A tourist bent down, smiling politely, to pick up the book that had slipped from her hand and fallen in front of the grave, setting it beside her. She placed it gravely on her lap, open at The Adoration of the Shepherds, who were arrayed reverently around the child and his mother Mary. It was El Greco’s last painting; he’d intended for it to hang over his grave in the Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Her words flowed, barely above a whisper, bringing the past to life, and Rafi strained to listen, not wanting to miss a word, as the infant in the painting cast a glow onto Nora’s face as well as those of the shepherds around him.
“Some mornings you wake up and you know it’s not like other mornings. You’re on top of the world, everything you dreamed of the night before is waiting for you just outside the door, you just need to push it open with your toes and everything will rush in, climb into bed with you, right into your lap. That morning, it was her lap that was overflowing. I froze; the moans she was suppressing were coming from my body. ‘Help me …’ she begged. Pleas, sweat, bloody-tasting tears: I had no idea what to do, and the contractions were coming thick and fast, there was no time to think.
“‘How did you hide this the whole time?!’ A spasm of pain and my reproach was batted away; her water broke at my feet. The stink of bloody water covered my limbs, blinding me. I could feel the heat of the fetus against my thighs as it swam in that water. I was pressed up against her thighs, face to face, as a storm tore through my body. I had no time to look for help; it was just me and that laboring belly and the world closing in on us.
“‘No one can know …’ The breaths she wasted on that plea closed the womb around the baby’s thighs. I don’t know how long the child had to wait on the threshold of the world like that until I slipped my fingers inside her. Even today, my hands tremble when I reach for something …” She raised her trembling fingers in the air.
“I can still feel her vagina and the baby drenched in water. I tried to free a tiny leg trapped by a tear in the vaginal wall, and I pushed the left leg, which was in a hurry to step over the threshold, back against the right so they could slip out together; I was afraid the frantic leg would tear the pelvises of both mother and child. In those hours, which felt to me like a single viscous second, I sank inside the woman who’d been my only friend; the only person who could read me like a silly poem memorized in school. I’d never been more than a flimsy imitation of the passion and tenderness that she imposed on the world around her through books and words … There, on the knife-edge between life and death, I lost the ability to communicate with her slow rhythm. She was in no hurry to push that child out, despite the fear of scandal; if anything, maybe she was hoping to keep the baby hidden inside her. But then a violent spasm in her womb decided the matter: the baby was out. He didn’t cry. With two bloody masses on either side of me, I waited: for her placenta and for the first breath to blow open his lungs. For a moment, I allowed her to die, worried that the walls of the womb had collapsed around the placenta, but then out of the corner of a terrified eye, I saw her belly contract as she squatted, and the placenta slithered slowly out on to the ground. I was conscious of nothing but the tiny, slippery, utterly mute body in my hands. I had nothing to cut the umbilical cord with, so I sealed it off near the belly with a bobby pin, and instinctively turned him upside down and rubbed his body between my palms so the lungs would open and drink air. For a few moments, time stopped: the tiny body in my hands watched me silently with closed eyes that peered through me, and then, in an instant, my lips were on his blue lips, my forefinger parted them, and I sucked deeply. The taste can’t be described in words — it wasn’t salty, it wasn’t bloody — it was the taste of life. The liquid filled my throat, and it still does; I often wake up coughing in the middle of the night, trying to spit it out. A last desperate suck at what was behind those lips and a shudder convulsed the little chest. He cried! Joy gripped me, but fear, too, fear that someone might hear, and he sensed it too and fell definitively, finally, silent. Living and dying in the space of a moment.
“How long did we sit there, those two heaps, once living, now dead, lying between us? I felt guilty for the vitality that had come over me. I couldn’t bury him; he was still lying against my chest, his blood clotting on my nipples. When she got up, limping her usual slight limp, she pulled the placenta to her chest; I followed her, and we walked almost pressed side-by-side. Under the stairs, I dug with one hand and with the other held the baby firmly against my chest. All my longing to give birth was embodied in that pliant bundle of life, and when the hole was long enough I let her snatch him from me. I ignored his male organ, preferring to bury him gender-less, and turned and went upstairs before the soil could touch him.”
