CONTRO CORRENTE

“Pregnancy,” Dr. Maroni says with a solemn smile, “is not a pathology.”

Dr. Maroni, later forced into retirement and investigated for malpractice, is clearly contro corrente, very much against the swim of things.

“Pregnancy is not an illness,” he insists. “Childbirth is the most natural thing in the world.”

In order to prepare the mothers, and incidentally the fathers, for this extremely natural event, he proposes to teach them a method of self-hypnosis that will allow them to blank out their minds and let the body's normal and natural animal functions have their way. Underlining the substantial scientific underpinning to what he teaches, he mentions French and Russian experts, American research centers. Such references score highly in an insecure country that no longer believes it could finance any major scientific discovery.

The young men and women, arm in nervous arm on awkward chairs, are impressed.

Yes, considerable research on the extent to which contractions can or cannot be consciously controlled has been carried out in California, Dr. Maroni explains. He speaks in great technical detail, and always with an extravagant and tubby smile, of all the various chemical and physiological changes that take place during childbirth, the extraordinary fact that the child's head is actually wider than the space it has to pass through, the importance therefore of the screw effect caused by the child's turning in the birth canal, the consequent danger that the umbilical cord will become twisted around his or her neck.

This is the wonderful mechanism, he smiles, that God and nature have devised for bringing us into this world. And above all it is perfectly natural.

To me, sitting in a row of pregnant mothers, the whole thing begins to seem more and more frightening. The word “natural” after all can very appropriately be applied to such phenomena as earthquakes, volcanoes, and, most commonly, death.

Dr. Maroni is a big man, bulky, heavy breathing, but with a hypnotic voice. Relax, he tells his middle-class audience when he has got them properly scared: what we are experiencing is the tension caused by the conscious mind's awareness of danger, our unnatural intellectual awareness of a natural process; this blocks what would otherwise be the body's natural reactions and so provokes the very danger it has imagined and seeks to avoid. What we have to do then is to re-learn a primitive innocence . . .

He begins his autogenous training. The tone is oddly biblical: “Let each one of us say unto ourselves: I am relaxed, I am serene, I am calm, I am at peace . . .”

We are in a small, institutionally spare room of square-backed chairs and posters inviting women to have their breasts examined for cancer, or to get themselves tested for AIDS, or to discuss their marital difficulties. For this is Verona's Consultorio Famiiiare. “Vient, donna,” says a huge poster, “vieni al consultorio.” Come woman, come to the clinic. The abrupt rhetoric reminds me of those dull programs one occasionally tunes into on the BBC World Service, where well-spoken announcers talk worthily about educating peasant folk in the third world. Notably, there is no publicity for contraceptives. Nor abortion. The Pope will have his sops.

“Let each one of us say unto ourselves, I am at peace, there is nothing I need to think about, there is nothing irritating me, nothing I need to do . . .”

Everybody closes their eyes and sets about this impossible business of relaxing. Above their bowed heads, the Madonna presides, a small, rather gaudy ceramic on the wall to the doctor's left. Like most modern Italian mothers she has had (in the Catholic version of the story) only one child, and, as we are being advised, she opted for the most natural of births: simple surroundings, the freedom to adopt any position felt to be desirable. The light, in particular, one imagines, despite the extravagant star, must have been kept fairly low. (Dr. Maroni has let us know of his enormous contempt for the bright fluorescent light used in most hospital delivery rooms, which he believes makes a baby's arrival into the world unnecessarily traumatic, like being woken by a searchlight.) Joseph, of course, does not appear in the ceramic. If he was present and supportive at the birth, as a good modern husband should be, he certainly did the disappearing trick later. As likewise the real father. But this again is more or less the norm in Italy. I know of very few men here who have actually changed any soiled swaddling clothes. And I envy them.

The doctor, who always makes a point of letting us know that he is not paid for his evangelical encouragement of a return to nature, has an immensely hypnotic, self-assured, complacent voice: “Let each of us say unto ourselves, I am the skin on my fingertips, the softer flesh beneath, the wrinkles over my knuckles, the veins on the back of my hands . . .”

The game is to concentrate on various parts of the body, minutely, one by one, and relax them. I concentrate, and, as is my way when I concentrate, grow more conscious and, if possible with all the coffee I drink, more tense.

“Let each of us imagine,” says the doctor's slow, sage voice, “that we are entering our own bodies through our vaginas. First the outer lips open, then the redder inner lips. There, we are now inside the vagina. We have reached the neck of the uterus. We are entering our own wombs, where our baby swims in his amniotic fluid . . .”

It's at moments like this that I can't help wondering at the good doctor's insistence that the husbands must attend these sessions. Unable to relax my uterus, I decide to concentrate on the bizarre grammar deployed to achieve some of the effects he is after, imagining literal translations of the variety: Let each of us reflect to ourselves on how much to us changes the cutaneous surface passing from the smooth dark of the groin to the swelling rough and hair of the pubic zone . . .

