A New Injustice, Pt. 1
By: Steven T. Bramble
Tags: Short Story, Abortion, Relationships, Ethics And Morals, México

Itzap, receiving confirmation at the consultorio she was pregnant, wanted the baby taken out from the very first. Her implant had expired two months before and she’d lost track. She was embarrassed to have willfully ignored all the symptoms for so many weeks, but now some of the tension subsided and she quickly forgave herself, not least because she’d caught it early. Her nurse (a woman in her late thirties and pretty except for a heavy, seemingly permanent veil of acne) stood under the bright lights with all the serenity of a nun, gently urging her to go home and reflect before making any decisions. In her experience, attitudes had the tendency to change drastically when it came to a pregnancy.

But Itzap’s feelings were not ambiguous, not even emotionally murky. Childlessness was a virtue she had fought and argued for her entire adult life, not just with boyfriends and family members, but even now, serving as a delegate on the Congreso de las Mujeres de Guanajuato, where maybe it shouldn’t have surprised her certain women remained remarkably conservative on the subject of motherhood. Her status as a delegate put her in a well-connected position to secure an abortion in Mexico City, and Leopoldo would be in agreement — would probably even offer to pay for it (she would suggest half) — so, as far as reflecting on things was concerned, the decision was already made.

Walking home she spotted a pack of spotted, sand-colored mules hauling bulging sacks of produce from one of the outlying campos, huffing languidly up the cobbled glorieta on the other side of Túnel Santa Fé and being driven along by a robot. The thing was little more than a matte-black polycarbon stick mounted atop swivel treads made of composite rubber, a shiny camera lens serving as its face and catching sunlight like a monocle. Following the mule train was a group of three impoverished haitianos all in an uproar over something, arguing in explosive French. People stared, customers and shop owners starting to peek out of storefronts to see what was going on. The steady stream of taxis and motos flowing through the glorieta slowed. The tallest of the haitianos was struggling with the other two, who were attempting to restrain him. Itzap saw from the corner of her eye four older men, construction workers standing in front of an abarrotes shop sipping Coca, begin to strut wolfishly toward the weird procession, paint stains on blue jeans and cowboy boots clacking on cobble. The haitianos spotted them, the one in hysterics finally breaking away from the other two and dashing past the sinewy mules up to the robot driver, but before he was able to attack the machine he was forced to turn and face the men. He was on some kind of drug, eyes wide and wild, barefoot and clad in ripped pants, shouting broken castellano at the mexicanos quickly encircling him. Itzap, on the other side of the glorieta, could hear only the gist of what they were saying.

I am Mexican!

No, friend, we don’t do that here.

I am Mexican, I deserve a job!

Calm down. We don’t do that in this neighborhood. Here, we respect other peoples’ property.

I respect when they give me a job!

Oye, negro, cálmate. There are families. You need to go.

Itzap watched the robot and huffing mules ascend one of the steep streets branching off the glorieta.

When she got home she called Leopoldo, as she’d promised, to give him the news. Answering, he sounded typically half-drunk but unusually emotionally disheveled, his voice foregrounded against bubbly noise of what she already knew was some smoky cantina of the type she’d been to with him hundreds of times, arguing and nuzzling at corner tables, nipping at bottles of Victoria. She decided not to go to the trouble of any sort of preamble and just laid it on him in two vicious, succinct strokes.

“I’m back from the consultorio. I am.”

Nothing but modulated bar clatter through speakerphone, the unpleasant sound of a nearby table of drunk men bursting into laughter.

“I’m just calling to let you know I’m going to get it taken care of, so you don’t need to worry about anything.”

She was faced with more silence, a few sonic sparkles of bottles clinking. She imagined, in an admittedly sick way, he might derive a weird sexual satisfaction from her decisiveness, but he wasn’t saying anything.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll talk to you when I know more.”

“Itzap — ” deep smoker’s voice flanged with something between emotional and physical anguish.

He didn’t often call her by anything but pet names.

“Wait.”

“What?”

“I don’t want you to get an abortion.”

Her breath caught. “Leo, I — ”

“Or,” he suddenly backtracked (possibly qualified), “it’s not that I don’t want you to, but I don’t like the idea of you having it done before we get a chance to discuss it together.”

She couldn’t help noting the stinging irony: Toño — had this been his baby — would have opposed getting rid of it too. The only difference being, objecting to an abortion would’ve been keeping perfectly with his character.

—

Acidic disappointment rose inside her. Rather than focus on it, she pushed it away. She wasn’t used to feeling negative emotions toward Leo, and for that reason she was loath to start. But it wasn’t something she could just forget or ignore. Her trust in him was shattered. She recognized the manipulation in his vocabulary, especially the word discuss.

