for some reason I didn’t even want to. I just wiped them on my wrist.
“What are you doing here? Teresa, did you invite him? Why did you come?”
I stood up and took Bern’s hand. “He stopped by to see us. We hadn’t seen him for so long. I offered him some lemonade.”
Nicola watched us with an unreadable expression.
Bern was extremely edgy. “Why are you crying? What did you talk about?”
His eyes went to Nicola. “What, huh?”
“Nothing,�
�� Nicola replied, holding his gaze.
Bern would not have forgiven me for telling him about the treatment.
“You have to leave,” he threatened Nicola. “This isn’t your place anymore. We paid for it, understand? Go!”
Nicola got up slowly. He positioned the chair under the table, then took another look around, as if to take in the wonder of the masseria one last time.
“It was great to see you,” he said to me finally.
He took Bern by the shoulders in a kind of embrace and touched his cheek to his. He gently touched his beard, maybe because he’d never seen it so long. Bern remained motionless, offering no resistance. Then Nicola got in the car. He drove off, honking the horn twice as he reversed.
I picked up the lemonade pitcher, but I didn’t know what to do with it and I put it back where it was.
“Why did you treat him like that?”
“He has no right to come here,” said Bern, who had sat down, his eyes fixed on the empty table.
“You were like brothers. Now you and Tommaso act as if he’d never existed.”
His thumbnail dug into the plastic tablecloth.
“Cops like him should stay away from this place.”
“You chased him off as if he were a criminal. You were the one who acted like a cop!”
Bern bowed his head. “Don’t be mad at me. Please.”
His voice was so defenseless, so sweet. My anger was swept away in an instant, replaced ounce per ounce by the usual surge of devotion.
I sat down, put my arm on the table, and rested my head on it. Bern’s fingers were quick to find their way into my hair.
“We’re very tired,” he said, “but soon things will be different.”
His fingers massaged the roots, rhythmically. Eyes closed, the late May sun on my eyelids, the silence of the countryside: I let all those things envelop me, like a new promise.
* * *
—
IN MY SECOND YEAR of high school, the family doctor had cauterized a wart under my big toe. Before starting, he’d said, “Now we’ll do some welding on this little girl.” My father was squeezing my hand and telling me not to look down, to keep talking to him. It was the only clinical procedure I had ever been subjected to. So on the day of the oocyte retrieval, while I slowly took my clothes off behind the screen and put on the coarse, demeaning paper gown, hearing Bern’s and Sanfelice’s voices out there, my body was trembling, as if a sudden chill had entered the room.
The procedure was brief, however. The doctor commented step by step on his miraculous probing inside my anesthetized cavities. It was a way to reassure me, but I would have preferred him to be silent. I saw his assistant smile kindly behind her mask, a girl my age, who in all likelihood would never have to undergo such a treatment. For some time I’d been dividing women into two categories: those who could easily conceive and the others, like me.
“Nine!” exclaimed Sanfelice, handing her the probe.
“Nine what?” Bern asked him, mesmerized by the deftness with which Sanfelice slipped off his gloves, stretched his fingers, and scribbled something on the chart.
“Nine follicles. We’ll have so many oocytes that we can make a nestful. Excellent job, Teresa.”
Through the sheet he gave me the same little slap on the buttock as he had the first time. Before the pickup he had started calling me by my first name, because we were allies now, he and I, in the front line of that battle.
The next phase would take place in the laboratory, under the lens of a microscope. There, far removed from our eyes, in a silent coitus in the midst of a perfectly sterile environment, Bern’s fluid would be mingled with mine. Nature would take care of the rest, even if I no longer used that word “nature,” at least not in front of Sanfelice, after he’d gotten angry with me right in the middle of the dilation: “Natural?” he’d snapped. “What would be natural in your opinion, Teresa? Are the clothes you wear natural? Is the food you eat natural? Oh, of course, I know you grow your own vegetables, the ones you brought me last time were excellent. And you probably don’t use pesticides or products like that, but if you think your tomatoes are natural, then, forgive me for being frank, you’re naive. Nothing natural has existed on this earth for hundreds of years. Everything is the result of manipulation. Everything. And you know what I say? Praise be to God for this, even if he doesn’t exist. Because otherwise we would still be dying from smallpox, from malaria, and from bubonic plague, not to mention childbirth.”
