Authors: Matilde Asensi
Ona walked next to me, resolutely weighted down with Dani’s bag of supplies and the almost twenty-five pounds of her son. My sister-in-law was very young; she had recently turned twenty-one. She had met Daniel during her first term of college in the Introduction to Anthropology class my brother was giving that year at the university, and they moved in together shortly after that, partly for love and partly, I suppose, because Mariona was from Montcorbau, a small town in Aran Valley, and it must not have been very comfortable for them to share their intimacy with the other four Aranesan students who shared Ona’s apartment. Before that, Daniel had lived with me, but suddenly, one day, he had appeared in the door of the living room with his computer monitor under his arm, a backpack on his shoulder, and a suitcase in his hand.
“I’m going to live with Ona,” he had announced with a happy expression. My brother’s eyes were a very surprising color, an intense uncommon violet. Apparently he had inherited them from his paternal grandmother, Clifford’s mother, and he was so proud of them that he had been very disappointed when his son Dani’s eyes, when they had lightened, had stayed simply blue. To highlight the different genetic combinations we came from, mine were dark brown, like coffee, like my dark hair, although that’s where the physical differences ended.
“Congratulations,” was all I had said in reply that day. “Good luck to you.”
It’s not that my brother and I didn’t get along. On the contrary; we were as united as two brothers could be who loved each other and who had grown up practically alone. The problem was that, both of us being sons of Eulàlia Sañé (once the most talkative woman in Catalonia and, for the last twenty-five years, of England), we had no choice but to turn out quiet. And in any case, during the course of life, one learns, experiments, and matures; but as far as change goes, what is referred to as change, people do not change much because they are at every moment the
same as they always have been.
My father died in 1972 when I was five years old, after being bedridden for a long time. The only memory I have is an image of him sitting in an armchair, beckoning to me with his hand, but I’m not sure it’s real. Shortly after, my mother married Clifford Cornwall and Daniel was born two years later, shortly after my seventh birthday. They gave him that name because it was identical in both languages, although we always pronounced it like in English, putting the stress on the “A.” Clifford’s job in the Foreign Office required him to travel incessantly between London and Barcelona where the General Consulate was, so we kept living in the same house as always and he came and went. My mother, for her part, kept herself busy with friendships, her social life, and continuing to be—or considering herself to be—the spiritual muse of the ample group of my father’s old work friends from the university, where he’d been head of the Department of Metaphysics for twenty-some years (he had been much older than my mother when they had married in Mallorca, where he was originally from), so Daniel and I had a very solitary childhood. Every once in a while they sent us off to Vic for a few months with our grandmother until they noticed that I was starting to bring home horrendous grades from school, from having missed so much class. So they enrolled me in boarding school at La Salle Academy, and my mother, Clifford, and Daniel went to live in England. At first I thought they were going to take me with them, or rather that we would all go together, but when I noticed that it wasn’t going to happen, I had no trouble coming to terms with the fact that I would have to learn to survive alone, and that I couldn’t trust anyone other than my grandmother who waited for me every Friday afternoon like a post at the exit of the academy. When I started my first business, Inter-Ker, in 1994, my brother, desperate to separate himself from our mother’s apron strings, returned to Barcelona to study Spanish Language and Literature and after that, a graduate degree in Anthropology at the Autonomous University. Since then, and up to the day he had left, saying “I’m going to live with Ona,” we had lived together.
Despite his being as introverted as I, people in general appreciated Daniel much more for his affability and sweetness. He spoke little, but when he did everyone paid attention and thought they’d never heard anything so opportune or interesting. Like his son, he almost always had a smile on his face, while I was surly and taciturn, incapable of maintaining a normal conversation with anyone in whom I had not placed all of my trust many years previously. It’s true I had friends (although more than friends they were in reality close acquaintances), and, for business, I maintained relations with people all over the world, but they were as strange as I, little disposed to communicate or only doing so via a keyboard, with lives that almost always took place under artificial light and who, when they weren’t in front of a computer, dedicated themselves to hobbies as eccentric as urban spelunking or role-playing games, collecting wild animals or studying fractal functions
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, much more important, naturally, than any living person close to them.
