“Why did I come today to talk to you?” Cristina asked. She hadn’t touched her tea, nor removed her glasses. Leaning back, her helmet of gray hair lying just past her ears against the canvas of the lawn chair, black linen blouse without sleeves, black linen trousers without calves, and toenails that needed no paint shining out from within her espadrilles, she seemed like a runway astronaut about to eject into the ether. “Because I may be your mother. And a mother’s duty is to warn her daughter.”
Even though mathematics was my strongest suit, I had, of course, created plenty of fantasies featuring Cristina and Tibor as my parents, although we couldn’t have looked less alike. Where Cristina and Tibor were tall, I barely broke five feet and struggled to get my weight up to a hundred pounds. There had been a time in my first year at Cambridge when I brought cutouts of Cristina’s head from People and Time to Cropper’s across from the Trinity gate and asked the hairdresser to perform the impossible with my thin, disembodied hair. I tried to smoke, since I never saw either of them without a cigarette, but found it easier to imitate Cristina’s preference for thé au citron. I had no desire to become a director like Tibor or an investigative journalist like Cristina. But they had clearly spent a lifetime coping with one thing or another. And maybe, just maybe, they were the biological origin of what the headmistress had called my copeability.
But the word maybe and its verbal cousin may awakened the part of my mathematical brain that dealt in probabilities. I may be your mother, Cristina had said. I could understand the uncertainty of Tibor’s paternity, but with mothers … isn’t there a higher level of probability, reaching almost to absolute certainty?
“There was confusion,” Cristina went on. “Tibor and I were very poor in those days and we had just arrived in Rome.” That much I knew from the articles in Il Messaggero and Oggi that celebrated Tibor’s 1988 return to the Eternal City and the dinners and drinks in expensive restaurants by the Pantheon or the Palazzo Farnese that featured Tibor’s face next to Laura Morante or Valeria Golino. “I was pregnant. I gave birth in Fatebenefratelli. But then …”
“I know,” I said, wanting to save Cristina the pain of saying it but also keen to try out my pet theories, “but you didn’t have enough money, the Italians were going to send you back, you had to give me up. Santa Sabina …”
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t that.” Cristina looked up to the church across the road, the steeple cradled in the cleavage of the afternoon sun. “The room in the maternity ward of Fatebenefratelli was very beautiful — white light, the river just past the windows on both sides. I was there for a whole day — very quiet, very tranquil, floating on a white bed between contractions, twenty-four hours at least, totally alone. More than alone — well,” she stopped and realized that she was speaking to me. “While Tibor …”
I waited. Behind me, I heard the rattle of a bicycle chain on the towpath by the river, a shuffling breeze through the apple trees. I tried to imagine Cristina, my mother, with the proto-me inside her, the two of us riding the raft of Fatebenefratelli down the Tevere, waving up to the girls of Santa Sabina looking down on us from the Giardino degli Aranci.
“Tibor finally arrived on the second day. He was with a strange little English man and his strange little English wife — a girl really — very pale, very blonde, very pregnant. I saw them come in. I saw them lay the girl on the bed. I wanted to speak with Tibor. But then both of us, the English girl and I, went into serious labor, and the doctor shooed everyone else from the room. When I woke up enough to focus, I was in the room again, alone. Or, to be more precise, Tibor was gone. The English girl was gone, the strange little English man was gone, the doctor was gone. The light from outside was sulfur and cold. It was all I could do to pull the blanket up to my chin. I don’t know when the nurse came in, it could have been two minutes or two hours later. She put me in a wheelchair — the pain was, well, pain. She wheeled me down to where Tibor was sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette. I was in no shape to understand much except that there was a problem. Everything was in Italian, and my Italian was still new. But what I understood, what Tibor and I understood at the time was like this:
“The English girl and I both gave birth. Both babies were taken away in a single cradle, to be weighed and measured and registered. But when the Sister went to bring the babies back to us, she opened the cradle and it was empty. Not two babies. Not one. Empty.” Cristina paused to light a fresh cigarette. The sound of her lighter shocked me.
“And one of the babies that wasn’t there was me?”
“I screamed for a long time, I think,” Cristina continued. “Or maybe I just think I screamed.” She exhaled, smoke rose into the branches of the apple trees — had she even heard me? “Then I stopped. Tibor smoked. I smoked. It grew dark outside. We went home. Tibor didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. Tibor made up a story for our friends, about the authorities — I don’t know exactly what, we never discussed it. All I had to do was smoke and accept their sympathies. Somehow — and I don’t expect this will make you happy, Ottavia — we both came to believe that this was the best solution, whatever happened to you was better. I would be lying to you if I said we hadn’t thought about giving up the baby every day of the nine months of my pregnancy. We spent enough of our childhood in Rumania fighting against the dictator who was calling on our patriotic souls to climb on top of each other and have children. It felt like we’d be giving in, selling out, if we actually had a child.”
But there had been the anniversary production of the Divine Comedy, I thought, when Sister Francesca Splendida sent me down to meet Tibor with eleven other girls, and something in the way that I did something — my sense of space, of direction, the way I could find things — reminded Tibor of his own early days with the Bomb Squad and his unerring ability to sniff out the mines along the delta of the Danube that the Soviets, the Germans, or maybe the Emperor Trajan had left during one war or another. And Tibor and Cristina were convinced that one of those two babies who had disappeared from Fatebenefratelli ten years earlier was me. Maybe. Tibor had become a successful director in America. Cristina was climbing up the ladder of television journalism. They had enough money to pretend. I could be a toy, a cat they took out once or twice a year, to pet and play with when they weren’t otherwise engaged. It was in nobody’s interest to check DNA, to open the lid of the genetic box too wide — except mine. Maybe.
“Cristina,” I asked, since the word mother had never gained much of a flavor, “why are you telling me this now?”