© Isabel del Rio
Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Isabel del Rio (Madrid, 1954) spent her childhood and most of her adult life in London. She has worked as a journalist and writer in Spain and in the UK, including working at the BBC World Service. She has also worked as a literary and commercial translator and currently works as a full-time translator for a UN agency in London. La duda, from which `No one' and `The Key' were taken, was shortlisted for the New Writers' Prize and the Icarus Prize in Spain. `Countdown' was published in Nomad as N6madas (1997), a collection of short stories and poems by Spanish and Latin American writers living in London. She writes poetry and prose, in English and Spanish, and is now working on two novels and a collection of short stories.
`Once upon a time, before mankind had wings ...'
That was how all my mother's stories began when I was a little girl: harking back to an ancient or perhaps mythical time when mankind had not yet acquired the ability to fly. I loved hearing those stories, and I would beg her to tell me them over and over again, even though I knew them all off by heart: the one about the hero who, having no wings of his own, made himself wings out of wax and bird feathers; but when he flew too close to the sun the wax melted and he fell into the sea and drowned. Or the one about the man who invented a device made of canvas and wood that enabled him to launch himself from the tops of mountains and glide over the valleys of his country, taking advantage of the warm air currents, something we all do today almost instinctively, yet hearing it recounted made it seem strange and novel, as though I myself had just discovered a phenomenon which is so common nowadays we don't even notice it.
Little did I know as I listened to my mother's stories that, one day, the lack of wings was something I would experience very close to home, and the myth of those disfigured beings would end up becoming part of my own life.
I never felt any great maternal instinct. I remember that when we were teenagers, a lot of my friends yearned for the day they would become mothers; they seemed to have no other vocation in life, and I felt profoundly irritated by their oohs and ahs and the silly faces they pulled every time they saw a baby; they would surround the cot or the pram cooing like doves and eventually they would ask the mother if they could just hold the baby for a minute in their wings. When the mother said yes and they gathered it to their breast and wrapped it in their flight feathers, they looked so happy that I didn't know whether to set about them for being so wet and stupid, or myself for being so detached and insensitive. It made me feel odd to see them so carried away with something that left me cold.
In time I grew to understand that there was no obligation to be a mother. So as I approached the age of forty, happily married and with a fulfilling career, I had given up the idea of having children, but it was a sort of automatic decision: quite simply, motherhood did not enter into my plans. Then I discovered I was pregnant.
From the beginning, my husband and I were surprised by the doctor's intense solicitude, his insistence on examining me and doing tests, repeating some of them with the excuse that the results had not been clear enough. We had the impression something was not right, and so it turned out: I was just beginning the third month of my pregnancy when the doctor asked us to call at his surgery and gave us two pieces of news. The first was that the baby was a girl; the second was that in all probability she would be born without wings.
I was offered the option of terminating the pregnancy, but I refused. I, who had never felt the least attraction towards the idea of motherhood, was already in love with that unknown baby girl, even though I realised she would be a burden to me all my life. She was now my daughter and I would not give her up for anything in the world.
The birth was fine, surprisingly easy. It was as though that disfigured child came into the world full of the will to live, and as though the strength she ought to have in her nonexistent wings had flowed to other parts of her body, especially her limbs: even during the pregnancy I had been surprised by how hard she kicked in the womb, and the staff in attendance at the birth all noticed how strong her arms and legs were.
When they brought her to me, still covered in blood and mucus, and put her to my breast, I cuddled her in my exhausted wings and noticed how warm her naked skin was. I thought she was the most beautiful baby in the world, all pink and clean, free of that cold tangle of downy feathers that other new-born babies have. Her nakedness moved me so much that the thought even crossed my mind that, ever since humanity has had wings, we have lost the warmth of that skin-to-skin contact, because there are always hard, dusty feathers between us. Who knows whether in gaining wings we have not lost many other things, as smooth and sweet as unprotected skin.
From that day on, my little girl was the centre of my life. The first few months were no problem; after all, a normal baby has such weak little wings that it can't use them to fly or do anything else, so my daughter seemed almost normal. She fed well, was a good sleeper and very soon learned to recognise us and smile and make little noises. When she saw me going over to her cot, instead of spreading her wings she would hold out her arms to me, asking me to pick her up. Apart from that small point, she was no different from any other little girl the same age.
