Richard Brautigan - The Abortion - An Historical Romance 1966

So I just sat there listening to the abortion going on in the other room and looking at Vida and where I was at: this house in Mexico, so far away from my San Francisco library.

The small gas heater was doing its thing because it was cool within the adobe walls of the doctor’s office.

Our room was in the centre of a labyrinth.

There was a little hall on one side of the room, running back past the open door of the toilet and ending at a kitchen.

The kitchen was about twenty feet away from where Vida lay unconscious with her stomach vacant like a chalkboard. I could see the refrigerator and a sink in the kitchen and a stove with some pans on it.

On the other side of our room was a door that led into a huge room, almost like a small gym, and I could see still another room off the gym.

The door was open and there was the dark abstraction of another bed in the room like a large flat sleeping animal.

I looked down at Vida still submerged in a vacuum of anaesthesia and listened to the abortion ending in the operating room.

Suddenly there was a gentle symphonic crash of surgical instruments and then I could hear the sounds of cleaning up joined to another chalkboard.

The doctor came through the room carrying the teenage girl in his arms. Though the doctor was a small man, he was very strong and carried the girl without difficulty.

She looked very silent and unconscious. Her hair hung strangely over his arm in a blonde confusion. He took the girl through the small gym and into the adjoining room where he lay her upon the dark animal-like bed.

Then he came over and closed the door to our room and went into the forward reaches of the labyrinth and came back with the girl’s parents.

‘It went perfect,’ he said. ‘No pain, all clean.’

They didn’t say anything to him and he came back to our room. As he passed through the door, the people were watching him and they saw Vida lying there and me sitting beside her.

I looked at them and they looked at me before the door was closed. Their faces were a stark and frozen landscape.

The boy came into the room carrying the bucket and he went into the toilet and flushed the foetus and the abortion leftovers down the toilet.

Just after the toilet flushed, I heard the flash of the instruments being sterilized by fire.

It was the ancient ritual of fire and water all over again to be all over again and again in Mexico today.

Vida still lay there unconscious. The Mexican girl came in and looked at Vida. ‘She’s sleeping,’ the girl said. ‘It went fine.’

She went back into the operating room and then the next woman came into the operating room. She was the ‘one’ coming the Mexican girl had mentioned earlier. I didn’t know what she looked like because she had come since we’d been there.

‘Has she eaten today?’ the doctor said.

‘No,’ a man said sternly, as if he were talking about dropping a hydrogen bomb on somebody he didn’t like.

The man was her husband. He had come into the operating room. He had decided that he wanted to watch the abortion. They were awfully tense people and the woman said only three words all the time she was there. After she had her shot, he helped her off with her clothes.

He sat down while her legs were strapped apart on the operating table. She was unconscious just about the time they finished putting her in position for the abortion because they started almost immediately.

This abortion was done automatically like a machine. There was very little conversation between the doctor and his helpers.

I could feel the presence of the man in the operating room. He was like some kind of statue sitting there looking on, waiting for a museum to snatch him and his wife up. I never saw the woman.

After the abortion the doctor was tired and Vida was still lying there unconscious. The doctor came into the room. He looked down at Vida.

‘Not yet,’ he said, answering his own question.

I said no because I didn’t have anything else to do with my mouth.

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s like this.’

The doctor looked like an awfully tired man. God only knows how many abortions he had performed that day.

He came over and sat down on the bed. He took Vida’s hand and he felt her pulse. He reached down and opened one of her eyes. Her eye looked back at him from a thousand miles away.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘She’ll be back in a few moments.’

He went into the toilet and washed his hands. After he finished washing his hands, the boy came in with the bucket and took care of that.

The girl was cleaning up in the operating room. The doctor had put the woman on the examination bed in the operating room. He had quite a thing going just taking care of the bodies.

‘OHHHHHHHHHH!’ I heard a voice come from behind the gym door where the doctor had taken the teenage girl. ‘OHHHHHHHHHH!’ It was a sentimental drunken voice. It was the girl. ‘OHHHHHHHHHH!’

‘16!’ she said. ‘I-HHHHHHHHHH!’

Her parents were talking to her in serious, hushed tones. They were awfully respectable.

‘OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!’

They were acting as if she had got drunk at a family reunion and they were trying to cover up her drunkenness.

‘OHHHHHHHHHH! I feel funny!’

There was total silence from the couple in the operating room. The only sound was the Mexican girl. The boy had come back through our room and had gone somewhere else in the building. He never came back.

After the girl finished cleaning up the operating room, she went into the kitchen and started cooking a big steak for the doctor. She got a bottle of Miller’s beer out of the refrigerator and poured the doctor a big glass of it. He sat down in the kitchen. I could barely see him drinking the beer.

Then Vida started stirring in her sleep. She opened her eyes. They didn’t see anything for a moment or so and then they saw me. ‘Hi,’ she said in a distant voice.

‘Hi,’ I said, smiling.

‘I feel dizzy,’ she said, coming in closer.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘Everything is fine.’

‘Oh, that’s good,’ she said. There.

‘Just lie quietly and take it easy,’ I said.

The doctor got up from the table in the kitchen and came in. He was holding the glass of beer in his hand.

‘She’s coming back,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good.’

He took his glass of beer and went back into the kitchen and sat down again. He was very tired.

Then I heard the people in the outside gym room dressing their daughter. They were in a hurry to leave. They sounded as if they were dressing a drunk.

‘I can’t get my hands up,’ the girl said.

Her parents said something stern to her and she got her hands up in the air, but they had so much trouble putting her little brassiere on that they finally abandoned trying and the mother put the brassiere in her purse.

‘OHHHHHHHHHH! I’m so dizzy,’ the girl said as her parents half-carried her, half-dragged her out of the place.

I heard a couple of doors close and then everything was silent, except for the doctor’s lunch cooking in the kitchen. The steak was being fried in a very hot pan and it made a lot of noise.

‘What’s that?’ Vida said. I didn’t know if she was talking about the noise of the girl leaving or the sound of the steak cooking.

‘It’s the doctor having lunch,’ I said.

‘Is it that late?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I’ve been out a long time,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’re going to have to leave soon but we won’t leave until you feel like it.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Vida said.