Damage
The couple had put their baby in the wicker chair suspended from its frame in the spa foyer. She was propped up on cushions, stabilised and not toppling over, happy enough in the gently swinging chair. Her parents stood back. They were waiting until the chair was still enough for them to photograph her. But for anyone watching them watch their child, they looked like the Magi adoring the baby Jesus.
The woman looked on, equally entranced. After the man had taken the photograph and her mother had lifted the baby out of the chair, she spoke to them. ‘What a beautiful baby!’ she gushed. ‘Thank you,’ they answered in the measured tones of those who know there is nothing more to say when presented with what is self-evident. She was a very beautiful baby. They were beautiful too but even these flaxen-haired, clear-skinned, clear-eyed people were eclipsed by the beauty of their child.
All babies are beautiful to their parents, the woman thought. Or is it only to their mothers? Are fathers less easily beguiled by physical beauty and just feel proud? My son? My daughter? My flesh and blood? And is it all babies that are thought beautiful? Most are but some are not appreciated to the same degree as the Russian couple’s child. (They were Russian, they had admitted, when she asked). Some are even scorned. Some abandoned or harmed. Maimed. Even killed.
That had not been the woman’s fate some 70 years earlier. Not scorned or abandoned, and she was never intentionally harmed either. Instead, she was displayed and adored in much the same way as the Russian baby though in a pram - not a wicker swing chair in a spa - by her doting, utterly besotted forty-one-year-old mother, amazed to have given birth at all and to have given birth to someone so perfect. Or almost perfect. The first time she bathed her baby she saw some indentations in the skin in the middle of the tiny back and she wept. This object of unconditional love had already been damaged even before coming into this world.
The mother blamed herself, convinced that the tiny perforations had been caused by a fall on an escalator in a department store late in the pregnancy. She admonished herself for having used the escalator, it was foolhardy, reckless even. She never used one again. Always took the lift, much to the frustration and disappointment of the girl she thought she had harmed who, as a talking walking child, thought the escalator looked like a lot of fun. The lift was boring, suffocating with the stale smell of tweed-clad elderly bodies and the heavy scents of the 1950s Je Reviens, Arpège, Quelques fleurs. Worse still, the lift was controlled, indeed manned, by a pompous lift attendant who announced the floors of the store and what was available there in a plummy voice that made the girl feel coy with embarrassment.
So, the 70-year-old woman had been born ever so slightly damaged. And there was more to come as there is for us all. Next was another fall. This time, the child herself, tottering along a garden path clutching a small flowerpot given to her by the man who came to mow the lawn. Hutchie, his name was, probably a shortened form of Hutchinson. Later she found him repugnant, even frightening. But then she had happily accepted the proffered flowerpot but, unsteady on her little legs, tripped and was pitched forward her soft baby face colliding with the shards of the flowerpot as it shattered. There must have been a cry of horror from the mother, the child first silent in shock and then screaming in pain and fear, snatched up quickly, her left eye filling up with blood from a wound, which, when washed, was found, blessedly, to be above her eye where her eyebrows would later grow though never over the scar that remained. There was a frantic trip to casualty, a few stitches and a lot of mercurochrome making the wound look far more startling, the damage far worse than it really was. Now the scar is invisible but the sparse eyebrow is sparser at the site of this second wound.
What was next? The woman scanned her body in the spa changing room as she rubbed on lotion to soothe her parched skin. There had been a tonsillectomy but if there were scars, these were internal. Earlier, an abscess in one of her ears, lanced on the kitchen table by the family doctor. The smells and sounds and sights of this are still vivid in the woman’s mind: the thrum of the kettle boiling on the stove, the smell of antiseptic and the carbolic soap the doctor had used to wash his hands, the cold metal of the otoscope, the heat of her throbbing ear. Like images from a nightmare, they are hard to throw off.
A little later was chicken pox, a bad bout that had left its mark, a visible one, another small indentation between her eyes at the point of the ajna chakra, where a tilaka (Sanskrit: तिलक) might have been placed had she been an Indian baby. What damage if any, might that scar have done to a third eye, the woman pondered as she fingered the spot where the scar had once been. It was gone now or at least had been obscured by the folding of skin where she had too often knitted her brows, perplexed or angry.
