Genesis

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EVERY WOMAN he dares to sleep with bears his child. So now it is Mouetta’s turn. Whispering and smudging his ear with her lipstick, her breath a little sour from the garlic in her lunch, she confirms her first, his sixth, pregnancy. His sixth at least. She’s “passed the urine test,” she says — an unintended play on words which she acknowledges in the matinee darkness with half an optimistic smile. The doctor thinks she’s twelve or thirteen weeks. A baby’s due by May. It’s early days.

Mouetta feels, of course (before the morning sickness and the backaches start, before the lifetime of anxiety and love), that her pregnancy is a personal blessing. The raven of good fortune has chosen her. It has alighted in her yard and she’s been brushed by its great wing. No other adult explanation matters to her for the time being. She is the lucky one. This is her miracle.

They sit together in the cinema, that drafty art house cinema down on the wharf, their elbows touching and their jackets spread across their knees, to watch young lovers on the screen, young actors making love, or seeming to. She wishes Lix would speak to her, do something more than press her forearm with his own, a kiss perhaps. But he’s a film buff and an actor himself. “Silence for the colleagues,” he usually insists. He won’t ever speak, not once a movie has begun. Perhaps it’s just as well, this winterish afternoon, the perfect weather for the cinema, that he will make her wait until The End before he answers. He wants to say he feels besieged. Another child? He only has himself to blame. To be so fertile is a curse.

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