They’ve clipped my wings. Excised my supernumerary mammary glands. Technically, all this time I’ve been going through life with four tits instead of the official two. Not the surplus tits with nipples and areolas all down the bellies of bitches and sows, but a pair of small lumps that grew below my armpits by mistake. According to my mother, who’s responsible for passing these protuberances down to me, women with back-up breasts were thought to have special powers and were burned at the stake as witches. Just like it is with those little Indian girls born with two faces, four legs, and four arms—there’s always someone out there willing to worship us for our deformities. I’d never thought of myself as a lactic deity, and I didn’t believe my weird boobs had magical properties. The inconveniences that afflicted them were pretty ordinary, actually. They went through the same physiological changes as regular breast tissue and got swollen when I was on my period. Plus, my gynecologist told me that when I became a mother, they’d grow, painfully, at the same rate as the other two.
All that seemed pretty harmless to me. I used to have these nightmares where my kids suckled on my armpits and I rolled deodorant on my nipples. There’s more. In my case—and this doesn’t necessarily apply to other people—my extra tits poked out the sides of my summer shirts, like a pair of meatballs. Several times, while making love, my partners would mistakenly kiss them with passion, even bite them. Those mistakes never led us to discover any erogenous zones in the area—in case anyone out there thinks four breasts is double the pleasure.
People have strange relationships with certain parts of their bodies. Even more so when it’s a deformity. If your anatomy is a family, then the deformity is the freak child and you’re the heartless mother who can’t bring herself to love her own flesh and blood. Every morning, you call it names in front of the mirror and remind the freak just how ugly and useless it is. This message settles in the heart of the defect and, I believe, can be hard to remove, even with surgery. We may live in the era of positive messaging, but there are very few people, even beauty queens, who aren’t willing to hate some part of themselves, whether it’s a hooked nose or a whole personality.
A friend who believes in chakras told me to either chop them off or learn to accept them warts and all. This is how the idea of getting them excised began to seriously take hold in my head, especially after I learned from one of those awful healthcare sites that “polymastia”—a generic term for the condition of having additional breasts—was not only operable, but the surgery itself wasn’t considered an issue of vanity, something to be tackled by a plastic surgeon, so much as a medical treatment recommended for women who suffered physical or psychological “discomfort” from benign breast conditions, or in other words, it was another form of breast cancer prevention. These websites were awash with photos of the most implausible tits. It was a true atlas of breast anomalies: supernumerary nipples, ectopic nipples (the kind that can crop up on any part of your body—leg, vulva, testicles), accessory nipples, inverted nipples, asymmetrical boobs, amastia (the absence of one or both breasts), macromastia (gigantic breasts), micromastia (tiny breasts), male boobs . . . I felt like part of a community of women with something like mamma issues and joined a discussion forum about weird boobs, where I eventually stumbled across a news article with the headline “Chilean Wwoman with Ffour Bbreasts Uundergoes Ssurgery,” about a mother who bore a very passing resemblance to me. She was on the verge of losing everything and killing herself over a pair of extra tits. “Her husband tried to look the other way so his wife wouldn’t develop a complex, but it was pointless,” the article said. The operation, which lasted two hours, was successful, and the woman can’t wait to see her family and enjoy the summer with them. According to the article, “something as simple as a hug could cause her unbearable pain.”
To those I didn’t hug as hard as I should have: I’m sorry. Ever since the removal of my benign nemeses on a freezing winter day in November 2005, my hugs have become firmer. I may never be a deodorant model, but at least I can wave at people in the distance, raise my hand in class, hold on to the straphanger on the bus. All thanks to the approval of the Spanish welfare system, which spared one of its migrants from emotional and bioaesthetic agony as well as a possible family tragedy. Key to this was knowing that a friend of mine, who’d been traumatized by her gargantuan chest, had her breast reduction surgery fully covered, like it was just another health benefit. Mine was too. The operation lasted about four hours, during which I was fully unconscious. In the painful post-operative period—the eight-centimeter incisions that leaked dark blood under my arms took nearly a month to heal—I needed help with basically everything: brushing my teeth, cleaning my wounds, bringing a forkful of rice up to my mouth.
Today there are two thin scars where my monstrosities used to be. They clipped my wings, literally, and maybe, as my mother used to believe, I’ve amputated my magic. I’ve said goodbye and asked their forgiveness for the unjustified violence. But the most staggering thing I learned in those days when I couldn’t move, or write, is that some of us write with our pits. There’s nothing more important for a sustained narrative than a healthy wingbeat. With this in mind, you could say writing poetry is easier. You can write poetry with a hand or a finger. Prose, on the other hand, requires good, uninterrupted, unstoppable flapping. 
Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian writer and journalist based in Madrid. Her books include Sexographies, Llamada perdida, Nine Moons, Dicen de mí, and Undiscovered, which was longlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize, as well as the poetry collections Ejercicios para el endurecimiento del espíritu and Una pequeña fiesta llamada eternidad. In 2018, she won Peru’s National Journalism Award for her part in an investigative report on gender violence. She recently cofounded Sudakasa, a migrant and community art and writing project.
Julia Sanches is a literary translator working from Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. Recent translations include Boulder by Eva Baltasar, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023, and Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener, longlisted for the same prize in 2024. Born in Brazil, she currently resides in the United States.
Illustration: Yolande Mutale.