Her hands move down the front of her torso where just to the right of her hipbone is a thin scar, straight and neat and barely noticeable, 60 years after the wound that produced it healed. This was the first invasion, an operation performed urgently, assumed to be an appendectomy until the incision was made and the surgeon saw, to his surprise, a cyst on the ten-year-old girl’s fallopian tube. They explained this to her afterwards, but she didn’t know what they meant. She didn’t know she had tubes aside from her intestines. That same day, the only other child in the ward, a boy younger than the girl, was visited by his family. ‘How are you darling?’ his mother asked, stroking his arm. ‘A little crestfallen,’ was his response. Still drowsy from the effects of the anaesthetic, the girl dozed, wondering what ‘crestfallen’ meant and marvelling at a child younger than she was producing such an interesting word. The girl liked words and prided herself on knowing some big ones. She was impressed and a little envious of this highly literate child. When she woke up after falling into a drug-induced sleep, the child was gone. Had she dreamt him and his big word?
Later, much later there was another cyst and then another. More invasion and more scars, created with less finesse than the first one. But it was this first surgery that caused, she was told later, the infertility that shaped her life as a younger woman, shaped her whole life. She would never have a child. She was only sorry she hadn’t known this when she was a teenager, terrified of getting pregnant. It had never been possible. Life would have been more fun had she known, the woman muses. Or would it have been? Would it have seemed that the fates had dealt her a cruel blow, set her apart from others, made her into a pariah, barren, incomplete? No, it was better that she hadn’t known.
She rubs the lotion on her legs. There are freckles, one the size of a one-cent coin, and broken veins. The skin is thin and easily damaged by contact with low-lying furniture, discoloured by years spent in the vicious Australian sun. ‘Glory be to God for dappled things’, said the poet. ‘I am now a dappled thing, a pied beauty’, the woman thought and smiled at the idea of someone praising God for her and her speckled legs.
The feet are still quite pleasing to the woman. She had always liked them though there is a toe stubbed hard and broken and now slightly bent and with a bump that reddens in contact with shoes and flippers (the woman swims). It hurts from time to time and probably affects her gait, her kick when swimming. The veins are very prominent on her feet, mauve and grey and there are fine violet capillaries threading around and below the ankle bone. On her hands too, the veins wind and intertwine forming tributaries and deltas. All her veins are close to the surface. Once a lover had told her he found them beautiful. The woman is not sure they would be to everyone’s taste but does not really care. She likes to look at her hands.
The left one has had a tough time of it. Her fingers are long but they have suffered some damage. The ring finger and little finger were broken. She tripped over the root of a tree and put out a hand to break her fall, a fall not unlike the flowerpot fall when she was a baby, but this time instinctively protecting her head, she hurt her poor hand, bending her fingers back, like mafiosos do to the uncooperative in movies and probably in real life. Her face escaped unscathed. She then had to walk for nearly an hour, sobbing and gasping from the pain, to where she and her partner had parked their rented scooter. It was a holiday island and at the small but modern hospital the doctor who examined her hand, the palm now a worrying ultramarine, was keen to tell her he played the didgeridoo (the woman is Australian). He made a splint for the broken fingers, a frightening thing of white styrofoam strips bent and held stable by a thick crepe bandage. It was summer, and it was hot, and her hand seemed to beg for release from this straight-jacket of plastic and cloth.
And not long after, the fracture now healed but her little finger permanently crooked, she stabbed herself in the centre of the palm while cutting some very hard Manchego cheese. It hadn’t been deliberate but very careless to hold a knife as sharp as that in such a way that it could bounce off the cheese and plunge into the centre of her palm. The pain made her gasp and almost faint. She only grazed the tendon but the wound throbbed and ached for weeks. A stigmata, she liked to think. Or is the singular stigmatum? Or stigma? A stigmatized hand, a stigmatized woman, marked out. But by what? Nothing much really but she felt it sometimes. An apartness, a not belonging, sense of being excluded.
