The first time I read “Baby” I was overwhelmed. Ultra-short and steeped in meaning. The abandonment of a newborn. I interpreted the boy’s role as that of “a very bad boy.” Very, very bad. One who reacts harshly when removed from the affection of his family. That long human conflict in which love and the terrifying fear of losing one’s own place contend. The rejection among close ones that dictionaries record under the word Cainism. And those ambivalences of life that render contradictions comprehensible. Because José loves his sister —he rocks her and sings to her—, yet at the same time he understands her arrival as a threat: “… she will take his place in the family.” Delibes published in 1973 his novel The Dethroned Prince, written a decade earlier, which condenses in a few hours on the first Tuesday of December 1963 how a boy of almost four feels relegated by the birth of his sister. Of course, alongside that reaction of child psychology there are other themes: differences between social strata, hypocrisy, barriers to communication, a budding feminism…
The second time I read “Baby”, I was still more moved. I realized it was a story meant to prevent horror from progressing any further, to stop it from multiplying in the species.
Ambivalences, two values that may oppose each other in a mysterious something or in an inscrutable someone, without end. It happens in certain places and in certain journeys. In round trips. In heights and abysses. Beside protection, sacrifice often sits nearby.
It happens, I think, in that half a dozen persistent words of a “Baby”. That suggest more than they explain or teach.
Affection can exist under the same roof as violence or abuse.
Karla Barajas was born in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the most populous city and capital of the Mexican state of Chiapas, in the southwest of the country. The last paragraph Wikipedia dedicates to her notes: “She uses narrative as a way to visibilize differently machismo and misogynistic practices. Confronting readers with themes such as male violence against women and girls, death, child violence, pedophilia, among other themes.”
I can’t resist bringing here this micro-story of hers titled “Vacationing”.
“In the last assignment before vacations, most of my students write that they will play with the water in pools, seas, or rivers; that their skin will tan under the sun until it burns, that they will walk barefoot on the hot ground. I’m driving, I recall those stories. At a red light, a cascade of water drips from a bottle onto my windshield; I see two of my students cleaning my windscreen, bare feet on the pavement. The girls have flushed cheeks and arms burned by the sun.
“—Do you work during vacations?”
“—Only in summer we work in the streets, teacher.”
That bears witness to her commitment. She has stated that, in microfiction, with tangible stories and characters, irony and even dark humor allow her to radiate social critique “without the listener or reader erecting a barrier because they feel that what I say risks their system of values, beliefs, which makes disqualification immediate.”
And she answered in an interview, “If you see a child working in the streets in San Cristóbal, you may have normalized child exploitation; at best you buy the products they sell, but I think we must not forget those realities, and they should not stop troubling us, because our humanity perishes with acceptance.”
In “Baby” there is no answer to the firm suspicion that the newborn will be mistreated in her own home. That grave, ice-cold, iceberg-like silence compels the reader to actively participate in constructing the story. So that they become involved. So as to rescue. Or for us to be rescued.
Karla Barajas knows how much omissions help in such a grand narration of fewer than fifty words, and how useful a little blanket, a toy, and a compassionate bus can be. To neither forget nor avert our eyes from so many realities. Like those she may have witnessed inside José, before his sister —before taking her— arrives at that darker square on the board. In that board where we still are. So close to danger. Or to safety.
***
Baby
José loves his newborn sister, rocks her, sings to her. He knows she will take his place in the family, so, in secret, he takes her out of the house wrapped in a blanket and leaves her on a bus with a toy beside her. That way no one will mistreat her. ■