Free Listen to My Voice by Susanna Tamaro Page B

Either decision leaves me completely indifferent
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    Just remember, if you appear in front of me one day with a bundle in your arms, I won’t be even slightly moved, nor will I betray my convictions
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    I’m grateful to you for the lovely hours we spent together, for the philosophy, the poetry, the sex, and for the guilelessness that was always in your eyes when you looked at me
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    M
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    My father and the father of my dead sibling were, therefore, one and the same person. The same vile person.
    By now, I had very few doubts about the contents of the other envelope, the white one. I opened it a little, peered in, and recognised the handwriting I’d come to know very well.
    Every one of your words corroborated what I’ve always known. Children belong only to their mothers; after the fathers perform the necessary fertilisation, they are no longer required
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    And soon they won’t even be necessary any more; a donor and a syringe will be enough, and thus the pathetic history of the family, the ballet of make-believe that has destroyed the mental equilibrium of so many generations, will finally draw to a close
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    Many of us live in my house in Trieste. I won’t lack assistance or company. The child will grow up without blinkers and without hypocrisy. He’ll never feel compelled to put up a poster in his room with the words, ‘The family is airy and stimulating, like a gas chamber.’
    He’ll be a free child, and he’ll be on the way to an equally free world, with no more mistaken ideas and without the repression imposed by patriarchy, capitalism, and the church
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    He won’t suffer from fears and anxiety, because his childhood will have been spent in accordance with the innate goodness closed up inside every human heart. And his soul will be so large that I may never truly learn to know it, but, unlike you, I’m not distressed by this prospect, nor will it make me go back on my decision
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    That’s the challenge: to send creatures more complete than ourselves out into the world. If we can’t make a revolution with weapons, at least we can do it by raising our kids differently
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    G. says that somewhere in the heavens it was written that you and I would meet, and that our existences would unite in a new life. Our destinies and the destiny of our child were inscribed in an astral conjunction long ago – I believe that, even though you won’t accept it. Probably, in order to carry out this plan, we’ve been chasing each other through several lives, and since you refuse to procreate, your karma will be long and devastating. You’ll probably be reincarnated in an animal; I can just see you as a reptile (your cold blood irrigating every cell of your body and its minuscule brain), or maybe a mandrill, with a bright red muzzle to match your behind
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    Inevitably, your child will look like you; he’ll have your eyes, your hands, and your way of laughing, but to me he’ll be only himself, and you’ll be an outdated mail-order catalogue. If he asks me anything about you, I’ll tell him of a magnificent, impossible love shared one night on a distant beach . . . I’ll make him dream about his father
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    Luckily, I have G. in my life. I don’t know what I would have done without him. Despite your sarcasm, he’s not my new lover; he’s a unique person who’s very important to me. All the broken pieces I’m carrying around inside – he’s helping me put all that back together. He alone has the patience to make sense of every fragment and return it to its proper place. G. knows how to see things others don’t see. He knows how to untangle the confused strands of people’s lives and find the thread that will lead them to safety
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    I’ve never told you this, but I was pregnant with your child a few years ago, too. You never learned about him, because he was no bigger than a tadpole when he got flushed down a toilet. I did everything by myself, without consulting anyone. At the moment, it seemed like an event of little