The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966

Furniture Studies

There was a small bell to ring on the door. It was not like the silver bell of my library, so far away from this place. You rang this bell by pressing your finger against it. That’s what I did.

We had to wait a moment for someone to answer. The children stayed away from their play to watch us. The children were small, ill-dressed and dirty. They had those strange undernourished bodies and faces that make it so hard to tell how old children are in Mexico.

A child that looks five will turn out to be eight. A child that looks seven will actually be two. It’s horrible.

Some Mexican mother women came by. They looked at us, too. Their eyes were expressionless, but showed in this way that they knew we were abortionistas.

Then the door to the doctor’s office opened effortlessly as if it had always planned to open at that time and it was Dr Garcia himself who opened the door for us. I didn’t know what he looked like, but I knew it was him.

‘Please,’ he said, gesturing us in.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I just called you on the telephone. I’m Foster’s friend.’

‘I know,’ he said, quietly. ‘Follow, please.’

The doctor was small, middle-aged and dressed perfectly like a doctor. His office was large and cool and had many rooms that led like a labyrinth far into the back and places that we knew nothing about.

He took us to a small reception room. It was clean with modern linoleum on the floor and modern doctor furniture: an uncomfortable couch and three chairs that you could never really fit into.

The furniture was the same as the furniture you see in the offices of American doctors. There was a tall plant in the corner with large flat cold green leaves. The leaves didn’t do anything.

There were some other people already in the room: a father, a mother and a young teenage daughter. She obviously belonged to the brand-new car parked in front.

‘Please,’ the doctor said, gesturing us towards the two empty chairs in the room. ‘Soon,’ he said, smiling gently. ‘Wait, please. Soon.’

He went away across the corridor and into another room that we could not see, leaving us with the three people. They were not talking and it was strangely quiet all through the building.

Everybody looked at everybody else in a nervous kind of way that comes when time and circumstance reduce us to seeking illegal operations in Mexico.

The father looked like a small town banker in the San Joaquin Valley and the mother looked like a woman who participated in a lot of social activities.

The daughter was pretty and obviously intelligent and didn’t know what to do with her face as she waited for her abortion, so she kept smiling in a rapid knife-like way at nothing.

The father looked very stern as if he were going to refuse a loan and the mother looked vaguely shocked as if somebody had said something a little risqué at a social tea for the Friends of the DeMolay.

The daughter, though she possessed a narrow budding female body, looked as if she were too young to have an abortion. She should have been doing something else.

I looked over at Vida. She also looked as if she were too young to have an abortion. What were we all doing there? Her face was growing pale.

Alas, the innocence of love was merely an escalating physical condition and not a thing shaped like our kisses.

My First Abortion

About forever or ten minutes passed and then the doctor came back and motioned towards Vida and me to come with him, though the other people had been waiting when we came in. Perhaps it had something to do with Foster.

‘Please,’ Dr Garcia said, quietly.

We followed after him across the hall and into a small office. There was a desk in the office and a typewriter. The office was dark and cool, the shades were down, with a leather chair and photographs of the doctor and his family upon the walls and the desk.

There were various certificates showing the medical degrees the doctor had obtained and what schools he had graduated from. There was a door that opened directly into an operating room. A teenage girl was in the room cleaning up and a young boy, another teenager, was helping her.

A big blue flash of fire jumped across a tray full of surgical instruments. The boy was sterilizing the instruments with fire. It startled Vida and me. There was a table in the operating room that had metal things to hold your legs and there were leather straps that went with them.

‘No pain,’ the doctor said to Vida and then to me. ‘No pain and clean, all clean, no pain. Don’t worry. No pain and clean. Nothing left. I’m a doctor,’ he said.

I didn’t know what to say. I was so nervous that I was almost in shock. All the colour had drained from Vida’s face and her eyes looked as if they could not see any more.

‘Two hundred and fifty dollars,’ the doctor said. ‘Please.’

‘Foster said it would be two hundred dollars. That’s all we have,’ I heard my own voice saying. ‘Two hundred. That’s what you told Foster.’

‘Two hundred. That’s all you have?’ the doctor said.

Vida stood there listening to us arbitrate the price of her stomach. Vida’s face was like a pale summer cloud.

‘Yes.’ I said. ‘That’s all we have.’

I took the money out of my pocket and gave it to the doctor. I held the money out and he took it from my hand. He put it in his pocket, without counting it, and then he became a doctor again, and that’s the way he stayed all the rest of the time we were there. He had only stopped being a doctor for a moment. It was a little strange. I don’t know what I expected. It was very good that he stayed a doctor for the rest of the time.