Bern had not contested that outburst, not even afterward. I wondered if he remembered what Fukuoka had to say about medicine and doctors. But no, not even Fukuoka existed anymore, swept away by longing, and by an unconditional trust in Sanfelice and his techniques.
Outside the clinic, after the retrieval, I nearly collapsed. I hadn’t eaten anything since the night before, not even the sugary tea the doctor had recommended. Bern held me up before I could fall.
“It’s all those drugs,” I whimpered.
He kissed me right there on the sidewalk, with people passing by who knew nothing about us.
“It’s over,” he promised.
That evening, in fact, I felt lighter, the local anesthesia was wearing off, my legs slowly began to feel like my own again, and the exhaustion of the previous days diminished, though I had not stopped the hormones. It was the thought of our baby that raised my spirits. Maybe she already existed under the microscope and would soon be inside me.
Sanfelice’s assistant called the next day to summon us to the office. She wouldn’t say why. On the way to Francavilla we were so distressed by what that phone call might portend that we did not exchange a single word.
Sanfelice was in a good mood, spirited, even, as he told us that the nine follicles, so promising, that he had congratulated us on less than twenty-four hours earlier were empty, not even one oocyte among them.
As always, my understanding struggled along behind his words. I asked, “How is that possible?” as I felt the emptiness Sanfelice had spoken of spread through my abdomen, through my chest and throat.
“Anything is possible.”
He had a nervous tic that made him blink his eyes and then reopen them in a kind of amazement. He did this twice in a row, before adding: “We are operating in the realm of statistics, Teresa. But I’m planning to change the treatment. In place of the Decapeptyl, which you told me you did not tolerate well, we’ll try the Gonal-F used in combination with Luveris. Had I already given you the Luveris? No, in fact. And we’ll increase the dosages a little.”
“Another stimulation?” I asked, already tearful. I wept with shameful ease in those weeks. The explanatory leaflet, which I had read and reread, said that could happen.
“Come, now, my dear!” the doctor urged me. There was a hint of irritation in his voice. “Sometimes it’s necessary to accept a little sacrifice for a good result, am I right?”
He repeated it. “Am I right?”
Bern nodded for me.
Then we were out on the street again, on that corner of Francavilla that would become the backdrop of all the memories related to those months. There was a fruit-and-vegetable store opposite the entrance to the clinic. The vendor always stood outside, leaning against the doorpost, watching those who went in and out. Who knows if he was aware of what was going on.
“I don’t know if I can do it,” I said to Bern.
“Of course you can do it.”
He was already leading me toward the pharmacy for the new medicines we needed, new ways to force nature, whatever it was, to do what it didn’t seem to have any intention of doing.
* * *
—
THE SECOND STIMULATION CYCLE was pure hell. My abdomen, my hips, my back, my legs—every single muscle hurt. I hardly crawled out of bed anymore. I stayed confined to our room, which had been turned into a field infirmary: old medicines
and new ones were piled up everywhere, along with open packets of disposable syringes and glasses bearing the residue of a soluble powder that Sanfelice had prescribed by phone for headaches.
Bern was incapable of tackling that mess. During the day he managed to keep up with all the work in the fields by himself; I was afraid he’d get one of his back spasms, then we’d really be in trouble. Between one chore and another he poked his head into the room to ask me if I was any better. He never asked how I was, only if I was better, then he disappeared, afraid of the answer. In the evening, exhausted, he fell asleep on the edge of the bed to leave me as much room as possible.
One night the cramps were so strong that I woke him up. He didn’t know what to do. He went downstairs and came back with a pot of boiling water, as if I were about to give birth. I screamed at him, so he vanished again and reappeared with a basin of cold water. He dipped the corner of his T-shirt in it and rubbed my forehead.
“Don’t grind your teeth like that,” he pleaded.
I told him that maybe I was dying, and he started shaking his head, stricken with panic.
“You can’t,” he repeated, “you can’t.”
He wanted to call an ambulance, but he would have had to walk to the end of the dirt track and farther on to the intersection with the paved road, leaving me alone all that time. The ambulance would not have been able to find us otherwise.
He pounded his thigh with his fist, as if trying to transfer the pain to himself. I told him to stop it. A great calmness had suddenly come over me, along with a kind of pity, not for me, solely for him, for his fear-ravaged face.
Finally I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes again the room was flooded with sunlight. Bern was still there beside me. He had picked some chervil flowers and put them in a jar with a sprig of bay laurel, which he’d set on the bedside table. He stroked my head and I slid closer to him.
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