Leopoldo was a professional when it came to discussions, a history, philosophy and history of philosophy professor with an altogether overactive sex drive for a 52-year-old, and (she felt certain) more girlfriends than just her. Not to mention his wife, of course, and his two grown step-children. She had been dating him nearly two years (two years seeming worthy enough to dispose of the term having an affair) and was sufficiently versed in his habits and personality to know his precondition of “discussing it together” was precisely the kind of reasonable-sounding thing he usually said to get his way. Of course, his manipulations would’ve been ineffectual were it not for the fact they always came cloaked in sincerity.

They’d had many discussions on the topic of having children. It was one of the things they always circled back around to because of her stance, and Leo’s opinions had always been equal to hers if not even more stridently opposed. In his analysis, to have a child at this moment in history was tantamount to an immoral act. He condemned the desire to add another person to an already dangerously overpopulated planet simply so “one could look upon a projection of oneself,” as a shamelessly egotistical impulse, especially while so many other children — already born — were in need of parental figures. But in Itzap’s mind, Leo’s principal objection to having a child was a selfish one, even though he considered it a matter of pragmatism. He was deeply involved in a pan-American political resistance movement, and a child would be a crippling distraction from his activism. What that activism entailed, however, she didn’t know. He kept her knowledge of it purposefully limited: the group was composed of people from many nations across the Americas. Their goal was the undermining and overthrow of every ethnonationalist member-state in the COAN. She figured the whole thing was just as likely an elaborate lie so he could hop between women.

As for her reasons for not wanting a child, they were less ornate. She saw some truth in Leo’s claims that the world had become a polluted, inhospitable, maybe even irredeemable place, but for her those were little more than excuses. Her objection was rooted in nothing more than a feeling, one she didn’t see any need to explain. A feeling that to bring another life into the world would be an inconceivable injustice.

So why such an abrupt reversal of ideals on his part? Maybe he’d just been fleetingly sentimental. But as a general rule, when it came to matters of love, Leo was only ever sentimental about sensuality, and never about sacrifice. In this sense, at least, he was a good materialist. What was it, she wondered, with moderately intelligent men and sheer physicality? She couldn’t really criticize, though, when this was actually what she liked most about him, his immediacy and dispassion set against an oddly unbeaten romanticism.

He had been her teacher during her second year of university. Back then he offered a creative writing course in extremely high demand due to the fact he’d managed to write a very objectively good novel (damn him) that young literature majors with little reading experience had started to list alongside the works of Rulfo, Pacheco, Bolaño and Márquez as among their favorites. But that wasn’t when she’d started dating him. Even that long ago, she and Toño had already been together three years.

Her second year of university was also the year Toño’s father was killed in a car accident. His father’s ex-wife — Toño’s older brother’s mother — succeeded in laying claim to half his assets, which left Toño’s mother and little sister in Irapuato without an income. He quit university in the middle of a law degree to move back, an hour away from Guanajuato, to start driving a taxi in order to support them financially.

Even before his father’s accident, they had mostly stopped having sex. Itzap had no explanation for it. If she tried asking him directly, he was defensive to the point of anger, and naturally she had assumed he was cheating. Incredibly, though, there was no evidence to back up her suspicions. She knew his daily schedule, looked through his phone without him knowing, did everything possible to catch him in the act, but as far as she could tell he barely spoke to other girls. She eventually blamed it on his simply having a low sex drive. But even that was confusing. When they’d first got together during their final year of preparatorio he had been like a pent-up dog, so eager he’d been almost like a cartoon, and then all that sexual energy faded as quick as the details of a fantasy, leaving her with meager reality.

They were a smart socioeconomic match, both of them from protective, lower-middle-class families with designs to send them to school, and there had been many benefits for Itzap in keeping her parents pleased. She was afforded privacy, allowed to live in Guanajuato with Toño rather than with the family of an older cousin. She had gone so far as to announce they intended to marry at some point in the future.

Back in prepa, Toño had been studious but strong, projecting a kind of unflappable masculinity for a boy of eighteen. His personality, however, had meant far less to Itzap at that age than his looks: he’d been a straight-edge but brooding type, vulnerable and tough in equal measure, boyishly groomed but mannishly built, with a rounded, full-cheeked smile and exceptionally benign eyes. His reticence around her drove her crazy in a teenage girl way, had made her wonder, what was he thinking? — was he as into her as she was him? — was he just shy or did he possess a fearsome self-control? True to the stunted nature of their relationship, these questions were never resolved for her, though now she couldn’t have cared less to discover the answers. He’d become little more than an inert force in her life, constant and bothersome.

Their first year of university she had lost the ability to arouse him, and he precipitously lost all interest in her. He’d always been stoical in character, but this was something else. His personality flattened down to nothing when around her. He expressed nothing personal, became enraged when she inquired or requested anything of him. She groped for reasons, cycling through several different theories — the stress of his degree, or too many video games, or another girlfriend, or boredom with her sexually. Nothing explained it. Finally, she was past the point of caring. She’d made up her mind to leave him and needed only to work up the nerve.

