A Woman Nurses her Child

Right now (which is to say: before), the old Sherpa is walking, comprehending that you do not always need to give an explanation. As he covers the peninsula, he resolves not to justify himself at once. He greets Rabbit from afar and then continues to get closer. She sees him coming, of course; but she seems to be more concerned not to give up on the mechanised movements with which she is cradling the baby. The blind dog howls two or three times, but it is clear that it is merely an alarm system, and not a reprisal. He howls and sprawls out on the grass. But then he thinks again, regrets it: he gets up and walks away. If the advance of the stranger has to lead to a full-blown attack, he would prefer to be elsewhere rather than fall prey to the idea that he was unable to defend his territory. The old Sherpa smiles and, from time to time, lifts his hand as he walks. Less and less: the greeting loses emphasis as the distance between them shrinks. Rabbit doesn’t return the greeting, but nor is her expression hostile. Nor is it especially curious. It is, rather, the gesturality of slight annoyance: someone who has to face a minor obstacle, a routine inconvenience. As if she’d just returned from the pharmacy and realised she had to go back out again to buy fungicide. And so the seconds pass. Just a few seconds. Until someone has to speak:

‘Hi, how are you.’

‘Hi. Can I help you?’

‘Is he yours?’

The Sherpa points an index finger at the baby. He doesn’t understand that there are few things more terrifying than a young man who shows up alone, aimlessly walking cross country, and points at a nursing infant to inquire after his stock. For this reason, Rabbit withdraws, assumes a defensive position.

‘Do I know you?’

The Sherpa senses her fear and feels doubly mortified.

‘Yes, no. No, you do not know me. We crossed paths but didn’t…’

‘Crossed paths?’

Out of instinct, Rabbit takes a step back. The baby expresses something. A syllable, let’s call it. Less: a nasal vowel. It isn’t crying, no. It’s more of a reaffirmation. Like someone who might say with petulance: ‘Yes, here I am, cast into the world, and because I am here, I proclaim my being and demand that those responsible for this unconsulted casting preserve my existence.’ The Sherpa takes note. You don’t always need to give an explanation, true; but opacity is overly revealing. You see everything. He elects to polish.

‘At the corner store… At the supermarket, the grocery – I don’t know how you say it here…’

A silence.

‘You were crying? Remember?’

It was enough to press that key. Now, slowly, inspired, without disturbing the reigning being that was the baby, a quiet cry comes out of Rabbit once again. And from this new cry, all speeds up. Rabbit disarms. She clings to the baby. The Sherpa feels the double edge of compassion and power: he doesn’t want her to cry; he knows that he was the one who made her cry this time. And so he dissolves into apologies. That he didn’t want to be a bother, that he only came to see if there was something he could help her with, that in the store he thought she seemed like she was doing so very badly that he felt a little selfish for leaving without asking, and that if she wants he can come back some other time or not come back at all. That it was clumsy of him to come here unannounced. Then she makes her penultimate move. She turns, goes back in the house, and leaves the door open.

‘Come in.’

That’s what Rabbit says. And disappears into that half-darkness of rooms that are closed on summer afternoons. The old Sherpa – what else is he going to do? – follows.

The house is predictably simple on the inside, too. One room that combines dining, kitchen, sitting and pantry. Table, four chairs – one broken – a two-seater settee, an aluminium countertop, two burners, the refrigerator, a cupboard resting on the floor. And more things: a proliferation of the inanimate. A snorkel, a rake, a basin, two bags of dog food, a changing table, and more things. A high chair: Rabbit sits her child in it. The baby smacks the plastic tray with both fat palms. He is frenzied. In the back of the room, the Sherpa sees a short hallway and three doors. Two bedrooms and a bathroom, he infers.

But that isn’t what stands out most on this panoramic scan. That is the cortex. The nucleus is the two-seater settee, occupied by a man. Seated, immobile, staring straight ahead, as though hypnotised by a Caribbean telethon. As if he had decided not to blink until he uncovered the figurative key concealed in a Jackson Pollock painting. A man.

‘My husband.’

The old Sherpa inclines his head with considerable courtesy and says hello.

