She looked up from the hole, and for the first time there he was, holding out his hand to her. He dressed the two holes that had been her fingers. Walking tall is important, she said, so she straightened up and cleaned her firearms as best she could, polishing the metal, everything that could be shined with a little grease and some tender loving care. She wondered if he liked her. In the midst of the horror of war, she was an attractive, well-equipped soldier if ever there was one. “I looked damn good in my silver jacket,” she said. So they continued on. When they finally reached the trenches she waited, protecting him until the sandbags and rocks took over for her. During one of these exercises, a hand grenade left her with half an arm. And when I stared perplexed at Brigitte’s two good arms, she responded again: “Loss is on the inside.” That was the last time I interrupted her story, understanding that Brigitte would have forfeited every one of her limbs, bled to death, but she used allegory, as I did, to protect herself against bleeding words that could never explain her feelings.
She went on with her story. He cured her again. She survived again, and who knew why? Must be for love. Or perhaps she wasn’t alive anymore, like they said. But she believed it was love. She walked tall again and smiled at him. The sun reflected her silver jacket. She was an attractive, well-equipped soldier if ever there was one. And they marched on. He followed behind her on the minefields, walking in her footsteps. They crossed many fields, and in one of the last ones, Brigitte lost her leg and half of the other one (allegory, I thought, and let her continue on with her story). Again, he tended to her. Since there wasn’t much farther to go and she had enough body left to continue covering him, she continued onward. She crawled across the few meters separating them from the ramshackle house where their comrades would eventually find them.
“It’s important to stand tall,” he said, but when they arrived, she couldn’t stand on her own. He helped her, propped her against the wall that was also leaning over. Her silver jacket was brown now, sullied with mud and dust. It hurt her to see it, she said. Waiting for relief, she rolled a bandage in the three fingers she had left and cleaned the jacket till it was gleaming again, and all that was metal gleamed, 90 percent of her body. She still had her face, and abundant chestnut hair under her helmet, an arm and half of the other one, a little bit of leg, and everything was covered in her silvery jacket. Not too bad, and all of it handsome. She smiled and gleamed for three days, at the end of which time, the helicopter arrived. This time she allowed him to go first, since the hands extended were friendly ones. Tied to a harness, she watched him ascend and disappear safely through the door of the mechanical dragonfly. This was the only time she allowed him in front of her, because he was more important than she was, for war and for peace. For her. When it was her turn, the enemy forces broke the copper cable that was pulling her up. She fell, but not more than a few meters. She wasn’t hurt. She moved around, trying to catch an angle for the sun to reflect her jacket again, like a mirror, to bid him farewell. It took a lot of effort for her to create the reflection, which she controlled with her own movements, the little circle of light sliding like a restless little animal over the skin of the helicopter. Seeing it move into the distance, she asked herself if he, her love, had even noticed the gleam (her goodbye) from the window. She wondered if she would become the memory of a flash or of an invisible soldier.
When she finished her story, Brigitte said that though her body was intact when the war ended, those days spent protecting her soldier—real, faithful, absolute protection—were like a process of dismembering. She has felt a strong attraction toward people who have had limbs amputated, though she couldn’t say whether this attraction was connected to the soldier, whom she never saw again, or the things she sacrificed while she was protecting him. I hugged her when she finished, and suddenly felt more complete in our embrace.
It was a girl. I mean in the fourth month of my pregnancy I knew it was a girl. Not because I had a sonogram, as they do today to ascertain a baby’s gender—still a new technique at that time—or because Jim’s offspring, whom I was obsessed with finding, was a girl. I knew because of my belly’s shape. You, sir, like so many other people, may deny my pregnancy; you may think I’m out of my mind or that I’m writing this under the effect of some medication. A woman born with a faulty womb, with a non-reproductive system that is primarily masculine, a dysfunctional penis, testicles—there’s no way a woman like that can get pregnant. Fine. I can’t deny this biological impossibility, but for now you’ll just have to believe me if you want this story to make any sense. Just consider it a psychological pregnancy: I wanted to be a mother so badly that my belly and breasts engorged, similar to what happens to dogs. So as I said, I knew the sex of my baby in the fourth month, the way grandmothers used to: by the spread of my still-tiny belly, which was filling in more along my waist in contrast with how boys are carried, according to old wives’ tales, showing a more pointy belly in front, making the pregnant woman look further along than she is, especially when seen from the side. I liked to imagine my daughter that way, growing modestly and taking shape, sticking closer to my ribs instead of outward, more mine than anyone else’s, more private than public. I could truly feel her, and since I wasn’t crazy, I didn’t say a word to Jim. What was happening inside me wasn’t connected to the lines of communication that allow us to share things with our significant other, so I knew that trying to offer an explanation would be futile.
We were back in New York, and so physically and morally exhausted that it took us a few months to recuperate. We made a promise to each other that we would give ourselves time to recover, until we got our strength back. Jim had his military pension. It wasn’t much, but we could live modestly, and in order to afford the trips, we scouted out odd jobs that gave us sporadic income without a great amount of effort, work we enjoyed, and a needed stimulation because the trips often evoked feelings of frustration, sorrow, and discouragement. So we obliged ourselves to use these times of rest in New York to bounce back and do what we had to during these brief interludes: forget the past, stop thinking about the future, and live in the present, jettisoning bad thoughts. At least that’s what we tried to do, usually pretty successfully.
I never realized that each month during the gestation period of my baby had a corresponding cycle of months or years in my own life. Time passed more slowly for my baby girl than it did for my body. While I thought I was the one in charge of her on earth, in fact she was journeying through space, traveling more or less at the speed of light. For her, it was a short trip; for me, it was a protracted one, allowing me time to prepare for whatever the future had in store. So sometimes I imagined my little girl that way, in space, connected to me by way of a long, invisible umbilical cord by which she fed me, she sustained me.