When the Night (2 page)

“Does it bother you?”

“I didn’t say that. I just noticed that you never do.”

“Is it a problem?”

“I can’t talk to you, Manfred.”

“Certain things are not meant to be discussed; you just do them.”

Late at night, I graze the tip of her breast with my finger. Her days are long, so she sleeps soundly.

THE STEAK HAS an unpleasant taste. It’s overdone. I need to find a woman to screw. Maybe the woman who works at the wood shop; she’s not married. She’s ugly but she has big tits and she’s willing. Karl told me they did it once at the sawmill, with the electric saw switched on to drown out the noise. I won’t bring her to my place; I don’t want any women in here.

Anyway, I wanted kids. Things went the way they were meant to; it’s like the story our father told us in the snowcat. I
never saw him look upset because he missed his wife. Except that one time.

He was a man of steel. He raised us by himself, and gave each of us something: the house in the village for me, the lodge to Albert, and the ski-rental business to Stefan. And now he lives in the city. Who would have thought it was possible? After thirty years of managing the lodge with three kids, now he has a dishwasher and thinks that progress isn’t such a bad thing after all. Stefan says he has a woman, and perhaps that’s why he’s so happy to live in town, but none of us knows who she is. I went to see him last Sunday.

WE’VE BEEN SITTING in silence for the last ten minutes. I’m holding a beer. His hands, swollen and tough from years of working in the cold, lie on the kitchen table like two empty shells. Mine will look the same one day.

He asks me, “How are you doing?”

“Fine, and you?”

“Fine. Do you miss your wife?”

“No. You never missed yours.”

“I had you.”

“Simon and Clara are coming at the end of the month.”

“Women don’t know how to raise children.”

“And yet they’re the ones who usually do it.”

“Men think it’s women’s work, but they’re wrong. I raised you by myself so I know what I’m talking about. Women don’t love their children.”

“Everyone says the opposite.”

“Because they don’t know. How about Albert? How is he doing up at the lodge with his wife? Is she still there?”

“Yes, Bianca likes it there.”

“We’ll see.”

BIANCA IS STRONG, but my father is right. Who knows how long she’ll last? Albert says she’s happy. Don’t be too sure, though; I know something about the happiness of women. It’s not their happiness that matters, but their mood. If they’re overexcited, that’s a bad sign, or if they buy things they don’t need, or have trouble sleeping, or stare out of the window in silence. Or if they are too particular and want to argue about everything.

The first few years we were married, I wasn’t worried. She didn’t ask me why I didn’t touch her breasts when we made love. At night I screwed her steadily and calmly; I can go for a long time. Her eyes went from brown to green, and then she looked like a little girl. A little girl and a woman. Then I came.

The last few years, though, she was either too happy or suddenly sad, and when she woke up she had the habit of staring out of the window in silence. She wanted to talk about everything, and no explanation was ever enough. I gave her wine in the evenings, but still it wasn’t the same. The green-eyed girl was gone, and the woman I married no longer interested me. But I would never have left her alone with the children. She knew that, so she left me.

Tomorrow I’ll give the rest of the potatoes to Bernardo so he can feed them to the pigs. They’re disgusting.

I DIDN’T WANT to rent the apartment to that woman. But the real estate agent told me there was no one else in July. Luna decorated the apartment when the carpenter who used to live there died.

“That way we can rent it out to vacationers and make some extra money.”

“If we rent it to someone in town we’ll have fewer hassles.”

“I want to decorate it.”

“That way you can buy all the stuff we have no space for.”

“What do you care? It makes me happy.”

We rented the apartment and made more money, and it changed nothing. Now, I never go inside. The agency has it cleaned, finds the tenants, and deposits the money in my account. This is the first time they’ve rented it to a woman on her own, but it’s none of my business. She’s up there, and I’m down here, and it’s only for a month.

I have no need for the dishwasher and I never use it. I go to bed early. Tomorrow I’ll take two tourists up to the lodge and spend some time with Albert and Bianca. Tonight I’ll sleep on the left side of the bed; if you switch sides you don’t feel lonely.

I
PEER OUT OF the window: black mountains, starless sky, silence; leaves rustling, bird calls in the distance. We’re in the last house in town. It could be the Middle Ages if it weren’t for the landlord’s car parked downstairs. I let the corner of the curtain drop back down.

If the baby sleeps five or six hours I’ll be all right. Tomorrow I’ll take him out early in the morning; we’ll go to the meadow to watch the cows graze. He likes them, but they also scare him a little bit. It’s cold when we go out. The jagged peaks hide the sun, leaving the valley in the dark. He plays with his toy cars in the grass,
vroom vroom
. When he’s not moving around, I gaze up at the pink mountain tops and wait for the sun to warm the air. It’s seven in the morning and we’re already outdoors.

Tomorrow I’ll dress him in his new red woolen jacket and cap, which I bought at the local market. He mustn’t catch cold, or else he won’t sleep. If he gets a fever, I won’t be able to
handle it on my own, so far from everyone, without Mario or my mother or anyone else to help me. For now, he’s breathing all right; his nose is not too stuffy. If he could just sleep five or six hours straight, or even four, things would be much better. I brought the baby monitor but I don’t really need it; the apartment is so small and so quiet that I can hear it when he turns over in bed.

I have to move quietly in the kitchen so as not to wake him. But I’m not hungry, just tired, with an ancient fatigue I’ve been carrying inside me ever since they put him in my arms at the hospital, wrinkled like an old man and covered in my blood.

