Sabina Urraca
Birth
from the novel Las niñas prodigio
Translated from Spanish by Allana Noyes
It all started with the invitation to the birth from this woman I hardly know who’s agreed to let me watch her squeeze her second daughter out into the world. Everyone should have the chance to witness a birth in my opinion. My plan is to write an article about this one, and in that article I’ll eschew all those damaging misconceptions about the sterile, aseptic birth; the lovely mother cradling a perfect, round bundle in her arms. I am thirty-one years old. I’ve never given birth and don’t know if I ever will, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to have the experience. Afterall, I was born into a capitalist society. I want to have it all for myself, see it all, live it all. I can’t bear to miss a thing.
The woman whose birth I’ll be witnessing lives in a small town not far from the valley where I’m staying. It’s been two months since I moved out here to the countryside, to a dilapidated, hundred-year-old farmhouse in southern Spain. It’s pretty rustic, with no indoor plumbing or bathroom, and it’s only accessible by hiking up and down intricate trails that run parallel to an ancient Moorish aquifer. I spend my time wandering through the woods or swimming in the pool, enjoying sporadic conversation with the other valley inhabitants by day and the grunting of the wild boars by night. There’s so much beauty here, even if the loneliness can be oppressive from time to time. Life here feels like a New Year’s resolution; there’s the initial excitement of a new commitment, but as the days go by, my lack of willpower and normal mental chatter impede me from being productive in any meaningful way. I came out here because I have memories of spending time in the country as a kid. I can see six-year-old me wearing dirt-crusted pajamas, mumbling to myself, struggling to dress the barn cats up in doll clothes. Back then I existed in a state of perfect introverted serenity that I now feel desperate to recreate. I’m hoping that my return to this simple way of life will save me, that this experience will help me find myself.
It takes just one month before it’s clear that my inner neurosis is still going strong and will not be undone by any amount of dulcet birdsong or country living. When you’re a true neurotic, it doesn’t matter what tropical paradise you might find yourself in, you’ll drive yourself crazy worrying that you aren’t wringing every last drop from your experience and then the paradise is tarnished.
I write a post on my Facebook page, “If you liked it when I put out my cigarette in a mini Zen garden in the natural goods store because I thought it was an ashtray, you’re going to love today’s episode where I mistakenly mash garlic in a Tibetan singing bowl.”
Various forms of “ha ha ha” populate the comment section. What do you mean ha ha ha, don’t give me that ha ha ha crap. This is no joke. This is my cavernous spiritual void we’re talking about here.
Soon every new source of stimulation that could potentially lure me away from the reason I came out here in the first place—to sit down and write—becomes an irresistible temptation. I realize I’ve been projecting onto this birth I’m invited to like a fussy customer at the spa who demands to be relaxed without doing any of the work herself, like, “I’m here, ready for you to produce the bodily sensations necessary to heal my trauma.” It’s the same way I feel about the birth, “Create in me a sense of infinity, the humming essence of life in its purest form, please. I demand catharsis that leads to inner peace.”
On the day the message comes, “Sanne’s having contractions. See you soon. Xo” I change my outfit three times before leaving the house. I know full well, as I’m pulling on and off different shirts in my mirrorless house, that I’m being stupid. But I just can’t calm the quinceañera-esque euphoria of getting ready for a ball that I know will change my life forever. I climb up the rocky hill that leads to the highway. Beads of sweat roll down both sides of my body and there’s a wet splotch in the middle of my shirt. I try to read its shape like some kind of sign, some premonition of what I’m about to witness. When I first got my period, I’d try to interpret the shapes my blood left on the pad, like reading tea leaves. The sweat stain doesn’t reveal much and instead goes cold, sending a shiver up my spine. I have a change of clothes in my backpack, but I can’t strip here on the shoulder in plain sight of all the cars driving by and the groups of day trippers coming down from the Buddhist center higher up the mountain. For the first time since I came here, I see that the door to the hermitage on the side of the highway is open. The Hermitage of Our Eternal Father is a minimalist, modest structure that does not attract any tourists despite my insistence on showing it off as a roadside oddity to any visitor I might encounter. It contains one of only three Catholic statues in the world cast in God’s image. The hermitage is in a little white house with mismatched chairs and a table made of repurposed wood that serves as a base for the altar. On top is God himself like the one-eyed Polyphemus, a little triangle in the center of his forehead. In one hand he holds a scale. I turn my back to the statue and take off my shirt. I open my backpack but then, because of my desire to exploit any moment showing the slightest potential for spiritual profundity, I let my shirt fall to the floor and walk down the center aisle. I stand there in front of the statue for a moment silently, my tits out in the air, looking straight into the eye in the center of the triangle when a phrase pops into my head, “Life is a gift.” The thoughts are firing off now; how I long for every moment to be this solemn and definitive and that’s why, out of nowhere, my brain comes up with these feel-good mantras, like something a woman emerging from the ocean spray might think as she brings a cold beer to her lips, closes her eyes, and in one purifying breath, lets go.
