The doctor turned around with a start. “What’s happening?”
“She’s dying.”
The doctor sat up. “Go back over there and put some water on to boil.”
The door closed with a crash. “No! Come back!” the doctor shouted.
The door opened again. “Get some towels and sheets. Tear the white sheets into strips.”
She had two months to go. That meant that her baby would be two months premature. Giving birth after a pregnancy of only seven months wasn’t generally a fearful prospect, but it could be in those circumstances. And even if things were different from what he thought, even if he’d guessed wrong and the woman was keeping the secret of her own calculations and nine months had in fact passed, that didn’t make the circumstances any less fearful, and the Cizur boy’s shout had sufficed to announce them. The doctor didn’t know why he’d told the kid to tear white sheets into strips. Births don’t require bandages. He should have asked for cloths. That was a first sign of incompetence, but it was nothing to get alarmed about, and anyway, his alarm had made itself evident when the boy burst in and announced the imminent birth. The doctor hastily crossed his living room and went to his office. His leaden leg had never seemed so heavy to him as at that moment. He filled his medical bag with what he thought he’d need, namely alcohol, cortisone, aspirin, a syringe, a case with a pair of scalpels, the stethoscope from his days as an intern, a pair of forceps that could perhaps be useful, and a can containing sterilized gauze, none of which reflected any incompetence, either, since it was the humble sum of what he had. Then he went back to fetch his cane. He had walked the several meters from the living room to his office without crutch or cane. An impulse had prompted him to haul his leg after him as if willpower alone could make it work. His step was surprisingly sure, and with a similar act of will, he thrust himself into a raincoat and opened the garden door. The wind whipped his face. He went down the path leading through the trees, skirted the low wall, and crossed the neighboring garden, passing among the shadows of the tormented bushes, covering his head with his raincoat, holding the medical bag in his left hand, struggling with his cane as with a pivot to get himself up the slope, and finding his way by the glow of the lightbulb that was swaying on his neighbor’s front porch. Severo was waiting for him and opened the door.
“She’s upstairs. When I got here, there was nobody downstairs, and I found her upstairs.”
“Is there hot water?”
“I’m heating it.”
“I’ll need washbasins full of hot water.”
The house was practically in darkness. There was some light coming from the upper floor. The doctor took off his raincoat and threw it over a chair. He cast a glance upward and began to climb the stairs, clutching his bag in one hand and making sharp sounds with his cane. His body’s enormous shadow spilled out over the stairs, step by step. When he reached the top, he paused and caught his breath. The source of the light was in one of the bedrooms. And there she was, having been there, no doubt, for several hours, maybe for more than twelve hours, or maybe for a day and a half, because it had been two days since Severo had last brought firewood and food to Las Cruces, and they didn’t know how often her gardener came or even if she ever let him inside. The doctor had to think of a way to make sense of her actions, to find some human reason for them. He had to think that she had wanted to give birth like that, alone, trapped in the syndrome of her accursed solitude, a condition too real and too substantiated ever to be discussed.
“Hot water!” the doctor shouted.
At that very moment, Severo entered with a steaming washbowl. The boy looked scared. He left the basin at the foot of the bed and withdrew into a corner. He’d seen three of his sisters give birth, and he’d seen some atrocities in the war, but he’d never seen a woman who wanted to have her baby alone, voluntarily alone, clinging to her solitude and to the fruit of her womb as to a piece of timber in a shipwreck. The doctor approached the bed. The woman was bathed in sweat. She was breathing forcefully, as if a weight were pressing on her lungs. When she sensed the presence of the doctor at her side, she opened her eyes. For a moment, she held the doctor’s gaze without blinking, and then she closed her eyelids again. Her tight, weary breathing continued. The doctor delicately examined her. The woman had thrown the covers to one side of the bed. She was wearing a long nightdress that covered her stomach, a stomach so swollen that it seemed to have acquired a position of preeminence in her physiognomy, to be more important, more silently alive than the body it inhabited. The lamp on the night table was turned on. Its light was sufficient. The doctor palpated her stomach with an uncertain gesture and then abruptly withdrew his hand. The woman was clutching the bars at the head of the bed, and her whole body was shuddering. Women died in childbirth from exhaustion or hemorrhages, and the question was how long this woman’s heart would be able to hold out. She had expelled the mucus plug that blocked the opening of her cervix, and the whole bed was soiled and soaked. It had doubtless been some time since she’d begun to lose fluids. Everything in the bed felt damp and cold, like a deathbed.
“A towel!” the doctor shouted.
When the boy came out of his corner and handed the doctor a towel, he delicately slipped it under the woman’s body. Then he raised her nightdress and started washing her legs. Yes, she had indeed expelled her mucus plug, and her amniotic sac had broken as well, but something didn’t look right. The doctor felt the perspiration running down his forehead. Now he was sweating, too. Individual cases differed, he knew that, and he thought he should stop assessing his incompetence and his fear, assume them, and hide them from the eyes of whoever could judge them; besides, nobody in that room was in any condition to notice anything of the sort. Gently but firmly manipulating his patient’s belly, he set the baby in the right position. It was like making a ball turn inside a taut stomach. Once again, the woman expelled a stream of liquid and mucus and shapeless fragments of tissue.
“Hot water!”
The boy returned with another steaming washbasin in his hands. The woman’s panting was no longer audible. But her shaking continued, as if she wanted to get rid of some foreign object that was occupying her body, which was in fact the case, the natural situation, the doctor thought, regaining confidence. He had no need even to open his medical bag to determine that her heart was beating like the rocker arm on a hydraulic pump, at risk of giving two or three more good strong strokes and then stopping altogether, and it would be even less necessary to bring out the scalpels and split open her womb to free it of the foreign body; birth is indeed a natural process, he thought, and in it two lives are at stake, or one life and one death, and all within the course of a few hours, as if nature placed its highest bet on the timing of a childbirth.
“Cloths! I need cloths, damn it!”
Something was beginning to come out. If the woman’s heart could only hold out a few minutes longer … He’d forgotten the storm that was raging outside. The boy handed him another towel and a torn sheet.
“A little more. One more push,” the doctor said, certain that she was in no condition to hear him.
He had rolled up his sleeves, and the new expulsion of fluids had made his hands dripping wet. The light from the bedside lamp flickered. The baby had moved again. The doctor stopped the flow with one hand and with the other forcefully manipulated the patient’s stomach. The inert form inside it seemed to turn around and settle into the right position, or at least that was what the doctor thought he felt when he risked applying pressure to her sides. Sweat rolled down his forehead. He asked Severo to wipe him off with a cloth, and the boy obeyed. For a moment, the doctor turned his eyes away from the chaos of fluids and excrement and contemplated the woman herself. Already a widow, she hadn’t imagined that she could be a victim, too, and nevertheless so she was, with the special kind of victimhood that pertains only to women sacrificed in childbed, amid amorphous debris and the ejaculations of their entrails. Maybe her heart wouldn’t hold
out, and then her sacrifice would be resolved into the chaos of what had been a thwarted existence. The doctor thought about the cortisone in his bag. He wasn’t sure whether injecting her would be the correct thing to do. His fears and his wretched, unjustified sense of incompetence played their part in the calculation, and before he could decide, a weak rasping and a new effort, made in short, monotonous, indifferent waves, drew his attention back to her womb. A suspicion had begun to form in his mind. There was something frighteningly passive about what that womb contained. The boy put his face close to the doctor’s ear and murmured, “We have to give her some air.”
“What did you say?”
“She needs air.”
The doctor made no reply, and Severo began to fan the woman with the corner of a towel. Her eyes were closed or rolled back in her head, and her undone hair lay on the pillow in a big, soaking mass, like a clump of ferns or wet seaweed. One of her hands groped the mattress beside her, as if she were looking for something, while the other still clasped one of the bars at the head of the bed. At that moment, the lamp on the night table teetered. Some minutes passed. Her shaking was intermittent, almost like that of a dying person. The doctor decided to force the issue. With one hand, he assisted her dilation, and with the other, he applied pressure to her stomach, as he had been doing for some time. His suspicions were being confirmed. There was something inert and passive in there. He couldn’t perceive the slightest beating or any movement distinct from the mother’s effort to eject the object inside her. Perhaps half an hour had passed since the doctor’s arrival. During his long pause, he observed that a small but continuous trickle of blood had soaked the towel. Then he turned over the cloth he’d put under the woman’s body to absorb the fluids that did not cease to flow out of her. The doctor took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow again. He looked at the watch he carried in his pocket. Another quarter of an hour had passed. There was no way of predicting how long a birth might take. The woman’s body suffered a new contraction. Like a piston stroke, the movement expelled blood, mucus, and a kind of white drool. She also expelled a piece of the placenta. The doctor felt a sudden anguish, and cold sweat ran down his forehead. At some births, it was the custom to pray. There were ancient prayers for childbirth, but they were not what the doctor had learned in medical school. He didn’t want to impose his own anguish on the woman’s suffering, and he tried to calm himself with small, immediately accomplishable tasks, asking the boy for another cloth, wiping away the steady discharge of fluids, assisting the effort and tension of the womb with continuous pressure on the stomach, helping the organ to evacuate its contents. And so another fifteen minutes passed, maybe more, or maybe there was no way of measuring the length of the woman’s suffering, the unremitting agony that seemed to be tearing her body apart, as if an enemy had impregnated her in order to end her life. He couldn’t know if her life was on the line, but everything depended on the slow, strong beating of her heart, whose very strength was an affliction. The doctor closed his eyes for a moment. He felt the liquids from her body running over his hands. The biblical curse on woman, condemned to bringing forth children in pain, came to his mind, and that pain seemed to him unbearable, a punishment inflicted by an unjust divinity that she had not sought to bribe with prayers in the crucial instant of her life. The woman started. The lamp, its light filtered through parchment, swayed on the night table. Either God or the devil clasped her body in his fist. The doctor opened his eyes in time to see the kid from Cizur making the sign of the cross on the other side of the bed. Then the doctor found that it was absolutely necessary for him to leave the room for a moment and breathe. Wiping away the bloody flux with a towel, he asked the boy to take his place and got to his feet, leaning on the bed as he rose. He went out into the hallway, where the air was fresh and healthy. Rain beat against the windows, and the storm whistled in the roof, as if a fully rigged mast were standing up there. The downpour began to slacken a little. The air smelled like rain and nitrogen. The long hall extended into darkness. At the last turn, a mirror glinted, cutting the darkness like a knife blade. The doctor inhaled the frigid air with all his might and returned to the bedroom. The boy from Cizur welcomed his presence with relief and passed him the cloth he was holding. The doctor leaned over the bed again, kneeling on one leg and stretching out the other. His brow was dry, his mind clear, and all his attention fixed on whatever was about to happen.
Another half hour went by. Successive waves of pain shook the woman’s body, and from between her clenched teeth came a groan that was not human. Someone wanted to take away her life amid a vile flux, but the horror of that image gave rise to a moment of placidity. The woman unclenched her lips and gasped for air. She appeared to be summoning all her strength. The doctor put both hands on her stomach. Then he placed his left hand on the bulge and held it there so that the baby wouldn’t get turned around again, and he slipped his right hand between her bloody thighs. Her body jerked twice, weakly, and then once again, harder and longer. Her bleeding became profuse. The doctor was sweating. He could taste his sweat, salty in his mouth.
Then came a contraction stronger than the rest, and the doctor gently received in his right hand the baby’s little head, which he held up, clear of the soaked towel. Once the head was out, the rest of the body followed in two or three brief convulsions. The body was well formed, beyond doubt premature, and frighteningly inert, with something stubborn and monstrous in its passivity. Its color was the purple of plums. It was a girl. It would have been a girl. The doctor cut the umbilical cord with a pair of forceps. Then he tried to revive the diminutive corpse. At that moment, no doubts about his competence occurred to him, no questioning of his ability to perform the operations necessary in such a situation, for he knew he had in fact performed the necessary operations, he’d followed clinical protocol without error and done nothing but assist the natural process, so that his responsibility was dissolved in the irreparable error of nature itself, an error that had preceded the delivery. These considerations didn’t occur to him at that juncture, nor was there leisure for him to evaluate his skill or his clumsiness. She had lost consciousness. The doctor had no time to get out his stethoscope. He put his hand on the woman’s chest and ascertained that her heart was beating. Cortisone. He wrapped the lifeless infant in the cloths that had been meant for her first diapers and thrust his hand into his bag. He let Severo take charge of the poor baby and hurriedly gave the woman a cortisone injection. After a few moments, her heart reacted again.
