XIII
A rending, moments repeated incessantly, torture indescribable, pain embedded in the body, battle, cruel cries....
I remember everything and every second. I remember the seconds when I gnawed at my bedclothes, when I howled like a wild beast. I remember all of them and others. I remember that none of them was ever the last, how the hours added themselves to the seconds in an excruciating, inhuman succession of throes in which my whole being set furiously upon itself, how I no longer had the strength to suffer.
I twisted my head from side to side like a dying animal in entreaty; I stifled it in the pillows; it was wet with perspiration; I felt a new convulsion begin and break like a wave. And when an infernal force tore me with a pang greater than all the others, I heard vaguely a cry that was no longer mine, a film passed over my pupils, I sank into an abyss sunlit and sultry. It was over ... it was over ... I fell asleep.
Did I remain in that state of lethargy and inertia for long? When I opened my eyes the whiteness and blankness of the walls of my room seemed to be released by a spring. About me was a startling silence peopled with sibilant whispers. I saw women stooping, then disappearing with their arms full of linen.
My baby! My baby!
His father, exultant, held him out to me. I became fully conscious. But goodness, how ugly he was! The shrivelled face of an old woman, the profile of a vulture, a forehead covered with plushy mucosities, cheeks smeared as with the yolk of an egg, hands on the outside exactly like a bird's and on the inside creased and red. And real nails!
At the fontanelle the pulse beneath the skin throbbed terrifyingly, and the fuzz on his skull was skimpier than pin-feathers on a fledgling.
I took him in my arms, stiff and long in his swaddling-clothes. His eyes opened half way and showed a glassy violet with milky gleams.
Our child? We both in turn dropped timid solemn kisses on his downy cheeks made of a sweet smell, and I dared not say anything.
Well?... The call of the blood, the rejoicing of the flesh, the issue of love, the instinct, the lurid mother-instinct at last?
No!