In the taxi, I’m overwhelmed by an uncontrollable desire to fly. I watch the city pass by in scenes and I’m overcome by such intense longing that I want to open the window, climb out, and fly above it, memorizing its every detail: the lady carrying her purse in a bag from Bonpreu, the child playing with a plane-tree leaf, the man talking on his phone and buying a newspaper without saying a word to the seller, the girl playing in front of a toyshop window, the old lady pushing a half-empty shopping cart that she uses as a walker, the old man passing time on a shady bench—all of them. In no time at all I’ll miss these people of the city. It’s not that I’m leaving, the taxi is just taking me to somewhere else, but never again will I see the city as I do now. The next time I look at it will be through different eyes, I don’t know how, but that’s how I imagine it: thus this desire to fly over the city. But I don’t have wings, I have arms and hands that are, at this moment, holding onto my belly, which is so heavy that I’m afraid it’ll drop and crack like an egg.
I’ll have only been away for a few days but when I come back to the city there’ll be nothing left of who I am now, even if I look the same on the outside—I’ll be somebody else and it’s no cliché. And I won’t have become one of those magazine mommies with long straight blond hair halfway down their backs, who dress in white and smile even when they’re asleep. I’ll be an awkward monster with scars and an inflated chest. I’ll look awful, wearing the first thing I can find that fits. I won’t remember to brush my hair and I’ll have left my smile behind in the operating room in the maternity unit.
That’s right, I’m in labor—the moment all mothers eagerly await has finally come. All mothers. Yes, in a few hours I’ll have given birth, or the baby will have been born, but will I be a mother? Me, a mother. . . . But that’s not why I want to fly. It isn’t to memorize the city I’m leaving but not. I want to run away. I can’t be a mother. Maybe I should try moving my arms as if they were wings, and if my belly opens and the baby comes out, well, let it come out, because, right now, I don’t know if I want it. No, that’s not true, I do know; I don’t want it. How can I have wanted a baby? How did I get myself into this? Right now it’s a mystery. And I remember it was my decision.
And the scenes keep passing by and the city takes on those European colors as you cross Diagonal, and suddenly I start seeing those happy mothers from the magazines, but these women look real. Maybe they’re wearing pastel colors instead of white, maybe their hair isn’t naturally blonde and their smiles aren’t quite so permanent, and there are moments when it seems to waver just a little, or even fade. But you can see from far away that they’re happy mothers, and it’s now very clear that I’m never going to be like them.
That’s enough, that’s enough I say. I open the window and let my belly hang. It doesn’t hurt anymore. I feel my hands getting bigger, my arms getting stronger, my legs shrinking, my eyesight sharpening, my body getting lighter. I stand up, look out, and start to pull myself out of the car. I close my eyes, inhale the wind, consume it, and stretch out my arms with my feet on the seat until all that’s left in the taxi is my luggage and my legs. My husband will be calling me to see what stage I’m at. We were talking about stages. . . . Because now my feet are no longer sinking into the seat. Now the yellow and black car is getting smaller, smaller, smaller beneath me and I hardly need to move my arms to fly. It’s like lying dead in a pool, and I bite the wind and swallow it, devour it, and finally the city is below me, the city as I see it now, as I always want to it to be.
My belly’s no longer heavy, though it hasn’t changed. I can feel the baby moving inside, and, while I’m not really intuitive about this kind of thing, I’d say it’s happy. But it’s a happiness that won’t last, because this is just a parenthesis and very soon they’ll have me on the operating table and they’ll take the baby out of my belly. They’ll tell me it’s my child and expect me to turn into a mother as if by magic and I won’t know what to do. Then the moment will come when it’ll open its tiny mouth and I’ll have to offer my nipple and it’ll suck. And I’ll have to smile because it means that everything is as it should be, and that’s what it’s all about, being as it should. Performing, feigning happiness in front of visitors, crying when they go, because I won’t be happy, not really. Everything will have changed, and everything will have shifted and they’ll have taken everything from me.