“…and kept repeating that he was dead, and that he wanted me to bury him.” A small sob escaped from Ona’s throat.
I came suddenly back to reality, finding myself blinded by the neon lights, as if I had been walking with my eyes closed. I hadn’t heard anything my sister-in-law had been telling me. My nephew’s blue eyes now looked at me attentively from his mother’s shoulder, and from the edge of his pacifier dripped a thin string of drool that hung from a sleepy smile. Really, more than looking at me, what my nephew was contemplating was the small earring that gleamed on my
earlobe. Since his father had an identical one, to the boy it was a familiar element that identified us.
“Hi, Dani!” I murmured, caressing his cheek with my finger. My nephew’s smile widened and the drool flowed freely onto Ona’s sweater.
“He woke up!” his mother exclaimed sadly, stopping in the middle of the hallway.
“Marc and Lola have offered to stay with him tonight,” I told her. “Is that okay with you?”
My sister-in-law’s eyes widened, showing infinite gratitude. Ona had light brown hair and wore it very short, arranged in such a way that it always seemed comically disheveled. A substantial orange-dyed streak framed her right cheek, making her freckles and the intense white of her skin stand out. That night, however, more than a fresh and attractive young woman, she seemed a frightened child in need of her mother.
“Oh, yes! Of course it’s okay!” With an energetic movement, she sat Dani up and held his face close to hers. “You’re going to Marc and Lola’s house, darling, okay?” she asked him, showing immense joy, and the baby, without knowing he was being manipulated, smiled, enthralled.
Despite the hospital being full of signs prohibiting the use of cell phones, it seemed that no one there knew how to read, least of all the hospital’s own staff so, without worrying too much about it, I took mine out and called the “100” directly. Jabba and Proxi had been about to leave. My nephew, who had a special predilection for those small artifacts that people stuck to their faces before beginning to speak, stretched out a hand without warning, trying to take it from me, but since I was faster and he couldn’t he got angry and gave a loud grunt of protest. I remember at that moment I thought that a hospital was not the ideal place for a child: first, because his shouts could bother the sick people, and second, because the air in those places was so loaded with strange illnesses…or so it seemed to me.
To remove my cell phone from Dani’s line of sight while I talked with Jabba and Proxi, Mariona sat down in a green plastic chair next to a vending machine filled with bottled water and played with the little boy, offering him a packet of tissues which, fortunately, seemed to interest him very much. The other chairs making up the row of seats were broken or stained, giving the lamentable appearance of ruin. It was said there was no better medical care or better doctors in the area than at the public hospital, and surely it must be true, but in terms of decor and hospitality it couldn’t compete with the private one.
“They’ll be here soon,” I told her, sitting next to her and giving my nephew the small phone with the keyboard locked. Ona, who had seen my brother’s phone fly through the air and crash into the ground on various occasions, tried to intervene, but I insisted; Dani suddenly ceased to exist for all intents and purposes, entertained by the precious toy.
“If Lola and Marc are coming to take him,” my sister-in-law explained, nodding at the boy, “we can wait for them here in case the doctor comes out and wants to talk to us.”
“Daniel’s on that floor?” I asked, surprised, and turned my head toward the opening of a long hallway to our left with the word “Neurology” written over its entrance.
Ona nodded. “I told you already, Arnau.”
She’d caught me red-handed, and I couldn’t hide it. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help the automatic gesture of stroking my goatee, and when I did so I noticed that the hair was rough and clotted from the humidity in the sewer.
“Sorry, Ona. I’m… disconcerted by all of this.” I took in the space with my gaze. “I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but… could you tell me everything again, please?”
“Again?” she asked, surprised. “It seemed like you weren’t listening. Okay…Let’s see.
