I REACHED THE PARK near my apartment by clutching at everything, grasping at the walls at times, as if I were blind or drunk. I remember the grass was sprouting green. It was springtime. I had trimmed my own hair the day before, from what little still grew beneath my wig, as if trying to delay nature’s resurrection, the change of season after the snows. Grass in the park, shorter hair on my scalp, because I wanted to express the following: flowers, squirrels, hibernating animals, wait till I recover for rebirth, wait for me so that I can watch you. But they hadn’t waited. There were the trees, shameless, blossoming, in spring, while I hadn’t left winter yet. Enwai—my name for New York—was in full bloom. And that’s how I began walking, expecting to die. I crossed the park without leaning on anything, free, evolved: from a simian woman to woman erectus, convinced the city would be the last place my feet would ever touch, my eyes would ever see, my badly wounded head would ever appreciate. Enwai was like Yoro’s first sonogram, and I absorbed it all with a blend of expectation and fear, while Yoro, in my womb, revealed the genesis of New York as I meandered along, her heart beating hard and fast, what’s expected of a six-month-old fetus or a city in continuous gestation, never completely born: the unborn city.
I began at the intestines. A jumble of streets in a mile-long stretch from north to south, from Delancey Street to what would become Ground Zero, and a two-mile ambit east to west from the Williamsburg Bridge to Broadway. Everything was spinning around me. I was giddy and nauseated, probably due to morning sickness, but I continued forward. They call these guts Chinatown, it breaks the grid of the body, and there can be no straight lines or squares between the stomach and the anus. I’ve always thought that chaos is a product of time, of complexity, and that’s why I found it incredible that Yoro, being as yet so simple, so unfinished, could already have such disorder in her belly, this tangle that impeded any view of the beginning or the end. The first time I dared enter a store in this neighborhood, they told me, “We don’t accept credit cards. All business here is done in cash.” The big intestine doesn’t want to pay taxes for what the mouth, and not it, enjoyed; or maybe Yoro’s digestive tract was still immature, unable to digest the type of sophistication that came with credit and banks over palpable, jingling cash. My baby’s functions weren’t developed, I think, beyond absorbing the tiny amounts of amniotic fluid she drank from me. That day was a holiday in Chinatown, and there was a parade in the street. I followed behind a long red Chinese paper dragon that skipped and slithered beneath the firmament. How lucky, I thought. How lucky to be able to lift off the ground. How lucky it would be to fly with my heavy belly, with the lightness of a balloon or a planet held by laws one doesn’t even need to know. Free, no references. The dragon had huge yellow scales like flames, supported by all the big and little hands of people celebrating the festival, walking in procession through the digestive galleries, the visceral tubes digesting chicken feet at all hours, orangy pig snouts, starfish, frogs, a variety of aphrodisiac powders from many different creatures who in their best days ran across the windy Asian prairies on four legs.
Enwai is the name she gave herself, that’s why I call her that, though it’s all been forgotten and now everyone calls her New York. They insist on emblazoning NY, her initials, on mugs. NY is also the name of a state, which tourists wear inscribed on T-shirts—I ❤NY—to splash a bit of style across their chests, not realizing that the heart doesn’t symbolize their love for the city, it represents the pulse of the city thumping between their skin and the cotton fabric. Even now, when I think back to that walk through Enwai, I feel like saying “Listen up, folks, be careful with that heart. It’s not just a sticker or a patch. It’s my little girl’s muscle, or an island they call (by way of that obsession for naming everything) Manhattan, of which only a third is asphalt, steel, machinery; so look out, because in the other two thirds, every year come March, organic matter is developed, like a boy, a rose, an ovary.” But I don’t want to get sidetracked by other things. I was talking about that walk I took, wandering through Enwai on the third Sunday of a month of March, when I saw Yoro, who in that month had developed—besides her intestines—her head, her brain, her lungs, and her left arm.
Walking, I was surviving so far longer than I had expected, but anxiety affected my breathing enough that to get away from the crowds, I sneaked into a narrow alley. I would have liked to ignore the fact that Yoro had an appendix. At that point in time they were considered useless, and sailors had them removed before embarking on a voyage lasting months, to avoid the risk of the appendix’s becoming saturated with noxious residues or bursting when they were far from land. As soon as I caught my breath again I went down to catch the subway. I found a seat, but a lot of people were standing. It was a sunny day, women were wearing dresses and skirts again, and nearly everyone’s legs were bare, like a great forest of white and black trunks that in brushing against one another after months of cold gave off the electricity of a stranger’s skin. Others in the subway brushed against me lightly. After such a long time, that whisk of another human’s skin comforted me. How little it took to bring joy, no more than the brush of anonymous skin.
