I stared at the snow and felt, for the first time, peaceful.
Then I went to my cold room in the isolation ward, and slept.
7
Greetings
Luca arrived after lunch. The SAMU came to our fifth-floor apartment on 5, rue du 29 Juillet in the middle of the night a few days before the feast of St Valentine. It was the same unlucky two men, even more nervous this time because my waters had broken. I had gone into labour, but I still had the metal stitch, and the baby’s head now pushed against it, trying fiercely to break out. This time I was not crying, I was screaming. I leaned against the french windows overlooking the Musée d’Orsay and howled.
‘Madame, please,’ pleaded the Antillean SAMU, trying to take my arm. ‘Please don’t scream.’ The two of them led me into the lift, bent over. They got me down the lift, into the ambulance and to the hospital, screaming the whole way. It was near dawn and they drove like Frenchmen: brutally fast, occasionally bumping me up in the air, and I would have fallen off the cot in the back had they not strapped me down with old-fashioned leather straps and a buckle. One drove, and the unfortunate one, the soft-spoken Antillean, had to stay in the back and hold my hand, trying to comfort me, and failing. Earlier, I heard them talking to Bruno: the baby was coming fast, they said, and they would bring me to Hotel Dieu, the closest hospital.
‘Non. You WILL NOT bring her to Hotel Dieu,’ he said. ‘We’re going to Béclère.’
‘But it will take us an hour, and she is in terrible pain.’
‘Béclère,’ Bruno said with insistence. ‘She needs her doctor.’
He drove alongside the ambulance on his motorcycle at 120 kmph, sticking close so that I could see his eyes beneath his helmet.
I had a tiny suitcase and we had remembered to bring our iPod. Think about Bach, I told myself as we drove. Think about the Beatles. Think about conjugating French verbs. But I couldn’t forget about the stitch. I screamed and screamed every time the baby’s head jutted against the metal holding my cervix closed. When we reached the hospital, the SAMU deposited me with a nurse, and ran away quickly, wishing me luck. I saw the relief when they handed me over to the hospital. I could not blame them.
The hospital at 5 a.m. was empty except for a very young Arab girl with a headscarf and a huge belly. She was alone, leaning on a chair. A nurse came and made me lie down and brought a huge pair of scissors that looked like hedge clippers. She said she was going to cut the stitch.
I drew back. ‘I want a surgeon,’ I said.
‘There is no surgeon,’ she replied calmly. ‘I can do this. I just have to cut the metal. Be still and it won’t hurt.’
‘No!’ I screamed. Now I did want the American hospital, and an English-speaking nurse and a doctor who played golf. I wanted it to be clean and easy. I wanted a birth plan, a blue layette and my mother.
‘Fine,’ the nurse said curtly. ‘Then I won’t cut it.’ She walked out of the room as another contraction came, and the baby pushed harder against the stitch.
‘If I were you,’ Bruno said, from where he was standing somewhere near the door, ‘I would stop acting like a princess, and I would let her do it.’ He went to the hallway to get her, and she came back, miffed and slightly smug, and cut the stitch.
She pulled out a metal contraption that looked like a small, bloody bear trap. Gruesome though it looked, it didn’t hurt after all.
‘Better?’ she said, winning her moral victory.
‘Better,’ I gasped. A contraction hit, hard. Suddenly I did not want a natural childbirth. I wanted drugs.
The midwife arrived. It was not the swimming sage-femme, but a young woman with dark hair called Nathalie. She had just come back from Australia. She carried a tray and said, slightly embarrassed, that she was going to shave me.
‘You can’t be serious,’ I said; this seemed to be my catchphrase for every aspect of giving birth in France.
‘I know it is not something you do in England or America,’ she said in careful English. ‘But we prefer it.’ She had a can of shaving cream and one of those pink plastic razors that come in six-packs.
‘Then go ahead.’ I had given in to the fact that giving birth did not involve keeping my dignity.
‘Don’t look, please,’ I said to Bruno. My mother had warned me the week before not to let my husband watch the birth. ‘Better that they come in after you brush your hair and are sitting up in bed with a pretty bed jacket and lipstick,’ she said, as if I were in a movie from the 1950s.
