Mouthful of Birds(5)

When the first ten days are over, things are already running a little more smoothly. I take my three pills a day on time, and I respect every session of “conscious breathing.” Conscious breathing is a fundamental part of the treatment, and it’s an innovative method of relaxation and concentration, discovered and taught by Weisman himself. Sitting on the grass out in the yard, I focus on making contact with the “damp womb of the earth.” I start by inhaling once and exhaling twice. I draw out my breath until my inhale is five seconds long and my exhale is eight. After several days of practice, I inhale for ten seconds and exhale for fifteen. Then I move to the second level of conscious breathing, where I start to feel the direction of my energies. Weisman says this level is going to take more time, but he insists the exercise is within my reach and that I have to keep working at it. There comes a moment when it’s possible to visualize the speed of the energy as it circulates through the body. It feels like a gentle tickle and it generally starts in the lips, hands, and feet. You have to try to slow it down, gradually. The goal is to stop it entirely and, little by little, start it circulating again in the opposite direction.

Manuel can’t be very affectionate with me yet. He has to be faithful to the plan we made, and so for a month and a half he has to stay away, talk only when necessary, and come home late some nights. He complies diligently, but I know him: I know that secretly he’s better, that he’s dying to hug me and tell me how much he misses me. But that’s how things must be done for now; we can’t risk straying from the script for even a second.

The next month I keep progressing with conscious breathing. Now I almost feel like I can stop the energy. Weisman says it won’t be long now, I only have to push a little more. He ups the dosage of my pills. I start to feel my anxiety diminish, and I’m eating a little less. Following the first point on her list, Manuel’s mother makes her greatest effort and tries, gradually—that part is important and we underline it many times: gradually, it says—to start making fewer calls to our house, and to not be so eager to talk about Teresita all the time.

The second month is perhaps the one with the most changes. My body is not as swollen now, and to both of our surprise and joy, my belly starts to shrink. This change, so marked, alerts our parents. Maybe it’s only now that they understand, or intuit, what the treatment is about. Manuel’s mother, especially, seems to fear the worst, and although she tries to stay on the sidelines and keep to her list, I feel her fear and her doubt and I worry it will affect the treatment.

I start sleeping better at night, and I don’t feel as depressed anymore. I tell Weisman about my progress in conscious breathing. He gets excited, it seems I’m about to reverse my energy—I’m so, so close, a hairsbreadth from the goal.

The third month starts, the penultimate. It’s the month when our parents will play their biggest roles; we’re anxious to make sure they keep their word so that everything comes out perfectly. They do, and they do it well, and we are grateful. Manuel’s mother comes over one afternoon and reclaims the colored sheets she’d brought for Teresita. Maybe because she had thought about this detail for a long time, she asks me for a bag to wrap the package in. “It’s just that that’s how I brought it over,” she says, “in a bag, so that’s how it should go,” and she winks at us. Then it’s my parents’ turn. They also come for their gifts, reclaim them one by one: first the hooded piqué towel, then the pure cotton socks, finally the washable diaper bag with the Velcro closure. I wrap them up. Mom asks if she can caress my belly one last time. I sit on the sofa and she sits next to me, talking in her soft and loving voice. She strokes my belly and says, “This is my Teresita, how I’m going to miss my Teresita.” I don’t say anything, but I know that if she could have, if she didn’t have to stick to her list, she would have cried.

The days of the last month pass quickly. Manuel can come closer now, and the truth is, his company does me good. We stand before the mirror and laugh. The feeling is the total opposite of what you feel when you’re leaving on a trip. It’s not the joy of leaving, but of staying. It’s adding another year to the best year of your life, and under the same conditions. It’s the chance to keep on, unchanged.

I’m much less swollen now. It’s a physical relief and it raises my spirits. I visit Weisman for the last time.

“We’re getting close,” he says, and he pushes the preservation jar across the desk, toward me.

It’s cold, and it needs to stay that way; that’s why I brought the thermal lunchbox, as Weisman recommended. I have to store it in the freezer as soon as I get home. I pick it up: the liquid is transparent but thick, like a jar of clear amber.

One morning, during a session of conscious breathing, I make it to the final level: I breathe slowly, my body feels the earth’s dampness and the energy that surrounds it. I breathe once, then again, and again, and then everything stops. The energy seems to materialize around me and I can specify the exact moment when, little by little, it starts to turn in the opposite direction. It’s a purifying feeling, rejuvenating, as if water or air were returning of their own accord to the place where they were once contained.

Then the day arrives. It’s marked on the refrigerator calendar; Manuel circled it in red when we came back from Weisman’s office the first time. I don’t know when it will happen, and I’m worried. Manuel is at home. I’m lying in bed. I hear him pacing, restless. I touch my belly. It’s a normal belly, like that of any other woman—it’s not a pregnant belly, I mean. Weisman says the treatment was very intense: I’m a little anemic, and much thinner than before the episode with Teresita started.