Lia’s pregnancy

Lia’s pregnancy and the birth of her son, Giulio, interrupt Casaubon’s absorption in the Plan and bring him back to a shared, immediate reality. As the pregnancy reaches term, the couple prepare for childbirth together, call the unborn baby the Thing, and imagine its arrival through both ordinary family language and the alchemical metaphors that have shaped their thinking. When Lia goes into labor while Casaubon is away, his fear turns the anticipated birth into a test of whether he can be present. He reaches her at the hospital in time to meet their son, whose intact, living body becomes a personal counterimage to the Plan’s abstractions.

Nearing the Birth

As Lia’s pregnancy comes to term, Casaubon neglects the Plan and stays with her whenever he can. He is anxious, while Lia reassures him that the time has not yet come. She is taking a course in painless childbirth, and Casaubon tries to follow the exercises with her. Lia has chosen not to learn the baby’s sex in advance, preferring to be surprised. He accepts that choice, touches her belly, and avoids asking what will come out; together they use the affectionate, deliberately nonspecific name the Thing for their child.

Casaubon wants a more active part in the birth than the familiar image of a father waiting outside the delivery room. He tells Lia that the child is his too and says he does not want to pace and smoke in the corridor. Lia answers that there is only so much he can do: when the moment comes, the labor will be up to her. She does, however, give him a role in the process. They rehearse counting together, so he can keep the rhythm for her as the intervals between contractions shorten. His wish to help is thus answered not with control over the birth, but with a specific act of accompaniment.

The Belly as Vessel

Their preparations bring the language of childbirth into contact with the alchemical imagery that has accumulated around the Plan. While they count in the dark and hold hands, Casaubon imagines that the Thing’s birth might lend reality and meaning to the old wives’ tales of the Diabolicals. Their imagined chemical weddings seek to produce gold, while their speculations about the philosopher’s stone circle around a humble grail; in contrast, Casaubon locates his own grail in Lia’s belly. The metaphor shifts the work of transformation from secret rites and disputed objects to a child growing within a living relationship.

Lia herself calls her belly a vessel in which primal matter is steeping, but she reverses the ominous associations Casaubon attaches to the image. When he lists the melancholy, sulfurous earth, black lead, and purifying processes supposedly imagined by the people at the castle, Lia asks whether they cannot recognize what is actually ripening in the vessel: their child, white, pink, and beautiful. Casaubon acknowledges that those people know, yet treat the belly as a metaphor full of secrets. Lia rejects the premise that the child’s formation is secret: its nerves, muscles, eyes, and organs are known to them. Her response distinguishes the concrete, developing child from the symbolic mysteries that the Plan teaches Casaubon to seek.

Labor and Casaubon’s Fear

The ordinary course of the pregnancy is abruptly interrupted when Casaubon returns home and finds Lia absent. A note on the kitchen table says that her waters have broken, she could not reach him at the office, and she has taken a taxi to the hospital; she adds that she feels alone and asks him to come. Casaubon’s immediate panic is sharpened by the counting they had rehearsed: he believes he should have been reachable so that he could keep time with her. He imagines that his absence could lead to the death of both Lia and the child, and even fears that Salon might take them. These are his frightened imaginings, not outcomes the narrative confirms.

At the hospital, his anxiety makes it difficult to find his way. He asks people for directions, ends up in the wrong ward twice, and shouts that someone must know where Lia is giving birth. The staff tell him to calm down, pointing out that everyone there is having a baby. The rebuke places his private emergency within the crowded routine of the hospital without diminishing its importance to him. At last he finds Lia in a room, pale but smiling, with her hair tucked beneath a white cap. Beside her is the Thing they had counted toward together.

Giulio and the Return to the Real

Lia tells Casaubon that their son is Giulio. Casaubon recognizes the newborn as his Rebis, the alchemical union that had existed for him as an idea, but gives that image a decisive change of meaning. He has helped make Giulio not out of dead bodies or arsenic soap, but through the living relationship he shares with Lia. The child is whole, with his fingers and toes in the right places. The contrast makes the birth more than the fulfillment of pregnancy: it confronts Casaubon’s imaginative world of transformation and secret knowledge with a concrete, shared creation.

The pregnancy therefore marks a temporary withdrawal from the Plan and a return to the responsibilities of family life. Its symbolic language does not disappear; Casaubon still sees the child through the figure of the Rebis and recalls the Diabolicals’ vessel. But Lia’s insistence on the knowable body, the practical counting they rehearse, and the eventual arrival of Giulio place those metaphors under pressure. The promised secret yields to an ordinary but consequential fact: Lia has given birth, Casaubon has reached her, and the child they called the Thing has a name.