More contractions. ‘Fuck!’ I screamed.
Bruno, a bit embarrassed by my outburst, left the room to smoke.
Nathalie snapped on rubber gloves. An Italian anaesthesiologist, pretty in a low-cut blouse under her white coat, asked me if I wanted an epidural while there was still time, then made me lie on my side and put the needle in the base of my spine.
‘Give me a lot,’ I said. I had forgotten that I wanted a natural birth.
‘You don’t want to feel enough to push?’
‘I don’t want to feel any pain.’ My mother, aside from sitting up in bed with her pink quilted bed jacket and her cigarette, had been knocked out cold during all of her births. ‘It’s what they did in those days,’ she said. At the time I thought it barbaric. Now, struggling against the waves of pain that were so deep it felt as though I had broken bones, I wanted relief.
Aside from his cigarette breaks, Bruno stayed with me the whole time. As soon as the epidural kicked in, I grew dreamy. We laughed and laughed. We listened to jazz. We fell asleep, me on my narrow bed with tubes running in and out of my back and monitors everywhere, and Bruno with his head on the table and his exhausted eyes.
The midwife came in and out, checking the dilation, but Professor F. did not appear until lunchtime, when the baby decided to come out. Again, he looked worried, and took Bruno aside. ‘What is it?’ I said, trying to sit up and failing.
‘Nothing.’ Bruno came back and stroked my hair. ‘You’re going to push soon.’
Then it was past noon, I could tell by the way the light was falling on the table where I was lying, and I desperately wanted a glass of water.
‘It’s time,’ Professor F. said gently to me. ‘He’s going to come out soon.’ They shifted the stirrups higher. I felt like a frog. I should have done more yoga, I remember thinking.
Then came a blur of nothingness. I felt no pain below my waist, only a pressure. The midwife, Bruno and the professor were somewhere near my feet. They were shouting at me in French to push. They shouted louder; I was not pushing correctly. ‘Not with the eyes! Not with the eyes!’
But something was wrong. Bruno came and took my hand. ‘Please, darling, try harder. The baby’s stuck. He needs to get out. Try to push with your breath.’
I pushed, but the baby did not budge. Professor F. muttered something to Bruno, who nodded, and he went to another room and came back with what looked like a portable vacuum cleaner. He was saying something about a ventouse. The music changed from Charlie Parker, now it was Julie London singing ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’. Bruno made a startled noise: ‘I see his head.’ Then a minute later, he said in a strange and delighted voice, ‘He has your hands!’ The doctor reached inside with the vacuum cleaner and scooped the baby out. Our longed-for baby was born.
My little boy was terribly still. I don’t remember him crying, but he must have when the doctor whacked him. He was covered in white fluid, and his eyes were closed. He was very small. Apprehensively, I reached out my arms, because that’s what you are supposed to do, but I felt frightened of the white stuff all over him.
‘Is he dead?’ I said.
‘No, of course he’s not dead,’ said Professor F.
Later, I wondered why this was the first thing I thought of. I remember thinking I was supposed to cry, that is what new mothers did, so I closed my eyes and two obligatory drops slid down my cheek. Professor F. seemed to approve and handed the naked bundle to me.
‘Hold your son,’ he s
aid. Then to Bruno, he motioned towards the iPod and Julie London warbling: but my heart belongs to . . . Daddy! ‘He’s going to be a blues man,’ the doctor said, grinning.
They moved him on top of me, near my deflated stomach. I was shaking, from cold, from the epidural, and because I was afraid I would drop him. Was this my baby? It had not quite registered. Wasn’t I supposed to feel a sweeping recognition that this was my flesh and blood? That this was my offspring? Wasn’t I supposed to feel a rush of undying, undiluted love?
I did not. I felt someone tugging me, trying to get the afterbirth out, and I felt confused. Suddenly, the room was full of people. Someone took him from me, and I did not resist. Two nurses led Bruno away with the baby to wash him. Someone else was noting the exact time of birth. Someone else was down by my legs shouting something about the placenta. There were a few other doctors, a few strangers wandering around as though nothing had happened. For me, everything had happened.
