34

THAT’S HOW we spend a few days, he drinking wine, me hot water, always dying of cold and tiredness, trying to organize all the madness, crammed full of words and thoughts that come up to explain the inexplicable, until one of those mornings he comes in and says listen, you aren’t going to believe me, I know a place, well really my mother knows a place, it’s a foundation, and then he straightens up and says there’s a Danish couple and, looking at me seriously, as I’d rarely seen him, says it’s guaranteed, they’ll take the baby, they’re good people, my mother knows them, they’ve been looking for a baby for years. Given that the only thing that hadn’t occurred to me was to give the baby away, I’m assaulted by a memory that surely comes from the unbearable smell of cow shit wafting through the window, and it’s another damned memory from my childhood: I’m lying down in the bedroom of my dad’s family’s country house, a house that always reeks of cow shit; I’m lying facedown, crying, and feeling the snot accumulate on the pillow. I’m drowning. There are children in the room, my cousins and their friends. They’re all playing, and I’m embarrassed because while they play I picture the night and am afraid and cry, and the boys who keep playing start putting their feet on my back and then start walking on me and pulling my hair, and I keep crying without turning to look at them, and they, increasingly violent, step on me, except my brother, who in a wild attempt to protect me punches the glass window in the door, and there’s silence. My dad comes in, and I, who suspects what happened, keep crying without lifting my face until the next morning when my brother comes back with his hand in a cast. And this embodied memory makes me think that everything comes full circle here, in Bustarviejo, that it was a good decision to come, that this man and our correspondence is the best thing that’s happened to me in my life, that I need to have this baby but that he won’t be for me, and I say yes, that’s what we’ll do, let’s give the baby to this Danish couple.

35

FOR DAYS I watch my belly grow, read books, and eat what’s necessary. Months in a room M visits every night (we only make love a few times, always insatiably and quickly but also with a strange sweetness). There are days when I go crazy and change my mind, but most of the time everything sounds coherent and the therapy sessions with the little Spanish ladies from the foundation go over well. The women make me read books, walk, tell me generic things about the Danes, they’ve agreed to meet me, they could sit for an interview with me, but I don’t want to meet them. What I want is to ask them very concrete questions, so the women from the foundation suggest I write a letter, that I ask a series of questions, and I think of the questions one snowy night. The next morning, I sit down at the computer and ask them. The couple answers my questions, and I evaluate the responses with M, and they’re fairly coherent responses: two babies dead at birth, stable relationship that’s only missing a child, both with interesting jobs and lives. Guarantees, says M. The Danes have been living in Spain for years for something related to the husband’s job, M’s mother knows them, they’re good people. That’s the most important thing, isn’t it? And later I continue my routine that manages to soothe me into oblivion. I walk, read, eat, and always end up thinking that if they’re Danish, they’ll do it right, they’ll do it better than I would with all this chaos I am. To soothe myself, I write a diary, I force myself to write at least once a week.