B0040702LQ EBOK (16 page)

From the beginning, my husband and I were surprised by
the doctor's intense solicitude, his insistence on examining me
and doing tests, repeating some of them with the excuse that
the results had not been clear enough. We had the impression
something was not right, and so it turned out: I was just
beginning the third month of my pregnancy when the doctor
asked us to call at his surgery and gave us two pieces of news.
The first was that the baby was a girl; the second was that in all
probability she would be born without wings.

I was offered the option of terminating the pregnancy, but I
refused. I, who had never felt the least attraction towards the
idea of motherhood, was already in love with that unknown
baby girl, even though I realised she would be a burden to me
all my life. She was now my daughter and I would not give her
up for anything in the world.

The birth was fine, surprisingly easy. It was as though that
disfigured child came into the world full of the will to live,
and as though the strength she ought to have in her nonexistent wings had flowed to other parts of her body,
especially her limbs: even during the pregnancy I had been
surprised by how hard she kicked in the womb, and the staff in
attendance at the birth all noticed how strong her arms and
legs were.

When they brought her to me, still covered in blood and
mucus, and put her to my breast, I cuddled her in my
exhausted wings and noticed how warm her naked skin was. I
thought she was the most beautiful baby in the world, all pink and clean, free of that cold tangle of downy feathers that other
new-born babies have. Her nakedness moved me so much
that the thought even crossed my mind that, ever since
humanity has had wings, we have lost the warmth of that
skin-to-skin contact, because there are always hard, dusty
feathers between us. Who knows whether in gaining wings
we have not lost many other things, as smooth and sweet as
unprotected skin.

From that day on, my little girl was the centre of my life.
The first few months were no problem; after all, a normal
baby has such weak little wings that it can't use them to fly or
do anything else, so my daughter seemed almost normal. She
fed well, was a good sleeper and very soon learned to recognise us and smile and make little noises. When she saw me
going over to her cot, instead of spreading her wings she
would hold out her arms to me, asking me to pick her up.
Apart from that small point, she was no different from any
other little girl the same age.

Naturally, as the months passed, the differences began to be
more noticeable. Between eight and ten months a normal
child will begin to squat, or kneel down, spread their wings
and begin to beat them, getting ready for their first flight.
Instead of that, my daughter used to sit up and then rock to
and fro, or she would get down on her hands and knees and
try to walk like a dog or a cat. My husband could not bear to
see her doing this; he would say she was like an animal. Other
relatives suggested I should tie her to the bed to stop her
doing it. I refused to do so. I defended her right to be different, to move and express herself in a different way from us
and from other children. `She has no wings, surely she has to
move as best she can?' I would say to them. But nobody
understood: they would say we ought to encourage her to
move like other children, that when she was older maybe her
problem could be overcome with artificial wings, that
although we had to accept that she was different, we should
not try to make her even more so. Day by day, the confrontations with my husband, relatives and friends grew more
violent. None of them seemed to see that since the baby was different, it was only logical that she should do everything in
a different way.

One day, I made a wonderful discovery. I had observed
from old drawings and pictures that, in the days when mankind had no wings, women would hold their babies in their
arms, instead of cradling them between the wing-feathers, as
we do now I remember that it was a winter's afternoon, I was
alone with my daughter and she was crawling around the
living-room carpet; at a certain point she sat up and held out
her arms to me. Driven by an uncontrollable impulse, I too
held out my arms and clasped her, then picked her up and put
her on my knee. I cannot describe the feeling that swept over
me at that moment: I had my baby on my lap, and my arms
encircled her, from the right and from the left; and the most
surprising thing of all was that she copied me, she put her little
arms round my body and the two of us sat there like that for
a long time, in this new and untried posture, facing each
other, body to body, she with no wings and I with mine
tucked away behind me, the two of us held together only by
our intertwining arms.

From then on, I always picked her up in that way. At the
beginning, I did it secretly, partly from shame and partly
because I did not want to provoke any more quarrels with my
husband, who was finding it more and more difficult to accept
our daughter; but I soon began to hold her that way all the
time at home, and then, later, I even began to do it in public.
The first few times it took a tremendous effort to lift the baby
up into my lap, but gradually my arms grew stronger from the
repetition of this action, and I would say they even took on a
different shape, as if some of the muscles were developing and
rounding out in order to adapt to that movement. In the long
hours spent with my baby in my arms I came to understand
why old paintings depicting the subject of motherhood
radiate an atmosphere of tenderness, incomprehensible to us,
and fail to arouse the feelings of rejection one might expect,
depicting as they do relationships between disfigured beings:
the mother who holds her child in her arms communicates
with the child as intensely as the mother who cradles it in her wings, perhaps even more intensely. Naturally, the few times I
dared to voice such an opinion everyone looked away and fell
silent, as pity for another's misfortune demands.

