The Cave by José Saramago

In the safe silence of the bedroom, between sheets rumpled by the recent amorous agitations, the man heard his wife tell him that her period was two days late, and the news seemed to him extraordinary and utterly amazing, a kind of second fiat lux in an age in which Latin has ceased to be used and practiced, a vernacular surgeet ambula which has no idea where it is going and which is frightening for that very reason. Only an hour before, at most, in a moment of touching openness rare in the masculine sex, marcal Gacho had admitted to being a child, when, quite unbeknownst to him, he had been a father in embryo for some weeks, which just goes to show that we should never be too sure about what we think we are because it could easily happen that, at that precise moment, we are, in fact, something completely different.

Almost everything that Marta and marcal said to each other that night, before falling asleep out of sheer exhaustion, is described in a thousand and one stories of couples with children, but the concrete analysis of the concrete situation in which this married couple find themselves did not leave un-examined certain questions peculiar to them, for example, Marta's diminished ability to cope with the hard physical work of the pottery, but it failed to resolve, because this was dependent on the expected promotion, whether the baby would be born before or after their move to the Center.