‘How are you, nice to meet you.’

There’s no response. Nothing. Not even a nasty face. Not even the flicker of lateral perception in the contour of the corneas.

A young woman nurses her child. Now the old Sherpa knows: her name is Rabbit. She is in her house; almost a shack, a hut. Outside it’s clear, the sky. The baby is growing fast and disproportionately. His ears are too big for that head. His hands are very small in relation to his feet. The young mother knows this and is restless. She says, from time to time: ‘Aren’t those tiny hands adorable?’ Or, later on: ‘Those ears come from his father’s side; in my family no one has those ears.’

His father. The old Sherpa is particularly concerned about that father. The man who is sitting on the settee, totally absorbed in nothing.

Rabbit goes on: ‘It’s not that I think my baby’s ugly. He’s sweet, he’s precious. But I’m worried he’s not growing right.’ In some paradoxical way, that thought reassures her. It drives off any notion of rejection and sends her towards optimistic conclusions. ‘It’s going to be okay. His father is a very attractive man,’ she says, swollen with maternity, raising the child to be able to examine him better. The father: that creature who is extinguishing himself immobile on his seat, without any response to stimuli, without expressing more than an endemic incapacity.

His heir burps, rolls his eyes, dribbles a trickle of drool from his gums. Rabbit calls the baby by his name; mother and son look into each other’s eyes, in a kind of communion that can only be achieved by two people who have shared an umbilical cord. They look at each other and smile, the little baby with his overgrown ears and his mother, beautiful, innocent.

A cloud, the only cloud in an otherwise clear sky, crosses the path of the sun, and the light gets, all of a sudden, grey, faded. Rabbit seizes the opportunity to go into one of the bedrooms and lay the baby down in his crib. When she comes back into the living room, she puts a kettle on the fire and opens the windows so the house will air out. ‘That’s what my mother used to say: the house has to breathe,’ she explains to the old Sherpa.

The draught brings with it some optimism. The old Sherpa is excited by the possibility that the spell will be broken, and the father of the child will abandon his suspension. That he will stop concentrating on his introspective shock. But nothing happens. ‘As everybody knows,’ Rabbit is telling the old Sherpa, ‘my mother could do everything.’ She doesn’t mean that, of course. She isn’t alluding to omnipotence. She means, rather, that there was no domestic challenge that her mother couldn’t tame. Stains on clothes, dust on furniture, food preservation. ‘She knew all the secrets you need to keep a household running.’ Rabbit explains to the Sherpa that, even as a child, she admired her mother’s skill and ceaselessly divulged this idolatry. That was why her family’s army of satellites gave her little toy feather dusters and party-favour brooms. So that, through early emulation, little Rabbit could become, someday, an efficient manager of her home and a meticulous administrator of her garden.

As the plot lines expand, three ideas compete for a monopoly over the old Sherpa’s consciousness. The first has to do with submission to stereotypes. The second with the attraction he feels towards Rabbit, even with her husband four and a half metres away, lost in thought and a prisoner of the most hermetic silence. The third, it is evident, revolves around Rabbit’s omissions: why does she tell him in such a detailed way about her mother’s life and not explain anything that has to do with that man in his vegetative state, in the very same room they are, staring at the wallpaper?

Then, little by little, over the years – Rabbit is explaining to him – the tasks of the household ceased to be a priority for her. Her mother noted that she no longer ran up to hold her dustpan when she swept the hallway, that she no longer went out of her way to dry the dishes that emerged immaculate from the sink. She still helped, of course. But her enthusiasm diminished with every passing day, until it could be said that she did it reluctantly. In any case, her parents connected it with the inevitable, but fleeting, stage of puberty. Bigger was the surprise the day her mother had to go up to Rabbit’s room and ask her to please come down to the dining room to set the table, an activity that – what is more – she had always jealously reserved for herself. Now in full adolescence, Rabbit carried out with obedience and tedium the household chores that her strict mother would impose on her. Of course, as she made the beds or hung the clothes on the line, she could not stop whimpering or, and this was more common, crying her eyes out, repeating (not always just to herself) the unhappiness she felt when she was chained to a mop or a floor squeegee. How unjust God had been to arrange nature in such an unhygienic manner, requiring daily adjustments to put back on track what, left to its own devices, would wind up a gigantic rubbish tip, an enormous ocean of scourges and diseases and filth.