Surprised by my unexpected resilience, I got off at the stop where Enwai touched the sky: where the head resided. It’s festooned with garlands of flowers and a river. It too was given a name: the New York Botanical Garden. You can see the whole thing from an airplane, or from the eye of the falcon who has nested there for several years now. But I saw the whole thing on foot that day. The bare-leafed trees were covered in hundreds of buds in all stages, from being invisible to blossoming. The garden is equipped with a laboratory that specializes in plant chemistry; samples of the DNA of all the plants growing there are stored in case one day they should succumb. So Enwai is wearing a tiara that is like its own planet, an arched natural reserve where the most unassuming life-forms find refuge, from oaks to lichens. Freezers there store the genetic information of extinct species. But Enwai never displays these icy chambers. Quite the contrary, she keeps them hidden in the tiara where virgin nature protects the machinery of her survival. If I live long enough to see Yoro born and growing up, I thought, I’ll comb her hair in the same tender manner this garden is cared for every day, a garden whose existence could be the key to New York’s reforestation.
This is how Enwai’s metamorphosis was taking place, whose quickening I could sense in myself at the time, and spring was undoubtedly in the air, because I found her head inside her lungs. I was in Central Park, where Enwai’s organic system was fighting to gain ground from the mechanical system. Here Enwai thinks as she breathes in and remembers as she breathes out. The main neuron spins and spins at the center of the park, around Sixty-fifth Street: a carousel with fifty-seven wooden horses. I perched atop a white one. The organ music played for three and a half minutes, the time it takes for the merry-go-round to twirl around seven times. The black horse rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell. Its mouth was open, as if it were whinnying with glee at the pleasure of copulating with the flesh-and-blood mule who a hundred years ago, beneath these very wooden horses, spent her life tugging the carousel around, huffing and puffing, ever more exhausted, round and round in so many circles: the carousel’s, the memories of Jim, my life.
Enwai’s development didn’t end there with that walk, because year after year she continues to manifest signs of biological regeneration. More proof: expansion, Enwai’s colonization of live cells, what the city of New York considers its most recent urban acquisition. The High Line, the unused raised train tracks that are now a panoramic garden. One’s view pierces between the buildings all the way to the port as easily as the sea receiving a tongue of land jutting into it. The vegetation is lush now that the tracks are completely hidden. The stone-eyed mayor thinks this is a garden, but it’s skin. Just as skin dresses bone, so meadow grows over iron. First, the greenery covered Fourteenth to Twentieth Streets—Enwai’s left humerus—and then from Twentieth to Thirtieth Streets—the ulna and the radius.
When the hand appears, what were once rails will be fresh green skin from shoulder to fingertips. Maybe then I’ll be able to see my girl, not only me but everyone else too; maybe right now, laid out like a grassy blanket soft enough that anyone strolling across might feel called to caress it, kick off their shoes, showing the respect of a good shepherd toward pastureland. These are merely images; don’t think I confuse signified and signifier. Today Yoro is a woman you will know in time. The pasture, the prairie, they aren’t Yoro, but if Yoro had an ideogram, it would be something garden fresh and good for all humankind.
That whole day I thought wandering around and dying were one and the same thing. But I lived in Enwai, I resisted there, and now I felt spring arrive with Yoro’s first little kicks. The sun was still warm in the late afternoon. I found an out-of-the-way corner of that green lung, wriggled out of my dress, and lay down. I could smell it. I smelled the green. Grass was growing in Enwai, and for the first time since the bomb in Hiroshima, my hair was beginning to grow. A few months later, at forty-two, I could feel the weight of my own hair. A little while later I learned that during this stage of pregnancy, a fine soft down grows to protect the fetus’s skin, which still lacks fatty tissue. It’s called lanugo. That day the same brownish grass sprouted over Yoro and me, like a new down.
Seventh Month:
Irrational Number
But spring ended for me the same day it began. And three years would go by before I ever saw it again. I quit looking outside of myself during that time, because Yoro was developing inside of me, though I felt very bad for having put off the search that had been so important to the man I’d loved more than anything. But it didn’t upset me enough, because my despair carried me to the heights of selfishness.
Let me try to summarize the most important events in my life during those three wintry years. My dog died, but I kept one of her puppies. I mention it because you’ll soon see how holding on to that puppy’s leash is what nudged me toward a brighter period. But it took three years of winter first, and though I would never have believed it possible, my agoraphobia intensified. That’s when I met a man I’ll call Irrational Number. The name suits him because to this day I still can’t figure how many decimals he had. He was like an infinite man; all the subtle features that make up a person’s individual character, in his case, were hidden from me. It’s impossible to choose a word or two or even one hundred words that could possibly portray him. That’s why I use the analogy of irrational numbers, an allusion to that one Greek who discovered them and in return was drowned at sea, as the legend goes. My man, my Irrational Number, had also been tossed from a boat, or more precisely from society. In the manner of Hippasus of Metapontum, he had committed an audacious act of equivalent magnitude.
First let me tell you the story of Hippasus, in case you aren’t familiar with it, so you understand the association. The plucky Greek dared to measure the diagonal of a simple square, each side 1 unit long—that is, the square root of 2—and show that the result was not a natural number, nor rational, but in fact a number with apparently infinite and random decimals. He’d effectively discovered incommensurability, deemed heretical by Pythagoras, he who had defined the perfection of the universe, music, and harmony in whole numbers or fractions. Hippasus confronted the Pythagoreans with the difficulty of measuring the universe. It was a blow to the mathematical ego. How to measure the geometry of the world if you can’t even measure the diagonal of a square?
