Authors: Matilde Asensi
We didn’t get any rest at all that night. Daniel kept opening his eyes and speaking without pause in long and well-constructed, though erratic and delirious, sentences: Sometimes he would expound at great length on topics that must have to do with his subject, such as the existence of an obscure primeval language whose sounds were innate to the nature of beings and things, and at other times, he would explain in minute detail how he prepared breakfast in the morning, cutting the bread with a knife with a blue handle, collecting the slices with his left hand, programming the toaster for two minutes and the microwave for forty-five seconds to heat the cup of coffee. There was no doubt that both of us had come out just as methodical and organized as Grandma Eulàlia, from whom (in lieu of a proper mother) we had learned almost everything. But my brother’s favorite topic was death, his own, and he would anxiously ask how he was going to be able to rest if he could not feel the weight of his body. If we gave him water, he drank, but he said he didn’t feel thirst because the dead don’t feel thirst, and on one occasion, when he brushed the glass with his fingers, he was startled and asked why we were putting that cold thing in his mouth. He was like a boneless puppet who only wanted to rest six feet underground. He didn’t know who we were or why we bothered to get close to him. Sometimes he would stare at us and his eyes looked as dead as the crystal eyes of a doll.
At last, around seven in the morning, the sun began to illuminate the sky. Ona’s parents arrived a few minutes later and she went with them to have breakfast, leaving me alone with my brother. I would have liked to lean in close to him and tell him: “Hey, Daniel, get up and let’s go home!” And it seemed so possible, so feasible, that I placed my hands several times on the armrests of the chair to get up. Unfortunately, on each of these occasions, my brother suddenly opened his eyes and spit out such a string of nonsense that I ended up exhausted and disheartened. A little while before Ona and her parents returned, he began to talk in a monotonous voice, staring at the ceiling, about Giordano Bruno and the possible existence of infinite worlds in the infinite Universe. Watching him affectionately, I told myself that his craziness, his strange illness, could in a sense be compared with one of those pages of perfect code that one writes few times in one’s life: both contained a certain kind of beauty that could only be seen beneath a disagreeable surface.
Since I had to go by home before going at eight o’clock to the airport, without having slept, I left the hospital. I was tired and depressed and I desperately needed a shower and fresh clothes. I did not like the idea of going by the office so instead of using one of the three business elevators, I used my private one. This elevator, controlled by a computer that recognized my voice, only had three stops: the garage, the ground floor (where the reception desk and the lobby of Ker-Central were) and my house, situated on the rooftop of the building, surrounded by a five thousand square foot garden protected by opaque screens of isolating material. That was my personal paradise, the most difficult to realize of all the ideas I had had in my life. In order to
build it, it had been necessary to move all the refrigeration, heating, and electrical installations to the top floor, the tenth, and to cover the floor of the roof with layers of waterproof material, thermal insulation, porous concrete, and workable earth. I had hired a team of landscaping and gardening professionals from the Barcelona School of Architecture and the American company that constructed the living space—a two thousand square foot chalet, with only one floor—specialized in ecologically friendly materials, home automation, and intelligent security. The project had cost me almost the same as the rest of the property, but it was without a doubt worth it. I could claim, without lying, that I lived amidst nature in the center of the city.
When the doors of the elevator opened, I found myself at last in the living room of my house. The light streamed in through the French doors through which I saw Sergi, the gardener, leaning against the oleander bushes. Magdalena, the housekeeper, was already vacuuming in some room in the back. Everything was clean and orderly, but the sensation of strangeness that I felt inside stuck to the walls and objects just by me looking at them. I didn’t feel that relaxing stir that went through me every time I arrived. Not even the water from the shower could wash the grime of unreality down the drain; neither could breakfast, nor the telephone conversations with Jabba and with Núria, my secretary, nor the drive to El Prat with the windows rolled down, nor seeing my mother and Clifford for the first time in five months, nor, of course, seeing again, now beneath a brilliant sun, the old mass of La Custòdia, ascending its steps, getting into one of the giant squeaky elevators, and returning to the room containing my brother.
Around twelve in the afternoon I left Ona, Dani (Proxi had brought him first thing in the morning to the hospital), and Ona’s parents in front of the entrance of their building, on Xiprer Street, and I returned to my own house. On the way, my phone started to ring as on any normal day at that time. But I didn’t answer; all I did was block it so that only calls from my family and from Jabba, Proxi, and Núria came through. The business world would have to stop for a while. I was like a processor fried by an electrical surge. I only remember that after getting out of the elevator, I dropped Clifford’s and my mother’s bags in the hall and I fell like a lump on the bed.