Naturally, as the months passed, the differences began to be more noticeable. Between eight and ten months a normal child will begin to squat, or kneel down, spread their wings and begin to beat them, getting ready for their first flight. Instead of that, my daughter used to sit up and then rock to and fro, or she would get down on her hands and knees and try to walk like a dog or a cat. My husband could not bear to see her doing this; he would say she was like an animal. Other relatives suggested I should tie her to the bed to stop her doing it. I refused to do so. I defended her right to be different, to move and express herself in a different way from us and from other children. `She has no wings, surely she has to move as best she can?' I would say to them. But nobody understood: they would say we ought to encourage her to move like other children, that when she was older maybe her problem could be overcome with artificial wings, that although we had to accept that she was different, we should not try to make her even more so. Day by day, the confrontations with my husband, relatives and friends grew more violent. None of them seemed to see that since the baby was different, it was only logical that she should do everything in a different way.
One day, I made a wonderful discovery. I had observed from old drawings and pictures that, in the days when mankind had no wings, women would hold their babies in their arms, instead of cradling them between the wing-feathers, as we do now I remember that it was a winter's afternoon, I was alone with my daughter and she was crawling around the living-room carpet; at a certain point she sat up and held out her arms to me. Driven by an uncontrollable impulse, I too held out my arms and clasped her, then picked her up and put her on my knee. I cannot describe the feeling that swept over me at that moment: I had my baby on my lap, and my arms encircled her, from the right and from the left; and the most surprising thing of all was that she copied me, she put her little arms round my body and the two of us sat there like that for a long time, in this new and untried posture, facing each other, body to body, she with no wings and I with mine tucked away behind me, the two of us held together only by our intertwining arms.
From then on, I always picked her up in that way. At the beginning, I did it secretly, partly from shame and partly because I did not want to provoke any more quarrels with my husband, who was finding it more and more difficult to accept our daughter; but I soon began to hold her that way all the time at home, and then, later, I even began to do it in public. The first few times it took a tremendous effort to lift the baby up into my lap, but gradually my arms grew stronger from the repetition of this action, and I would say they even took on a different shape, as if some of the muscles were developing and rounding out in order to adapt to that movement. In the long hours spent with my baby in my arms I came to understand why old paintings depicting the su
bject of motherhood radiate an atmosphere of tenderness, incomprehensible to us, and fail to arouse the feelings of rejection one might expect, depicting as they do relationships between disfigured beings: the mother who holds her child in her arms communicates with the child as intensely as the mother who cradles it in her wings, perhaps even more intensely. Naturally, the few times I dared to voice such an opinion everyone looked away and fell silent, as pity for another's misfortune demands.
I gave up my job and devoted myself more and more to the child. Or perhaps I should say she devoted herself to me, because in fact she showed me a whole new world, a world at ground level. Instead of flying, she would crawl on the floor; then she began to stand up and take a few steps, advancing by holding on to the furniture and managing by this means to go all over the room; when there was nothing to hold on to, she would get down on the floor and support her body on the palms of her hands. Quite unlike other children, who first of all learn to fly, and then afterwards, when their wings are strong enough, begin to walk; that way their wings act like a parachute when they take their first steps, if they feel themselves falling all they have to do is spread them. My little girl, on the other hand, learned to walk much earlier than usual, and more surprisingly still, she could do it without the help of wings; it was astonishing to see how she contrived to keep her balance despite that very difficult posture, her back held straight with nothing to counterbalance it but the movement of her arms and head. I could hardly believe it when I saw her standing up in that way, tottering forward without falling and protecting herself, if she stumbled, by putting out her arms to cushion the blow.
I got into the habit of lying on the floor to be with her. My husband would fly into a rage when he saw me like that, face down on the carpet, my wings folded like those of a butterfly and leaning on my elbows to play with my daughter. But I enjoyed seeing things from down there, as she saw them, since she was unable to take flight and land on top of the wardrobe or observe the room from a corner of the ceiling. I gradually got out of the habit of flying.
All my friends and relatives said I must keep on flying, lead a normal life, get out more, I was burying myself alive. But I paid no attention; I was completely happy.
My husband went through several phases, from anger to indifference. By the time our daughter was two, we hardly spoke to each other, in fact we were seldom home at the same time: he always had loads of work and we would only see him at weekends, invariably in a bad mood; during the week, he would get home so late that he just slipped into bed in the dark, thinking I was asleep. Soon he had to work on Saturdays as well, then go off on business trips at weekends. His mood had improved, so I knew what was going on, but I didn't say anything: I didn't want my daughter to grow up without a father-figure, even if it was a purely symbolic one. A little girl like her needed all the protection we could give her.
By the time she was two, she could speak almost fluently; she was an extraordinarily bright child and I was very proud of her. But soon afterwards my torment began.
The first sign came one night while I was bathing her. I was rubbing soap on her back and suddenly noted a small rough patch just by her right shoulder blade. I examined it, thinking that perhaps she had hurt herself all I could see was a red mark, and I forgot all about it.
