And the mother stuck to her guns: she wanted another daughter now, so that they could name her Emily. The father had sworn he’d give her three more little lads first, but fate proved him wrong yet again: along came Emily two years later. In return for which it hadn’t been all that easy, since the baby was in a breech position and refused to turn, it took a long time and Madie, as she put it later, had gone through the mill. It had taken a bit more persuasion on Pata’s part to convince her that two out of three births went like clockwork, and that therefore they ought to keep going—which they did, successfully, because Sidonie was born exactly one year and five days after Emily. And while Madie had to concede that the birth really had been easy as pie, she was beginning to drag her feet when it came to heading back out onto the battlefield—the expression was Pata’s—and for a while she took a contraceptive, which he tried to hide from her now and again, to give them a chance, so he said, but she didn’t find it at all funny.
No one really understood why Madie tossed her pills in the garbage one day. She complained that she’d been putting on weight but, logically, successive pregnancies were more at fault than contraception. She also complained of lethargy, dizziness, nausea—in short, all the poor excuses you come up with when you want to get rid of something, and maybe that was the only reason, Madie wanted to go off the pill without losing face, without admitting that she was wrong, that her fate was that of enthusiastic, disorderly procreation, or at least that was what she thought at the time. In any case, chemistry hadn’t caused her organism any harm because she got pregnant immediately afterwards. What no one could have predicted, on the other hand, was how long that subsequent birth ended up taking, or perhaps it was the midwife who got it wrong, thinking that labor had already begun. Forty-eight hours later Madie was still at the hospital, exhausted, and her epidural had gone to waste. When the pain became noticeable, she endured it with courage: C’mon girl, we’ll do it like in the old days. But in fact the pain quickly got the better of her goodwill, and she ended up screaming so loud that a quaking Pata quickly retreated to the other side of the door. Then they’d had her torn perineum to sew up, because Lotte weighed over eight pounds on the hospital scale.
Thus, it was with great reticence that Madie greeted Pata’s joyful outbursts when she came home from the maternity ward, particularly as she refused to take the pill again for the same somewhat obscure reasons she had given before. So they came up with a compromise, which made Pata complain and Madie tremble: during her fertile days, the father would resort to the withdrawal method. He sulked, frustrated. The mother was terrified she might make a mistake, until she got her period and was reassured for two weeks or so. Yet it was because of a miscalculation—unless Pata let something out and didn’t say anything—that she found herself pregnant again. And although, once she had digested the news, she accepted the father’s pirouettes with good grace up until her eighth month, after Marion’s birth she moved her mattress to the other side of the room and decreed that that was it. To be honest, Pata did not protest initially. And by the time he did, Madie had already gotten used to the change and didn’t often go back on her decision.
There’s no way of knowing whether things would have stayed like that forever, that regular, forced abstinence, but the huge tidal wave, at that very point in their lives, confronted Pata and Madie with far more pressing concerns. The mother deemed that between nine births and a major flood, fifteen years had gone by without a lull. She would have liked to have a moment of rest—but there it was, there were storms, wind, and the ocean constantly devouring their land, chasing them from their home precisely thirteen days after the catastrophe, and life had been nothing but catastrophic ever since.
So there is nothing to thank the heavens or fate or anything for, ruminates Madie. She’s had her fill of pain, and if she brought children into the world, it was not so that they would be taken from her. It will be a long while before she’s ready to forgive the world. She’s filled with spite, is Madie: a week of mourning and fate figures they’re even? A likely story. She’s hardly had time to come to terms with it. Moreover, Madie plans to get even with the heavens, and she’ll start by covering them with scorn. She spits in the water when Pata has his back turned. Makes a vengeful fist, casts a furious gaze. She likes that the heavens would feel hurt. Deep down, she’s scared out of her wits. Never mind, she will be brazen. She bets the heavens wouldn’t dare come after her twice in a row, not all that soon.
But nothing eases her sorrow. When she has finished thinking about her children, when she has finished imagining what she could do to get even with the heavens, she is crushed with pain all over again. It’s like a bad flu, her body aching all over, her throat burning, her head caught in a vise that no one can loosen. Madie puts her hands on her head, tries pressing to make it stop. It doesn’t stop.
Leaning over the side, she sees her reflection in the ocean. Recoils. Even in the gray water she can see how pale she is, her features drawn and bruised with grief. She will keep these marks to the very end. She knows: from now on, she will be the mother of a little ghost.
-
At lunchtime on the tenth day, Emily and Sidonie begin to cry: there isn’t enough to eat. The eggs are long gone, the bags are empty; fishhooks stay bare. Neither the father nor the two eldest have the strength to fish once they put down their oars—and besides, they’d have to stop on an island and make a fire to cook the fish, because no matter what Madie says the little girls will not touch raw flesh, she can just picture their noses wrinkling, their disgusted expressions, It’s yucky. But they will have to make landfall soon: the mother has only a dozen raw potatoes left, so there, too, she needs a fire. In the meanwhile she divides up the last, moldy, pancakes, rather hesitantly; what if it makes them sick. She watches the children nibbling and feels her own stomach rumbling, stirring up emptiness and bile inside, her hand deep in the bag strokes the last two eggs she’s hidden from the father, they’re for the baby, she’ll give them to her when everyone’s asleep.
Madie clears her throat.
“If we find an island…”
She doesn’t finish her sentence. Pata is bound to turn around and ask her.
“You want us to stop?”
“An hour or two, if there’s some wood to make a fire. For the potatoes. And if we could try and fish… there’s nothing left.”
The father nods. He doesn’t tell her that he’s been scanning the water for days and hasn’t seen a single fish. Maybe the beast that is still following them off and on is the reason for the penury, devouring or terrifying everything it sees, circling around them as if they will be its last feast, he’s sure it’s because of the beast. He thinks he can smell its stench of slimy skin and the deep, every morning when they get started again after he has cautiously raised the little anchor that breaks the surface, bringing up the mustiness of the silt. He alone knows that sometimes the beast comes up to rub its back against the boat, testing its resistance; yes, it’s like the storm, Pata can tell the animal is getting ready. It’s a strange combat they’re engaged in, the two of them, muted and mean, and the father wishes he could read the creature’s mind, to know what it is planning, to take the measure of his own chances to reach higher ground before it comes to a confrontation, to outpace it; does it know they are getting closer to the mountains?