Then Toño’s father died, and things got hopelessly complicated.

She couldn’t end things under the circumstances, but the shock Toño experienced reopened him to her emotionally, as if a shell that had been covering him had cracked and flaked away in pieces. He began to confide in her again, grew talkative and even cautiously intimate. She went with him to the funeral, stayed by his side through the grieving process, and found herself slowly regaining some of the love she’d lost.

But his openness didn’t last. Once the funeral ended and the initial pain had had time to deaden, the shell regenerated more rigid and callous than before.

Adding to the problems was a second, and in some ways more difficult, tragedy. Toño’s father, after remarrying, had never updated his will, and as a result his first wife inherited the majority of his assets. There was a brief legal fight but to no avail, and Toño’s mother and little sister were left without an income. The family had gone into debt to pay for the funeral and burial, and they were left with no other option but to sell their home. Instead, Toño decided to leave school, took out a loan to rent his cousin’s cab and started working full-time as a taxista in Irapuato to support them.

The taxi job was meant to be temporary. His plan had been to return the following semester once his mother’s financial situation stabilized. But the fact he would be leaving Guanajuato came as a relief to Itzap. She hadn’t been happy with their relationship for a long time, but she knew breaking up with him in the midst of so much turmoil would leave her with an unbearable guilt. Not to mention she would be upending her own world. So she embraced his absence as an easy way out.

What was meant to be temporary slowly turned permanent. Toño didn’t return to school the next semester, or the next, and finally at all, never quitting the taxi job, never moving back to Guanajuato. Likewise, their relationship never formally ended either.

One reason for this was that almost as soon as Toño moved back to Irapuato she had begun cheating on him. Never anything serious, just an adventure here or there that never lasted beyond a week or two. Even though the guys she turned to to satisfy her sexual urges were more interesting than Toño, and better lovers, she never really considered leaving him for someone else. She already had a long-term, passionless relationship, one which had accumulated years of pressures and complexities, family expectations and deceits. She let herself get strung out on new loves, new losses, experiencing what she felt had been denied her, and throughout all of it she stayed with Toño. He had come to represent an insuperable guilt in her life, a Catholic-grade pasteup of shame and personal failure. But there was another part of her that didn’t feel guilty at all. A rationale took shape in her mind, one that viewed having more than one partner as normal, natural. Maintaining the illusion of being with Toño had kept her family from meddling with her life, gifting her with an easy independence she didn’t have to justify to anyone.

She finished school, abandoned her writing aspirations to graduate with a philosophy degree in women’s studies, avoided Toño’s pleas to move back to Irapuato with him, and got a job at a bar in Guanajuato where she ran into Leopoldo. He recognized her immediately as having been in one of his classes years ago, but couldn’t remember her name. He asked if she was still writing, then surprised her by telling her he had given up on it too. She was confused. He was famous, in the literary sense of the term. He said the world had fallen into a lamentable state, and politics had finally corrupted his love of writing. She said that was too bad, she had enjoyed his book. A regrettable fate for both of them, he said. Then she served him drinks without further conversation for several hours. By the time she clocked out he was still there, smoking away and reading. She was not very attracted to him — he was older than her by more than twenty-five years — but was drawn to him for other reasons. His eloquence, his knowledge (or pretense of it), the way that, in only a few words, he had intrigued her, made her feel seen and heard. She sat down at his table and their conversation lasted three hours. He somehow understood her right away, got her to say things in the course of twenty minutes she’d never been able to discuss with anyone else. She found herself pouring out every secret and emotion about Toño. Regarding her belief that it was natural to have more than one man, he assured her not only was it normal, it was her right. She clearly hungered for a broader experience, the opportunity to freely empathize with others outside the neuroses of monogamy. His own view was that love was an illogical thing, a necessarily animalistic emotion subject to absolutely no set of morals, an instinct which craved, even thrived on, a certain level of depravity. But he also leveled with her, telling her that to deceive was unfair, cowardly and undignified.

Outside the bar she kissed him, and tasted for the first time his pungent but oddly not altogether disgusting smoker’s breath. It wasn’t that the things he’d said to her had never crossed her mind before, or that she even found them so smart, but that he had listened so intently as to have immediately hit upon the issues she’d been grappling with for so long, and assure her, in honest terms, that he could understand why she had done what she did. They started sleeping together, and she discovered he was endlessly energetic, devoutly romantic (in the idealistic sense), that he treated her as an equal, inviting her to political and academic discussions with professionals twice her age, always encouraging her to realize her potential. By being introduced to so many of his political contacts, she secured a spot for herself on the Congreso de las Mujeres, an organization working to draft a national women’s bill of rights in México. Leo had been ecstatic.

She had lived apart from Toño for five years, and been together with him nearly eight. At the same time, she’d given up on new loves for Leopoldo and was now pregnant with his child.