Foster was of course right.

He became a doctor by turning to Vida and smiling and saying, ‘I won’t hurt you and it will be clean. Nothing left after and no pain, honey. Believe me. I’m a doctor.’

Vida smiled 1/2: ly.

‘How long has she been?’ the doctor said to me and starting to point at her stomach but not following through with it, so his hand was a gesture that didn’t do anything.

‘About five or six weeks,’ I said.

Vida was now smiling 1/4: ly.

The doctor paused and looked at a calendar in his mind and then he nodded affectionately at the calendar. It was probably a very familiar calendar to him. They were old friends.

‘No breakfast?’ he said, starting to point again at Vida’s stomach but again he failed to do so.

‘No breakfast,’ I said.

‘Good girl,’ the doctor said.

Vida was now smiling 1/37: ly.

After the boy finished sterilizing the surgical instruments, he took a small bucket back through another large room that was fastened to the operating room.

The other room looked as if it had beds in it. I moved my head a different way and I could see a bed in it and there was a girl lying on the bed asleep and there was a man sitting in a chair beside the bed. It looked very quiet in the room.

A moment after the boy left the operating room, I heard a toilet flush and water running from a tap and then the sound of water being poured in the toilet and the toilet was flushed again and the boy came back with the bucket.

The bucket was empty.

The boy had a large gold wristwatch on his hand.

‘Everything’s all right,’ the doctor said.

The teenage girl, who was dark and pretty and also had a nice wristwatch, came into the doctor’s office and smiled at Vida. It was that kind of smile that said: It’s time now; please come with me.

‘No pain, no pain, no pain,’ the doctor repeated like a nervous nursery rhyme.

No pain, I thought, how strange.

‘Do you want to watch?’ the doctor asked me, gesturing towards an examination bed in the operating room where I could sit if I wanted to watch the abortion.

I looked over at Vida. She didn’t want me to watch and I didn’t want to watch either.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay in here.’

‘Please come, honey,’ the doctor said.

The girl touched Vida’s arm and Vida went into the operating room with her and the doctor closed the door, but it didn’t really close. It was still open an inch or so.

‘This won’t hurt,’ the girl said to Vida. She was giving Vida a shot.

Then the doctor said something in Spanish to the boy who said OK and did something.

‘Take off your clothes,’ the girl said. ‘And put this on.’

Then the doctor said something in Spanish and the boy answered him in Spanish and the girl said, ‘Please. Now put your legs up. That’s it. Good. Thank you.’

‘That’s right, honey,’ the doctor said. ‘That didn’t hurt, did it? Everything’s going to be all right. You’re a good girl.’

Then he said something to the boy in Spanish and then the girl said something in Spanish to the doctor: who said something in Spanish to both of them.

Everything was very quiet for a moment or so in the operating room. I felt the dark cool of the doctor’s office on my body like the hand of some other kind of doctor.

‘Honey?’ the doctor said. ‘Honey?’

There was no reply.

Then the doctor said something in Spanish to the boy and the boy answered him in something metallic, surgical. The doctor used the thing that was metallic and surgical and gave it back to the boy who gave him something else that was metallic and surgical. Everything was either quiet or metallic and surgical in there for a while.

Then the girl said something in Spanish to the boy who replied to her in English. ‘I know,’ he said.

The doctor said something in Spanish.

The girl answered him in Spanish.

A few moments passed during which there were no more surgical sounds in the room. There was now the sound of cleaning up and the doctor and the girl and the boy talked in Spanish as they finished up.

Their Spanish was not surgical any more. It was just casual cleaning-up Spanish.

‘What time is it?’ the girl said. She didn’t want to look at her watch.

‘Around one,’ the boy said.

The doctor joined them in English. ‘How many more?’ he said.

‘Two,’ the girl said.

‘¿Dos?’ the doctor said in Spanish.

‘There’s one coming,’ the girl said.

The doctor said something in Spanish.

The girl answered him in Spanish.

‘I wish it was three,’ the boy said in English.

‘Stop thinking about girls,’ the doctor said, jokingly.

Then the doctor and the girl were involved in a brief very rapid conversation in Spanish.

This was followed by a noisy silence and then the sound of the doctor carrying something heavy and unconscious out of the operating room. He put the thing down in the other room and came back a moment later.

The girl walked over to the door of the room I was in and finished opening it. My dark cool office was suddenly flooded with operating room light. The boy was cleaning up.

‘Hello,’ the girl said, smiling. ‘Please come with me.’