But now I am flying and eating wind. I open my mouth and swallow the polluted air of the city that I’m about to lose and maybe it’s not good for the baby, but then giving birth won’t be good for me, and at this moment I can’t think of anyone but myself. I won’t have the automatic altruism that other mothers have, I, who, when I see a baby, runs a mile before they can ask if I’d like to hold it, because no, I don’t want to hold it and if I admit that, then they all look at me as if I’d just confessed to a crime.
I never lose sight of the taxi that’s taking my suitcase to the maternity hospital. In my bag my cell phone will be ringing. My husband will be beside himself wondering if I’m at the hospital yet, if he’ll get there in time. He wants it, the baby, or that’s what I’ve thought for the last 40 weeks that seemed an eternity and now I wish they were. Maybe he was also playing a part and now I’ll find him flying like a bird up here with me.
Everybody gets pregnant; the mother and the mother-in-law talking about biological clocks and the spare room nobody knows what to do with. Suddenly all the pieces fit together and the picture on the puzzle is a child and that’s the answer, because, well, why not? And flying doesn’t bother my belly. I can hardly feel it, nor does it feel heavy, but the baby is still there and it’s moving and I imagine it in the same position as I am, lying inside me. I say inside me but I’m not excited. What do you want me to say? To me it’s just something that’s moving in my belly, I have no ties to it and I don’t know if I’ll know what to do. I haven’t sung songs to it, or talked to it, I’ve tried but it seemed so fake and I felt so ridiculous that I stopped right away.
I wonder if I could have the baby while I’m flying, give birth up here. If it’s lying inside me then it could lie outside, and maybe if our relationship began with us flying over the city, it would change in just that moment. Everything would be better and I’d know how to play the role of a believable mother. I touch my belly, dig my fingers in, and push the baby’s head downwards, shaking its legs hard, but nothing happens. So I fly and eat the wind and if it’s polluted then so much the better, because I don’t like the over populated European-ness of the city, with that mix of indiscernible smells and odors of waste, urine and rancid sweat.
Maybe if I turn over and, with sharp movements, fly closer to the buildings and the risk makes my adrenaline rush. What if I fly into a pylon, what if some . . . I realize I’m changing, until just a minute ago I’d never have dared put my life in danger for anyone, let alone for a baby I’ve never set eyes on, because what people say about looking at it and thinking it’s the most beautiful baby you’ve ever seen, can’t possibly happen to me. If this baby inside me is ugly, I’ll know from the second I see it and no rush of hormones will blind me. And to me it’ll always be ugly.
But the truth is I’ve started to change, as has the city. Now I see it as a world of potential danger and so I’m taken by the idea of giving birth in the air. I don’t see it like I did a while ago. I won’t look at it again as I did before. And all because of this belly, because of doing what’s expected of me, going along with everything, faking an excitement that doesn’t exist—if it did, it wouldn’t make me happy. So I do somersaults, stop listening to my body, and listen to my head. t tells me to pull myself together, get closer to the high roofs, absorb the waves from the antennas, immerse myself in the smoke from the chimneys and extractors.
I swallow everything the city throws up into the sky because it’s not wanted, because I do want it and in exchange, I throw into the sky everything I don’t need. It’s a fair swap. My flying starts to make so much sense that I feel movements in my stomach and I know the time has come, that I’ll give birth up here, among the clouds of pollution and pigeons. I don’t understand how, from so far up, I can hear a cell phone, but I do. And I answer it. I don’t know how I answer if I’m flying and my phone is in my bag, in the taxi, and the taxi is down there, sliding through the city to the hospital. But I answer and it’s my husband wanting to know where and how I am. I say I’m in the air, that I’m fine, and he doesn’t know how to take it and asks to speak to someone else. And I realize I’m in the taxi with my legs and trousers soaking, and the taxi driver is looking at his seats, biting his tongue so as not to swear as he steps on the gas, telling me to breathe, just like I’ve been doing, that it seems like I’m gulping air and to keep counting, that we’re nearly there. And as I lose sight of the city, I can still see one of those happy mothers walking along. I don’t say goodbye, because when I see it again I’ll be pushing a stroller through its streets and I won’t see it in the same way I have up till now, as if I wanted to drink it all in. Instead, I’ll analyze it piece by piece, performing an autopsy with latex gloves and a mask, dressed in white or pastel colors as I push a lock of dyed blond hair from my face with a grimace that began as a smile.