32

M MEETS ME at the airport, and it takes forty-five minutes to get to Bustarviejo, where he now lives. The village smells like cow shit, the silence is only broken by the snap of a branch. We ride in his car. Crosswalks painted on the asphalt of the streets paved with tar. Just a few streets branching out from the village’s entrance. Dirt paths among the stones of the viaduct. Then he says the train going north used to pass through here, so we secretly maintain the truncated hopes of many of the prisoners who had to build it. After the solemnity of the phrase, a burst of laughter. He talks about things I cannot follow, I’m nauseous and a little anxious. We get to his house, there’s an armoire in the kitchen that opens for some reason. Then he offers me water, shows me to what will be my room and says this is your bedroom. I love that word: bedroom. Then we go into his, where there’s another armoire that he closes—I don’t know why. It’s a euphemism, he says, and we laugh. He moves toward me, kisses me, takes off my clothes, and we make love slowly. He touches my swollen belly as if knowing that something is happening inside, I picture his dick touching the sac covering the fetus’s body and have a gentle, unusually quick orgasm. He takes longer and pulls out before ejaculating and then kisses me and says a series of things I appreciate. Lying down, naked, he asks what’s going on, and I tell him I’m pregnant; the news doesn’t faze him much, or it does, and he hides it. He asks a few questions, realizes I don’t want to answer, brings wine to bed and talks about far-fetched, beautiful things while I fall asleep holding his warm little body.

33

BEING PREGNANT is a form of dying, I tell him. He answers always so dramatic. I say fuck you, it feels like actual death, like you’re dying, and we get into a long conversation that ends in fits of laughter, again. It’s impossible not to laugh with him. Then, a little more seriously, I say:

I’m not getting an abortion. I can’t handle another.

I say I tried to kill the fetus, but it won’t die.

I say I wanted to have the baby, I felt like that’s what I needed to do, but I know I don’t have the strength to support it.

I say I love this baby, boy or girl, I love it, I want it to live.

I say I can’t do it with him.

I can’t.

I say I always feel like things aren’t done how I do them, but not anymore.

I say help me.

He asks questions; he says don’t answer them if you don’t want to. But I answer, though sometimes I lie about the details. I try to explain what happened, but the words fall short or get twisted and come out in surprising ways, and then I tell him about running over that man, the retreat, the last row with my husband, I tell him that the man from the cave is a man I barely know, but I feel like I’ve known him forever. I constantly mix up the men. And in that time, the real and the imaginary, the truths and lies sound inadequate and incapable of explaining anything.