I wasn’t like D. Real men aroused me. When I met Jim, I desired him with everything I had in me. His knowledge of botany, of ornithology, and the way he conveyed it, excited my libido. I had never really considered the more elemental forms of life before, like birds and plants, and to discover them, like a breath of air under the sun, stirred me physically.
That day when we met in the Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park, he brought me to his apartment. We sat on his bed and watched a movie together. I was afraid of what it might lead to. I was nervous to be on a bed with a man that I desired, but I also liked it, because I knew it could all be over in a flash, in that instant of penetration when the thrill of our encounter might fade away. Penetration was similar to expulsion for me. It drove away the chance of a second date, negated the care I took to fix myself up and explain who I am in a dignified way; it expelled me from my own self. I hadn’t yet written my letter to Jim, so I wasn’t interested in any sexual contact with him. I used to get around things by turning off the light. But it never really worked; it simply put things off because the scars always gave me away. This is what usually happened: If the man caressed my tits gently, he’d feel the stitches from the implants. If in contrast he squeezed them passionately, he’d feel that the texture, the density were off, and know they weren’t natural. But breast implants weren’t what scared men off, it was the other thing: the artificial vagina that was reconstructed after the explosion, over several procedures that took years to complete. I had all of that on my mind while I lay on the bed with Jim, so I asked him to give me some time, that all I wanted was to be held and to rest together.
I remember Jim talking to me while I leaned my head on his chest. I was so tired and had a hard time paying attention to what he was saying. The words tumbled into the ear that wasn’t touching Jim’s skin and gathered there inside of me, swinging back and forth in a rhythm that lulled me into a reverie where real life and fiction got mixed together as they do in dreams. The reality was that Jim was very tall, and though I’m of medium stature, beside him I seemed tiny. The reality was that Jim seemed to know all the secrets of botany and ornithology. The reality was that we’d met only a few hours earlier and had ended up watching a movie in his apartment, where I learned the meaning of the first words I had heard him pronounce: den lilla Aurora. First he told me about the sun, something like what I wrote at the opening of my testimony, which I copy now, though they aren’t the exact words: “The sun strengthens the bones. You’ll need it if you spend the winter in this city.” And then he said what I only came to understand later: den lilla Aurora.
It had happened so quickly. After the Cloisters and the gardens, the subway to his apartment. It was getting dark. First we watched the movie, and then I had to say that I only wanted to rest in his arms. The crucial word for me, which I didn’t want to discuss yet, was sex, and also child, but above all sex. His crucial word was daughter. And both words came together in a dream because I was so relaxed that I fell asleep while Jim was talking.
Unable to become a mother, I dreamed about my pregnancy until slowly the desire for Jim began to rouse me. I didn’t wake up, but I did dream, and I woke up inside of that erotic dream. I was (I dreamed that I was) so tired. I could hardly react to his caresses. I half opened my eyes. Night had come. I calculated by the heaviness in my arms that I must have been asleep for about an hour. I wanted to tell him how tired I was, but words form more slowly than desire. So I accepted. In the space of dreams I could feel, I desired, metamorphosis. He was hard and that hardness entered my flesh still tender from the dreamy lightness. First my neck tensed and I heard a sound escaping through my nose, like a change in matter, like a cold log crackling toward the heat of firewood. And then, as if I were pregnant, I spoke to my daughter, a fetus only a few weeks old. When I woke up, realizing that such a thing could never happen, I jumped right out of the bed and said goodbye to Jim.
When I got home, I wrote something for that unborn girl, mostly images from the dream, stories, and a few of the things Jim had told me about flowers and birds. The experience was so vivid it was as though I had a real vagina. In my dream I told Jim that I didn’t want anything plastic inside me and allowed myself to reject one of the things I most envied from those days, but that mostly stuck or tore in artificial vaginas: condoms, forgetting entirely, in my sleep, that a large part of my body was, and is, made of plastic. To date, that was one of the most merciful moments life had ever given me, a vagina by birth, the possibility of saying no to a condom. But it wasn’t real. More important, there was another unreal thing in that dream: I had felt maternity in my fake dream-state flesh. I imagined that I was four months pregnant in that dream that took on physical sensations. Don’t ask me why four months exactly. Maybe because I’d heard that the fetus is more settled after three months and there is less chance of a miscarriage. Or maybe because I had read a few weeks earlier that the genitals are perfectly distinguishable by then, and though I didn’t care whether it was a boy or a girl, what I didn’t want was both in the same body and having to blame myself for passing on my sorrow of indetermination. Following this first experience, I felt the same sense of maternity several more times, right up to the very last. I’ll come back to that in a little while. Right now I imagine you going back to read everything again in order to catch what I’ve said about the last event that changed my life for the good while ending other people’s lives. But right now I don’t want to talk about that. You can go ahead and skip straight to the end, but if you decide to follow the order of things, I’m going to make you wait. If you wouldn’t ask gravity to explain why it holds you to the earth, then don’t ask me for an explanation either. But let’s put this last chapter aside. What’s coming now is a transcript of what I wrote to my unborn daughter that first time I felt another life inside of me, thanks in part to the goodwill of Jim, he who was still a stranger to me.
Fourth Month: 1965
Before I got pregnant, there were times I didn’t notice the little squirt at climax. But ever since I realized you were there three weeks ago, I feel the warmth of the liquid along the walls inside of me and I can imagine the semen of your origins splashing against the water where you are floating, making the little boat rock in the waves. Drink it, daughter, now that you’re fortunate enough to absorb it everywhere, since your mouth, your belly button, your anus have yet to be formed. I envy you that. I’m sorry. You haven’t even been born yet and already I envy you. Sometimes I don’t know in which orifice to receive the fluid, so I change position, undecided, holding who knows what parts of your father, and then, caught in the trance, I make him move, and I don’t know how I do it because he’s so big and I’m so small by his side. Perhaps he moves on his own, waiting for me to decide. And holds off. Holds off until I can adjust myself and tell him it doesn’t matter which organ: here inside, it’s fine here. Someday I might beg your pardon for talking to you like this (though I doubt it), but take into account that I’m not your mother yet, and you are no more than a little pea without a princess. A pea without a mattress. No, not a pea. At four months you’re a little bigger than that. Rounded, like a four-inch piece of fruit between my legs. And your father’s down there. Look! He lifted me onto his shoulders like a little girl and he’s running with me through French cloisters. Plenty of flowers and trees. He knows the names of all the plants, down to the most insignificant herbs, and he recites them to me, pointing an enthusiastic finger here and there, even invisible shoots that appear only when he names them, suddenly, like instantaneous flowers, flowers that refuse the tedious gestation of a bud. Shattering the cyclical rubrics of the botanical. I laugh. It’s so much fun. I laugh as we run in a circle, dodging the stems that grow beneath the gallery of arches as if they are mines. No, the stems are not mines. We’re mines, the weight of a woman and a man running on two single legs, trying to avoid massacring a shrub. Something rubs against my hair. It’s the ceiling. The wooden ceiling. I’m so much taller now I have to protect my head. I put a scarf on as if it were a soft helmet, a strong and flexible helmet made of some advanced material. And on his shoulders I reach the center of the cloister. This must be the main tree. It’s leaf-laden, and I push the branches from my face.