Macarena Bruner's permanent infertility

Macarena Bruner’s permanent infertility follows an abortion she chose under pressure from her husband, Pencho Gavira, and an emergency hysterectomy after the procedure caused a uterine perforation and arterial bleeding. The loss means she can never have children again; its delayed emotional force helps explain why she came to see Pencho as a stranger and ultimately left him.## The pregnancy and operationMacarena tells Lorenzo Quart that she became pregnant and that Pencho reacted as if the news had brought the world down on him. He insisted that the pregnancy had come too soon and that there were already too many problems. She describes his pressure as unlike anything she had experienced before: he pressed her to have an abortion.She resisted for as long as she could, identifying herself as Catholic, but says that she loved her husband. Against Príamo Ferro’s advice, she entered a clinic and lost the child. The abortion was complicated by a perforation of the uterus and arterial haemorrhage. Doctors had to perform an emergency hysterectomy, leaving her permanently unable to become a mother.## A hidden lossThe consequences were not publicly known. Macarena says that no one knew except Príamo and Gris Marsala, and now Quart. Pencho himself was not told. Ferro continued to give her communion when she asked for it; his silence about the episode contrasts with the directness of Macarena’s eventual confession to Quart.She does not approach Quart to seek absolution. Her disclosure instead makes him a witness to an experience she had kept private, including the medical loss and the intimate breach between what happened to her and what her husband knew.## Delayed estrangementFor a time, Macarena avoided thinking about the abortion. She describes living in a strange dream from which she wanted to wake. Three months after returning, she entered the bathroom while Pencho showered after they had made love for the first time since her return. As he smiled under the water, she suddenly saw him as a perfect stranger: not the man she loved, but someone disconnected from him and from the fact that she had lost the possibility of having children for his sake.That recognition turned the bodily consequence of the operation into a rupture in the marriage. Macarena says she felt empty and alone, worse than she had felt in the clinic. She packed a suitcase and came away; Pencho never understood her departure and, she says, still does not understand it. Her permanent infertility is thus not only a medical outcome but the lasting cost through which she reassesses her love, her marriage, and the decision she made under pressure.