I hitchhike and the man who picks me up asks where I’m going. A birth, I tell him. He says, oh, a cow birth? No. We spend the rest of the ride in silence.
Sanne lives in a renovated farmhouse surrounded by trees and sunbathing animals. There are two dogs, one old and wet, the other young and dry. The old one barks lethargically at me as if defending his property makes him intensely drowsy. In the middle of the living room there’s Sanne on all fours, swaying her hips back and forth to ease the pain of her contractions. When the most recent wave of pain subsides, she greets me, smiling.
Hours pass. We eat together. I don’t dare speak, almost. When they first invited me to the birth, the parents and I came to an agreement that I should remain on a sort of separate plane, although I’m not sure what this entails exactly. Can I participate in their conversation? Can I ask questions? I’m sweating, a lot. The kind of sweat that smells bad, the way I sweat when I’m nervous.
After the meal, her contractions begin to intensify. Her screaming deepens, becoming more guttural as if belted through space by an intergalactic cow. After twelve hours of labor, everyone in attendance, the mother, father, their five-year-old daughter, the midwife, and I, are completely exhausted. I’d be lying if I said the air wasn’t thick with tension and fear. I’m guessing the baby, whose head is constricted by its mother’s pelvic bones, is probably tired too. Maybe it’s in pain. The mother drifts in and out of sleep. There are times I feel scared, other times I’m so bored my mind wanders. I write text messages to friends, “This is so crazy. I’m seriously freaking out. I’ll tell you all about it later.” Or “Poop, blood, mooing—it’s incredible.” At one point, the midwife asks me to bring her a glass a water. With shaking legs, I fill a glass and approach them, and as I do, I see myself from above like a hyper-realist Bethlehem. The room is dark, only the faintest beams of light twist around the three figures. The sweating, delirious mother is squatting and hunched over a chair. She hurls insults at us, cursing in her mother tongue—Dutch, I think. The midwife and father flank her, trying to keep her stable. If I step back, the three figures morph into the blurry image of a glistening, naked monster. The chair the mother is clutching scoots forward and the midwife orders me to hold it steady. From there I can see the baby as it begins to slide out of its mother’s body, its back coated in a layer of white grease, the eyes completely black, a little alien. At first its body is purple and limp. They lift it to the mother’s chest who bursts into tear-filled laughter and speaks to it in her language. The baby shows no sign of life whatsoever and there are a few milliseconds where I think it must surely be dead. I think perhaps they knew all along, how sometimes mothers decide to give birth to a baby who has died inside of them instead of going to the hospital to have it removed. I read about that. They do it as a sort of ritual to gain closure, to give the thing a dignified birth if you can call it that. I think maybe I’ve witnessed something I shouldn’t have. All of these things run through my mind in the time it takes for the baby to inhale its first sucking, gasping mouthful of air and start to cry.
An hour later the mother is still in another room with her first daughter and the newborn, all three dozing happily in bed together. Any half-decent director would have scrapped these scenes, I think to myself, these wouldn’t have made the final cut. So, what now? It’s an absurd kind of limbo where I’m not sure how to act or feel. They give me a blanket so I can get some sleep on the couch, and I’m suddenly so overwhelmed by emotion I start sobbing inconsolably. I’m crying and laughing at the same time and the midwife takes me in her arms, which embarrasses me. Freeing myself from her embrace, I go to the kitchen, which is full of dirty dishes, and then I pull out my laptop to write down everything I’ve seen, quickly realizing I might as well be trying to recount a drug-addled night of partying. I can’t seem to remember the sequence of anything. I manage to finish the article and hastily send it off to the magazine. My boss responds, “Nicely done.”
