They were each given four bottles of beer a day to help the flow of milk. During visiting hours the husbands, lovers, and families of the mothers would bring delicacies in brown paper bags and in filet parcels—cheeses, soups, pastries, fresh-baked baguettes. Antonio brought her baklava and steamed corn.
They decided to name the baby “Isabel” and to give her the middle name of Françoise, after the woman who brought them wine glasses at their wedding.
“But we must give her more middle names,” he said. “So she can choose the name she likes best.”
“A wonderful idea,” said Rosa. They inscribed Isabel Françoise Catherine in the Livret de Famille.
Rosa was told it would be best for Isabel if she, Rosa, stayed with her in the hospital until the baby was ready to come home. The hospital walls seemed to enfold her, never to want to let her go.
She grew restless. She tried to read, to knit. She paced up and down the corridors; she gazed through the pane glass at the infants in the nursery. Isabel seemed content, compared to the other babies, but so tiny, so frail. Isabel had a way of gurgling on the tip of her bottle as if she were playing and were enjoying herself. “Petite cochonne,” the nurses called her. “She’s lazy,” they said affectionately. “Too lazy to suckle.”
Rosa worried. Her nipples were large, and the baby’s mouth so small. If only the milk held out until the baby was strong and big enough to suckle.
Once during visiting hours Antonio grew cross with her. “You’re not holding her right!” he cried. “And the baby . . . the baby isn’t trying.” He adjusted Isabel in her arms, adjusted Isabel’s mouth. “She has to make an effort too,” he said of the five-day old infant. “She’s lazy. It’s her nature.” He tapped her with his black-gloved fingers.
“No!” cried Rosa. “You’re wrong. She’s too little to know what she’s doing.”
“Relax more,” he told her. “Everything will be all right.”
Milk flowed out from her copiously through the breast pump, which the nurses then poured into Isabel’s bottle.
Six days after Isabel’s birth Antonio told her that a girl named Marguerite who lived upstairs in their building had killed herself. She had been found with a bullet hole through her head and a gun at her side.
Marguerite was a thoughtful, plain, quiet girl whom Rosa and Antonio had sought out as a companion on occasion until a terrible incident last August. If only it hadn’t happened, Marguerite might still be alive, Rosa believed. The suicide seemed as if it must bring ill in its wake.
It had been hot that August. Rosa and Antonio prepared a delicious drink with crushed strawberries and cream. All day they were on unusually good terms. Antonio told her they ought to share the drink with Marguerite, who seemed so alone. He said, “I’ll just be a minute. I’m going to bring a glass upstairs to her. Then we’ll go for a walk.” He blew her a kiss. Rosa waited and waited. The sky darkened as the sun went down. It grew chillier. Often he kept her waiting like this while he went to chat with a neighbor. Minutes would turn into hours. This habit stretched her nerves taut. Now it began to be unbearable.
Finally she went upstairs and knocked, and then without waiting for a response pushed open the door. Antonio and Marguerite were sprawled out against each other on the bed in a lax embrace. Marguerite, attired only in a red silk kimono, half untied, looked very pale. Her dark hair, which had recently been cropped close to her head, accentuated her features so that her plainness acquired a kind of beauty. Her breasts were partially exposed.
Flames of rage seared through Rosa. “Get out of here!” she shrieked at Antonio. At that moment she felt capable of murdering them both, choking them both to death. Her shrieks were loud enough to be heard through the entire building. Rage entirely transformed her. Her eyes blazed black against the redness of her face, which took on a grosser, heavier aspect.
She rushed upon the pair to separate them. “Get out of here!” she shrieked again and again at him. “Get out of here!”
Antonio had risen. The drink, barely touched, stood on the floor next to his feet. He left immediately with Rosa.
“You’ll regret this,” he snarled. “But I’ll never have anything to do with Marguerite again. If she has no friends, tant pis.”
