The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

105 Bad Seed 1950

On 4 July 1950, I gave birth to a daughter. And then wept for two days. A good-for-nothing like me had achieved this. I who had been raped by life had managed to bear fruit. I who was supposed to be useless had created something new. I cried out of joy, relief and sorrow and couldn’t believe my own eyes when a healthy little girl was placed in my arms. Dad shed a tear of solidarity, took care of Héctor, and negotiated with the Bennis to grant me a week’s maternity leave.

I gave birth at home. In Dad’s and my room. The midwife was the fortune-teller from the village, the same one who had wrongly prophesied the Crocodile’s paralysis but had nevertheless proved her powers when it came to the curse on his son’s tool.

The child appeared almost blond straight out of the womb, with a white body that looked like a beam of light in the black hands of the midwife, who showed a considerable lack of human warmth. I said nothing about who the father was, but even when the baby had barely pushed its head out to show its tiny wrinkled face, the clairvoyant could see who he was. She roughly clasped the baby, like a calf out of a cow, and kept on muttering to herself: ‘Bad seed, bad future.’ She severed the umbilical cord with a wrinkled brow and handed the howling infant to me with a look of disdain.

But she was just a small gypsy cloud on my clear horizon. Because now I understood why children were called sunrays.