Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

She inspected everything without a word. For me? she gestured. We nodded, and stood there watching like nervous scientists. She started to eat the sweets. She ate them, solemnly, one after another.

‘Shouldn’t we stop her?’ asked Benjamin, but we were so happy she was eating our sweets, at least she wasn’t rejecting us.

I showed her the ramshackle baño . She looked frightened. She stayed on the threshold, staring at the bath.

Benjamin said, ‘She’s never seen one before.’

‘Of course she has. This is the twenty-first century.’ — It wasn’t, though, in Brazil. How could I have been so stupid? I wonder sometimes if I’ve always been stupid, always failed to understand what mattered. Now I’m fifty-five and it’s all too late.

‘I hope she knows how to use the loo.’ He was thinking aloud, sparing me nothing. Enormous doubts began to gather.

It was hard to know what to do that day. If we’d been in a city, with bookshops, I could have read her stories in Portuguese. (Had she seen books before? Would she like them? Would she like me? Would she ever love me?) We were perilously near her home, only three or four miles away, and I was jumpy, fearing her family would change their mind, we had paid them the money now, after all, they might come to the hotel with the chief of police, or come to the hotel and weep and plead… I took her for a walk, and everything felt dangerous. She wouldn’t hold my hand; she stumped along, hanging a few feet behind me, so I had to keep turning round in terror that I’d lose her, and I soon found the walk too tiring; so different from striding along on my own. Besides, it was too hot for a pale English woman… she was evidently used to being too hot. She would have walked for ever, but I took her back, still hanging behind me, pale gold, impassive.

When we’d nearly got to the hotel, she ran away behind some flame-coloured eucalyptus trees which lined the abandoned railway track; there her scarlet nylon was almost invisible, and my heart thumped in wild alarm, thinking she had run back to Mummy and Daddy, but when I spotted her she was crouching down and peeing. A lot of things were going to have to be explained.

‘What time does a three-year-old go to bed?’ Benjamin wondered. We didn’t know. We decided on eight o’clock. We looked in her bag for pyjamas. There were no pyjamas, of course. It would have seemed uncaring, or faintly indecent, to let her sleep without pyjamas, though neither of us ever wore pyjamas; I found her a small silk vest of mine.

I took her for a bath. She screamed. She wouldn’t let me take her clothes off. I think she thought I was going to murder her, penned in this blank foreign place. Her fear of me was terrifying. If I inspired such fear, what kind of person must I really be? I felt I was forced up against some naked truth, in the horrible bathroom which smelled of drains. Anna Maria was not polite; Anna Maria couldn’t lie to me, or understand what I wanted her to think… It was as if she pierced to what I really was, instinctively, and it was monstrous, but I told myself to stop thinking these things.

I gave up on the bath. I sponged her face. I remember enjoying that intensely, sponging her small arms and face. I knelt on the floor. I sponged her feet. Surely she must see I only meant to love her. Small broad feet engrained with black. Her smallness, innocence, helplessness. I found myself weeping though the smell was sour, the immemorial cheesey smell that I’d turned away from all over the world wherever the poor confronted us. I sponged her feet till they were clean. Then I smiled up at her, triumphant, but her eyes were closed, she was pretending to be dead, perhaps she was less frightened if she pretended that the worst had already happened to her, or perhaps she was just exhausted, just sleeping.

I took her by the hand, led her to her bedroom, showed her her bed, shut the shutters. I blew her a kiss, I didn’t want to rush her though I longed to hold her in my arms. I made to leave. She ran after me, screaming. A torrent of Brazilian Portuguese, she wanted her mother, her father, her sisters. She was small, but her grief and her will were huge. I pointed to myself, and said ‘New mother. Mother. I’m your mother.’ She hit me, with furious small hands, tried to push past me and run away.

It was one in the morning before we slept, in our bed which creaked whenever she moved, curled between me and Benjamin.

She had not stopped protesting, not for one moment. She had merely collapsed, in the end, exhausted, in the middle of saying, for the hundredth time, ‘You’re not my mother! You’re not, you’re not!’

I lay there listening to her fast shallow breath. I could feel its heat on my shoulder, faintly. The bed was too narrow for the three of us. At four in the morning she woke up again, shivering, and started to cry, this time very quietly, and it happened as I had hoped and dreamed, she let me hold her against my body — I cradled her to me, her head in my arm, and listened to her breathing change, she fell asleep, I lay and marvelled, and in a little we slept together.

In the morning we were woken by an unaccustomed noise and saw her bare bottom underneath my pink silk perched on the window-ledge above the sheer drop; she had wrestled the shutters open, she was struggling with the window catch, we were fifteen feet up but she was going to jump out — we pulled her in again and tried to console her. Her screams were so shrill, they tore at my guts… what if people thought we were murdering her? ‘Please, please,’ I found myself begging her. ‘Please don’t cry. Please. You’re safe with us. You’ll be happy with us.’

Then she was sick; perhaps yesterday’s sweets, perhaps terror at what she had seen of her future. She was sick on the table, on her only dress, on our case, on Benjamin’s shoes, on the carpet. We had no cloth to wipe it up. I had to do it with Benjamin’s shirt, wrung out in tepid tap water, while he held the child on his knee and rocked her, and she quietened a little, from screams to sobs, hiccupy sobs with long silences between them. After I’d finished I threw the shirt in the bin.

The sight of them together, curled together, provoked an odd emotion I still haven’t understood, his bigness curled around her littleness, he looked happy, remember I had loved him once — ‘I’ll take her now,’ I said, I insisted. But she wouldn’t come to me.

My life as a mother lasted less than two weeks. It was no time at all, yet it seemed like for ever once I knew that things were going wrong.

We set off on the drive to the airport, a five-day drive if we went flat out. Perhaps everything would have been all right if Benjy and I could have got her out of South America. Even after eighteen months we were strangers there, we didn’t know how to find toys or doctors or children’s clothes or food she would eat. We didn’t know anyone else with children who would have helped us with all these things, shown us how to be mother and father, let their children play with her. I never saw her playing with other children. So many things I never saw her do, I have the rest of my life to realise how many.

She stopped eating. We offered her fruit. Half-eaten fruit lay around the hotel room, pocked with small white tooth-marks soon going brown; it littered the floor of the car, and stank. We were short of sleep, and too tired to clean up, too tired even to keep ourselves clean. One morning as we were packing to go I noticed Benjamin smelled of sweat; I’ve always liked clean men, I was indignant, amazed; ‘Benjamin! Your armpits smell!’

His eyes were red. ‘OK, Alexandra.’

‘Well go and have a shower. It’s disgusting.’

‘I’m trying to clean this child’s teeth…’