Letter to a Child Never Born (5)

     Yesterday I gave in to a bad mood.  You must excuse my talk about throwing you away.  It was just talk, nothing more.  My choice is still the same, though all around me it’s cause for surprise.  Last night I spoke with your father.  I told him about you.  I told him on the telephone because he’s far away and, judging by what I heard, it wasn’t exactly good news.  First of all, I heard a deep silence, and we hadn’t even been cut off.  Then I heard a hoarse, stammering voice: “What will it take?”  I didn’t follow his meaning and answered, “Nine months, I guess.  Or rather less than eight, now.”  And then the voice stopped being hoarse and became strident: “I’m thinking about money.”  “What money?”  I asked.  “The money to get rid of it, of course.”  Yes, he actually said “get rid of it.”  As though you were a parcel.  And when I explained to him, as calmly as possible, that I had quite other intentions, he went into a long argument in which pleading alternated with advice, advice with threats, and threats with flattery.  “Think of your career, consider the responsibilities, one day you’ll be sorry, what will other people say.”  He must have spent a fortune on that phone call.  Every so often the operator came on in a bewildered tone to ask: “Are you still talking?”  I was smiling, almost amused.  But I was much less amused when he, encouraged by the fact that I was listening to him in silence, ended by saying that we could each pay half the expense: after all we were “both guilty.”  I suddenly felt nauseated.  I was ashamed for him.  And I hung up thinking that once I had loved him.

Loved him?  One day you and I will have to have a little talk about this business called love.  I still don’t understand what it’s all about.  My guess is that it’s just a gigantic hoax, invented to keep people quiet and diverted.  Everyone talks about love: the priests, the advertising posters, the literati, and the politicians, those of them who make love.  And in speaking of love and offering it is a panacea for every tragedy, they wound and betray and kill both body and soul.  I hate this word, which you find everywhere, in every language.  I-love-to-walk, I-love-to-drink, I-love-to-smoke, I-love-freedom, I-love-my-lover, I-love-my-child.  I try never to use it.  I don’t even ask myself if what is troubling my heart and mind is this thing they call love.  Indeed I don’t know if I love you.  I don’t think of you in terms of love.  I think of you in terms of life.  As for your father, the more I think of it, the more I’m afraid I never loved him.  Admired him yes, desired him yes, but loved no.  The same goes for those who came before him, disappointing ghosts in a search that always failed.  Failed?  Not completely.  It was worth something after all: to understand that nothing threatens your freedom as much as the mysterious rapture that a human being can feel toward another, a man toward a woman, for instance, or a woman toward a man.  There are no straps or chains or bars that can hold you in a blinder slavery, a more desperate sense of helplessness.  Beware of giving yourself to someone in the name of that rapture: it only means forgetting yourself, your rights, your dignity, and thus your freedom.  Like a dog floundering in the water you try vainly to reach a shore that doesn’t exist, a shore whose name is Loving and Being Loved, and you end in frustration, scorn, disillusionment.  At best you end up wondering what drove you to throw yourself in the water: dissatisfaction with yourself, the hope of finding in another something you didn’t see in yourself?  Fear of solitude, of boredom, of silence?  A need to possess and be possessed?  According to some, that’s love.  But I’m afraid it’s something much less: a hunger that, once satisfied, leaved you with a kind of indigestion.  A wish to vomit.  And yet, there must still be a way that would show me the meaning of this damned word, Child.  There must still be a way for me to find out what it is and that it exists.  I have such a hunger and need for it.  And it’s this need, this hunger, that leads me to think: maybe it’s true, what my mother has always maintained, that love is what a woman feels for her child when she takes it in her arms and feels how alone, helpless, and defenseless it is.  At least for as long as it remains helpless and defenseless, it doesn’t insult you, doesn’t disappoint you.  What if you should be the one to make me discover the meaning of that absurd four-letter word?  You who are robbing me of myself and sucking my blood and breathing my breath?

I can see a sign of it.  Lovers enduring separation console themselves with photographs.  And I always have your photographs in my hand.  By now it’s become an obsession.  The minute I come home I seize that magazine, I calculate the days, your age, and I try to find you.  Today you’ve completed six weeks.  Here you are at six weeks, seen from the back.  How cute you’ve become!  No longer a fish, no longer a larva, no longer something formless, you already look like a human being: with that big bald pink head.  The spinal column is well defined, a white strip securely in the middle.  Your arms are no longer confused protuberances nor fins, but wings.  You’ve grown wings!  I am overcome by the wish to caress them, to caress you.  What’s it like there in the egg?  According to the photographs, you’re suspended in a transparent egg that looks like the glass egg in which one extends a cord ending in a remote white ball, with veins of red and spots of blue.  Seen in this way, it looks like the earth, observed from thousands and thousands of miles away.  Yes, it’s just as though an endless thread, as long as the idea of life, were extended from the earth, across that distance, to arrive at you.  In such a logical, meaningful way.  So how can they say human beings are an accident of nature?

The doctor told me to come back at the end of six weeks.  I’m going tomorrow.  And needles of anxiety pierce my soul, each alternating with a flush of joy.

[小斧頭媽]

嗯， 妹妹太有才了， 周末愉快！