Many women neglected the daily herbal baths and imbibings which helped pelvic dilation. This exercise was called breaking bones. “How often did you break?” Grandma, suspecting the worst, would ask. Horrifying answers would come, dripping from flaky, fear-twisted lips. Hearing the same woman scream and express the fear that she was going to die would make one say, under one’s breath, that she deserved every ounce of pain she got, though for us that was no consolation at all, because the baby still had to come out.
I was not allowed to witness the actual moment of birth. I always left when the woman lay down on her back, a pillow under her head, legs up under the sheet, perspiration dotting her face, fear popping under her eyelids, panic just a breath away, with Grandma combatting waves of hysteria. At such moments Grandma was like a goddess, a priestess, an oracle whose every gesture, every sigh, every twitch spoke volumes. At the flick of her finger, I would leave the arena, an acrid smell in my nose, the picture of the woman’s face deeply etched in my mind, the sound of her voice buzzing in my ears, a vague evaluation of her chances coursing through my head.
At the beginning of my stint, I used to be afraid that the woman was going to die. I would quake and quiver, with sharp pains kicking up storms in my breast. Each woman cried differently, and with some it felt as if their blood would be on your hands, and on the hands of your children’s children, if they died. The men, gloomy and silent, were not reassuring either. They seemed to be studying every fluctuation, every nuance in the woman’s vociferations, as though waiting to pounce on you the moment they were sure that she had drawn her last breath. Half my mind would be busy with the woman, visualizing her anguish and her efforts, and half would be working out the safest escape route, but sometimes it went on for so long that I dozed off and slept, the woman’s screams fading away like wisps of smoke in the evening sky, until I would be jogged back into wakefulness.
I would go outside and be whipped by the smell of cow dung or pig shit or goat urine, depending on what animals were kept by the family. On rainy days the pigsties, oozing liquid shit, stank to high heaven, worse than the sodden kraals and the waterlogged cow pens. This stink and the runny shit I often stepped into didn’t endear animals to me in general.
It was in everyone’s interest for the delivery to go well. If all failed and the woman, with baby head peeping or leg popping, had to be rushed to the hospital, the resultant cloud of tension and anxiety messed up everyone’s peace of mind. There was only one car in the village, owned by a scion of Stefano, but it was more often than not out of order. It would often stop dead on the road, and he’d ask us to help push it.
The chronic unreliability of this machine meant that somebody would have to find a van to take the woman to the hospital, because in that condition she was in no position to sit on a bicycle. The most annoying aspect of it all, however, was that most of these cases had had prior warnings from doctors not to risk delivering at home. They always had reasons for not complying.
The transformation adults underwent with the onslaught of pain both fascinated and frightened me. Women who normally worked like horses, digging, fetching water, carrying mountains of firewood, washing hills of clothes and the like, would suddenly be reduced to whimpering wrecks, head turning this way and that, arms beating weakly, legs gone rubbery, self-control in tatters. They reminded me of a dog under attack from thousands of bees or a teetering paper canoe in a stormy swamp.
It was equally fascinating to see the same women after the baby had arrived. They seemed to have sweated out all the pain, all the anguish, all the nightmares, and were open to joy, relief and satisfaction. I would see them laughing, smiling, beaming, shedding tears of joy, as though what had occurred before had been a joke, a mere bit of playacting.
The cause of all the prior commotion would lie there glistening like a baby monkey soaked in grease or a piglet immersed in crude oil, all wrinkles and purple membrane, the ugly umbilical cord popping with each exhalation. Our ordeal would be over. Dissolving into the air would be all the lost sleep, all the past anxiety, all the fizzled tension, all the sacrificial blood of cocks beheaded, cocks strangled or cocks buried alive at witch doctors’ shrines.
My first delivery was the hardest and the most memorable. The messenger woke us up just after midnight. It had rained, and a cold wind was blowing, rustling the iron sheets of the roof and making tree branches wail. Contemplating the discomfort outside made the bed feel warmer and sleep seem sweeter. Hearing the unwelcome caller made me wish the wind would carry him away and bury him in a ditch till day broke, but there was no stopping such individuals; they acted with the urgency of boiling milk on the rise.
Grandma called me several times, and I feigned sleep, like the children in Uncle Kawayida’s story who overheard their parents fucking. She shook me and I woke up with a start. She laughed and I laughed too, but that was where the levity ended. I had seen the woman in question twice; she was short and thin, her belly like a sack of potatoes strapped onto her frail body. Why hadn’t she gone to the hospital? I wished death on her, and then I revoked my wish because, whichever way it turned out, we still had to put in an appearance.
The messenger, a big adolescent boy with thick calves, had come on a bicycle, but Grandma would not sit on it despite his great expertise (he regularly carried coffee sacks up the implacable Mpande Hill to the mill, and participated in the suicidal downhill races in which one could brake only with one’s bare heels). I sat on the carrier for part of the way, but the bumps were so bad that I decided to walk. We arrived caked in mud. I had damaged a toenail on a rock, but there was no time for self-pity because of the turmoil at our destination.
The boy’s father, big, dark, tall, was trembling and his teeth were chattering as he bit back his tears. The woman was wailing, thinly, as if she were using the very last of her energy. This was more frightening than the more energetic, full-voiced screaming I heard on latter missions. This was the cry of a woman with a dead baby inside her, heavy like a sack of stones. It was the cry of a dog dying after being beaten by a horde of boys for stealing eggs or for biting somebody. She was calling for a priest, of all people! I peeped inside the room, saw the popping eyes, smelled the long labor and something else I could not name, and I drew back. It took Grandma two hours to deliver the baby. It should have been a large, thick-waisted parcel, but on the contrary, it was as small as a fist. We spent the rest of the night with the family. The puny baby woke us up in the morning with such a screech that Grandma glowed with pride.
The leper in our village, Fingers, was a nice, kind, harmless man. I was not afraid of him, but the scars of his deformity deeply disturbed and haunted me. The fading pink knots on the spots where the fingers had been made my stomach turn whenever I met him. My skin crawled when he touched me, or patted me on the head as he sent greetings to Grandpa or Grandma. I would stand there, not pulling away because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, answering his questions while praying for something drastic to happen to terminate my ordeal. Fingers was a generous man. He now and then cornered me and invited me to his home, and he gave me large yellow mangoes and juicy purple sugarcane. His children would be playing in the yard, without a care in the world. I could not refuse the gifts; it wasn’t polite or cultured to do so. So I ate, putting a brave face on things like the adult I believed I was, but as soon as I left, I would push a finger down my throat. I wanted it all out: all the residual leprosy, all the germs, all the juice. The fact that his wife and children bore no signs of infection did not reassure me: there was the possibility that leprosy was only infectious to non-family members.