On those naked steps high in Toledo, Nora and Rafi sat in silence, the radiant energy of the painting of the child and shepherds animating the dance-like figures of the tourists around them. The striking contrast between the degrees of dark and light in the painting and the city heightened the drama of the scene. The long shadows of tourists, the laughter of a girl sitting on the shoulders of a young man with long hair, the babbling of an old woman who’d begun dancing, alone, to the melody of the violin played by a homeless man in colorful gypsy clothes. Nora’s voice blew toward them like wind from a distant time and place. She absentmindedly stroked the naked infant among the shepherds on the page.
Nora got up, as if fleeing from that birth, and Rafi followed her. They walked through the brilliance of the clashing darkness and light in the painting, and their feet led them to the fourteenth-century bridge of San Martín. The Gothic surroundings were the most beautiful setting for a sunset in all of Spain.
“I snuck under the stairs with my paper and charcoal, that night, and drew that baby in dozens of sketches, but none of them pulsed with the warmth of the tiny body that had died on my chest. None of them tasted like that water. I couldn’t bring myself to breathe a single word for months after that, it might have been seven months, or maybe more — I was afraid I’d lose the taste in my mouth, the taste of the inside of a woman from a child’s mouth. It was my secret taste, and without it the world would drop dead and abandon me. That child should have been born from my womb so he could shatter this worry of infertility. I never dared to ask what had made a married woman deny that she was pregnant.”
Around them the violin’s song blended with the crimson sunset and the bodies around them began dance, everything swayed as though drunk in the sunset, and Nora fell silent. It only added to the feeling that they were still walking through The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, the distorted proportions of human bodies that dominated the painting mingling ecstatically with the tourists on the bridge, whose faces had become exaggeratedly tragic or comic, their laughter shriller and their silences more profound, as longing floated in the air above like a blood smear that dissolved the city in the red peaks of the mountains.
The disc of the sun looked like an oil painting pinned to the horizon. Stone Toledo loomed above them, its head in the sky and its feet in the waters of the Tagus. Time froze. Nora was like a creature from a different era, stamped — no matter how she tried to shake it off — with features of primitiveness and imminent extinction. A voice inside her explained to her what she was seeing around her.
“There’s an eternal process of displacement, a constant concealment, in which people are forced to hide their religion, their loyalties, their pregnancy, their reality, their battles, even their gender. People disguise themselves as something other than what they are: man as woman, genius as idiot, Muslim as Jew as Christian, debaucher as prig, fundamentalist as liberator, so they can guarantee that they’ll be accepted, or so they can worm their way into people’s hearts or places or positions of power, or just so they’ll be left alone to live in peace.” The people around her, and Nora, herself, were part of that human flock, in a state of denial, hiding, masking. All those living creatures, minerals, humans were nothing but masks of the Divine Power, who became visible in extremes of infidelity and faith, piety and sin, moving away from Himself to practice His wholeness. The alley of her childhood was all about unmasking; that truth had come to her early, when she was still a child, though she may not have been able to translate it into words at the time. How many masks had been pulled off in that faraway alley? There, when a passerby felt certain that they were alone, silent and unseen, they would play out their reality, revealing their face for God alone to see without judgment or punishment. The difference between seeing and seen would dissolve. Tragic and comic storylines were acted out in that alley, and only the doves replayed the same act over and over when they answered the sound of her lover’s motorbike with a flutter of their wings and flew in a complete arc over the alley like passion flowing. Her heartbeats quickened, warning of exposure, and she stuffed the masks inside her breast though she longed to release them. The departure of the motorbike, more than that of the man, was what had caused her to feel a tyrannical urge — like exhaust fumes — to flee and spread.