‘What is his name?’ a North African nurse with a clipboard asked. We had not decided the name. Bruno wanted to call him Geronimo or Pinocchio. Pinocchio because Gepetto wanted a little boy more than anything in the world and we both believed, more than anything, in the truth. I wanted to call him Costantino after my grandfather, or Vincenzo, after my father.
‘Luca,’ we both said, once Bruno had come back into the room with the baby. Luca was the only name we had agreed on. Luce, Luca, the bringer of light. We looked at each other and laughed. ‘He’s called Luca.’ Later Bruno would register him as Luca Costantino Pinocchio Girodon di Giovanni. The nurse wrote it with the French spelling, Lucas.
‘No, Luca: L. U. C. A,’ Bruno said. ‘No S.’
After a while, they carried Luca in and they handed him to me again. His white rabbit suit was too big because he was seven weeks early and weighed only 1.9 kilos, I wrapped both arms around him. ‘I’m afraid,’ I whispered to the small lump that fit into my hands. ‘You’ve got to help me out, because I am really, really afraid.’
Bruno had always told me, ‘Nothing bad can happen when I’m here.’ I believed him, in that same way you believe your father when he carries you on his shoulders into the waves; the surf is below you, angry and able to swallow you up, but someone else is above it, carrying you. But holding Luca, I felt suddenly frightened of all the things that could happen to this child, all the things I had seen happen to children: disease, war, death.
They wheeled us up to my bedroom, me clutching the baby to my chest, flat on my back, frightened that he would roll off and on to the floor.
‘You don’t have to clutch him so tight,’ the nurse said. ‘He won’t go away.’ But I held him tighter, in his small white rabbit suit. Bruno stood behind us, pushing the gurney and we went up in the elevator to the third floor.
‘He’s our redemption,’ I said, though I was not sure why.
Inside the room, we were three together. My tiny, flawed, and perfect family.
8
Hospital
The baby and I had been in the hospital for more than a week. He was premature, he had jaundice, and he had to lie in a light box, naked except for an eyeshade, the kind they give you on long-distance flights so you can sleep. It physically hurt me to see him flailing and flinching inside the box, blinded and utterly helpless. I still felt as though he were attached to me. ‘He’s cold, why does he have to be naked?’ I wailed to the nurse. ‘Does he feel the cold?’
‘Yes, of course he feels the cold,’ she said, wheeling him away. The paediatrician was frosty and spoke no English. She addressed Bruno, ignored me, and ignored the tears of frustration that rolled down my cheeks with frequency. I could hear the words prématuré, jaunisse, faible. They discussed what extra nutrients he needed, how he should be fed. What Bruno relayed back to me patiently seemed to be only half of what she was saying.
‘Tell me what’s wrong,’ I said.
‘Nothing. He’s just small, he’s just weak.’
I lay in bed on my stiff sheets and submitted to all the doctors’ check-ups and questions, and I tried to understand the emotional cloud that was suffocating me. I felt, I realized, the same way I had when I was at school and the teacher was doing something I did not understand. I would sit in the back and silently suffer. Eventually, I would become overwhelmed with feeling isolated, cut off, feeling that I did not exist as the teacher scribbled numbers or equations on the blackboard. In strict Catholic convent schools you got sent to the headmistress for this, and I spent a lot of time sitting on the hard bench outside her office.
This is how I felt in the hospital. I existed as flesh and bones, as the woman who had pushed out the baby, but on another level, I existed not at all. No one knew me from my former life. No one knew my father, my mother, or knew what I looked like as a child. The doctor who delivered all of my mother’s seven babies was her uncle; we called him Uncle Doc and he treated us for broken bones and inflamed tonsils. I had chosen to leave my home and my family and go as far away as possible, but I had no idea how desperately I would miss them – even the ones long dead and long gone – when I felt the most vulnerable.
One day, an occupational therapist came in to check the baby’s lungs. She had round, gold glasses and spoke to me in French, then shifted to English. Her mother was Australian, she said, and she was bilingual. Though I had no connection to this woman, and in my other life we probably would never have met, I felt like she was my only link to my old life.
