These months that made up my fourth month of pregnancy coincided with a letter from S announcing a visit, and I couldn’t have imagined a better time. She stayed for five weeks. Her business had been open for a while now, always operating from underground. She hadn’t yet revealed the template for her genitalia, but she seemed content, full of hope and very beautiful. I discarded the idea of telling S about my pregnancy. I think she would have gone along with me, she would have seen it, but I didn’t know how to explain it to her. I was experiencing a process of metamorphosis and regarded it with an overwhelming feeling of estrangement. My body’s transformation was an ultimate act of freedom, the most significant I’d ever allowed myself because it originated in desire. It astonished me, after spending so much money on plastic surgery that this gratuitous development I imagined was taking place inside me, the life I wanted to germinate, without me or anyone else intervening in how it took shape. I didn’t have the language for it. I liked to think that for once in my life it wasn’t other people who left me speechless, but instead a piece of myself, that breathed only because I did, that grew only because I nourished myself. It was my greatest love, and yet at times I also felt the need to protect myself from that part of me, desire become pregnancy that only I could distinguish, and that kept my tongue in check, which I needed in order to share the news with S.
Though I still lacked the necessary tools to describe my transformation to S, I did let her in on another project, thinking she would be the best companion to accompany me to some classes I had started taking several years before. I had the idea when I underwent breast augmentation, which in my case required a full implant. During the consultation process I met other women who were undergoing mammoplasty. Generally, they had to wait longer than I did, endure more tests, because most of them were cancer survivors who had undergone mastectomies. I could feel their disapproval when they found out I was having the same procedure as they were, but to offset the more visible features of my sexuality. The women considered the right to reconstruct a once-existing breast trumped the right to choose having breasts you had lacked from birth. Though I could understand their way of thinking, I found it completely pedestrian. I knew it wasn’t worth discussing with them, but one day I came up with an idea that could ease the discomfort of the months between having their breasts amputated and the reconstructive surgery. I tried it as a pilot project, and it worked. Before sharing the idea, I ask you to keep one thing in mind—which, I think, proved its usefulness—that the women involved had suffered a great loss of self-esteem. Even today, the scars from a mastectomy are devastating, but they were much worse then. These women had never been exposed to images of these kinds of scars before—not in photos, advertisements, or campaigns against cancer—so the first time they ever saw these kinds of scars was the day they finally removed the bandages in front of the mirror after having tried a few times earlier without being able to, precisely to avoid seeing that hideous naught outlined by a gash. The sight was always such a shock that it took a long time to dare look at themselves again, let alone allow anyone else to.
S carefully listened to the project I had developed a few years earlier. I told her how damaging these types of procedures were for a person’s self-esteem and showed her the practical applications of my plan. I told her to have a seat while I went to look for something. I came back with an oval mass of silicone they’d given me in the hospital and explained that this was one of the temporary prostheses that were worn in the bra during the waiting period before the procedure. Thanks to the prosthesis, nobody could tell that a clothed woman was lacking a breast. It was such a relief that many women even slept with the prosthesis, even showered wearing a bra, so as not to have to see the amputated area even for a second. But I was interested in finding a way to make these women feel comfortable with their bodies again. How could I convince them that after surviving cancer, they weren’t any worse off than healthy women with two breasts? Breasts—I used to tell them—end up sagging. Some women think their breasts are too small; others wish they were not so big. I tried to defend what I still think is true, what in fact I can prove after a few years: the body is not a static thing; it changes, it can be transformed. I didn’t see any reason why the burdens of age or saggy breasts were any easier to accept than the effects of cancer. Old age, when it comes down to it, is also an illness. A healthy woman should accept her body with or without scars. I used myself as an example. I was born with a gender that my parents negated. This was a problem because my body wasn’t my body, but someone else’s that others had chosen for me.
Once I was finished explaining to S the nature of the silicone I held in my hands, I put on some dance music, turned the volume up, and started playing with the prosthesis as if it were a piece of equipment used in rhythmic gymnastics. I’ll admit I’ve never been a great dancer, but my body’s flexibility and years of yoga and qigong compensated for my lack of proper dance training. I lay on my back, arched my body to form a circle, and let the silicone roll down to my neck. For a second I asked myself if my bodily transformation, being something in my head, was visible only to me or if S could see the little swelling of my midriff, but it was the effect of the hormones I’d been taking for years, which at times would make certain areas traditionally associated with fertility swell, like my hips, abdomen, and breasts. Within limits, chemistry helped me mimic a woman’s natural cycles. The hormones turned me from a flat piece of limestone into the Venus of Willendorf, a little less full-bodied perhaps, but still with some nice curves. I imagined myself, a fossil become flesh, in some museum somewhere generations into the future, an exemplary contour of the twentieth century, being explained in the voice of some android guide: “This is H, the Hormone-Fed Venus of Hiroshima. Found by X at Site X. Materiaclass="underline" organic.” But as I was saying, that day I was with S, dancing to the music with the prosthesis, I was tossing it up in the air and grabbing it with my feet. S was amazed as she watched me move, quick and agile as a cat, focused on that apparatus meant to be hugging my torso but instead making it fly and then slither down different parts of my body. The prosthesis rolled across my belly button, my forehead, my groin, like a breast moving around free of any divine decision or doctor who fixed it one single place. And that’s how the idea came about for dance classes designed for women convalescing from a mastectomy. The prosthesis became a means for strengthening their backs, arms, and glutes. If later they chose to attach it to their chests, then fine, but women needed to raise their self-esteem, and not with a motionless plastic ball but by improving their bodies in ways we are all capable of doing. When I saw that project through for the first time, I was proud to hear some of the patients say they were even more comfortable with their bodies than before the operation. They felt healthier, stronger, more in control of their movements, and as a result, a whole lot sexier.
S loved the idea, so over the course of her stay in New York, she helped me look for women who could benefit from these dances. These classes became a source of income for me, to finance the next trip, and something else. Dancing with them took me away from things. My mind melded with the mass of translucent silicone I was playing with, and everything around me, everything that meant anything, I could see it all reflected there, contained within, and only there. Nothing else mattered to me at that moment. But at night, despite the heat of Jim’s body, or maybe because of it, I mourned not being able to share my feeling of being pregnant. I had trouble sleeping. I felt ridiculous helping other women when I wasn’t able to express something so fundamental for fear of being misunderstood not by just anybody but by Jim himself, the person I loved more than anything else in life. On nights like those I remembered how many times in the past I had toyed with the idea of adoption, which I always ended up deciding against because I considered it a next best thing to becoming a mother. Maybe—I thought before feeling pregnant—if I had been physically incapable of conceiving, I would have adopted a child. But what obsessed me so much was being denied the possibility, to the point of not wanting to break the connection between maternity and the process of gestation. For that same reason, I spent years feeling stupid every time I stopped to think about how much effort, how much sadness, how much of my life was devoted to searching for someone else’s daughter. After I had mulled over these thoughts, lying in bed beside Jim, optimism would descend and carry me off to sleep, when I would touch my belly and say that all this was in the past, and that there was something worse than not being able to announce my pregnancy to Jim: and that was not having anything to announce at all, the absence of my baby, a baby that certainly for me was developing like something real.