Only one person actually brought you up to me. It was our neighbor M’s youngest daughter. One afternoon as we were having a snack in one of the few get-togethers with friends I participated in, the girl asked if she could play with one of the toy soldiers in your collection. I saw her mother shoot her a glance that said, Lower your eyes and be quiet. That’s when I broke down and started to cry and told them all to leave. I’m sure that even today they all think it was because of the girl, that she’d hurt my feelings without meaning to, when they were really at fault, treating me as if you’d never existed, burning the memory of you—which is the soul—and tossing away before my very eyes the ashes that are your soul in the urn where your body’s ashes already were. That’s what people who won’t talk about the dead achieve: they cremate the soul. So that’s why, as I was saying, the day I walked into our doctor’s office, I was happy that he brought up an anecdote about you before even asking me what I needed. He loves you a lot, our doctor, and surely that’s why he also needs to continue talking about you. Yet in view of my ongoing panic attacks, he suggested that I not try to practice apnea, since he thinks being underwater and holding my breath will only exacerbate the moments of angst. But I told him that I have this intuition, which holds the same weight for me as the word knowledge, that this sport will help me control a key piece of the always confusing puzzle of mechanisms that trigger a panic attack: breathing.
That’s right. Apnea, the voluntary cessation of breathing whose primordial objective is to allow us to reach the great depths of the ocean, is an exceptional means for relaxation. The goal is to spend a maximum amount of time submerged in water, and you learn a series of techniques that help you consume the least amount of oxygen possible. Oxygen is precisely what I have too much of, because when I’m feeling afraid, anxious, or panicked, I hyperventilate, which produces vertigo and intensifies the unease. Let me explain in the present tense what I learned today, the first day, because apnea is lived in present time or, what is the same thing, indefinite time. The minutes before immersion are vital. It’s when you begin the controlled breathing and expansion of all parts of the body. Once you’re in the water, you have to avoid attaching to any single thought. They tell you it’s very important, and I wonder how am I not going to think if I live tangled in your net? Apparently, the more complex the thought, the more oxygen it consumes in the brain. Thinking drains you. That’s why it’s good to allow mental images to pass by, similar to when you’re a passenger in a moving car. The landscape goes by without your having to hold on to a single tree or a mountain or a church. Everything gets a little easier. That’s it. I find my own mechanism. I close my eyes and see your image: you’re greeting me like in one of those books that you can thumb through quickly to animate the illustration. I keep flipping. I can’t stop, because if I do, you become static again, which is death. I don’t pay attention to details. I don’t have time to stare at your eyes, your mouth, your arms, because the pages flit by so quickly, but I see your motion, intangible but alive. After watching you greet me, I show up in the book too. You kiss me, you take off my clothes, you caress me, suck me, penetrate me, hug me, pick me up. We’re in the shower: you soap me, rinse me off, dry me. We get dressed and walk out the door. To have supper. Not to die. To have oysters and wine. It’s not a bad way to begin the first day: not grabbing on to you, but to your movement.
I continue listening carefully to the trainer, sitting beside my companions around a small pool next to the main one. The water in the little pool is somewhat warmer, which allows you to last longer because the cold also makes the body use more oxygen. We’re a group of twelve, counting me. After the trainer’s brief presentation, we get in the waist-deep water. He asks us to form a circle, holding hands. We’re supposed to relax and take a deep breath of air before floating facedown on the surface. So I take in as much air as I can and float facedown, following his instructions. I know the world record is seven minutes. How I envy those seven minutes of peace. But it doesn’t matter. It’s the first day. Except for another friend, all the rest are still submerged when I come up for breath. Following the security protocol, I don’t break the circle and I squeeze my two companions’ hands every thirty seconds, the left hand of one and the right of the other. They respond by squeezing my hands the same way. They’re fine. They’re still floating facedown and they’re fine. I think I’ll never forget the image of them floating like that, in a circle, completely relaxed and in a brotherhood of suspension, there in the same liquid. For the first time in a very long while I am dread-free, happy, and serene, and in good company, a circle of strangers. And for the first time in many months, Yoro kicks again. Here she is, resuming the pregnancy today, the same day I’m learning how to breathe less. I think Yoro will be like me, a woman accustomed to making fish from bread, wine from water. These weren’t divine miracles; they were the work of a good man who, like us, did the best he could with the little he had.
I touch my belly while in the water. There, I feel her move. I know that by this point, Yoro inhabits the larger part of the uterus and there’s less amniotic fluid, so I think it’s peculiar that the pregnancy should show again just when I’m submerged in water. As my internal liquid decreases, the external liquid, all the water in the pool, surrounds me and contains me; while I learn how to moderate the need to breathe, my baby’s lungs are almost prepared to learn about air. I think back to my cousin’s pregnancy after the bomb, her belly shrinking after the sixth month, as if from remorse, as if saying, “I refuse to be in this world,” walking backward down the path from fetus to sperm, from sperm back into the nothing. Something to the contrary takes place in the pool, as if I am the one who is walking backward, who moves from being a woman to becoming an embryo, while our Yoro foists herself on the world, gets stronger, expands, and goes in search of the boundless waters that extend beyond the walls of my uterus. Exactly like reliving one’s own gestation. I’ve never stopped cursing the terrible moment when the embryo who became me decided to choose both sexes, but I feel as though for the first time I’m reconciling with my own self; I now realize that the life without form that I was months before I was born shared the same beating heart with the one that has been doing all the judging. So now I understand how silly it is for me to be cursing my own seed’s indecisiveness at the forking path between male and female because the person didn’t make the decision, the decision was made for the person. Slipping into that prenatal unconscious allows me to take responsibility for my own nature, the same way I eventually took responsibility for choosing my sexual identity, which has never changed.
It still takes me about three times longer to follow the route from my apartment to the pool, because every once in a while I have to sit down on the first stair I can find to allow my anxiety to ebb. But it never happens when I get out of the pool, when I take a step and breathe normally. These return trips remind me of my previous life, how regardless of the pain I could think freely without that sticky mass of disquietude clouding my judgment, making me think, mistakenly, as I had a thousand times, that I was going to die right there in the middle of the street.