AS SOON AS he came out of me, I looked at him and thought, I can’t do it.

The nurse scolded me. “Don’t squeeze him so hard. Do you want to suffocate him?”

How could she think that a mother would suffocate her newborn child? She was the first to scold me, followed by the pediatrician, my mother, and Mario. In the days after the birth I wanted my mother, but when I saw her arrive I felt like crying, like a little girl.

“Why are you crying? Aren’t you happy?”

Everyone kept talking about happiness. Perhaps I had a rock instead of a heart.

I’ll never be able to manage, I can’t do it.

I didn’t tell my mother how I felt, even though I trusted her. Until the problem with the milk began.

I didn’t have milk; it just wouldn’t come. I’m not a cow. Maybe that’s why the baby likes cows so much; he’s attracted to their swollen udders. Mine were swollen too, and hard as rocks, but only a few measly drops came out. A joke, a tease. At the hospital, the woman in the bed next to mine woke up every morning with her nightgown dripping with milk.

“I have so much! How will I keep from leaking when I go out?”

The nurse would glance over at me. “Milk is a blessing.”

In the morning they brought the babies to us on a cart. I could hear the wheels squeaking down the hall.

I hope he’ll suck this morning! So hard that the milk will gush out of my useless breasts like a fountain.

My breasts ached, as if there were stones hidden inside. The nurse would put the baby in my arms; she never let me look at him. She would pick him up brusquely and say, “He has to wake up, he has to eat.”

Open your eyes, so she’ll stop tormenting you!

The nurse would take my nipple in her hands and move it like a weather vane in front of his tightly shut lips. He would make a face. He didn’t want the breast; he didn’t like the taste. She would put it in his mouth anyway. The nipple was not part of me, it was something completely separate.

Come on, latch on, that way she’ll leave us alone.

I wanted to fall asleep forever next to him.

Don’t eat if you don’t want to, go back inside, back into the silence and tranquillity, and take me with you.

He would suck weakly from the deformed nipple, with a look of disgust. Then we were alone again, just me and the
woman with all the milk. She would talk on the phone with her mother, telling her how much the baby had grown, how much he weighed. Her baby sucked insistently. Mine didn’t, and fell asleep quickly. Everything was natural for her: breast-feeding, sleeping, eating. Like an animal. My mother would have put it differently. “It’s her maternal instinct. Every woman has it.”

What about me? I watched the woman’s every movement, the way she shifted the baby from one breast to the other, the way she dried her nipples and attached her bra, how she held him over her shoulder to burp him, how she talked to him.

“That’s enough, you’ll eat too much and then you’ll cry because you have a tummy ache.”

It all looked so easy. What was wrong with me? My baby would release the nipple and let it sit there, forgotten, like a cork, a strange beast next to his cheek as he slept. Her baby had black hair, mine was bald. My mother approved. “A newborn should be bald. You were the same.”

So it’s nothing special.

The milk will come, you just have to believe. It seems you have to believe in milk, and maybe I just didn’t believe strongly enough, and that’s why it didn’t come. My mother tried to reassure me. “It will come, don’t worry. I didn’t have milk, but you will be more fortunate.”

Before falling asleep I would say a prayer: tomorrow, please let me wake up covered in milk, with my nightgown stuck to my breasts like my neighbor. Gallons and gallons of sugary serum; I’ll taste it with the tip of my finger. Let it come tomorrow, enough to cover them all, to make my mother envious, to drown that bitchy nurse who looks at me with distaste. I want
to see milk everywhere, the bed sopping wet, the baby’s mouth full, his weight off the chart, and his diaper full of marvelous yellow shit. All new mothers sniff their baby’s shit with a satisfied air, and my mother would like to as well, but my baby barely shits because I don’t have enough milk for him.

The nurse said to my mother, “Don’t worry, we’ll give him formula.”

My mother said, “We’ll take him home and manage our own way.”

She meant
her
own way.

“You have to be relaxed, otherwise the milk won’t come.”

I had to believe in it, and relax. Instead, I never slept, not even for an hour.

“Take advantage while you’re here, because once you get home …”

What would happen at home? I thought about this and couldn’t sleep. I’ll never manage, I thought.

At night I would get up and go to the nursery to look at my baby. My stitches hurt but I needed to be alone with him. He slept soundly while the other babies screamed, ate, cried, lived. He didn’t get much milk and so he slept. I was afraid he would go back to where he came from, because of me. That’s why I got up at night, to make sure he was still there.

“Don’t sleep, stay awake.”

The night nurse was kinder than the other one.

“He’s small. It will take a little time for him to catch up.”

Neither of us had caught up. He looked like a tired old man. All I could see of his nose were two little holes. He had Mario’s hands. As soon as he was born, everyone began to take credit
for little parts of him: his hands, his feet, his eyes, his nose, his forehead. I put my finger into his little fist; I opened his hand and we stayed like that for a long while. He slept, and I watched him.

Back home, my mother brought a crib and tried to be helpful. The first few days, my sisters came too. They told me that I had to keep trying to breast-feed, that the same thing had happened to them, but that eventually everything worked out. My mother forced me to eat and gave me beer; she would change the baby and then hand him to me to breast-feed. She and Mario stood there and watched. I looked at the scale for the verdict after each feeding. Just a few grams more; the needle barely moved. Some days I celebrated: he gained twenty grams. I was as happy as on the day I graduated and the examination committee praised my work. Then another setback: he wasn’t growing enough.