“Take that away,” the doctor said.
With the little package in his arms, the boy from Cizur looked disconcerted. “Where?”
“Put it in another bedroom.”
The hemorrhage became more intense. It seemed as though all the woman’s blood was going to drain out of her. The doctor remembered from medical school the two causes of women’s deaths during childbirth: heart failure or loss of blood. He applied a few layers of gauze and changed the towel, dropping it onto the parquet floor at his feet, where there was a scattered heap of soiled and soaked towels. Then the flow decreased. A strong but contained surge, like a residual stream, expelled the placenta. There was further loss of blood. Not excessive. The uterus had contracted, and the capillary vessels had closed. The residual hemorrhage was light. Steps must be taken to avoid septicemia. The doctor applied sterilized gauze again in the best way he knew how. Then he picked up the remains of the placenta with the forceps, placed them in a washbowl, and finished washing her. She had recovered consciousness. Everything had happened in half an hour, maybe three quarters of an hour, not more, perhaps not much longer than it would take him to remember it, because the time he’d need to recall those events wouldn’t surpass the real time, so precisely were they fixed in his memory, so incandescently bright were his gestures and his actions, although the remembered circumstance could be recollected and repeated, and the time gone over again and again, until it ended up out of proportion, with all sense of real time lost.
That was what it had been his lot to live through. That had been his penance in the war. But the cruelty unleashed on innocents was now falling on that mother who had proved unable to become a mother and making her its victim, multiplying her solitude by a solitude a thousand times more unbearable than the first, because after a delivery with such disastrous consequences, to be still alive was both a stroke of luck and a punishment. The doctor gazed at the woman for a few moments. Her belly had lost all its volume. He bent over her, passed a fresh towel over her body, and covered her modestly with her nightdress, as he imagined a midwife would have done. Then he covered her with the blankets on the bed. She was still panting. Her young body looked as though she’d survived a shipwreck and the sea had tossed her up on some beach in the middle of the night. He thought he should put her in another bed. There was another one in that same room, a smaller bed against a wall. When Severo returned to the room, the doctor asked the boy to help him move her, but then he changed his mind. It would be better to wait for her to regain some of her strength, better to let her rest where she was.
For the first time since he’d entered the bedroom, the doctor took stock of his surroundings. Two hunting engravings hung on the wall. An antique crucifix spread its arms above the bed. The storm had died down. Through the black window came the gentle, steady sound of the rain. He bent down to collect his bag and started to put away the instruments he’d used. When he got to his feet, he felt the ache in his leg. He’d forgotten about it. Severo approached him and murmured something in a low voice.
“What’s that?”
The youth repeated his question, and the doctor replied loudly, “You’ll spend the night here. I’ll come back early tomorrow morning.”
The woman opened her eyes. The doctor bent over her. She was about to ask about the baby. That was the question she had on her lips. But no wailing could be heard, not a single cry, nor was there the sound of footsteps or whispering in that silent room, and no one had handed her a small, trembling package to cradle on her bosom. The black and gentle rain provided the tragic or indifferent background music, and the woman understood that she had been delivered of a stillborn fruit; perhaps she’d understood that some time ago, but only the silence and the rain had convinced her that she wasn’t mistaken. She raised her head slightly, as if she wanted to make sure of something. Her efforts had hollowed out her cheeks. Soon she let herself fall back onto the pillow. Her very sensitive ears told her that her hopes had come to an end, and when she knew this and understood it, she sealed her lips.
The Wrong Blood Page 17