“Why, why?” asked Rosa in confusion. Her anger had subsided; her face grew pale. Perspiration ran down her cheeks. She heaved with inner sobs and kept swallowing so as not to cry. She felt sorry for Marguerite, even wanted to befriend her. She was ashamed of her jealousy, and at the same time sensed that something terrible was going to arise from this incident.
It had grown dark.
“All right, let’s go for our walk. You wanted to go for a walk,” he said. His face was set rigidly; his entire body was tense. He grabbed her arm and propelled her along. Her belly felt especially heavy; she was overcome with a rush of fatigue.
“I’m so tired,” she said.
“You wanted to go for a walk. So come on. We will walk,” he said in a fanatic voice.
They walked down the stairs, through the courtyard, along the streets towards the Seine, where they often walked at night.
“I will have nothing more to do with her. It upsets both of us. But you will regret this,” he said. His voice was like steel. She could not reason with him when he was in a mood like this.
When they reached a grassy portion of the riverbank near the Pont Neuf he pulled her down onto the ground and attempted to make love with her. But he failed. Rosa felt frightened. He had rarely been impotent before. His physical state incensed him to even greater fury. “Come,” she heard him call out softly to some clochards and voyeurs in the darkness. He held her wrists firmly pinioned down with one of his hands; his knee was between her legs. Pregnant, she was not as agile as she had been. His fury frightened her. Try as she did, she could not free herself from his grip. He grew erect once more, tried to enter her, but again grew soft.
She wanted to scream out, to run, but he had her pinned down. With one hand he tried still again to insert his penis into her. Then, failing to do so, he caressed her with his free hand. “Lie here,” he said gently. “Enjoy. No one is going to hurt you.” His voice had grown gentle, mesmerizing.
She had always felt as if no harm could come to her when she was with him. No matter how cruel, how irrational his actions might appear, she always believed that some deeper, vaster intelligence of which he was barely conscious directed these actions (insane in the eyes of the world). His apparent craziness seemed akin to the acts of a Zen master, intended to awaken her. He was Protean. He took on many guises. His personality could change twenty times within one day. But she must stick with him, as in the Greek myth, stick with him through all his monstrous changes until he was forced to reveal himself in his true form. Then she would acquire a power which had been her birthright but had been stripped from her. He would empower her. But if she left him, she would be lost forever.
Now she allowed herself to be mesmerized by his voice, his hands. She felt other hands on her, gentle hands. The panic in her quieted. Apparently, no one was going to hurt her. With him she was safe. “Enjoy,” he repeated again and again. And she allowed the thoughts to blank out and allowed herself to be aware only of the caressing sensations against her flesh.
Then he jerked her up roughly. Bodies scattered in the darkness. There were light sounds of footsteps in the grass, bodies disappearing behind shrubbery, ascending the embankment.
“Come on, let’s go back.” He grabbed her arm. The rage had edged back into his voice.
“No, Antonio. I don’t like this at all,” she protested.
They climbed up stone steps onto the sidewalk. When she turned around, hearing footsteps, three young men were following.
“Don’t mind them,” he said. “Don’t you want to let them have a good time?” The grating tone of his voice, the phoniness in it, terrified her more than ever. She wanted to run, but her belly was heavy with the fetus. Perhaps she was safer sticking with him. Where co
uld she run? There was nowhere to run at all. If she ran from him now, it might be all over between them. She felt forced to stay with him as they walked along, frightened and uneasy as she was.
They walked through the courtyard.
“Go away!” she shrieked at them.
“Shut up,” he hissed.
The men kept following.
“Would you like to come in?” he asked, turning around to face them.
“Ah, yes,” said one.
He was crazy. They could be beaten, robbed at the very least, killed. And what of the baby inside her? If he forced them on her, what diseases might they have? She might abort. She decided that she must run from him, and she turned to bolt down the stairs.
They were blocking her passage, gazing at her with curious, soft smiles.
“Don’t run away, Petite. You are safe with me. Nothing is going to happen to you,” murmured Antonio in that same frightening voice. “Do you trust me?”
