XII
I have the feeling that I am not prepared; it is a sort of embarrassment, an obscure terror, and when I get myself to say so to the other women, they laugh and hush me up. "Don't worry. The knowledge comes of itself. Just being a mother teaches you how to raise a child."
It was by chance that I came to this street. I was walking along. The hospital. A dull flat smell surrounded the sordid building with a leprous haze. The doorway was swallowing up a long line of women from off the gray canyon of the street. I do not know what struck me—I retraced my steps and followed the women in.
We were made to wait in a room heavy with a brew of musty drug smells. Someone shut the door, and immediately there broke out a fearful hubbub, a concert of human meowings, bawls, pipings. A panic nearly seized me. With the dull patience of animals penned in together the women formed into groups and filled out blank forms, rocking and bobbing the light fragile bundles they each carried in their arms.
I went up to one of them, leaned over and looked upon the crumpled patch of a little old red face. Then I realized I had come there to occupy myself in my period of expectancy and catch a glimpse of my child in advance.
The woman's face was bloodless, like the face of a drowned corpse, and fanned by long colorless locks limp as seaweed. Seeing the supplication in my eyes she lifted up the thick dirty-gray shawl with the air of a benefactress. "Three months." The first thing they tell of a child is its age.
The little worm very leisurely wrinkled its forehead of peeling satin and stretched itself, opened two rather glassy eyes encircled by mauve, and let out its guttural wail through a toothless aperture upholstered with flesh. The provident mother had already pulled a rubber pacifier out of her pocket, which transformed the wail into a monotonous greedy gurgle. "Will you be quiet! They're an awful trouble. You'll see," she declared, gauging my heavy figure. "I had bad luck, I had no milk. No use giving him gravy or bread soaked and boiled. He doesn't get any good out of them. If you think you can fatten them on the doctor's fine words, as if the doctors even know what they're talking about!"
"I believe you!" bawled a big blonde. The baby which she had a triumphant way of carrying had hanging cheeks and bottle-blue eyes in button-hole slits. "Just look at mine. At nine months it ate like us. What do you say to that, eh?"
A group gathered. "What are you here for then?" asked a huge creature with a gray ogress head, high cheekbones and skin streaked with fine veins. The blonde turned her baby over and showed its chubby flesh covered with a crusty, scabby, red-streaked sheath. "Oh, only this."
The ogress dropped into an empty place on the bench and paraded her darling on her knees. "My daughter's," she explained to the circle around her. "Her third. Maybe you think she hasn't got something to worry about—three babies and working in a factory. Babies—I know a thing or two about babies. I've had eleven." There was a general stir of compassion followed by protests. "I have two left." She danced the mite on her knee. Her tower of a body swayed back and forth, through her half-open jacket you could divine her dead breasts. There was something weird and horrible in the dismal accustomedness of her knees.
"The doctors make you fuss such a lot. You give the babies too much, and you don't give 'em enough, and you don't bathe 'em, and you don't weigh 'em. There wasn't such a lot of talk in my time, but they grew up all the same. I said to my daughter, 'Look here, you let me alone, either I know what to do or I don't know what to do.' I used to give mine toast-water, that was all." She tucked up the lank pads of hair clinging to either side of her face. "You boil two or three crusts of bread...."
"Oh, I know," interrupted the woman with the drowned-corpse face.
"Mine has bronchitis," went on the ogress. "I wonder where he caught it. He never goes out and he sleeps close to the stove. I am going to try and see if I can't get a bottle of syrup...."
The folding-doors opened, a white-clad nurse made a sign, and all rose, each with the same enamored hugging-to-her of her wailing burden.
The crowd poured into an immense, well-heated room paved with white flag-stones and painted white. The light beat down hard through a row of bay-windows. At the far end presided a handsome old man in a white smock, an immaculate nurse at his side. "The doctor!" whispered the women in a tone of awed hostility. The man did indeed seem indifferent and just as God should be.
Spread out symmetrically on the bare table in front of him among other instruments was a complete apparatus of justice, bright and glittering—a set of scales with a basket and a row of copper weights drawing clamorous notes from the straggling music of the sunshine.
With remarkable dexterity the women undid the swaddling-clothes, turning, tucking up, unwrapping. The blonde swelled out her bosom as she stuck it full of pins; the ogress held her pins between her teeth. A suffocating odor of warm wool, sour milk, perspiration, and stale flesh arose amid the cries.
The line began to move. One after the other they went up tendering their children like poor plucked bruised flowers, with the idolatrous, skulking faith of believers approaching God.
From my bench, my heart frightfully wrung, I saw each showing me what I might make of my child ... a baby with its neck seamed with a reddish crack ... a baby with tiny, tiny limbs beneath an abdomen swelling like a bagpipe ... a baby whose ribs striped its body like a zebra's hide ... a baby with a back all covered with boils....
"He has green movements." "He has a swollen stomach." "He has ringworm." "He coughs." And the same slack answers to the doctor's questions: "I don't know.—I don't know.—I don't know."
The man cast his sovereign glance over the printed form held out to him, handled the little body, remained impassive while pronouncing his rapid decision, and took up the next case.
Among the lethargic flock who went away with bowed heads, some, to rally their spirits, mumbled the flesh of their babies with fierce kisses as if to take revenge and show that this man after all had done them harm....
I got up, dragging my double weight.
So this is the maternal infatuation which is so sanctified and revered. "I don't know.—I don't know.—I don't know." And I presumptuously was going to commit the same folly, I, who knew no better than they, who had not learned the unknown love awaiting me....
Why doesn't that man, the doctor, who knows, arise and snatch away these lives contaminated by the fond ignorance of the mothers, and proclaim that the instinct is fallible, fatal, even criminal?
Most of the women met me again under the porte-cochère, because I walked with difficulty. The one with the drowned-corpse face gave me a friendly little nod.
"You will see," her nod said, "it will soon be your turn...."
Yes, I know.... To be a mother.... In return for the gift of life, to have the right of death over one's child. And to use that right.