A few days later there were two red marks, symmetrically placed on either side of her back. As I touched them, I felt a swelling beneath the skin. I was scared, but I didn't want to take her to the doctor, so I just put a bit of antiseptic cream on them. A week later, things had got worse; the swellings had got bigger and were now two lumps like abscesses, inflamed and apparently painful to the touch, since she protested when I ran my fingers over the surface.
I put on a dressing, with more antiseptic cream, but it had no effect; I changed the dressings twice a day and the lumps kept growing. So I got some bandages and elastoplast and bandaged the whole of her thorax, keeping the bandages firm, but not too tight. Luckily it was winter, so nobody noticed the bandages, hidden beneath her bulky clothes.
That was no good either. The lumps were getting bigger and harder all the time, like a dislocated bone threatening to burst through the skin. I didn't know what to do, or who to turn to.
Until one day, the inevitable happened. I went to get her up that morning and I found her face down in bed, which was unlike her. Beneath the bedclothes there was a suspicious shape, and I knew what it was before I pulled back the sheets.
There they were: incipient, but developed enough for there to be no doubt. They had sprouted in the night, tearing the skin, so that the bottom sheet was slightly stained with blood. My whole world collapsed about my ears.
I knew there was only one thing for it. I picked up my child, uncovered her body and bit with all the strength of rage and desperation. A foul taste of dust and mites filled my mouth; it's unbelievable how much filth a pair of wings can pick up in one night.
She didn't seem to feel any pain. Perhaps she felt a slight discomfort, because she cried a little, then stopped almost immediately. I took her to the bathroom to clean her up, and I managed to stop the bleeding, disinfect the wound and bandage it up.
She kept the dressings on for several days, though I changed them frequently. Every time I took them off, I examined the progress of the wound. I was relieved to see that it was healing quickly and within a few weeks it had closed completely.
Now you can hardly see it. All she has is a slight invisible scar, which you only notice if you touch it, or look very closely or know it's there. She's gone back to being what she was before, and I still devote all my attention to her. If people tell me I'm burying myself alive, that I should go back to work, that I've lost my husband, that I shouldn't be so tied to her, I tell them I'm happy doing what I'm doing and that it's a mother's duty to sacrifice everything for her daughter.
© Paloma Diaz-Mas
Translated by Annella McDermott
Paloma Diaz-Mas was born in Madrid in 1954, but lives now in Vitoria, where she lectures on Spanish Literature of the Golden Age and Sephardic Literature at the University of the Basque Country. She has written scholarly articles on Sephardic themes, a book of short stories, Nuestro milenio (1987) and three novels, El rapto del Santo Grial (1984), Tras las huellas de Artorius (1985) and El sueno de Venecia (1992; winner of the Herralde Prize). Una ciudad Ilamada Eugenio (1992) relates her experiences in the United States. This story was first published in Madres e has, ed. Laura Freixas, Anagrama, 1996.
It was near the cemetery that I first heard poor Bieito moving inside his coffin. (There were four pallbearers, and I was one of them.) Did I hear it or was it my imagination? At the time I couldn't be sure. It was such a gentle stirring! Like the tenacious woodworm that gnaws and gnaws through the night, that quiet movement has been gnawing at my fevered imagination ever since.
The thing is, friends, I wasn't sure, and for that reason - please understand, please listen - for that reason I could not, must not, say anything.
Imagine for a moment that I was to say:
Bieito's alive.
All the heads of the old men carrying candles would go up in astonishment and alarm. All the little children catching the drips from the candles in their hands would come buzzing around me.The women would crowd round the coffin. On every lip would be a strange, amazed, murmur:
Bieito's alive, Bieito's alive.
The weeping of mother and sisters would cease, and the brass instruments of the band intoning a solemn hymn would miss a beat. And I would be the one who revealed it, the saviour, the target of everyone's amazement and gratitude. And the sun on my face would take on an unexpected significance.
Ali! But what if later, when the coffin was opened, my suspicions proved false? Their utter amazement would turn to vast, macabre ridicule. The fervent gratitude of his mother and his sisters to contempt. The hammer falling once more on the coffin would have a unique, sinister sound in the stunned afternoon. Do you see what I mean? That's why I said nothing.<
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There was a moment when a slight expression of surprise crossed the face of one of my fellow pallbearers, as though he too noticed the slight stirring. But it was gone in a flash. His face cleared again. So I said nothing.
There was a moment when I nearly spoke up. Turning to the man by my side, and disguising the question with an amused smile, I murmured:
`What ifBieito was alive?'
The other man laughed slyly, as though to say, `The things you come out with!' and I deliberately widened my joker's smile.
I also came close to saying something in the cemetery, when we had placed the coffin on the ground and the priest was murmuring the prayers.
`When the priest finishes,' I thought. But the priest finished and the coffin was lowered into the grave and still I could not find the words.
The Dedalus Book of Spanish Fantasy Page 10