“Yes,” she said, fearing he would erupt if she answered differently.
Antonio turned the key in the lock. As they walked through the front room, she clutched at the necklace of pearls around her throat. They were fake pearls which Antonio had once given her, and she wore them as a good luck talisman. The string broke; they all scattered across the floor.
He made her lie down on the bed, took off her white blouse and grey pleated skirt. She was afraid and at the same time trusted that he could somehow ward off any danger. Again he tried to make love to her. This time he succeeded. They lay on their sides, so as not to put weight on her belly. Then she was again aware of hands, their hands all over her, caressing, and Antonio’s voice, soothing, mesmerizing. “Relax, relax, enjoy this,” he said. He was the father of the baby inside her. He could not wish to harm the baby.
She endowed him with powers of perception greater than hers, powers of warding off harm. He made no secret of his desire to liberate her sensually. Months ago, when she confided in him a secret desire to make love to a girl—to release something frozen in her, she said—he provided her not only with a beautiful, rather remote young girl, whom he knew somehow, but he maneuvered them both into bed together and broke down their inhibitions.
He had introduced other women into their bed to shock, explode, melt her frozen attitudes. “So that you can be rid of this American puritanism and be fully a woman,” he told her. And after that first time with the young girl, she made love to Antonio in a state of abandonment she had never felt before.
Now because of her belief in him, because she felt that in some way not understood by her, this experience had its purpose, she allowed herself to relax, to sink into pure sensual enjoyment of the strangers’ hands on her body. (The French, she thought, while half asleep under the spell of a crushing fatigue, are less bestial than Americans. No American men would be this gentle, this passive. No American men would act in this way.) Tongues were licking her gently, softly, underneath the creases in her thighs, even as Antonio pumped against her, rocked deeper into her. Hands all over her. Tongues licking, hands penetrating between their bodies wherever Antonio was not touching her.
When it was all over, when at last the three youths had gone, having failed to rob, beat, or mutilate her and Antonio, she fell into a restless sleep.
The next morning Antonio said, “It will never be all right between us physically.”
“What do you mean?”
He did not explain.
She felt her wrist. It was empty where her wristwatch had been. Someone had stolen it last night.
After that night Marguerite avoided them. Rosa, for her part, was ashamed to seek out Marguerite and too preoccupied to think much about it. Marguerite was unobtrusive. For months she would slip in and out of the building unnoticed. She was quiet. No music blared from her apartment. There were no noisy visitors. Antonio told Rosa that he, for his part, would avoid her.
“But why?” asked Rosa. “She’s lonely. She liked you. You were her friend. Why?”
“No reason to explain. Just because.”
And now Marguerite was dead. How self-centered and cruel she and Antonio had been.
That afternoon the milk did not flow as plentifully into the breast pump. Later when Isabel was brought out to be fed her bottle, Rosa, looking down at the tiny creature, felt no connection. Isabel, red-faced, sucked at the rubber nipple of the bottle that contained her mother’s milk. Her head was so soft. The baby had no personality yet, nothing that bound her to Rosa. I love her only because she is Antonio’s. She is the essence of the two of us welded together without all the crap. She was impatient for the infant to finish, to be taken from her.
CHAPTER THREE
Eleanor Bernstein was a tall, gaunt woman with high cheekbones and grey hair. As a child, she liked to imagine she was a princess, a changeling. As an adult, she felt out of place in the modern world, felt that she belonged to an earlier time—perhaps the Medieval period or the eighteenth century.
She was sure her daughter Rosa needed her. That was why she had come to Paris. But she had not anticipated how difficult this visit would be.
Rosa looked so pale in her white hospital gown with her dark hair tied severely back.
“Ah, but Rosa looks like a young boy. A handsome boy, said Antonio, who sat in a straight-backed chair next to Eleanor’s.
“Oh no, not at all!” said her mother. “How can you say such a thing?” They spoke in French—her mother had studied at a Swiss pension as a young girl. Their chairs were touching, and the way Eleanor smiled at Antonio as she protested filled Rosa with a sense that something was not as it should be.