Three days later I’m standing in front of the hermitage again, hitchhiking back to Sanne’s house. The woman who picks me up asks if I’m going to the olive picking festival. I lie and say yes. It’s hard for me not to say what I’m not supposed to say, but I keep my mouth shut this time. This woman, with all her years of back-breaking work at the hog farm and her expired drivers’ license, has surely handled plenty of cow and horse placentas. She has held them in her red and calloused hands. I do not dare tell her that I am on my way to eat one.
Sanne holds the baby against her breast as she lifts a wineglass and says a few poignant words that I find embarrassing. They embarrass me because I’m the type of person who puts out her cigarettes in Zen gardens, who goes out looking for spirituality and trips over it, steps on its toes. She speaks of this new life that has just begun and how much it means to her to share this placenta with us, the placenta that provided sustenance for her little one. Her husband lifts the casserole dish off the fire and we toast. I’m the only one who notices the baby smiling a shockingly adult-looking smile in her sleep and this makes me strangely happy to be on the verge of eating human viscera. One of the guests says, “May we give thanks to the Great Spirit.”
I drank three beers before coming, for courage, and I’m a little too drunk to tell if this last statement is a joke or not. I laugh loudly either way.
Eating placenta is like eating tough octopus. Or maybe a chunk of ear. The taste isn’t bad, but the texture is unbearable. I practically swallow my piece whole. There’s a tension in the air, and I understand that this anxiety we’re breathing in is what truly unites us, not all the goofy stuff people said during the toast. Maybe no one else thinks this is gross, some of us are excited even, but to some degree we are all worried that we will be the one who is grossed out. The meal unfolds between intermittent hellish moments where I try to shake my memories from three days ago, the sack of woven veins slipping out of Sanne’s vagina.
As I head back to the house I decide that I did in fact like eating the placenta. They trusted me after all, they invited me to the birth and even let me write an article about it in which I used the word “poop” no less than six times. It was special, what they shared with me.
Before going to bed I post on Facebook about what I’ve seen. It immediately inspires fury from a good number of strangers as well as some acquaintances and in the following days I begin receiving anonymous hate mail filled with insults and threats, dense screeds explaining that what I have done is a contemptible, wicked act only slightly less offensive than cannibalism itself. They condemn the homebirth as well, saying it’s irresponsible. I start to receive calls. The members of a Christian group try to get me to embrace the good word and abandon what they deem to be a life of sin. A stranger leaves ugly, threatening messages. In the last one she seems to place a curse on me, saying, “I hope you have a child at home who dies and then someone comes and eats it!”
Up until this moment, my most recent stage of life had been comprised of days that blended into one other. This experience though—the baby’s head breaching the skin of a vagina stretched to its limit, the blood, the screaming—all of this disrupted the surface of life’s tedium with the same brute force of all the extraordinary experiences that burst into my life. Nonetheless, I am aware that no single experience has the power to transform me into someone else and, come what may, I’m probably not becoming a more centered version of myself anytime soon. At least I manage to stumble across these flashes of beauty along the way. But the internet attacks and menacing phone calls from strangers are threatening to dim the brilliance of this most recent spark, so to preserve it, I delete my social media accounts. I ignore the rueful emails and calls from private numbers, and I’m even more alone than I was before in this old house that makes disorienting sounds throughout the night. Miriam, who lives on the other end of the valley, said that if I hear I noise and can’t imagine what it might be that it’s definitely a fox in heat. I lie in bed and listen closely: there’s the squeaking door, the roof tiles settling in the wind, later a boar or two rooting in the side yard, a catfight, then the mixture of several of these elements all at once. Then there is a whimper, a pleading cry. Is that the fox? The whining continues and I try to set aside my fear and concentrate on what could be making the noise. Sometimes I fall asleep without meaning to, abandoning my vigilant state when my eyes flash open and I think maybe I was the one making the noise all along. One day I wake to find my own hand covering my mouth, trying to quiet myself so I can get some sleep.
On the morning of Sunday, October 25th, I am unsuccessfully attempting to light the fireplace when I hear two knocks at the door. The house is old, beat-up and shabby and very charming. A draft makes the windows open and close by themselves. Wood creaks and battling cats thud along the roof. But there it is again, the two knocks. When I open the door there are two police officers standing there. I don’t understand what they’re saying to me, but then it all comes together. The nightmare begins. They look disinterestedly at my belongings scattered around the house and in the entryway, they look at my nightgown, my underwear strewn about the floor, the bottles full of piss (the outhouse is far from the house and at night or when I’m working I pee in the bottles that I later empty on my favorite trees). They repeat themselves. They’ve received a formal complaint about me, someone is accusing me of leading a ritual, here, in my home. This ritual, according to the complainant, involved feasting on a newborn baby.
