Multiplication

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“What did you do?” I asked him again.

“I told her to lie down,” he said. “I stood in the doorway and shouted at her mother-in-law. I tried to tell the mother-in-law how to turn the baby. It’s a trick of pressure; you have to know where to feel, you see. It’s tricky, but it’s not impossible. The mother-in-law gave up too easily. We were all so used to loss. So I had to touch the mother; I had to push the baby up. I worked against the mother’s muscles to turn the baby.”

“Were they OK?” I asked him.

“They were fine,” the greengrocer told me. “But someone saw me go into the house, and I was arrested for touching a woman who was not my wife.”

“Oh, no!” I cried.

“Ah, it worked out,” he told me. “One of the guards at the prison was a boy I’d delivered. Remember the woman with fourteen children I told you about?”

“The one with the good hips?” I asked.

“Yes, her. It was her oldest son. He helped me to escape. I had an adventure getting out of my country, but I ended up here. Things could have been awful for me, you know? Instead, everything is just fine.”

“But you’re not a doctor anymore,” I said. “You don’t deliver babies here.” I wanted to feel sorry for the greengrocer. It was my first instinct.

“No, but I talk to beautiful women all day long,” he said. “And that cures everything.”

I knew I wouldn’t write his story down, but the next morning I called you at home in your time zone using the cheapest long distance connection I could find. I told you about my adventure in conversation, and you didn’t believe the green grocer.

“I’ve never known a woman to cure anything,” you said. “And the beautiful ones are the worst.”

“Do you ever get tired of feeling sorry for yourself?” I asked you.

“I’m tired of something,” you said.

“Well, go to sleep then,” I told you. “We’ll talk some more about this tomorrow.”

Of course, we didn’t speak the next day. I had terrible, terrible cramps in the night. I felt like I was being stabbed in the small of my back and in my left side. I took pain killers, but they didn’t work, and I broke into a sweat and started shaking. My husband put his hand on my head and said I had a fever. He took me to the emergency room but had to leave me there alone because we had left our children sleeping in their beds. There was no one nearby we could call at three in the morning to come and take care of them. The emergency room was busy. No one noticed me until I fainted and fell on the floor. Even then, I could still hear a man shouting; “Hey! I was here at least an hour before her.”

When I came to, I was in a bed, and there was an I.V. in my arm. After that, the first thing I was aware of were familiar voices. My husband and Paulo were arguing in the corridor.

“You must tell her to start writing again,” Paulo shouted. “You’re making her block parts of herself off. This is all the physical manifestation of a psychological metaphor.”

“Nonsense!” my husband told Paulo just as loudly. “And you better stop encouraging her nonsense. She’s under enough stress. There was no metaphor in there. There was just a cluster of cells that multiplied in exactly the wrong place.”

I listened to them, and I groaned. I had always dreaded that one day my husband and Paulo might argue.

“Are you awake?” someone asked me softly, gently. I turned my head and found Paulo’s wife sitting beside the hospital bed.

“You’ve just had surgery, I’m afraid,” she told me. “It was an ectopic pregnancy.”

“You’ll make her go mad,” Paulo was yelling in the corridor.

“Oh, I’ll make her go mad?” my husband said. “And her little fantasy world that you find so entertaining is sane?”

“They elected you to tell me?” I asked Paulo’s wife.

“They thought it was better if it came from a woman,” she said.

“Are they old-fashioned men or just cowards?” I asked her. What a pair I’ve found, I thought, a husband and a best friend who could not look a woman in the face when she had a “woman’s problem.”

Paulo’s wife shrugged and helped me lift my head. She held a plastic cup of water to my lips. I stopped listening to our husbands arguing.

“Did you know?” Paulo’s wife asked me. “Were you planning for a baby?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t known. I hadn’t planned. I had taken the usual precautions.

“How can it happen to someone my age?” I asked Paulo’s wife. “I have two children. Wouldn’t their fertilized eggs have cleared the path through my fallopian tubes?”

Paulo’s wife shrugged.

“You’ll have to ask the gynecologist,” she told me. “You’d think after four children, I would know something, but I don’t remember a thing.”

I asked her if Paulo had told her about you, about the friend I telephoned every day to tell stories to. She knew everything, so I asked her to call so you wouldn’t worry about me. She said it made her happy to be trusted. I went back to sleep to the sound of the men arguing in the hallway.

When I woke up again, I was in a ward and my husband, Paulo and his wife were gone. On the table beside the bed were an empty notebook and three black pens.

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