I left bereaved, as if I hadn’t had any doubts about the pregnancy. Rather than improving after that, my mood grew increasingly worse. It seemed like reality was a black hole where there was no room for exciting opportunities to come. My thesis advisor, who was so supportive, assured me more than once that my inconsolable sadness came from a violent change in my hormone production. That could very well be, but knowing it didn’t help. At the end of the day, whether I liked it or not, I was also an animal and my body and my mind alike reacted to the loss of my offspring just as Greta’s would have had she lost her kittens. It’s true that I was no longer as stressed as before, when the course of things was mine to direct, but the buildup of earlier pressures, added to the sadness I felt, submerged me in a state of depression in which it wasn’t even possible for me to return to what had been my basic routine. I stopped showering and eating and, of course, thinking of my studies.

From then on Greta was in the habit of always lying in my lap, as if instinctively trying to cover with her body the absence of the baby I used to carry in my womb. It repulsed me. Her purr agitated me, and I’d push her off. But my cat, undeterred, would come lie on me again after a few minutes. It was Marisa who took over my correspondence with Princeton. Had it not been for her, I wouldn’t have been accepted, let alone granted a scholarship. More than a thesis advisor or friend, she acted like a mother toward me.