She looks at her face in the mirror; a small scar runs from her upper lip to her nose, dividing her upper lip into two exactly equal halves. This scar is still clearly visible but has been joined by other finer lines, the result of years as a smoker. Pursing her lips had led to the formation of a bar code’ (an unkind man had once referred to the lines on another woman’s upper lip in this way) to remind would-be suitors that she was past her sell-by date. The woman smirks at this. Is she past her sell by date?
This scar is the result of a worse fall than the other two. Perhaps the effect of the evil eye, or so she sometimes thought (she hopes the Russian parents won’t think she had drawn the evil eye to their baby by complimenting her. She hopes she hasn’t). On a bus in Naples, shopping bags in both her hands, the dress she had just bought and was wearing for the first time, pulls tawt around the hem below her knees as she steps forward to get off the bus; she is propelled through the door. Her hands bound by the handles of the bags can’t reach up this time to protect her face and she is slammed hard into the pavement, a sandy pavement on the outskirts of the city.
The fall must have looked comical from behind. She remembers watching it happen, feeling it happen in slow motion as if in a dream. First, she thought she would hit her head so hard that she might die, then that she would break her nose, then her teeth (she could see the dentist’s bill of thousands for replacing all those even not quite-white-enough teeth). She sat up, her hands now over her face and when she dropped them at her sides as her friends gathered round, reaching out to help her to her feet, an old woman, a crone, perhaps the caster of the evil eye, cried out in horror at the sight of the woman’s face and made a plea to the Virgin for mercy.
The graze was ugly, stretching from the chin to her nose, worst on her upper lip. Her friends took her back to the house, and she was given slices of raw potato to put on the wound to stop some gruesome bruise from forming to keep the lurid graze company. That evening on the train back to Rome, she wore her scarf over her head to obscure her face so as not to frighten small children. The other passengers probably thought she was the victim of domestic violence. The Roman pharmacist who sold her a powder to speed up scar tissue formation definitely did. He was contemptuous, disgusted with her and her wounded face.
A few days later she had to go to Florence to a meeting with a patrician Florentine university professor who wore navy blue blazers, pale blue cambric shirts and beautifully tailored chinos. She had met him before. How would he respond to the ugly scab that had formed in the centre of her upper lip where the scar is today? Hardly la bella figura. But in fact, he said he found it strangely charming, her little scab moustache, even erotic, reminding him of Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter. It didn’t worry her at the time that a man found a woman’s battered face sexually appealing. It does now after a week of reading accounts of gender violence in the Australian press. There had been a spate of deaths. There is always a spate.
In the same way that she had escaped the damage done to some unloved and unwanted babies, the woman had largely made it through her long life unaffected by gender violence. Of course, there had been creeps on crowded trams and tube trains pressing their tumescence up against her, taxi drivers suggesting she might like to give them a kiss, the tragic men in raincoats offering to show her ‘something special’, concealed in the folds of grubby grey flannel trousers. There were those but the worst was a boy who had taken her to a dance. In the car at the end of the evening, he grabbed her head as if about to kiss her and then tried to force her, pushing her face down into his crotch. This was a boy from an expensive private school with the reputation of being a thoroughly nice guy who moments ago had been all pleasant conversation and was now menacingly silent, pushing and thrusting at her until she managed, after a struggle, to wrest her head from his hands, push him away, get out of the car and run to the front door of her parents’ house, leaving him red in the face and elsewhere in his expensive sportscar. ‘Should have told him I’d pass on the goodnight kiss, thanks’, the woman smiles. But the incident had left a mark, a scar somehow deeper than the others. Not a big deal, all things considered, but she had thought the boy had asked her to the dance because he was a friend, because he liked her, and it seemed clear that he didn’t. Didn’t even regard her as a person.
No, she hadn’t suffered much damage of that kind. She’d got through unscathed. Relatively. But sometimes, unexplained pain unfurling in her body seems to be emanating from some hurt inflicted, some cruelty, some injury suppressed, forgotten or dreamt but not experienced. A Tibetan doctor once told her that the pain in her back was caused by a very old injury. Was it the fall from the horse in the indoor riding school when she was nine or a blow, a beating taken (or perhaps inflicted) in another life? ‘I’ll never know,’ the woman thought. Best not to know. Best not to make it a thing, a finality. Best not to come to a conclusion.