X
I hesitate to go out on the street. I feel that people's eyes are drawn to my figure. There's no use fooling myself. The little girls actually point to me with furtive, vinegary glances, for they are more ingenuously hypocritical than women. Their insistent gaze embarrasses me.
Two long months to wait before the first cry of my child! If only I carried nothing beside my child. I feel also an imprisoned love developing which beats at the bars of its cage and chafes so that I don't know how to distract it.
The layette is quite ready; swaddling-bands warm to the touch, chemises like a doll's, caps which will never be of use; the equipment of a marionette; linen as soft as lint, bibs round and puffy as cockades. I have spread everything out in front of me, and each article as it passes through my hands assumes a shadowy lifelikeness.
Two months before I shall really know whether I am to be like other mothers, a brooding hen, with folded wings and in-turned heart, passionate for my own children, cattish and carping in my attitude toward other children. Two months before I shall know the secret force of that wild love which, they say, springs up all at once.
I am being initiated however. The other women give me a hearty welcome; they make the impression of crowding together to make room for me. A real sisterhood? Or the imperceptible joy of seeing a rival temporarily diminished? Under their escort I enter into the forbidden arcana. "What do you feel? I——" They make me a target for their reminiscences.
Each shamelessly outdoes the other. From the quantity and finished preciseness of the details narrated I infer that the story has been oft told. The least loquacious are the mothers who "have had a lot of them." These have nothing left but a vast, frequently refreshed memory in which their life merges in a blur with the life they have so many times carried beneath their hearts.
Which of them am I to believe? Many have broached the subject to me, many have discussed it, none has told me the secret of being a mother, the word that would reveal, the sign, flashing and disappearing, by which the treasure awaiting me would shine from afar, which would make me understand. I have heard them bemoan the misery of the months before childbirth and the sufferings of childbirth itself. I have heard them boast, with the reverence of fetich-worship, of the care they gave their little ones. But here their maternity stops. I still do not know. I have two months to wait.
I plunge my fingers into the milky mass of the little garments. "Do you," I say to my husband, "see the head of your child underneath this hood? Let us try to imagine...."
He smiles without answering, shaken in his flesh, so lucid and so well prepared for his approaching fatherhood that I feel myself a hundred leagues behind. He, at least, knows why he will love his child, why he already loves it.
As for me, my vision is obscured by the disconcerting pictures drawn by the other women. Perhaps also I am under the ancestral pressure exerted by the long line of my foremothers. Why should I be different? What quality would make me better?
The animal heaviness reasserts its rights. My body is an unwieldy sheath overspread with sleepiness, ramified by thick blood, its cells given over to contented, torpid well-being. My very heart is struck with stupor.
To lie at full length, on my bed beneath the weight of my breasts of rock, no longer to move or think, only to feel at momentary intervals a light stirring, a caress, which gently turns on its self and folds its wings.