They seem to be slightly embarrassed to utter this accusation aloud. In a state of total disbelief and shock I invite them in and offer them a cup of coffee. They decline, as if they think I might poison them too, but they are visibly exhausted and after a moment one officer reluctantly asks for a glass of water. They walk around eyeing my things. They gaze at the dirty dishes. There’s a bear-face mask on the bed and they look unflinchingly at that too. I imagine they’re thinking they wouldn’t put it past some freak who collects piss in bottles and wears a bear mask to be a baby-eater. Several minutes later we’re bent over my computer, shoulder to shoulder as if working on a group project for class. The policemen and I are searching Google Images for placentas, what they are and what they look like. They hear my side of the story. I steal glances at their stony faces out of the corner of my eye. I imagine they don’t have the nerve to reveal how truly disgusting they think I am. After all, they came all the way up here to tell me my mouth is tainted by baby flesh. I wonder, what part of the baby is it do they think I ate?
Many others have lived in the house I’m renting. A family of farmers lost a seven-year-old child here in the forties. His name was Ángel. There was a fire and he burned to death in the cellar. In the eighties, a pair of hippies moved in and remodeled. They had two boys and a girl. The little girl, Luz, died when she was three. She was having trouble breathing and then her breath stopped all together. They climbed the valley wall carrying her small body in their arms, but the autopsy didn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary. On the dresser near my bed there’s an old box full of photos. Some nights I look at photos of Luz, her pretty brown face. She’s wearing a navy-blue dress and riding a tricycle. She looks like a serious child; a touch of aggression plays across her face even though she’s smiling.
Two friends come to visit. The lawyer instructed me not to talk on the phone or through email to anyone about what happened, which means I’m the only one who knows about the mess I’ve gotten myself into. I’m anxious for their pending visit. I want to open my mouth and not stop talking until the horror of the whole fiasco has left me. I wait for them on the main street in the next town over. One of them, as she comes in close for a hug, takes a step backward in shock, saying, “Wow, that smell. You smell like . . . the country,” a long pause hangs in the air before the word leaves her lips. I know it’s not country life she’s smelling on me. It’s the smell of a sweating animal, of all of my glands churning simultaneously. My opened fire-hydrant of adrenaline thumps out liters of the stuff with every heartbeat. I’m crouching in the brush, hiding from predators.
In the days following the police report I have the same dream: I pick up a piece of meat off a plate and taste it, but it seems undercooked, so I decide to put it back in the frying pan. I then realize it’s not a piece of meat at all, but the body of a young girl. Horrified, I take her into my arms. With the weight of her head in the palm of my hand, I balance her on my forearm so I can get a look at her and then I see it’s me I’m holding. A five-year-old me. When I wake, my arm’s asleep and the indentation of her neck and hair, my neck and hair, remains stamped into the palm of my hand.
The investigation is eventually dropped because of lack of evidence. My friends leave but my mind does not settle. The night terrors are more frequent after the accusation, always the same nightmare with slight variations. In the daylight, my mind’s shadows burn away and everything is sunshine and colts grazing in the field. At night I am unable to turn off the light. I sleep no more than two hours at a time. I’m startled by the slightest sound and bolt awake.
There’s this book of fairytales I remember having as a kid. In the book it explained that the Fairy King would periodically charge a tithing from the human world, trading one of their own elfish babies for a human one in order to strengthen their deeply inbred blood pool. I understand now that this is what’s going on with my house. You might be able to make a happy home, but it comes at a cost. Maybe my tithing was to trade in that anxious child I’ve always been, the one clinging to me tooth and nail. In some ways, I got exactly what I wanted by coming here: I’m leaving the burden of the past behind, emerging from the valley as someone new, letting go of my fear of ghosts. Heading back to the city.
One night I’m in the fruit cellar which has a door that leads to a little sloping path and then on into the woods. My arms are full and a tomato I’m holding tumbles to the ground. It slowly rolls along the slope, almost stopping completely in the trail’s small grooves, but then continues, rolling into the shadowed patch beyond the trail. And then it keeps going, disappearing into the woods entirely. My blood runs cold. I rush back inside as fast as I can and see myself from above like in a dream, sinking my fingers deep into the soft flesh of the girl I was, slowly shredding her to bits.
I stand in the middle of the living room.
“What do you want?”