She casually beckoned me through the operating room as if it were a garden of roses. The doctor was sterilizing his surgical instruments with the blue flame.

He looked up at me from the burning instruments and said, ‘Everything went OK. I promised no pain, all clean. The usual.’ He smiled. ‘Perfect.’

The girl took me into the other room where Vida was lying unconscious on the bed. She had warm covers over her. She looked as if she were dreaming in another century.

‘It was an excellent operation,’ the girl said. ‘There were no complications and it went as smoothly as possible. She’ll wake up in a little while. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

The girl got me a chair and put it down beside Vida. I sat down in the chair and looked at Vida. She was so alone there in the bed. I reached over and touched her cheek. It felt as if it had just come unconscious from an operating room.

The room had a small gas heater that was burning quietly away in its own time. The room had two beds in it and the other bed where the girl had lain a short while before was now empty and there was an empty chair beside the bed, as this bed would be empty soon and the chair I was now sitting in: to be empty.

The door to the operating room was open, but I couldn’t see the operating table where I was sitting.

My Second Abortion

The door to the operating room was open, but I couldn’t see the operating table from where I was sitting. A moment later they brought in the teenage girl from the waiting room.

‘Everything’s going to be all right, honey,’ the doctor said. ‘This won’t hurt.’ He gave her the shot himself.

‘Please take off your clothes,’ the girl said.

There was a stunned silence for a few seconds that bled into the awkward embarrassed sound of the teenage girl taking her clothes off.

After she took off her clothes, the girl assistant who was no older than the girl herself said, ‘Put this on.’

The girl put it on.

I looked down at the sleeping form of Vida. She was wearing one, too.

Vida’s clothes were folded over a chair and her shoes were on the floor beside the chair. They looked very sad because she had no power over them any more. She lay unconscious before them.

‘Now put your legs up, honey,’ the doctor was saying. ‘A little higher, please. That’s a good girl.’

Then he said something in Spanish to the Mexican girl and she answered him in Spanish.

‘I’ve had six months of Spanish I in high school,’ the teenage girl said with her legs apart and strapped to the metal stirrups of this horse of no children.

The doctor said something in Spanish to the Mexican girl and she replied in Spanish to him.

‘Oh,’ he said, a little absentmindedly to nobody in particular. I guess he had performed a lot of abortions that day and then he said to the teenage girl, ‘That’s nice. Learn some more.’

The boy said something very rapidly in Spanish.

The Mexican girl said something very rapidly in Spanish.

The doctor said something very rapidly in Spanish and then he said to the teenage girl, ‘How do you feel, honey?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, smiling. ‘I don’t feel anything. Should I feel something right now?’

The doctor said something very rapidly to the boy in Spanish.

The boy did not reply.

‘I want you to relax,’ the doctor said to the teenage girl. ‘Please take it easy.’

All three of them had a very rapid go at it in Spanish. There seemed to be some trouble and then the doctor said something very rapidly in Spanish to the Mexican girl, He finished it by saying, ‘¿Como se dice treinta?’

‘Thirty,’ the Mexican girl said.

‘Honey,’ the doctor said. He was leaning over the teenage girl. ‘I want you to count to, to thirty for us, please, honey.’

‘All right,’ she said, smiling, but for the first time her voice sounded a little tired.

It was starting to work.

‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…’ There was a pause here. ‘7, 8, 9…’ There was another pause here, but it was a little longer than the first pause.

‘Count to, to thirty, honey,’ the doctor said.

‘10, 11, 12.’

There was a total stop.

‘Count to thirty, honey,’ the boy said. His voice sounded soft and gentle just like the doctors. Their voices were the sides of the same coin.

‘What comes after 12?’ the teenage girl giggled. ‘I know! 13.’ She was very happy that 13 came after 12. ‘14, 15, 15, 15.’

‘You said 15,’ the doctor said.

‘15,’ the teenage girl said.

‘What’s next, honey?’ the boy said.

‘15,’ the teenage girl said very slowly and triumphantly.

‘What’s next, honey?’ the doctor said.

‘15,’ the girl said. ‘15.’

‘Come on, honey,’ the doctor said.

‘What’s next?’ the boy said.

‘What’s next?’ the doctor said.

The girl didn’t say anything.

They didn’t say anything either. It was very quiet in the room. I looked down at Vida. She was very quiet, too.

Suddenly the silence in the operating room was broken by the Mexican girl saying, ‘16.’

‘What?’ the doctor said.

‘Nothing,’ the Mexican girl said, and then the language and silences of the abortion began.

