The Neapolitan Novels

67.

I know about the birth from two sources, her and the gynecologist. Here I’ll put down the stories in succession and summarize the situation in my own words. It was raining. I had given birth three weeks earlier. My mother had been in the clinic for a couple of weeks and, if I didn’t appear, she wept like an anxious child. Dede had a slight fever, Elsa refused to go to school, insisting that she wanted to take care of her sister. Carmen wasn’t available, nor was Alfonso. I called Lila, I set out the usual conditions: If you don’t feel well, if you have to work, forget it, I’ll find another solution. She replied in her teasing way that she felt very well and that when you’re the boss you give the orders and take all the time off you want. She loved the two girls, but she especially liked taking care of Imma with them; it was a game that made all four of them happy. I’m leaving right away, she said. I figured that she would arrive in an hour at most, but she was late. I waited a while, but since I knew that she would keep her promise, I said to the neighbor: It’s a matter of minutes, and left the children with her to go to my mother.

But Lila was late because of a sort of presentiment in her body. Although she wasn’t having contractions she didn’t feel well and, finally, as a precaution, had Enzo take her to my house. Even before she went in she felt the first pains. She immediately called Carmen, ordering her to come and give the neighbor a hand, then Enzo took her to the clinic where our gynecologist worked. The contractions suddenly became violent but not decisive: the labor lasted sixteen hours.

Lila’s account was almost funny. It’s not true, she said, that you suffer only with the first child and afterward it’s easier—you always suffer. And she brought out arguments as fierce as they were humorous. It seemed to her pointless to safeguard the child in your womb and at the same time long to get rid of it. It’s ridiculous, she said, that this exquisite nine months of hospitality is accompanied by the desire to throw out the guest as violently as possible. She shook her head indignantly at the inconsistency of the mechanism. It’s crazy, she exclaimed, resorting to Italian, it’s your own body that’s angry with you, and in fact rebels against you until it becomes its own worst enemy, until it achieves the most terrible pain possible. For hours she had felt in her belly sharp cold flames, an unbearable flow of pain that hit her brutally in the pit of her stomach and then returned, penetrating her kidneys. Come on, she said sarcastically, you’re a liar, where is the great experience. And she swore—this time seriously—that she would never get pregnant again.

But according to the gynecologist, whom Nino invited to dinner one night with her husband, the delivery had been normal, any other woman would have given birth without all that talk. What complicated it was only Lila’s teeming head. The doctor had been very irritated. You’re doing the opposite of what you should, she had reprimanded her, you hold on when instead you should push: go on, go, push. According to her—she now felt an open aversion toward her patient, and there in my house, at dinner, she didn’t hide it but, rather, displayed it in a conspiratorial way, especially to Nino—Lila had done her best not to bring her infant into the world. She held onto it with all her strength and meanwhile gasped: Cut my stomach open, you get it out, I can’t do it. When the gynecologist continued to encourage her, Lila shouted vulgar insults at her. She was soaked in sweat, the gynecologist told us, her eyes were bloodshot below her broad forehead, and she was screaming: You talk, you give orders, you come here and do it, you piece of shit, you push the baby out if you can, it’s killing me.

I was annoyed and I said to the doctor: You shouldn’t tell us these things. She became even more irritated, she exclaimed: I’m telling you because we’re among friends. But then, stung, she assumed the tone of the doctor and said with an affected seriousness that if we loved Lila we should (she meant Nino and me, obviously) help her concentrate on something that truly gave her satisfaction, otherwise, with her dancing brain (she used precisely that expression), she would get herself and those around her in trouble. Finally, she repeated that in the delivery room she had seen a struggle against nature, a terrible clash between a mother and her child. It was, she said, a truly unpleasant experience.

The infant was a girl, a girl and not a boy as everyone had predicted. When I was able to go to the clinic, Lila, although she was exhausted, showed me her daughter proudly. She asked:

“How much did Imma weigh?”

“Seven pounds.”

“Nunzia weighs almost nine pounds: my belly was small but she is large.”

She really had named her for her mother. And in order not to upset Fernando, her father, who was even more irascible in old age than he’d been as a young man, and Enzo’s relatives, she had her baptized in the neighborhood church and held a big party in the Basic Sight offices.