Daniel came home from the university around three-thirty. The boy had just gone to sleep. We talked for a while after eating, about…. Well, we’re not doing very well with money and, you know, I want to go back to school, so…. Anyway, Daniel shut himself in his office like always and I stayed in the living room reading. I don’t know how much time passed. This lump….” she said, referring to Dani, who was about to throw my phone at the wall to see how it sounded. “Hey! No, no, no! Give me that! Give it back to Arnau!”
My nephew obediently stretched out his hand to give it to me, but changed his mind at the last instant, elegantly ignoring the nonsense his mother was asking of him.
“Ok… So what happened was that I fell asleep on the sofa.” Ona hesitated, trying to get the chronology of events straight in her head, “and all I remember is that I woke up because I felt someone breathing on my face. When I opened my eyes I was startled to death: Daniel was in front of me, looking at me expressionlessly, like in a horror movie. He was on his knees, less than a hand-breadth away. It was a miracle I didn’t scream. I told him to stop messing around because it wasn’t funny and, as if he hadn’t heard me, he tells me that he’s just died and he wants me to bury him.” Under Ona’s eyes two dark puffy circles had appeared. “I gave him a push so I could stand up and jumped off the sofa. I was so scared, Arnau! Your brother didn’t move, didn’t speak, he had a vacant expression as if he really were dead.”
“And what did you do?” It was hard for me to imagine my brother like that. Daniel was the most normal guy in the world.
“When I saw it wasn’t a bad joke and that he really wasn’t reacting, I tried to find you but I couldn’t. He sat down on the sofa, with his eyes closed. He didn’t move again after that. I called the number for emergencies and…. That’s when they told me to bring him here, to La Custòdia. I explained to them that I couldn’t get him up, that he weighed seventy pounds more than I did and that he was falling forward as if he were a rag doll that if they didn’t come help me he’d end up on the floor with his head split open….” Ona’s eyes filled with tears. “Meanwhile, Dani had woken up and was crying in his crib…. My God, Arnau, what a nightmare!”
My brother and I were the same height, almost six three, but he weighed a good two hundred and twenty pounds, owing to his sedentary lifestyle. It would have been difficult for my sister-in-law to lift him from the sofa and move him anywhere; it had been enough for her just to keep him upright.
“The doctor took a half hour to get there,” she continued, tearfully. “In that whole time, Daniel only opened his eyes a couple of times and it was to repeat that he was dead and that he wanted me to shroud and bury him. Like an idiot, while I pushed him against the sofa so he wouldn’t tip over, I tried to reason with him, explaining to him that his heart was still beating, his body was still warm, and that he was breathing normally, and he answered that none of that meant he was alive because he was inarguably dead.”
“He’s gone crazy….” I murmured bitterly, staring at the toes of my sneakers.
“Well, that’s not all. He gave the same explanation to the doctor, with some added detail like he didn’t have a sense of touch, or smell, or taste, because his body was a corpse. Then the doctor took out a needle from his case and very gently, so as not to hurt him too much, pricked his finger.” Ona paused for a second, then she shook my arm to get my attention. “You won’t believe it: he ended up stabbing the whole needle into various parts of his body and… Daniel didn’t even make a sound!”
I must have looked dumbfounded, because if there was one thing my brother couldn’t handle, ever since he was little, it was shots. He would faint before the apocalyptic vision of a syringe.
“So the doctor decided to order an ambulance and bring him to La Custòdia. He said he should be examined by a neurologist. I got Dani ready and we came here. They took him inside, and we stayed in the waiting room until a nurse told me to go up to the floor, because they had hospitalized him in Neurology, and that the doctor would speak with me when he’d finished examining Daniel. I tried to find you everywhere. By the way…,” she said pensively, hugging the child to her chest despite his irate protests, “we should call your mother and Clifford.”
The problem wasn’t calling them; the problem was how the hell was I going to get my phone back without my nephew throwing a huge tantrum, so I began a cautious approach, waving my car keys in the air, until I noticed that both my nephew and my sister-in-law were ignoring me and focusing their gaze on a spot behind my back. Two guys with funereal expressions were coming toward us. One of them, the older one, was dressed in street clothes with a white coat on top; the other, small and wearing glasses, wore the complete uniform, including the clogs.