Forgotten Journey

She was trying to remember the day she was born, and she frowned so much that every few minutes the grown-ups came over to make her smooth her brow. Which is why she could never reach back to the memory of her birth.

Before they were born, children were stocked in a big department store, mothers ordered them, and sometimes went to buy them directly. She would have liked to see them unwrap the package and open the box that held the baby, but they never called her over in time in the houses with newborns. It was hot and they could barely breathe inside the box, and that’s why they arrived so red and cried all the time, curling their toes.

But she was born one morning making birds’ nests in Palermo. She didn’t remember leaving the house that day but had the feeling that she’d made the trip without an automobile or a carriage. It was a journey filled with mysterious shadows, and she awoke on a road lined with casuarina pines, smelling their strong scent, and suddenly she was making birds’ nests. The eyes of Micaela, her nursemaid, followed her like two guards. Building the nests wasn’t easy: they needed several rooms, including a bedroom and a kitchen.

The next day, when she returned to Palermo, she went looking for the nests on the road of casuarinas. There were none left. She was on the verge of tears when her nursemaid said, “The birds carried the nests to the treetops, that’s why they’re so happy this morning.” But her sister, who was cruelly three years older than she was, laughed and pointed with her knit glove at the gardener of Palermo who was blind in one eye and who was sweeping the street with a broom of gray branches. He swept away the last nest along with the dead leaves. In that moment she felt dizzy with vertigo, as she did when she heard the sound of the swings in the garden.

Time had passed since that day, distancing her desperately from the day of her birth. In each memory she was a different little girl but always with the same face. With each birthday the circle of little girls surrounding her grew more stretched out, until finally they could no longer reach to hold hands.

Until one day playing in the study, the French chauffeur’s daughter said horrible, vicious words to her: “Children when they’re born don’t come from Paris.” She looked around to see if the doors were listening and said softly but somehow louder than if she’d raised her voice: “Children are inside their mothers’ bellies, and when they’re born they come out of the bellybutton,” and who knows what other dark words spouted like sins from Germaine’s mouth, and she said them without even turning pale.

After that, children began to be born everywhere. There had never been so many kids in the family. The women had big balloons attached to their bellies, and each time the grown-ups spoke about some newborn baby, an intense fire spilled over their faces, making them bend down to look for something on the floor, a ring or a handkerchief that had fallen. And all eyes turned toward her like lamps shedding light on her shame.

One morning getting out of the tub, looking at the drain plug while the nursemaid wrapped her in a towel, she told her awful secret to Micaela, laughing. The nursemaid got very angry and reassured her that babies came from Paris. She felt a slight relief.

But when night came, an anxiety jumbled up with sounds from the street would invade her entire body. She couldn’t sleep at night even though her mother gave her many kisses before going to the theater. The kisses had lost their value.

And so it was many days later and many long black hours on the enormous clock in the kitchen, in the deserted hallways of the house, behind doors in rooms filled with grown-ups whispering secrets, when her mother sat her on her lap in her dressing room and told her that children did not come from Paris. She talked to her about flowers, about birds, which all became mixed up with Germaine’s horrible secrets. But the child wanted desperately to still believe that children came from Paris.

A moment later, when her mother said she’d open the window and she opened it, her mother’s face had changed completely under her feathered hat: it was a lady who came to visit the family. The window was shut tighter than before, and when her mother said that the sun was lovely, she saw the black sky of night where not a single bird sang.