There's the click of somebody's cassette recorder reaching the end of its tape. The doctor's voice is raised a little in obvious irritation. He hates interruptions, especially when the spell is approaching its climax: “Ecco, we are entering the womb to embrace our own tiny bambino, who is part of us and not part of us. We are at one with our bambino, who is at one with u s . . .”

A little later and we are more chastely located inside our lungs. Indeed, we are our lungs, and our whole being is no more and no less than the rhythm of our breathing. He lets this continue for some time, the voice becoming more and more soporific, while at the same time he occasionally snaps his fingers to see if we respond with that small instinctive intake of breath that betrays the breathing of sleep, or hypnosis. Noticeably, my wife responds perfectly. Then he wakes us up with a clap of his hands.

How had we faired, he asks.

Into the inevitable embarrassed silence that attends such occasions, Rita says that she has no problem achieving this super-relaxed state when she comes to these sessions and indeed when she practices on the sofa at home as he suggests, but that when she actually gave birth the first time she was unable to do so. This is why she is repeating the course, because she feels it would be useful, if only she could do it at the crucial moment when it was required.

There is a sharp intake of breath around us that has nothing to do with sleep now; partly because the idea of having a second child is so momentous in contemporary Italy as to be seen, depending on your orientation, either as a form of conspicuous consumption or as a Catholic rebuke to those who are clearly not doing what the Pope says they should, then partly because her experience appears to challenge the authoritative, almost authoritarian, doctor's claims that his training will prove invaluable at the dramatic moment.

Dr. Maroni has a way of twiddling his thumbs while smiling in an avuncular, slightly priestly fashion. He asks her what exactly she felt went wrong. She describes the appalling back pains she experienced, the terrible contractions, then the feeling of desolation in the small and rather shabby labor room

“Was your husband there?”

“Yes, but in the end a pain is a pain,” she says, rather too ambiguously it seems to me.

The doctor will not stop smiling, his face all reassurance. “It's a question of practice,” he says. “Practice, practice, practice. . . .” I fervently hope my wife won't feel she needs to repeat events of this kind ad infinitum until she has mastered the technique.

Then a voice from the back asks the question that is most on everybody's mind: Is it true that there is no intensive care unit at the doctor's small provincial hospital, and no facility for immediate heart surgery on the newborn child in the event of this being necessary?

The doctor frowns. After stressing the naturalness of childbirth, this is not the kind of question he wanted to hear, but to duck it would be to lose almost his entire following. There wouldn't be another birth in his hospital for the next hundred years. In the event of an emergency, he says, and it is costing him some effort now to maintain his smile, there is a helicopter at the hospital of Borgo Trento in Verona that can be at his hospital in approximately five minutes and back at Borgo Trento in a further five. Since it takes at least forty minutes to set up an operating theatre and find the necessary surgeons for a delicate operation, the baby is thus just as safe being born out of town as in the center. If not safer, since there they tend to induce birth with a drip and use every technological barbarity to impose their will on this natural event, rather than simply letting it happen. Not to mention those fierce lights when the baby emerges . . .

While many further questions are asked about the nature of muscle contractions and their relation to breathing, about diet, about the value of red lighting and low music and nice soft double beds in the delivery room, it's clear that what most people in the group are meditating upon as the evening draws to a close are those crucial seconds when somebody decides to call the emergency service at Borgo Trento, when somebody else has to start a helicopter engine, when doctors have to rush out onto the dark tarmac in the cold night air with a tiny newborn child in their arms . . .

Because for Italians pregnancy is, inescapably, a pathology, and childbirth its crisis and resolution. The lengths Dr. Maroni has to go to convince us to the contrary can only serve as confirmation. His is a voice crying in the wilderness, defining the wilderness for those who hadn't noticed it. The couples we met at his little sessions used him the way some people use homeopathic medicines: as a sort of fashionable and politically correct addition to the real thing, but not a basket one would seriously consider putting very many eggs in. And if the man is under investigation now for neglect, which I am sure he is not guilty of, it can only be because somebody who had a sad experience is convinced, and was probably always convinced, that childbirth should only take place in the center of a huge concentration of technological resources and expertise. If it went okay for the Madonna in her stable, that was merely because she was delivering the son of God. After all, she never tried again, did she? To those conceived by more natural methods the state owes every possible logistical support (as afterwards it owes every child an education, medical care, a steady job, a pension, TV entertainment, and a funeral). Nowhere could a nation's determination to forget the precariousness of its peasant past and embrace the protective mystique of modern science be more evident than in Italian attitudes to childbirth . . . after which infancy may be seen as a long and carefully guarded period of convalescence.