The audacity of my Irrational Number—an eminent white ex-professor of English literature who taught in his home state of Georgia, who had just been released from prison a few months earlier—was to beat a white man to a pulp for trying to stop a black woman from entering a public bathroom. It’s true the Jim Crow laws of racial segregation had been declared unconstitutional a decade earlier, but the white population in the southern states took a long time to accede to the rationale of a universe that had been built on black foundations. That year several black and Hispanic women filed legal complaints after visiting their doctors because they couldn’t seem to get pregnant, only to find that their infertility was due to surgeons who had taken advantage of earlier procedures to tie their Fallopian tubes without their consent. The United States was practicing eugenics some forty years before the Nazis, the regime the Americans had denounced for, among other reasons, carrying out certain practices to better the race, practices which the great father had been developing. So my man wasn’t simply punching another white man, but the state itself. And that meant expulsion from the university, and what to him was much more serious, an end to his sincere vocation of teaching.
A mutual friend introduced us, and we first got to know each other through letters. It wasn’t difficult to forewarn him about my pregnancy. Even though my, I calculated, seven-month belly was now showing, I let him know it was a psychological pregnancy. I knew somatization was the only way to explain to other people why the pregnancy was lasting so many years: I had gotten myself pregnant. I’d already read about similar cases. A woman in Austria insisted and made her husband believe that she was pregnant with triplets for nine months, her belly had grown so large. When the birth was overdue, they finally discovered that the only thing in her uterus was a giant balloon of unfulfilled desire. It made me so sad to read how they had to return all the gifts they’d received, not for one child but for three, and how they sealed the room so as not to have to confront the loss of their babies every day, because however imaginary the pregnancy was, it was also real. I used these cases as justifications, subjecting myself once again to the academic to be moderately accepted.
Meeting him in a public space was more problematic; it brought into relief my bruised state of mind. To skirt that obstacle, pleading shyness, I suggested a dark place, a movie theater, as the site of our first date. I planned everything in a way that would help me feel as relaxed as possible. A movie theater was just the spot, a dark, enclosed space. I arranged the hour, the row, and the seat. He would get there first. I would enter only once the lights had been dimmed. I would look for the seat and settle in beside him. I cautioned that I would be nervous, a normal reaction given the buildup of desire spread throughout the letters I had written him. And that’s how everything went that day. I was so nervous that I sat down without even checking to see if it was him, as if I were some random spectator. I stared at the screen in front of me, and wished I had that cubist eye, the one in my left temple that would allow me to see his complete profile and the screen all at once, without his detecting my furtive glances. I needed to calm down, I thought, he must be nervous too, but for a different reason: he was a lot older than me. I had already said in a letter that I thought age was meaningless. I could have told him that Jim had been several years older than me too. But instead I wrote that life is too short, why should I limit myself to loving someone who just so happened to have been born in the same decade as me? I count like the French, and if he had been eighty years old, I would have said, “Oh, how nice. Four times twenty.” That’s what I was thinking when he turned to me and we greeted each other in whispers. It all happened slowly, with a measured beginning, very deliberate, as in the verse: “not exposed, but behind a veil / are breasts desirable.” I left before the lights came back on, as we had arranged. And so our first date took place between two illuminations. Grateful for the gift of blindness, unfettered by the sense of sight, I gave him four more senses to employ, following a recipe I’d sent in writing beforehand, which he obeyed step by step, delicately, affectionately, while the movie lasted. This was my recipe:
MAIN INGREDIENT:
1 pound of abstraction (repeat six times: “The only two people in this room are her and me.”)
FOR SMELL:
Look to the right of your seat. I will be there. Place your mouth at the highest tip of my ear, on the exterior, right at what is called the helix (look it up for greater precision). No tongue. Bite it, or better yet, lightly press your teeth on the nerves three or four times.
; Then quickly drop your nose along my neck. My excitement will continue downward at the same pace, and when your nose reaches my cleavage, the smell will already be there. But keep in mind that it’s not just my smell. It’s ours.
FOR SOUND:
Suck a few of your fingers and slip your hand under my sweater to reach my sternum. It’s important to do it quickly because your fingers should be wet. Apply them to my skin as if they were electrodes. The wetness will conduct electricity, which accelerates the pulse. Use the pads of your fingers as if they were ears and listen to the pulse.
FOR TOUCH:
Place a bread crumb, which I will give you, in your mouth. Warm it up until it begins to disintegrate, some ten seconds. Look for my belly button and place the little mush there. Let it sit for a minute until I can feel the ball of salivated bread in my scar. Remove it and feel the texture. It’s a texture similar to what you may appreciate tomorrow when we lie naked and share our bodies’ liquors. It will be the kingdom of heaven. The place where a woman sprinkled yeast, hiding it in three measures of flour, and the world arose.
The Story of H Page 17