since her arrival and yet it seems that I have been her mother an eternity, holding her in my arms as the doctors and priests arrive and depart, ordering the servants to take the bloody dressings away after cleaning her wounds, examining her bizarre features, staring into her large eyes searching, forever searching, for some sign of God.
We named her Vittoria, but I call her Vita, denoting life. Vitality. Yet, surely, Vita is not meant to persist in this world much longer. God will repossess His creation and cleanse it of the spirits that have taken hold of her soul. Is it wrong to question such a creation? It seems to me that such a child was not meant to be born. It shames me to admit that I wish Vita dead.
“You received the child from God,” the priest said, when I confessed this terrible hope to him. “And He may see it right to call her back to Him. But she is yours to guard until that day comes.”
I endeavor to keep his words with me. But even this morning, when I heard her strange, garbled cry—a sound unlike any I have heard before, as if she is choking on her tongue—I slipped my fingers around her tiny throat and pressed until the baby turned red, then blue under my white knuckles.
Am I capable of murdering my own child? I believe I am. If one is capable of creating such a creature, one must be capable of destroying it as well.
Yet, I submitted to the priest. I promised the Lord that I would keep the child as best I could. I would shield her from those who would harm her, which, if her existence becomes known to the villagers, will be many. But later, alone in my chapel, I begged the Lord to let Vita die peacefully in her sleep, to take her gently and easily, so that her disfigurements of body and soul might disappear from God’s earth.
If Vita had come into the world in a violent storm of pain and suffering, I might better understand God’s intention in sending this punishment to us. But she did not. Her birth was quick, almost painless. She was my fourth child, and the first to survive outside of my body. One would think that such an accouchement would bring forth a child full of strength. A blessed child. But I understood something was wrong immediately. The infant did not cry. There was no sound at all, save a horrified gasp from the nurse.
I looked at the nurse and saw she was white with fear.
“It is alive?” I demanded, for my first thought was that the child had arrived stillborn. When she did not reply, I asked again: “Does it live?”
“Yes, madame,” she said, something odd in her voice, something fearful. “A girl. I believe.”
And with that she swept the baby from the bed to a tub of water, to wash and swaddle my daughter. To examine her again.
I thought she would clean her and bring her to me immediately, but the room became quiet for many more minutes. When I heard the nurse sobbing, I knew something was frightfully wrong. I pushed myself up and looked across the room. The nurse stood over the child, looking down upon it, transfixed.
I was too weak to walk, but determined to see the infant. If she had died, I would hold her a moment before relinquishing her to the priests. If she lived, and was ailing, I would hold her to my breast until the doctor arrived.
I called my maid to help me stand. A rush of blood slid down my thighs as I walked across the room, leaving a trail at my feet. The last thing to catch my eye before I looked upon my daughter was a bright stain of blood blooming like a poppy over the stone floor, its vermillion hue a shock of beauty against the dull stone. I remember this stain clearly, as a sign of innocence, the way Eve may have looked at the fruit before biting it.
Then I gazed down upon the beast lying before me, and everything in the world changed.
My child was deformed. That much was clear immediately. Her head was too large, and her eyes enormous, so big that they appeared to comprise half of her face. Her features were not regular, but marred with what I have come to think of as an animal quality—her nose was flat, the nostrils open and