She calmly explained what was happening to the baby: ‘He’s very early and he has glare – liquid – in his lungs.’ Then seeing my alarm, she added: ‘He’s going to be fine.’
Everything seemed mysterious and unavailable to me: the lists of instructions, the medicines, the jabs Luca was getting in his tiny hand that made me flinch – even the first bath that the fat nurse with dyed hair gave him, plunking him down into a basin like a chicken. Bruno stood by her side, lifting out the slippery baby with no apprehension at all. ‘Hold him, darling, hold him.’
‘No, I’ll drop him. I can’t do it.’
‘Yes, you can,’ he told me soothingly. ‘You can do it.’ Gingerly, he handed me our son. ‘See? He’s so good. He hardly cries at all.’
The paediatrician, sensing something was wrong with me, sent in another nurse. This one was blonde and young and she tried to talk to me about les bébé blues. ‘It’s normal to cry all the time,’ she said gently. Then she asked if I wanted or needed antidepressants, and gave me a prescription for birth control, which seemed utterly strange to me, given that I was still raw from childbirth.
The light box sessions, which also seemed strange to me, increased because the jaunisse was not going away. In the same way that he had banished me from the Côte d’Ivoire to protect me, Bruno sent me away finally as he could not stand my pacing and hand-wringing.
He sat alone with the baby for hours, holding his tiny finger through a hole in the glass. He filmed it once, too, with a camera and a night-lens and when I look at this eerie greenish film now, I am amazed at the ease Bruno had with a sick baby. He speaks to him gently in French, he laughs with him, he tells him this is what it will be like when he is older and lies on the beach. Bruno seemed, unlike me, utterly comfortable with parenthood. I felt guiltily relieved that at least one of us could cope with it.
‘But you are so competent,’ my friends in London, anxiously calling me to check in, said. ‘Why is this disturbing you so much?’
‘Because it’s not me,’ I said. ‘It’s not my life any more. What if I drop him? Accidentally drop him out of the window?’
‘You won’t,’ said one of my friends, the mother of two. She added, laughing: ‘You sound like a madwoman. Why would you drop him out of a window?’
‘I don’t know, I just keep thinking that.’
I lay in bed and watched the news of Haiti collapsing and I felt something like a failed state myself. Nothing I believed about motherhood was what it really felt like. I was frightened to hold the baby close. The doctor
s told me not to breastfeed because he was too premature, but I was not happy with the decision. The fat nurse came in and half-heartedly tried to squeeze my breast into the baby’s mouth for about five minutes before saying, ‘It doesn’t work. Stick to the bottle.’
In a sense, this was not the end of the world. A few days before I left for the first round in the hospital – the isolation ward – I met a friend, a literary agent, who was also having a baby, her second. She had gained 7 kilos – the baby plus an additional 3. She was not drinking hot chocolate as I was, but mineral water. She was still working, and she was wearing high heels. She was beautiful, utterly composed and calm. ‘Are you breastfeeding?’ I asked her.
‘No way,’ she said. ‘It takes all your time, you can’t be separated from the baby, and I need to get back to work. And,’ she added, ‘you can’t sleep.’ That was the thing that convinced me.
At that point, I had not slept – because of the cough – for two months. I thought of sleep, returning to my normal size, and how much I yearned for it. I left the café, and my half-finished hot chocolate, and walked home to Bruno. He was asleep on the sofa with the lights and the television still on. I had exhausted him with my endless problems, my endless needs.
‘I’m not breastfeeding,’ I said. ‘I need to sleep and if I breastfeed, I can’t sleep.’
He looked surprised and then said, ‘Whatever. No big deal. It’s your choice.’ My mother-in-law, it turned out, had not breast-fed, neither had the few other French women I knew.
The head nurse reassured me I was doing the right thing: the baby was too delicate.
‘It’s better for him if you use formula,’ she said. ‘And anyway, it ruins your breast tissue.’ She smiled slyly. ‘Your husband will be happier.’
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