what crushed the tender life of her son"mother tears"
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When I was born, my mother burst into tears. On the photograph taken of the two of us a few minutes after my birth, you can clearly see — despite the lipstick freshly applied to her lips, despite the foundation spread over her cheeks — you can clearly see her moist eyes. My mother in tears. After a crying fit. My mother’s tears. A tearful birth. I don’t remember who said terrible flood while looking at the photograph. My mother had slipped a few things into the pocket of her silk nightgown and as soon as the child arrived, in other words, as soon as I was there, even before she looked at me, not yet knowing if she had brought a beautiful baby into the world, a healthy baby, with no defects, with no infirmities, my mother had apparently plunged her hand into the pocket of her nightgown and pulled out a makeup bag. She put on fresh lipstick. She dabbed foundation on her cheeks with no concern for what had juelieved to have less weight to carry around along the street, up the staircase, when getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, those three and a half kilos of male child flesh from which she would never completely free herself despite the nurseries and nannies, despite her traveling and her weeks abroad, despite my father and my father’s patience. The crying fit, I’m told, occurred just then, immediately after my mother had applied her makeup the first time, made herself up for nothing because it all ran, staining her honor, giving her for a moment a mad woman’s face, a body with stiffening limbs, exhausting themselves in spasms as if ropes were pulling them in all directions, drawing them apart, assailing her furious flesh. In another era, a century earlier, there would have been a gleeful rush to photograph my mother, who would have then adorned the plates used to illustrate the woolly theories shrinks invented at the time, images that inevitably evoke a sense of disquiet through the inmates’ troubling beauty, their groans and frantic breathing, their shuddering limbs. When her makeup ran, it would have revealed the pallor of my mother’s cheeks, the cheeks of a strong, shrewd woman who in these circumstances was obtuse, unable to free herself from an obsession she’d already tried to wash away with a flood of tears, an obsession that, to be sure, should have a heavier, more cunning weight than the child in her womb, defeated by mere contractions. In maternity wards where mothers endure extreme violence before collapsing with joy, just as you might hear their screams, my mother’s crying fit was no doubt punctuated with invective launched in caustic tones like impossible, impermissible detonations. It couldn’t have lasted much more than two minutes. No one dared comment when my mother put on her makeup for a second time, especially not the doctor who had known this woman since he assisted her first two deliveries, this woman next to whom other women’s beauty was laughable, this woman whose eyes could blaze with funereal ferocity and dissuade all attempts at reverence or conciliation.
Just as my mother had ordered, my father was waiting in a room devoid of flowers because she hated seeing those death throes in vases and found their odor as viscerally repulsive as the smell of carrion. He was to wait until she joined him there. The male head nurse, who spouted mundane wisdom like clockwork, imagined it would be a good idea to tell my mother that my father’s presence would be a solace to her and he offered to go get him. This nice boy suddenly discovered how the cunning, malice, spite, and extraordinary superiority of beings—of whose existence he was previously unaware—can set fire to phrases, transform them into burning lashes that smite the skin and inscribe it with incurable wounds that will keep him from ever opening his mouth again without first considering who it is he’s dealing with, who it is he’s talking to, or from thinking that any woman is the same as the one who preceded her or the one who follows.
The photograph was not put in the family album.
There were photographs of all kinds in our albums, just not this one.
- I was seven years old. The photograph slipped ou
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what crushed the tender life of her son mother tears