JULY 6

Today I drank a coffee and felt the baby for the first time. There were two kicks. I imagined he was a tadpole. I remembered a romantic scene with my husband, both of us lying down, naked, reading Antonio di Benedetto’s El cariño de los tontos. I cried and recounted the scene to M while we ate pasta I cooked. He told me it’s a nice image but teased me for my dreadful sentimentality. I made fun of myself with him. I got two emails from my husband; I haven’t opened them.

JULY 8

I opened the email from my husband. It’s implausible, but real, he’s going to be a dad. I felt an unprecedented pain and immediately wrote:

I howl from pain. I’m not a wolf. I’m not a little dog. I’m not a rat. I’m not a canoe. I’m not a wave. I’m not a serpent. I’m not a mountain or its red crevice. I’m not a mare bleeding clots of flesh. I’m not a shard of glass that shatters in my body. Nor am I a metal box. I’m not a rickety door. I’m not the leak. I’m not the gas valve. I’m not someone who lost a child. I’m not a mother. I’m not a noose or someone who is going to kill themself. I’m not a woman falling from the fourteenth floor. I’m not a machine. I’m not someone about to be abandoned. I’m not a tree. I’m not the mountain in the forest or the tree they’re cutting at its root: the saw that’s going to cut the tree buzzes and the tree emits a sound that isn’t quite a howl, it’s a little sound, barely a murmur. It doesn’t complain, the tree doesn’t complain it only says the name of a child it repeats it, moving its leaves with an elegant lightness it says the name of a child who has climbed in its branches then starts to fall when it feels the saw trespass the body it lets itself fall feeling a pain that’s also pleasure its brutal weight will fall to the ground and the repose will crush the universe it will crush the ground and the tree will rest after having resisted so much. I am not that tree. Nor am I the ground onto which the tree falls. I’m not the moss on the tree or the red crevice or the mare. I’m not the ants flattened by the tree. I’m not the shaking of the earth. I’m not the houses falling. The walls collapsing. The windows shattering. I’m not the swing breaking. I’m not the rafter splitting a head. I’m not the asphalt opening. I’m not the mud sliding. I’m not the lament of someone who has gotten lost among the rubble. I’m not the shards of iron or the water flowing through the body that has bled nor am I the body that’s bled. I’m not the injured body. I’m not the tires shredded in their acceleration. I’m not the black foot they crush in their reckless acceleration. I’m not the crushed rat. I’m not the seashells cracking when those same tires drive over the wet sand. I’m not any object thrown into the abyss that returns because it doesn’t know what else to do, all it can do is return. I’m not my feet touching the cold floor. Walking toward the room next door. Toward the baby. Toward anywhere.