I don’t know where they are keeping me, Dad. I know only that they brought me to Zaire, which I think is a gigantic place and so unstable they had to change the name. Now I think it’s called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But I can’t say for sure because I live underground. Some of my companions who share this underground confinement say that pretty soon they’re going to take us to Namibia. They say there’s uranium there and people die in the open-air mines where it’s extracted; we die here buried in the earth, pulling minerals from its guts. At least they get to see the sky every day. When this letter reaches you, I will probably be here or someplace in Namibia. But since you’re in the military, I thought you might figure out a way to find me. I don’t know how I got here. I was with my last family one day, and the next I knew I was being loaded on a plane to I don’t know where, with a bodyguard, and then another plane, and another. They made me work doing things that I don’t want to talk about here, I wouldn’t know how. And then they sent me to a mine, and here I am. It’s a clue, of course, but they say that in this country there are many mines like this one, so it’s not much information for you to go on. I heard we’re in a coltan mine near Goma, but I’m not entirely sure. One of the ways they torture us is by lying to us about where we are, using a different name every once in a while to confuse us. We can’t ever be sure of anything we’re told. Only what we see. Which is mostly death. So many of my companions here have died, and nobody says anything when they do. Sometimes they just leave them where they fall, as if they aren’t in the way. Eventually they end up in the earth covered by the stones we excavate with our bare hands. We are our own mass grave.
For a while my families would send reports about my health. I don’t know who wanted them. They’d ask me questions all the time. My whole life, a long battery of tests. I don’t know what it is they expect me to come down with, but now I really am beginning to feel weak, and for the first time I’m afraid it might have something to do with the disease everyone has been waiting for. If it is, and if it’s serious, I want to die close to you, Papa. I’m saying goodbye before they come to take the letter. I pray it makes it to you. I’m waiting for you. Please don’t forget me. Besides, Papa, I’m pregnant, my belly is growing even in the miserable conditions here, working in the tunnels fourteen hours a day. I’m so frightened. I want this child, even though it’s the result of rape. It was one of the armed men, though all the men guarding the mine are armed. This particular mine, though, is also an arms reserve.
At first I wanted to get rid of the baby. I’ve never wanted to be a mother, and less so after being raped. I’m not so young anymore either. I must be around thirty-nine. More than half of those years were spent underground. Like a dead woman. I’d pull the baby out myself, but I don’t know how to do it and I’m afraid. Now it’s the only thing that keeps me company. If you make it here and don’t find me, please look for him or her. To make it all easier, I decided to give the baby a name, my same name, whether it’s a boy or a girclass="underline" Yoro. There’s a Spanish guard here who once told me that Yoro means to cry in his language, but it’s written in a different way. If anyone deserves this name, it’s me. I’ve cried an ocean. Please, I beg of you, if you can’t locate me, please find your grandson or granddaughter, who will have my same name, and give him or her the chance to live to contradict it. I’ve already cried for myself and for the baby, and for the children of his or her children. I’ve never, ever forgotten you. You are my true father.
I was sixty-six years old when I read that letter. I’d just returned to New York to rest, to stay put in the home I had once shared with Jim and to take care of myself while I waited—as I had always waited—for the definitive fatal disease to come and take me. I had reached this age and lived calmly, fear-free. But that letter shaved years away. Her cry for help rejuvenated me, which shouldn’t be confused with feeling happier, more beautiful, or more agile than before. What it did was throw me back into the tunnel of fear from many years before. The distress came from knowing that I would go after her, and in order to find her I had to be alive, and I had to remain alive for a good while longer, and to remain alive a good while longer I had to feel again the fear of death, the fear that I might not get there in time. A double fear, since again I knew it wasn’t only about me anymore, but about two of us: her and me. This anxiety brought me strength more than anything else. The strength to stand up for myself and for her, Yoro, whom I could feel again inside of me. At sixty-six years of age I finally felt the heaviness of an advanced-stage pregnancy. Nine months. I was a terribly strong old pregnant woman. I remembered my mother. When I was little she told me she’d wanted to give me a little brother, and that she and my father had tried for a long time but were never successful. She said it regretfully; almost embarrassed, as if apologizing for having denied me a playmate, a companion with whom to share my troubles or achievements later in life, when she was no longer around, someone with whom to grieve her death. She was very intuitive, my mother. It was if she could foresee that I would be left alone too early. A brother, if he had survived the bomb, would certainly have been a great help in my life. A heart that loved the same mother I did, a pair of eyes that shared a vision of all the pain my eyes have seen, a sense of joy that would have relieved some of the melancholy that had weighed me down since I was a little girl.
MY MOTHER USED TO SAY that the only way to attain something was by visualizing yourself with it, seeing yourself together with what you desire. Yoro’s letter made me grasp those words fully. Thanks to the letter I could now truly see myself with Yoro for the first time. Did it mean I had her? That I would find her in the end? This pregnancy on the verge of birth is what brought my mother to mind. Coincidentally, yesterday was her birthday, and I realized I had forgotten to think about her and wish her well, which was strange for me. Yoro melded with her in my mind and I began putting things together. I thought how true it was that my mother hadn’t been able to get pregnant again, but when she curled me inside her uterus like a little pink woolen sweater, she had also gestated another little girl, who was inside of me. So I was born pregnant. It’s why I felt pregnant so many years later. It’s why, truly, I’ve been pregnant my whole life. Pregnant—the day I read the letter—at sixty-six years of age. And that’s why, too, I’ve resisted, why I recovered from what anyone else would have solved with a bullet, a rope, or a knife. I withstood thanks to the daughter my mother gestated inside me to keep me company. Now I can be alone because I know I never really am, no matter what it looks like to other people, no matter what it looks like to me. So that’s why I take such good care of myself and drink alcohol only on special occasions. I avoid eating unhealthy things, don’t puff on cigarettes, and stay away from drugs. That’s why I’ve chosen carefully the people who can enter my body. That’s why I use my claws when attacked. That’s why in spite of everything and without really knowing why, I never chose death, nor would I give my life up for someone else, not even my mother if she were still alive, or Jim, though at times I’ve thought that for him I would.
No, I would never have given my life up for anyone because I’m not a single person, I’m two. There’s a girl inside of me, I knew when I read the letter; there’s a little girl I knew was Yoro. Yoro was inside of me, not since birth but from before I was born, from when I was being formed, the process that brought me from embryo to fetus, and from fetus to baby. This was my mother’s treasure and greatest gift, even though I wasn’t aware of it yet: my strength. She is my strength; it is she who gives me extraordinary energy. People wondered how I could be so alive, despite my age. Don’t overdo it, people said, not knowing what I was carrying inside. Today I’m more aware of this than ever. And you’ll be too when I’m ready to tell you about it. I was one body with two hearts, one body cupped inside of another. That must be why my little dog would approach my belly and rub her ears against it like a stethoscope. She must have heard Yoro’s beating heart, and the dog would whimper and Yoro must have liked the closeness of the animal too. I could tell when something charmed her because I’d close my eyes and feel so light that I would soar like an eagle at rest, an eagle nested in the flight of another eagle. I saw that image so many times. That’s the strength, the high flight and serenity. My mother’s gift. Sixty-six years of pregnancy that I never interrupted because, though at times it may have been a burden to carry so much life, I could never have aborted my mother’s daughter. Yesterday was her birthday and I hadn’t even thought about her. I closed my eyes, clutching Yoro’s letter in my hand, and expressed myself more or less in these terms: