The child leaves.

The child leaves me.

The child comes out and takes everything I’ve been able to give him.

36

THE BIRTH COMES, the day arrives, I go to Madrid, my fourth or fifth time in the city. Two little women accompany me, they say that if the birth is vaginal, it will be more difficult. They say there are women who change their minds after the birth, but I won’t change my mind and I say a natural birth, no C-section, and that’s what happens.

The pain is absurd, but it’s labor, I tell myself amid the madness of my body: my bitch hips are opening and mutating until they become smoke or dust or paper and like a viper I’m removing the drenched baby, with a pain that isn’t pain, it’s a calling, I repeat, pain from my hips grinding, becoming dough so they can mold the baby’s head. Pain that’s a body desperate to breathe that opens channels in you, little channels that become giant and, in that dilation, to feel the head, to feel the shoulders, to feel the legs of the creature fighting to find its way, pain that is tree trunks falling to the ground that is you, on top of the ant that I am, I am all the open animals, immense tree trunks that are hundreds of years old that split to shed the marrow, pain of the organs that loosen and clench up until they disappear, organs that are squished and fractured until they burst the sac like a soap bubble, cascade of pus and blood and yellow liquids and I scream fucking hell, I am giving birth, and a young woman with blue eyes studies the livid orifice stretched by the life that will come out of it, and she tells me we’re going to do it together, she tells me count, she starts to count one-two-three breathe, one-two-three push and like a mantra I follow her, they’re the eyes of a woman, I count one-two-three, I surrender to her lips that are rubbery, that are swollen and black, I follow them, I follow the mantra, she and I and the ghost of my brother who I feel circling in those eyes, now we’re all giving birth, I count and feel the baby’s legs slip through my vagina, his fingers tickle my clitoris and I burst with happiness because he’s out, he cried, and they’ve taken him away. Relief is the only possible thing, the only time I’ve felt it in my life, he came out. We don’t look at each other. He left.

Later, in a cold room, with others who have just given birth, with the injured and operated, I continue feeling relieved and say how can I do this and, at the same time, it’s the only thing I can do, and I feel rivers of blood flowing from my vagina. The blood returns.