He had four daughters and said they couldn’t decide which one to let us adopt. Each time we visited we took more dollars. The children had uniform Indian faces, broad flat noses, unreadable eyes. Any one of them would have suited me. Of course they were alike, they were young, they were babies, what could it matter which one they chose!
Babies, babies. I came here to find one. Let’s be brutal, I came here to buy one, but it all went wrong. Now we have to get out.
This little town sprawls in a hole in the forest. It presses all round you, especially at night, repulsively fertile, crawling with life, the rubber trees oozing yellow milk… The rain-forest knew we were wasting our time. Two more stupid pale-faced tourists leeched of their money and sent away. You could hear the monkeys laughing at us, screeching with laughter in the sweltering dark.
Don’t worry, I’m not defeated. I have never been defeated. All this is only delaying the moment when my glorious plan becomes a fact, I’m not too old, I’m not… I am vigorous, I am only fifty-four — well, fifty-five, because I’ve just had a birthday, but only last month I was fifty-four — I run and dance like a very young woman, I tell you it’s true, ask Benjy.
Benjamin is packing in the room next door. We have two rooms; in this grubby little hotel there are no suites, so we took two rooms and made them unstick the communicating door. It was obvious we had to have a sitting-room, but they looked at us as if we came from Mars.
The maid kept giggling as she struggled with the lock. She was a fat little thing, bursting with hormones, her upper lip hairy and beaded with sweat and those awful stinking jungly armpits.
‘Ask her to go away,’ I told Benjy. ‘She makes me feel ill. You’re strong, you could do the door, no problem.’
Benjy was smiling at her straining rump. ‘Leave her alone, she’s rather sweet.’
The door suddenly yielded with a clanking shudder, the maid tumbled sideways, Benjamin caught her. His Spanish is ten times better than mine because he once lived with a Puerto Rican. She was grinning and speaking volubly. I went into the bathroom and ran the tap but only a trickle of brown water came out and the pipes ground hideously.
He came in and touched my shoulder. ‘Have you got any change? We should give her some money… She shouldn’t really do heavy work, she’s pregnant. And she’s got three children under five to support.’
— See how they try to torment me. This sweaty little pig, bursting with babies. I remain quite calm, I shall not be maddened.
Benjamin is packing noisily, crashing drawers, clattering doors. Last night he drank too much alcol, the disgusting drink of the very poor, so strong that they use lighted matches to burn off some of the alcohol before they drink it, but Benjamin wanted to hurt himself, Benjamin wanted oblivion…
We were sitting outside with the night all round us. The air was close, soft as damp fur, and sweat ran down between my breasts. His face was beaded as if with tears, glittering in the lamplight. That cretinous maid had told him the campesinos drank alcol to drown their sorrows. I took one mouthful and spat it out but he pretended to like it, he was macho and stupid and drank all the more when I tried to stop him.
I confess I was impatient. Surely the grief and loss were mine?
‘I feel — as though we’ve lost our future,’ he said. ‘We would have looked after her together. I wanted her too, you know. You’re not the only one who wants a child.’ (Odd that that hadn’t occurred to me. I really thought he was just trying to please me.) ‘I loved my brother’s kids back in New York. If I had a chance, I could be a good father…’
His whining seemed an absurd intrusion. I’d have thought he’d have the decency to comfort me, but the young are very selfish… I wanted to get away from him.
‘I’m afraid I’m going to lose you, too.’ He was drinking steadily but not yet drunk. ‘I don’t want to lose you, whatever happens.’
‘I want a child.’ I evaded the issue.
‘Do you want me?’
I couldn’t answer. His honesty makes him seem so young. But he is so young, my beautiful Benjy, that’s why I came away with him… I said perhaps we needed space. We’d been cooped up together too long, the humid air was stifling me… I tried to be kind. I said how fond of him I was. I said perhaps he was just too young.
And so he got drunk and began to abuse me, thus sounding younger than ever, alas.
‘You only wanted me for a stud because that murderous bastard couldn’t put one in you. Ever since you resigned yourself to not getting pregnant —’
‘— You haven’t understood. I’m not resigned. All I want from life is a child —’
‘— Ever since you gave up on me making you pregnant you haven’t looked me in the eye.’
(True. I used to look into his eyes and see babies, a luminous future with fine twin babies, for older women are more likely to have twins, oh yes, don’t worry, I know the facts, there was a time when I read so many books, so obsessively, about having babies… Once upon a time I knew all the statistics, I read and dreamed for three or four years, I was positive Benjy would pull it off… For a year he made love to me every night, sometimes more, night after night.)
I still had eggs, but they never ripened.
So Benjamin was wrong for me. Or maybe my eggs were already dead…
— I know my eggs weren’t dead from the start. I did conceive all those decades ago, I refused an abortion, I had my daughter, but there was no father to support me, I had no life to offer her, I had her adopted for her own good… I was a child myself, what else could I do? I decided never to think about her. I decided never to think about children. I told Christopher I would never have children.
Then the mistake, the accident, what good does it do remembering… And we tried again and failed again. Blood on a flower in a Turkish wood.
Maybe my eggs all died from neglect. Maybe that’s why it only came too late, this piercing, tormenting wish for a child. Maybe it’s true, what he said last night, the thing I’ve been trying not to recall…
It was horrible, unforgettable. Something that shouldn’t be said to anyone. It sounds in my head again and again with the circular hum of a long-trapped wasp, maddened, dangerous… I could smell the poison as he leaned across to say it, too much booze and stinging green pepper, bitter alcohol and green regret.
‘Now you’ve given up on your fucking womb I’m no fucking use to you, am I? You’re a cold fucking bitch, you’re hard as nails, you’re so fucking — sterile —’
He meant something else, he didn’t mean that, but it will never be unsaid till I have a child.
We were alone on the verandah in the harsh light and dark from the brilliant insect-repellent lantern. I was stone-cold sober, drinking bottled water, I had stayed quite calm as he stormed at me, I knew the aggression was just hurt pride –
— I stared at the ugly cast-iron legs of the table under which his long legs would not fit, I concentrated on the vulgar iron, I examined the bruised black patches on our clothes where the sweat-soaked cotton clung to the skin, I thought of our cream-smeared arms and legs which gave the night its curious smell, something half-sweet, half-medical — I tried to hold on to these small hard facts in the enormous night that bore in on the lamplight –
— Then the jungle howled inside my head, it sobbed, it cried, I sat and wept, clutching the table, seeing nothing, deaf and blind, a thing of water, and all I wanted was to be dissolved, for the first time in a long life to be anyone but Alexandra, anything but a sterile woman.