Chalkboard Studies

Vida lay there gentle and still like marble dust on the bed. She had not shown the slightest sign of consciousness, but I wasn’t worried because her breathing was normal.

So I just sat there listening to the abortion going on in the other room and looking at Vida and where I was at: this house in Mexico, so far away from my San Francisco library.

The small gas heater was doing its thing because it was cool within the adobe walls of the doctor’s office.

Our room was in the centre of a labyrinth.

There was a little hall on one side of the room, running back past the open door of the toilet and ending at a kitchen.

The kitchen was about twenty feet away from where Vida lay unconscious with her stomach vacant like a chalkboard. I could see the refrigerator and a sink in the kitchen and a stove with some pans on it.

On the other side of our room was a door that led into a huge room, almost like a small gym, and I could see still another room off the gym.

The door was open and there was the dark abstraction of another bed in the room like a large flat sleeping animal.

I looked down at Vida still submerged in a vacuum of anaesthesia and listened to the abortion ending in the operating room.

Suddenly there was a gentle symphonic crash of surgical instruments and then I could hear the sounds of cleaning up joined to another chalkboard.

My Third Abortion

The doctor came through the room carrying the teenage girl in his arms. Though the doctor was a small man, he was very strong and carried the girl without difficulty.

She looked very silent and unconscious. Her hair hung strangely over his arm in a blonde confusion. He took the girl through the small gym and into the adjoining room where he lay her upon the dark animal-like bed.

Then he came over and closed the door to our room and went into the forward reaches of the labyrinth and came back with the girl’s parents.

‘It went perfect,’ he said. ‘No pain, all clean.’

They didn’t say anything to him and he came back to our room. As he passed through the door, the people were watching him and they saw Vida lying there and me sitting beside her.

I looked at them and they looked at me before the door was closed. Their faces were a stark and frozen landscape.

The boy came into the room carrying the bucket and he went into the toilet and flushed the foetus and the abortion leftovers down the toilet.

Just after the toilet flushed, I heard the flash of the instruments being sterilized by fire.

It was the ancient ritual of fire and water all over again to be all over again and again in Mexico today.

Vida still lay there unconscious. The Mexican girl came in and looked at Vida. ‘She’s sleeping,’ the girl said. ‘It went fine.’

She went back into the operating room and then the next woman came into the operating room. She was the ‘one’ coming the Mexican girl had mentioned earlier. I didn’t know what she looked like because she had come since we’d been there.

‘Has she eaten today?’ the doctor said.

‘No,’ a man said sternly, as if he were talking about dropping a hydrogen bomb on somebody he didn’t like.

The man was her husband. He had come into the operating room. He had decided that he wanted to watch the abortion. They were awfully tense people and the woman said only three words all the time she was there. After she had her shot, he helped her off with her clothes.

He sat down while her legs were strapped apart on the operating table. She was unconscious just about the time they finished putting her in position for the abortion because they started almost immediately.

This abortion was done automatically like a machine. There was very little conversation between the doctor and his helpers.

I could feel the presence of the man in the operating room. He was like some kind of statue sitting there looking on, waiting for a museum to snatch him and his wife up. I never saw the woman.

After the abortion the doctor was tired and Vida was still lying there unconscious. The doctor came into the room. He looked down at Vida.

‘Not yet,’ he said, answering his own question.

I said no because I didn’t have anything else to do with my mouth.

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s like this.’

The doctor looked like an awfully tired man. God only knows how many abortions he had performed that day.

He came over and sat down on the bed. He took Vida’s hand and he felt her pulse. He reached down and opened one of her eyes. Her eye looked back at him from a thousand miles away.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘She’ll be back in a few moments.’

He went into the toilet and washed his hands. After he finished washing his hands, the boy came in with the bucket and took care of that.

The girl was cleaning up in the operating room. The doctor had put the woman on the examination bed in the operating room. He had quite a thing going just taking care of the bodies.

‘OHHHHHHHHHH!’ I heard a voice come from behind the gym door where the doctor had taken the teenage girl. ‘OHHHHHHHHHH!’ It was a sentimental drunken voice. It was the girl. ‘OHHHHHHHHHH!’

‘16!’ she said. ‘I-HHHHHHHHHH!’

Her parents were talking to her in serious, hushed tones. They were awfully respectable.

‘OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!’

They were acting as if she had got drunk at a family reunion and they were trying to cover up her drunkenness.

‘OHHHHHHHHHH! I feel funny!’

There was total silence from the couple in the operating room. The only sound was the Mexican girl. The boy had come back through our room and had gone somewhere else in the building. He never came back.

