woman,” the doctor said, putting his hand to her forehead, “we’ll set things aright. What month of swelling are you in?”
“The eighth,” she replied and kept moaning.
Since I knew what to do in such cases, I asked them to bring kindling, lit a fire, and waited next to it with a large tobacco leaf across my knees.
“What’s your name?” I heard the doctor’s voice behind me.
“Maria,” the woman replied.
“Why do I even bother asking?” the doctor murmured.
When the fire was sufficiently kindled, I pushed aside two coals with a pair of tongs and began turning the leaf above them like a pig on a spit. The leaf must be heated up, it must get hot, but not burn. Since I am quite experienced at this task—“roasting the tobacco,” as Dr. Monardes calls it—I was ready very soon. It used to take me two or three leaves to get the desired result. However, with practice one can achieve unbelievable skill in all manner of things.
I took the hot leaf, tossing it from hand to hand, went over to the bed, and carefully placed it on the swollen woman’s navel.
“Ouch!” she said.
“This is Señor da Silva,” the doctor explained, “my assistant. This leaf will warm you up, it will draw all your humors up and via the umbilical cord it will reach precisely where it needs to go.”
But the leaf did not have the desired effect. Typically, it is not sufficient on its own. The woman kept groaning, and after waiting a bit to confirm that the leaf alone would not do the trick, the doctor dug around in his inside pocket and took out a cigarella.
“Woman, this,” he said, holding the panacea upright with three fingers before her eyes like a spear, “is a cigarella! I would like you to take a very gentle puff on it, hold the smoke in your mouth without inhaling, and then let it out. Do this two or three times. Then you must swallow the saliva. But puff very gently,” the doctor said again, handing her the lit cigarella, “otherwise you could harm the fetus.”
“It won’t make her miscarry, will it?” The husband, who had been standing with me in the opposite corner of the room, turned to me in alarm.
“Nonsense!” I said, cocking my head to the side, as was my wont in such cases. “Why would she miscarry?! What you see before you is Nature itself, not some basket of eggs! This is strong stuff!”
I thought of that sonnet by Pelletier in L’Amour des amours, where he describes how the Earth in its youth collided with some kind of heavenly body in the form of a medusa and miscarried the Moon. “Tossed from the womb unripe,” those are his exact words. He’s talking about the moon, of course, that it is unripe. Otherwise, Pelletier says, the Earth would have given birth to another planet. Mars, who had caused the Earth to swell, was extremely disappointed, he turned his back and grew completely cold to her. From then on, the couple, at one time fused by the hot flame of love, parted ways. The Moon, born prematurely, circled stillborn in space. But nowhere does he say what happened to that Medusa. The first time I read the book, I impatiently leafed through the whole thing to the very end to see whether it mentioned what had happened to Medusa, but I didn’t find anything. I was so fired up that after that I carefully reread the whole thing line by line, but again didn’t find anything. I did, however, discover a great poet. Every cloud has a silver lining, as they say.
The cigarella did the trick. The woman calmed down, her pains subsided. She was lying on the bed with a sweaty brow and her big white belly, swollen like . . . like I don’t know what—like Achilles’ shield, like a round hill above a river, like a marble cask, like a stack of hay. Nature had filled her up and stretched her seams to bursting. How awful—I thought to myself—to be so close to Nature, to be so completely under her power. Nature does what she likes and won’t spare you for a second. Unless mighty tobacco is firmly squeezing her throat with his sturdy fingers!
“It’s quieted down,” the woman said, placing her hand on her belly, slightly below the tobacco leaf.
“I’ll say! How could it not . . .” The doctor said, shaking his head.
Then he turned to the husband and said, “I’ll leave this cigarella here, in case you need it. But don’t you smoke it up prematurely!” He raised an admonishing finger at the man.
“No! Of course not!” the chap replied, releasing a torrent of words and empty twaddle. The doctor listened to him with an air of boredom, pursing his lips. I, however, lost patience and lashed out at him.
“Shut up!” I said. “We’re not here to listen to your drivel.”
And he shut up. The last thing we needed was to miss crazy old Lope thanks to this windbag.
When we got outside, the doctor said to me: “Guimarães, I must reprimand you. You should not have lashed out at the man like that. The woman is sick, but he is the one paying. Never forget who is paying. When all is said and done, he is the important one for us.”
“Of course he’ll pay, to hell with him, what else can he do?” I replied.
“That’s true, but still,” the doctor insisted. “This will be very important for you in the future, in principle.”
Then we got into the carriage, set out for Sevilla, and willy-nilly we began talking about Woman.
“The human female,” the doctor said, “is Nature’s favorite weapon. I am sure that in her eyes, woman ranks highest in the hierarchy of all creatures, far higher than you or me. There is no creature higher than she. You will object that females of all species reproduce, some of them far more profusely than the human female. For example, bees, caterpillars, and so forth. That might be true—but then again it might not—but that is not the point. Woman not only reproduces Nature, but besides she can sing, speak, play music, deck herself out in front of the mirror . . . and think,” the doctor continued after a short pause. “She can laugh, leap, talk, sing. That verges on the impossible.”
“Yet Nature does not spare her, either, she torments her as well,” I said. “She is that reckless.”
“Oh, she doesn’t do it out of recklessness,” the doctor replied. “You must have a proper understanding of such things if you wish to become a good physician.” He raised his index finger. “Nature acts through abundance. She gives birth to such an abundance of creatures that she can afford to be indifferent to every one of them individually. Human females, for example, are so numerous, that even if half of them were to disappear in the next second, this would not have any particular consequences, except that it might become a bit quieter.”
I thought of Jesús at the theater and how he exclaimed: “By all the saints! My wife is dead, she refuses to do the laundry!”
“Certain inconveniences would result, too” I said.
“Minor ones,” the doctor replied. “In any case, there would be enough women left for Nature to continue reproducing. Like the leaves on the trees, Guimarães. Who pays attention to a single leaf? Even if they all were to fall at once, they would come back again next year.”
“Yes, but certain things are very rare, unique,” I objected.
“That odious old man Plato says the same thing,” Dr. Monardes nodded. “By the way, nearly all old men are odious, for