In any case, it would never have occurred to Rabbit to question her mother’s orders, perhaps intimidated by the severe figure of this woman who had transformed her home into an infallible mechanism of precision, a Prussian hourglass. So that – as she herself tells the old Sherpa – Rabbit grew up cleaning and scrubbing, sweeping and washing, until one Easter Sunday she fainted while polishing the crystal beads on the old lamp in the dining room. When she regained consciousness, she was in her bed with a headache; a doctor was talking to her mother behind the door. He was telling her that heavy chores would be out of the question from that day forward. The only thing that mattered was rest. And fresh air, running, and hiding things.

Rabbit – she says it herself now, in the sitting room, while the baby sleeps in his room, and the man of the house sits entrenched on the settee, petrified – she wanted to continue listening to the doctor, but it was making her sleepy. Her eyes kept closing. Before falling asleep, she thought for the first time that she would like to live in a hotel, a place where every day someone would come to tidy up your room for you, make your bed, spray a pine-scented freshener in the bathroom. A hotel with an elegant reception area, circular, where the reading chairs were crowded around mahogany coffee tables. Where the concierge would know her name, where he would transfer phone calls to her room: ‘señora Rabbit, your mother’s on the phone, shall I put her through?’ It is what she refers to as – always as the most shameful of secrets, she clarifies – the hotel fantasy. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever told anyone,’ she confesses to the old Sherpa. He finds this hard to believe. It strikes him as something she probably tells everyone, all the time.

The Sherpa understands, after a while, that there isn’t much left for him to do. The baby is sleeping, the man is watching the wallpaper, Rabbit is talking without any pause. She’s pretty, and she talks without breathing, serves tea, moves her hands on the tablecloth, but says nothing about the man who watches the wallpaper while the baby sleeps. Everything seems stable. The dog had briefly disrupted the slackness of the canvas. He had come in with his blindness in tow, wagging his tail and demanding attention. But he had immediately taken on the sepia tones of the whole: he stretched out next to the settee and is now dreaming a bit of outdated images, lacking in colour, and another bit of strong aromas. He looks like, although nobody notices it, the dog that presides over Velázquez’s Las Meninas. In any case, the scene dies down; the old Sherpa decides it is time for him to leave.

‘Well…’

He says that, and the word leaves its harmonics bouncing off the walls of the room. The old Sherpa announces his withdrawal; it’s a well of transition. If it were winter, the expression would arrive in the company of a gesture: casting around for his coat, rubbing his hands together, slapping his knees. Summer is more merciless: it leaves everything to orality. The Sherpa, for a moment, misses the cold. He gets up and gets distracted. Cold without snow. Cold that encourages you to dissipate your energy reserves. No more concentration of powers, but rather survival and fuel. He gets distracted, or bored: He thinks of the gloomy fruit carts that are parked in front of his house on the harshest day of winter. They stop, they exhibit their wares without flies, with freshness. Pears, peaches, melons – all sweet, all ready. How is that possible? the old Sherpa wonders: ripe fruit while the cruel north wind blows? He gets distracted, or sleepy. The salesman looks at him. Moves his head: Are you going to buy something or what? No, not this time. Tomorrow, maybe, when noon is less ubiquitous. When the pale winter sun takes some licence in its metre. Then, perhaps, a fruit. A watermelon, to choose the biggest in the cart. So that you understand that it’s not a matter of financial or seasonal problems. A whole watermelon, unsliced. I’ll reserve for myself the revealing incision. What’s the problem? The Sherpa is distracted, is bored. Already plotting his escape.

Rabbit, on the other hand, tenses:

‘Are you leaving?’