After the girl finished cleaning up the operating room, she went into the kitchen and started cooking a big steak for the doctor. She got a bottle of Miller’s beer out of the refrigerator and poured the doctor a big glass of it. He sat down in the kitchen. I could barely see him drinking the beer.

Then Vida started stirring in her sleep. She opened her eyes. They didn’t see anything for a moment or so and then they saw me. ‘Hi,’ she said in a distant voice.

‘Hi,’ I said, smiling.

‘I feel dizzy,’ she said, coming in closer.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘Everything is fine.’

‘Oh, that’s good,’ she said. There.

‘Just lie quietly and take it easy,’ I said.

The doctor got up from the table in the kitchen and came in. He was holding the glass of beer in his hand.

‘She’s coming back,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good.’

He took his glass of beer and went back into the kitchen and sat down again. He was very tired.

Then I heard the people in the outside gym room dressing their daughter. They were in a hurry to leave. They sounded as if they were dressing a drunk.

‘I can’t get my hands up,’ the girl said.

Her parents said something stern to her and she got her hands up in the air, but they had so much trouble putting her little brassiere on that they finally abandoned trying and the mother put the brassiere in her purse.

‘OHHHHHHHHHH! I’m so dizzy,’ the girl said as her parents half-carried her, half-dragged her out of the place.

I heard a couple of doors close and then everything was silent, except for the doctor’s lunch cooking in the kitchen. The steak was being fried in a very hot pan and it made a lot of noise.

‘What’s that?’ Vida said. I didn’t know if she was talking about the noise of the girl leaving or the sound of the steak cooking.

‘It’s the doctor having lunch,’ I said.

‘Is it that late?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I’ve been out a long time,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’re going to have to leave soon but we won’t leave until you feel like it.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Vida said.

The doctor came back into the room. He was nervous because he was hungry and tired and wanted to close the place up for a while, so he could take it easy, rest some.

Vida looked up at him and he smiled and said, ‘See, no pain, honey. Everything wonderful. Good girl.’

Vida smiled very weakly and the doctor returned to the kitchen and his steak that was ready now.

While the doctor had his lunch, Vida slowly sat up and I helped her get dressed. She tried standing up but it was too hard, so· I had her sit back down for a few moments.

While she sat there, she combed her hair and then she tried standing up again but she still didn’t have it and sat back down on the bed again.

‘I’m still a little rocky,’ Vida said.

‘That’s all right.’

The woman in the other room had come to and her husband was dressing her almost instantly, saying, ‘Here. Here. Here. Here,’ in a painful Okie accent.

‘I’m tired,’ the woman said, using up two thirds of her vocabulary.

‘Here,’ the man said, helping her put something else on.

After he got her dressed he came into our room and stood there looking for the doctor. He was very embarrassed when he saw Vida sitting on the bed, combing her hair.

‘Doctor?’ he said.

The doctor got up from his steak and stood in the doorway of the kitchen. The man started to walk towards the doctor, but then stopped after taking only a few steps.

The doctor came into our room.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I can’t remember where I parked my car,’ the man said. ‘Can you call me a taxi?’

‘You lost your auto?’ the doctor said.

‘I parked it next to Woolworth’s, but I can’t remember where Woolworth’s is,’ the man said. ‘I can find Woolworth’s if I can get downtown. I don’t know where to go.’

‘The boy’s coming back,’ the doctor said. ‘He’ll take you there in his auto.’

‘Thank you,’ the man said, returning to his wife in the other room. ‘Did you hear that?’ he said to her.

‘Yes,’ she said, using it all up.

‘We’ll wait,’ he said.

Vida looked over at me and I smiled at her and took her hand to my mouth and kissed it.

‘Let’s try again,’ she said.

‘All right,’ I said.

She tried it again and this time it was all right. She stood there for a few moments and then said, ‘I’ve got it. Let’s go.’

‘Are you sure you have it?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

I helped Vida on with her sweater. The doctor looked at us from the kitchen. He smiled but he didn’t say anything. He had done what he was supposed to do and now we did what we were supposed to do. We left.

We wandered out of the room into the gym and worked our way to the front of the place, passing through layers of coolness to the door.

Even though it had remained a grey overcast day, we were stunned by the light and everything was instantly noisy, car-like, confused, poor, rundown and Mexican.

It was as if we had been in a time capsule and now were released again to be in the world.

The children were still playing in front of the doctor’s office and again they stopped their games of life to watch two squint-eyed gringos holding, clinging, holding to each other walk up the street and into a world without them.