The Dear Ones by Berta Davila

Author:Berta Davila
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: 3TimesRebel Press

After the appointment, Carlos and I drive home on the motorway and talk. I almost added animatedly, but that’s not quite accurate. I’m reminded of those other trips with Miguel to the fertility clinic, both of us silent, watching the electrical cables pass by through the car windows. Maybe we were losing our love for each other and that’s why we didn’t say much. Later, after the boy was born, we said even less, and it became obvious to us that there was a problem, even if it was hard to put our fingers on what. Letting each other go had been as simple as meeting at that party, as if we knew from the beginning that there would be an end and as if, over those past few years, we were simply waiting for it to come, not so different from knowing the tulip in a vase is going to die before long: you watch it deteriorate in the water until the day comes when you can’t put off getting rid of it any longer, and have to move onto something else, grateful for the time when it was beautiful.

There are rarely silences between Carlos and me. He always finds something to say. He tells me about the first time he saw snow, and some stories from the set of the TV show he’s working on. I put on a Supertramp CD, specifically, Crisis? What Crisis?, which opens with someone whistling. I don’t want the drive to end because the inertia of moving from place to place has always been a balm for me. For the first few months of my son’s life, when I didn’t know what else to do, I would strap him into the pushchair and go walking through the city to pass the time. This was the only way I had of finding some calm in my darkest moments.

Once, after a few hours of walking, I decided to catch the bus home. We waited at the stop for a few minutes and I tried to shield the boy from the rain by stretching out the hood of the pushchair. The bus appeared without me noticing, turning the corner faster than usual and stopping in front of us so abruptly that I could hear the passengers inside complaining. For an instant, I imagined an accident in grisly detail: the crash, like an earthquake, my body probably on the ground, head on the road, and from my vantage point, a terrible vision of the little wheels of the pushchair under the bus. I imagined my son’s death with horror, and at first, I thought that meant I was a good mother, because I didn’t want anything terrible to happen to him, and simply imagining it had caused me inconsolable grief. Then I realised that in my scenario, I was the one who’d been spared. Now, every time I see a mother pushing a pushchair through the city, I wonder what she’s thinking about, if she’s going somewhere in particular or nowhere at all, if she, too, is trying to escape.

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