Lying on the examination table in Wilma’s consulting room, I think of my son, who didn’t come along as she took me on a tour of the huge, dark house he’s been living in with this woman for I’m not sure how long—weeks, months, more than a year?
I got the impression my son never ventured upstairs, which was even colder and darker than downstairs, and divided into many rooms, all virtually empty. The only furniture in mine is a bed, a writing desk, and a chair. The bed is draped with a pink chenille coverlet, and I was so dismayed by the sight of that fabric, something I wouldn’t even put on a dog’s bed, I told myself, that I couldn’t help blushing.
Wilma noticed.
“This was all here when we moved in,” she told me. “We never have guests, so we haven’t redecorated the upstairs.”
Taking advantage of my son’s absence, I casually asked Wilma, “Where’s the baby’s room?”
“What baby?” Wilma carelessly answered.
Her cheeks turned faintly pink. She bent down and dragged my suitcase into the room so she wouldn’t have to look me in the eye.
“Well…” I said.
But the child’s name, that cursed “Souhar,” adamantly refused to cross my lips.
“You know who I mean,” I said, my voice almost desperate. “Please, please, stop pretending! My granddaughter…”
Has there been some decree that I must be punished whenever I seem to sidestep that hideous name?
“Talk to Ralph,” she interrupted.
We came back down the imposing stone stairway. In the front hall, Wilma opened a door with her key and ushered me into her consulting room.
“Are you a GP like Ralph?” I asked.
“No,” said this woman, “I’m a gynecologist.”
Then, in a gentle, professional voice: “Get undressed, mama, and lie down on the table. I’ll be right back.”
I never saw a doctor’s office in Bordeaux as modern and well equipped as Wilma’s in this humble village of San Augusto. From the rug to the armchairs, everything is fuchsia and white. The desk is a long sheet of glass on four fuchsia legs. The computer, a Mac, is the same color, and so is the pad on the examination table, and every lamp, every cabinet.
The windows look onto the deep, dark valley on one side, and the houses around the church on the other. There are no curtains. If I raise my head a little I can see the neighbors’ windows, and I imagine them seeing me too, looking at me lying naked on the table in this Wilma’s office, this gynecologist who lives with my son. Unless those houses are empty and abandoned, and there’s no human life in San Augusto but us.
Wilma comes back, now wearing a white smock, her hair tied behind her neck, her delicate face carefully made up again. I’m very uncomfortable having her see me this way, bound up in all the unhappiness of a body too long neglected. I cover my eyes with one hand. I murmur, “You know, this feels very awkward…”
“Don’t worry,” says Wilma, “I’m a doctor, nothing more.”
“I used to be pretty,” I say, suddenly powerless to shut myself up, “but, I don’t know how it happened, I lived my life, my mind was on other things, and my body, how can I say it, my body went its own way because I wasn’t bothering with it, it led its own little independent life, and of course I looked at it every day, but honestly, I didn’t see anything…”
“Relax,” says Wilma soothingly, “I’m not paying any attention to that.”
I turn my head so she won’t see my damp eyes.
The house is perfectly silent. What’s my son doing? Is he watching us? I vaguely sense other breaths than our own stirring the air in this room.
This Wilma woman comes and goes, pulling on her gloves, laying out her instruments, and I notice her beautiful plum leather pumps, and—below the hem of her violet skirt, half concealed by the smock—her oddly stout calves and thick ankles, and it moves me to see them, slight as she is in every other way. I whisper, “Isn’t my stomach strangely swollen?”
“We’ll see,” Wilma murmurs.
Her voice sounds suddenly different, heavy with foreboding. I put my feet in the stirrups, feeling my thighs wobble and jiggle. My skin isn’t fair, but varicose veins meander very visibly beneath the surface.
Wilma gently spreads my legs, slowly pushes the speculum into my vagina.
“That’s very cold,” I say, flinching slightly.
Wilma doesn’t answer. I raise my head a little and our eyes meet. Hers are filled with panic and perplexity.
She quickly gets up from her stool. She thrusts her hands deep into her pockets, goes to the street-facing window. She comes back, sits down, looks into the speculum again. Turning a wheel, she widens the opening. I groan in pain. She immediately turns the wheel back the other way.
“So,” I say, “what do you see?”
She doesn’t answer. I ask again. Stubborn silence.
I look past her shoulder, toward the window, where a little white chicken is now standing on the outside ledge, poised on one leg in anxious but focused attention, seeming to observe me with an implacable eye. I ask, “You have chickens?”
For a moment Wilma doesn’t understand, but then she glances over her shoulder.
“Yes,” she says, as if relieved at the change of subject, “but we don’t have time to look after them, we don’t even collect the eggs. You can, if you like.”
“I’ve never done that,” I say, faintly insulted, “and I don’t know that I’ll have time either. I’ve got to go back to work. I have to find a school here.”
“That’s not going to be possible, with what you’ve got in your belly,” cries Wilma, in a strangely horrified tone.
She yanks out the speculum, drops it into a little metal pail, shoves back her stool. She stands up and tears off her gloves, almost furiously.
“Who did you make this with, mama? What have you done with your life?”
Slightly sore, I pull myself up and sit on the table, my legs hanging over the white and fuchsia checkerboard tiles. I shiver in terror.
“So… Tell me what’s wrong with me,” I say, my voice strident.
With a sigh, I add: “And what am I guilty of now?”
Wilma’s long brown eyes seem to soften in something like pity. With a slow, graceful gesture, buying time, she pulls the elastic band from her hair.
“After all,” I say, “menopause isn’t a crime.”
“Oh, mama,” she says, “that’s not what it is at all!”
“So why has my period stopped?”
She shakes her head, at a loss for words.
“In any case,” she says, “you’re not sick. There’s just… something that doesn’t look like things we know.”
Suddenly I can’t bear the thought of her saying another word. I gracelessly plop down from the table. I can feel the thing in my stomach caught off guard by the sudden movement, I feel it lurch just above my pelvis, then settle back into place and grow still.
I hurry to get dressed. Meanwhile, Wilma takes off her smock. Beneath it she has on a tight violet angora sweater. The dusky skin above her breasts is slightly slack, though her face is taut as can be. This woman who lives with my son might well be far older than I am.
Not looking at her, struggling to button my pants, I ask, “Will my stomach get any bigger?”
“Yes,” says Wilma, “I think this is just the beginning.”
“There’s no way to get rid of it?”
“This isn’t the usual kind of thing, mama. I can’t take the risk. We’ll just have to see.”
“But,” I murmur, “it’s not…demonic, is it?”
“Yes, it is,” says Wilma.
She forces out a chuckle to hide her dismay, as if it were still possible to inject a little levity into our words, or at least as if this feint were necessary, not as a mutual deception but simply as a way of going on without falling into numb horror whenever we’re together, our mouths agape in disbelief.
I have one last question for this gynecologist who lives in my son’s house and who, I say to myself, may in some way be holding my son captive.
“Could food have caused this thing?”
She raises a surprised eyebrow.
“Of course not,” she says, “it has nothing to do with food.”