Herbert comes in kicking the door. He’s in his pants, hair on end, confused expression and a pillow mark splitting his cheek in two. What time is it, I ask, my voice hoarse, sitting up in three beats. I have the book with the naturalist illustrations on top of me, making it hard for me to move. Mum says for you to go upstairs. I hear him fine, but I don’t react, I hug my legs, I stretch to grab the sheet, screwed up at the foot of the mattress, and cover myself, I feel a bit embarrassed. It’s as if he’s speaking to me in a dream, there’s no sense replying. He insists: It’s urgent. What happened, I ask silently, raising my chin. Herbert says nothing more. Message delivered, mission accomplished, he turns round and is swallowed by the darkness of the corridor. I put on the first thing I can grab, the usual jeans and a black T-shirt with studs that Eloísa left one day and never reclaimed. I leave on tiptoe so as not to wake Simón, who is biting his lips in his sleep. A warrior’s dream.
I realise that I’m barefoot as I’m climbing the stairs but I don’t go back, I’m guided by the word urgent. In fact, if it weren’t for the confusion caused by the abrupt awakening, I would almost certainly be speculating on what might be waiting for me up there. But no, I climb on blindly. On the fifth floor, I lean in, half opening the door. I risk a few steps and from the kitchen I can see Mercedes snoring, sprawled over the bed; closer to me Herbert is lying on his, his eyes tightly closed, as if what just happened was my own invention. I can’t see Sonia anywhere.
I retreat. Motionless on the threshold, I hear a hoarse shout: Here, here. The voice is coming from the other end of the corridor, some four doors further down. I feel my way forward, unable to see much ahead of me until I make out Sonia beckoning with her hand. There’s no time for greetings or explanations. I need your help, she says quietly, guiding me into the flat by the shoulder. Identical to Mercedes and Sonia’s: dining kitchen, two rooms at the sides. The one on the right is empty, in the other there are three or four children sleeping on the same mattress, criss-crossed, superimposed. Between the bedrooms is the bathroom, instead of a door there’s an iron panel which Sonia slides across to pass through, carefully so that it doesn’t come apart. She makes me enter first, she’s anxious for me to see: a naked woman sitting on the toilet, her head straining towards her legs, about to give birth. The last thing she wants is to go to hospital, Sonia breathes at my neck. The woman, only just noticing us, throws herself back, her fright slightly out of time. She has a tangle of black hair, very black, covering half her face. I give an Oriental-style bow of greeting, she ignores me. It really hurts, it’s squeezing, says the woman, addressing Sonia, as if she doesn’t entirely accept my presence. I move back, the conversation is between them. Don’t you think we’d better go? The other woman shakes her head from side to side as if possessed.
We leave the room to deliberate. Sonia tells me that last time she was in hospital for three weeks because the stitches from her caesarean got infected. They cut her right up, she says. She doesn’t want to go through that again, she explains and shrugs, I don’t know whether in reprimand or sympathy. A silence and she confirms the latter: I’d do the same as her. Another pause and she nods. Suddenly she asks me: Are you up for this? I don’t know, I say. I think about horses, cows and calves. Also about snake eggs. Yes, I don’t know. It’ll come out either way, says Sonia as if in jest, but not. We enter again, feigning impossible courage. Relax, I find myself saying, and for the first time she looks straight at me, child’s eyes, sharp and shining. Sonia positions herself behind, I take her by the wrists, helping her to stand up. Now I can see her properly: the dirty stomach about to burst, that dark, flat belly button, arms and legs so limp. The woman is a girl of uncertain age, too young to have so many children, assuming that all those in the bedroom are hers. She has double circles round her eyes, a border of very dark skin and another of ash colour, reaching the top of her cheeks. A hardened young woman. Take deep breaths, release the air slowly, Sonia recommends, showing her what she should do, a sequence of brief rhythmic puffs to direct the pushes. The girl imitates as best she can but as soon as a new contraction comes she forgets about the breathing, her posture, the two of us, and doubles up again. I want to lie down, she says, surrendering. I can’t take any more. I offer her my arm so that she can stand up while Sonia covers her with a towel. In moving, the girl translates her discomfort with a series of Ows followed by a strident click, swirling the saliva between the tongue and the palate.
We accompany her to the bed, she curls up in the middle, I wonder where the father can be. The two of us take refuge in the bathroom. Sonia sits down, taking the place of the woman in labour, she also seems defeated, she speaks to the tiles: I’m worn out, she says. For a while we are wordless. Sorry, I didn’t know what to do. No, no, I say and venture: Perhaps it would be best to call a doctor, just in case. Sonia answers me by kneading the air with her hands, a call for calm: We’re already here, we just need to stick it out.
Hold me, the girl asks from the bedroom. Another shuffle and each of us is in our position. It’s coming, she says in a moan and her faces fattens like rubber. She becomes red, sweats incredibly, she contains a shout that takes a while to explode, silent first, then released with full force, violent, the way someone being shot must sound. Sonia’s expression adds to the effort, the pushes. At the height of the trauma, the panel that serves as a door slides open and a hand at the end of a skinny, tattooed arm shakes a plastic bag which I grab without words. Before disappearing the invisible man utters a phrase of annoyance, his voice slippery with alcohol: Everything was shut, I had to go to the back of beyond. Sonia makes a nervous gesture for me to unpack the things quickly: a roll of lint, cotton, a bottle of alcohol, another of Pervinox.
A fresh round of contractions and now it really does seem to be coming. Pass me a towel, Sonia asks me and places it like a cushion under the girl’s legs. We swap positions. Sonia bends down, rests her ear on the stomach, asking for silence as she searches for the heartbeat. She detects it, she smiles, reassuring the girl with her thumb up. Now she inserts two fingers into the vagina, index and middle, eyes on the ceiling. It’s very close, she says mid exploration. Rest a bit, get your strength together, we’re almost there. We rotate. Sonia behind, me in front. I crouch down. A moment of serenity and here we go. The girl’s stifled cries, Sonia’s fervent instructions for her to push and breathe, the hot flushes, all encourage me to clutch firmly to those trembling legs to keep them wide open.
What follows is so frenzied that I’m not entirely sure it really happened like this. Twice I saw the baby’s black jelly head crowning, twice I thought it was coming. The third time, when I started to fear that nothing was going to come out at all, that we would need to call an ambulance, shoot off to A&E, something gave way. The head opened a path, dislodging itself, followed by the rest of the body with the momentum of its own weight. The shock was so great that Sonia had to shout at me before I acted: Put your hands out. And I did; if I hadn’t, the baby would have ended up, newly born, on the floor.
The crying, the relief, the exaltation of the mother beyond fatigue, the cord across its neck, It could have been a tragedy, Sonia says in my ear, the atavistic face of the father who only now dares enter and blasts us with that unmistakeable cheap wine breath, Sonia’s watery eyes, my hands sticky with amniotic fluid, that new, silky body with its clusters of tiny fingers, Jonatán, that’s what they’ll call him, who attaches himself without delay to that tit with fat veins, the placenta which finally disengages like a warm, red, palpitating alien, it’s all too much. Inevitably, it takes me back to Simón and his dizzying birth: my waters breaking on the steps of the cemetery, the trip to hospital in Jaime’s pickup with the smell of decomposing petrol and the raucous voice of a nurse congratulating me: You just spat it out, girl, if only they were all like that. Saying goodbye, Sonia confesses at the threshold of her flat: That’s why I got my tubes tied.
I return to bed with the dawn and that dark head emerging from the entrails overwhelms my mind like a sky parting in the middle.