37

M WAITS FOR ME in the room and shakes my hand and a nurse puts two pills in my mouth and tenderly says so your milk goes away. I want to tell her to bring me the boy or the girl or a dog, but I don’t say anything, and I breathe, and I make myself think about the Danes’ happiness. M met them, swears they’re a good couple as you’d imagine Danes to be, beautiful, full of good manners and tenderness. He focuses on alleviating my sadness by telling me they’re good people and they already love him, that’s what they said, all I have to do is sign a sheet of paper in which I say the Dane is the baby’s father. M says he’s handsome, you would’ve liked him, he very well could be the father. I try to laugh, but there’s no way, I just grab the pen and put down my name, because right now I can’t sign anything. The women from the foundation paid for everything, or the Danes did, I can leave. A beautiful woman with pink hair comes and changes my giant diaper and helps me bathe and brings me warm clothing and tells me the baby boy is beautiful, he’s healthy, and they’re happy. I knew it was a boy, this pain kills me. The next day I leave the hospital, walk slowly, look through the windows from outside and think there’s the baby with the round face and a single tear falls. I move with the pain in my hips that becomes an issue again, with the sensation that a tree came out of me and my body is starting to close. How do I survive this, I ask M, I feel an unprecedented pain and a relief similar only to that pain.

He kisses me on the cheek and tells me time and forgetting and then makes one of his faces, but this time we don’t laugh.

38

WE GO TO THE SEA for a few days. I didn’t tell M that the sea distresses me, that I’m afraid of the water. I just got in the car and with swollen eyes accepted. Going anywhere is good. And at the sea, in the sand, in the shower of that little cottage at the edge of the water, the milk slowly disappears, the mornings are heavy, my breasts are heavy, the rolls of empty flesh the baby left behind are heavy, and I softly squeeze out the milk. Sometimes I bury it, I make little figures with it in the sand, I let it run on the edge of the sea, along with the foam. Sometimes I cry picturing faces or hands or pieces of some little body.