Iosi Havilio - Paradises

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.

Quarter past twelve in the human resources office. No one explained the reason for the appointment, I assume it’s about the missing iguana. They keep me waiting in the same place I sat anticipating the job interview that first time. I don’t know what I’m going to say, I don’t have it very well rehearsed, I’ll improvise and we’ll see what happens. On either side of the armchair there is a novelty: a synthetic pine with felt squirrels attached to the branches and an aluminium magazine rack with copies of National Geographic , an animal atlas and a booklet published for the zoo’s centenary. I open it at random, my eyes fall on a paragraph in an article called ‘The Founding’ and within three lines I’ve come across Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg. The man with the library that had the snake book, the man on the statue, the same man who wrote the novel about Martians. Mr Nic-Nac. Two pages are devoted to praising him without restraint. Energetic, philanthropic, erudite, patriotic and a humanist. At the bottom, a photo of Sarmiento: patron of the park, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento donated three black-necked swans for its inauguration. I continue leafing through the booklet and stop at ‘The Monkey Mystery’. Apparently, at one time, the zoo’s monkeys moved about the island without restriction, an arrangement that some time later was curtailed, leaving them stuck with the cages in which they have been kept to this day. The legend goes that in the summer of 1933, every morning, two chimpanzees would appear without explanation on the other side of the lake. The keepers were on edge for several weeks, because of the outrages the monkeys committed at night but above all because they were unable to fathom how they crossed from shore to shore when they couldn’t swim. The authorities resolved to mount a night guard to solve the puzzle. The answer lay with the buffaloes, which …

A door opens and the greasy guy appears, forcing me to suspend my reading. Shall we? he says, and stretches out his arm to usher me into his office ahead of him. Water, coffee? Thanks, no. And how are they treating you? I smile. You’ve got a good boss. Yes, we get along very well. You caught the tough season, now summer’s coming to an end you’ll see how everything changes, sometimes it gets too quiet. Well, he says, let’s get down to it. He broaches the topic without beating around the bush: Quite some business with the iguana, isn’t it? I nod. A mystery, he says. I think about the monkeys. There’s honestly no explanation, I say and immediately regret it, promising myself that from now on I won’t volunteer anything, to avoid false steps that might give the game away. Let’s see, we’ll just run through it, he says, and moves the mouse, eyes on the monitor screen. Here it says that it was the thirtieth of January. Do you remember anything? I tell him about my routine, the trip round the reptile house, the gathering of lost objects, the doors that close and those that don’t. And the nursery? Couldn’t you have left it open without meaning to? I shake my head determinedly and during the silence that follows I’m convinced the guy’s going to say something like You’re not telling me the truth or Someone saw you. But no. Ok, he says, bringing the topic to a close, to my surprise. We’ll have to keep investigating.