I gave up my job and devoted myself more and more to the
child. Or perhaps I should say she devoted herself to me,
because in fact she showed me a whole new world, a world at
ground level. Instead of flying, she would crawl on the floor;
then she began to stand up and take a few steps, advancing by
holding on to the furniture and managing by this means to go
all over the room; when there was nothing to hold on to, she
would get down on the floor and support her body on the
palms of her hands. Quite unlike other children, who first of
all learn to fly, and then afterwards, when their wings are
strong enough, begin to walk; that way their wings act like a
parachute when they take their first steps, if they feel themselves falling all they have to do is spread them. My little girl,
on the other hand, learned to walk much earlier than usual,
and more surprisingly still, she could do it without the help of
wings; it was astonishing to see how she contrived to keep her
balance despite that very difficult posture, her back held
straight with nothing to counterbalance it but the movement
of her arms and head. I could hardly believe it when I saw her
standing up in that way, tottering forward without falling and
protecting herself, if she stumbled, by putting out her arms to
cushion the blow.

I got into the habit of lying on the floor to be with her. My
husband would fly into a rage when he saw me like that, face
down on the carpet, my wings folded like those of a butterfly
and leaning on my elbows to play with my daughter. But I
enjoyed seeing things from down there, as she saw them, since
she was unable to take flight and land on top of the wardrobe
or observe the room from a corner of the ceiling. I gradually
got out of the habit of flying.

All my friends and relatives said I must keep on flying, lead
a normal life, get out more, I was burying myself alive. But I
paid no attention; I was completely happy.

My husband went through several phases, from anger to
indifference. By the time our daughter was two, we hardly spoke to each other, in fact we were seldom home at the same
time: he always had loads of work and we would only see him
at weekends, invariably in a bad mood; during the week, he
would get home so late that he just slipped into bed in the
dark, thinking I was asleep. Soon he had to work on Saturdays
as well, then go off on business trips at weekends. His mood
had improved, so I knew what was going on, but I didn't say
anything: I didn't want my daughter to grow up without a
father-figure, even if it was a purely symbolic one. A little girl
like her needed all the protection we could give her.

By the time she was two, she could speak almost fluently;
she was an extraordinarily bright child and I was very proud
of her. But soon afterwards my torment began.

The first sign came one night while I was bathing her. I was
rubbing soap on her back and suddenly noted a small rough
patch just by her right shoulder blade. I examined it, thinking
that perhaps she had hurt herself all I could see was a red
mark, and I forgot all about it.

A few days later there were two red marks, symmetrically
placed on either side of her back. As I touched them, I felt a
swelling beneath the skin. I was scared, but I didn't want to
take her to the doctor, so I just put a bit of antiseptic cream on
them. A week later, things had got worse; the swellings had
got bigger and were now two lumps like abscesses, inflamed
and apparently painful to the touch, since she protested when
I ran my fingers over the surface.

I put on a dressing, with more antiseptic cream, but it had
no effect; I changed the dressings twice a day and the lumps
kept growing. So I got some bandages and elastoplast and
bandaged the whole of her thorax, keeping the bandages firm,
but not too tight. Luckily it was winter, so nobody noticed the
bandages, hidden beneath her bulky clothes.

That was no good either. The lumps were getting bigger
and harder all the time, like a dislocated bone threatening to
burst through the skin. I didn't know what to do, or who to
turn to.

Until one day, the inevitable happened. I went to get her
up that morning and I found her face down in bed, which was unlike her. Beneath the bedclothes there was a suspicious
shape, and I knew what it was before I pulled back the
sheets.

There they were: incipient, but developed enough for there
to be no doubt. They had sprouted in the night, tearing the
skin, so that the bottom sheet was slightly stained with blood.
My whole world collapsed about my ears.

I knew there was only one thing for it. I picked up my
child, uncovered her body and bit with all the strength of rage
and desperation. A foul taste of dust and mites filled my
mouth; it's unbelievable how much filth a pair of wings can
pick up in one night.

She didn't seem to feel any pain. Perhaps she felt a slight
discomfort, because she cried a little, then stopped almost
immediately. I took her to the bathroom to clean her up, and
I managed to stop the bleeding, disinfect the wound and
bandage it up.

She kept the dressings on for several days, though I changed
them frequently. Every time I took them off, I examined the
progress of the wound. I was relieved to see that it was healing
quickly and within a few weeks it had closed completely.

Now you can hardly see it. All she has is a slight invisible
scar, which you only notice if you touch it, or look very
closely or know it's there. She's gone back to being what she
was before, and I still devote all my attention to her. If people
tell me I'm burying myself alive, that I should go back to
work, that I've lost my husband, that I shouldn't be so tied to
her, I tell them I'm happy doing what I'm doing and that it's a
mother's duty to sacrifice everything for her daughter.

© Paloma Diaz-Mas

Translated by Annella McDermott

Paloma Diaz-Mas was born in Madrid in 1954, but lives
now in Vitoria, where she lectures on Spanish Literature of
the Golden Age and Sephardic Literature at the University of
the Basque Country. She has written scholarly articles on Sephardic themes, a book of short stories, Nuestro milenio
(1987) and three novels, El rapto del Santo Grial (1984), Tras las
huellas de Artorius (1985) and El sueno de Venecia (1992; winner
of the Herralde Prize). Una ciudad Ilamada Eugenio (1992)
relates her experiences in the United States. This story was
first published in Madres e has, ed. Laura Freixas, Anagrama,
1996.