The Sherpa is surprised. His world was already a different world. It was winter, and there was tropical fruit. Not this heat and this question. The blind dog wakes up: it lifts one of its ears. The Sherpa, standing, tries a deep breath and nods. That double gesture, which he arbitrarily associates with the most withering determination, is still available to him on this scorching summer day. Rabbit seems on the verge of saying something. She raises a hand. But the voice to be heard comes from the other direction. Without taking his eyes off the wallpaper, the man, at last, now speaks:

‘The Ministry of War sent a newly weaned puppy to the family of every dead soldier.’

The voice is grave; its cadence spacious. The gaze remains fixed to the wallpaper. Everything is, for a moment, suspended.

‘A little puppy, yes. For every dead soldier.’

Rabbit’s husband has spoken, and everything is in a state of exception. The Sherpa sets aside his eagerness to escape. The dog lifts his other ear. They both look at the man who has spoken. Rabbit, too, who interrupts her gesture (hand raised to stop the avalanche) to instantly run to her husband, to squat down next to him, put a hand on his left thigh.

‘Hello, my love, it’s me. What were you saying?’

But the man is no longer speaking. He has tumbled back into silence. Rabbit’s tear ducts turn red again, and she lets a moment pass and then removes her limp hand from his lap, gently. She takes a moment to listen to the lack of a response. She straightens up, observes the old Sherpa and his disconcertedness. She goes up to him, takes his arm, guides him slowly out the door, out of the house, and she starts to cry. Again, Rabbit cries. The Sherpa sees the fingers of the weeper on his arm. A bit of pressure on his skin, the muscles, a tendon. He doesn’t dislike it.

‘What war is he talking about?’

The old Sherpa sympathises, of course. But he’s also curious.

‘No war. I don’t know. He’s never been in any war. He’s never left this town…’

The old Sherpa concedes: you don’t always have to explain yourself, but nor can every single thing be understood. Rabbit still has him by the arm, still gazing up at him with watery eyes. He has expressed his sympathy aloud. Sadness – attractive, impalpable – becomes intelligible to him. Not so the troubled well of the man who’s still sitting in front of the wallpaper, back inside the house. But not everything can be understood, he accepts again.

‘I understand.’

That’s what he says at the edge of the peninsula. It doesn’t mean he understands the core. Only that the man on the two-seater settee is immersed in a war that, in addition to being non-existent, is already lost. And he understands that this defeat spreads its influence over the rest of the house: Rabbit, the baby, the snorkel, the blind dog, the basin… But she says something, too.

‘Could I ask you a favour? A big favour?’

Rabbit speaks. Worse: asks. A favour, she asks. And it is as though the women were passing. The ones that look, or hold his gaze, so that the old Sherpa feels that he is little, almost nothing; so that he looks at his ankles, barely grazed by dark algae, there, in the ocean, on holiday, if holidays still exist. There where the tenuous current that returns, the wet sand and its roughness tell of the regurgitating of the oceanic mass.

The dialogue is asymmetrical. The old Sherpa doesn’t say much. He nods more than anything. Rabbit, meanwhile, goes on. She promises him that it will only be three hours, maybe four, between when she leaves and when she comes back from the store; she shows him the bottles filled with breast milk on the shelves of the refrigerator, the little pot to heat up the bottles in; she shows him the bags of nappies, the changing table; she dissolves into expressions of gratitude, tears; she warns him about the importance of burping, praises the properties of oleo-calcareous liniment; she tells him about two women neighbours, both of them elderly and half deaf, who might in the worst-case scenario help him out in an emergency; she assures him he will receive innumerable heavenly blessings in return for being so good; she tells him that she feels very ashamed, repeating several times that she has no other way out, but she swears that she will resolve her work situation in a more sustainable way, that she is just about to figure it out; she explains to him the maternity leave regime, and she starts to tear up again, or to weep mournfully; she advises him not to worry about the dog, who can take care of himself, nor about her husband, who is still frozen, elbows on his lap, eyes on the wall; she kisses him on the cheek; she says – retrospectively – that if she keeps going like this she will be fired from her job; and she leaves, she gets on her bike, she heads for the sea; she leaves the old Sherpa standing there, in the middle of the room, three metres from the wallpaper man and four from the baby, who is still sleeping. Why was it that Rabbit was crying?