Her mother wore a grey tweed suit and matching cloak, with a shimmering moss green silk scarf at her throat. Her skin had the softness Rosa remembered. When she embraced Rosa, Eleanor smelled of the violet fragrance that she always wore.
Antonio was impenetrable, polished.
Rosa tried to dismiss the sense of wrongness. After all, her mother had travelled all the way across the Atlantic to be with her. It was unjustifiable to fear her. Eleanor offered to shop for a crib, a refrigerator, and other things the baby needed (the crib and refrigerator that she and Antonio had never bought). Eleanor offered money, necessities.
Her mother flicked at a speck on the wall with her long fingers. “They’ve got cockroaches here,” she said with a laugh, and again a glance at Antonio.
“In France,” he said, “they are as attentive to the cockroaches as they are to the babies.”
He and Eleanor both laughed. Somehow it seemed that they were conspirators against her. And her mother had only arrived in Paris last night.
“The baby,” said her mother, “is so beautiful. I love the way she puts her tiny hands against you when you hold her, as if. . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she seemed to go into sort of a trance. Her face was drawn with fatigue.
“As if what?” asked Rosa, irritated by the unfinished sentence.
“I’m so terribly tired,” said her mother. Her eyes, which seemed to change color, were grey now, and they were filled with pain. The way she looked at Rosa caused her daughter to feel the guilt she always did when she looked upon her mother’s habitual sadness, as if she herself were the cause. It had been that way ever since she could remember. When her mother laughed and was animated, as she was with Antonio, even while it made Rosa uneasy, it gave her a sense of relief.
“My first grandchild,” said Eleanor. “I cannot believe it . . . I still feel as if I were eighteen . . . Rosa, I remember when you were born. You wanted to come out feet first.” She turned to Antonio, with an attitude half mocking, half self-deprecating, as if she were imploring him to listen. “The doctor had to turn her around with forceps. . . . I feared she had been damaged until I held her for the first time and looked into her eyes. They were jet black. And they were such angry eyes . . . far too angry to have suffered brain damage. . . .” Her mother shuddered, as if she had gone inwards to the past.
“And your sons?”
asked Antonio. “Were they also breach births?”
“No, I didn’t have the same problems with them. . . . With Howard I was sick with fever afterwards, so sick that I couldn’t nurse him . . . with Jesse . . . strange, I can’t remember.” Her glance became unfocused, as if she had again gone into a trance.
“Rosa looks like a young boy,” repeated Antonio. “Eleanor, when we go to the apartment, I’ll show you photographs I took of Rosa in which she looks exactly like a beautiful boy.”
“Do you like boys?” asked Eleanor.
“Not in that way.”
“Really, I wonder,” said her mother.
He glanced at her, reached as if he were going to take her hand, and then lit a cigarette instead. He called her mother by her first name.
“Stop your joking, Eleanor,” he said. “Sometimes your daughter looks like a boy, although she is so feminine. Could it be that your husband likes young boys? And she is trying to please her father?”
“Oh really,” said Eleanor.
After a moment’s silence, she said, “Rosa, last night we went to Les Halles. . . . How wonderful it was . . . all the fruits and vegetables set out . . . such glowing colors . . . green and purple cabbages and tiny radishes and entire carts of strawberries. . . .”
“And the whores,” said Antonio. “Your mother loved the whores.”
Eleanor smiled. “And the onion soup,” she said, “and the blind accordion player in the métro . . . the tune he played . . . Antonio, do you remember it? It reminded me. . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she gazed at a young woman with long brown hair who was being wheeled through the ward on a stretcher, her street clothes folded in a pile beneath her feet. “My, how astonishing,” said Eleanor. “Is that how you were wheeled in?”
“I suppose so,” said Rosa, upset by her mother’s habit of not finishing her sentences. Her mother seemed unable to complete a train of thought. “You were talking about Les Halles. Did you go there right after you arrived?”
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