The telephone was ringing. I couldn’t move. At last it stopped and I went back to sleep. Seconds later, again, it began to ring. Once, twice, three times…. Silence. Everything was dark; it must be nighttime. The damn thing kept at it. I sat up suddenly in bed, with my eyes very wide. Suddenly I remembered…. Daniel!
“Light!” I exclaimed; the lamp at the head of my bed lit up. The clock on the night table showed that it was ten after eight at night. “And speaker phone.”
The system emitted a soft click to let me know that it had picked up the phone for me and I could speak.
“It’s Ona, Arnau.”
I was dazed and disoriented. I rubbed my face with my hands and shook my hair, stuck like a helmet to my head. The remaining lights in the room automatically began to gradually turn themselves on.
“I fell asleep.” I mumbled by way of a hello. “Are you at La Custòdia?”
“I’m at home.”
“Okay, give me a half hour and I’ll pick you up. If you want, we can have dinner there, in the cafeteria.”
“No, no, Arnau,” my sister-in-law quickly declined. “I’m not calling about that. It’s that… well, you’ll see, I’ve found some papers on Daniel’s desk and… I don’t know how to explain it to you. It’s very strange and I’m very worried. Could you come take a look at them?”
My brain felt swollen. “Papers? What papers?”
“Some notes of his. Something very strange. I’m probably imagining things, but…. I would prefer not to tell you over the phone. I want you to see it for yourself and give me your opinion.”
“All right. I’m on my way right now.”
I was as hungry as a wolf, so while I showered and dressed I devoured, bit by bit, the dinner that Magdalena had left prepared for me. I spent a while deciding whether I should wear jeans like always, or perhaps some other pants that were more comfortable for spending the night in the hospital. In the end, I decided on the latter; jeans are almost a way of life, but, when it comes down to it, are very stiff, and at five in the morning, they can become perverse instruments of torture. So I put on a sweater, the black pants from one of my business suits, and some old leather shoes I found in the closet. Luckily, I still didn’t need to shave, so I put my hair back and I was ready. I got a jacket out of the closet, put my phone in one of the pockets, grabbed my backpack, slipped my laptop inside in case I was able to work for a little while that night, and went to my brother’s apartment.
Xiprer Street was one of those long tree-lined streets on which you could still find old chalets with people living in them and the neighborhood atmosphere of a small city. You had to drive around in a lot of circles and go up and down a lot of hills in order to get there, but when you thought your problems were over and all that was left was to park the car, you’d discover with horror that the cars were squeezed together in such a way on both sides of the street that it was almost impossible to get from one side of the street to the other without using a can opener. It would have been a miracle if the situation had been any different that night, but, of course, it was not, and I ended up doing the same as always. Which is to say I parked the left half of the car diagonally across one of the block’s corners.
My brother’s apartment was on the fourth floor of a very old building. I was convinced that some cloned strain of Jabba resided there, the product of some mysterious genetic experiment, because every time that I went, I found myself in the elevator with some almost exact replica of him. It never failed, and the phenomenon ended up worrying me so much that I asked Daniel if he had also noticed it. My brother, obviously, had burst into laughter and had explained to me that there was a very extensive family that occupied various apartments in the building, and that all of its members did hold a certain resemblance to Marc.
“Certain resemblance?” I exclaimed, indignant.
“They’re all enormous and red-headed, but that’s where it ends!”
“Well, I would say they’re identical.”
“Don’t exaggerate!”
But now my brother was not at home and I could not tell him, as I always did, that I had again found myself in the elevator with one of those clones. The door was opened by my sister-in-law, who, although she was dressed to go out, looked drawn and had bags under her eyes.
“You don’t look good, Arnau.” She told me with an affectionate smile.
“I think I didn’t sleep very well,” I replied as I went into the apartment. In the hall that began in front of me and ended in the living room, a diminutive figure came forward with a shaky step, dragging, like Snoopy with Linus, an old blanket with which he was also covering half of his head.
“He’s exhausted,” Ona told me, lowering her voice. “Don’t excite him.”
I didn’t get a chance to. Halfway there, the blanketed figure decided it wasn’t worth the effort and turned around, going back to his grandparents, who were watching television. Since
the sofa was visible from the entryway, I waved hello to Ona’s parents, while my sister-in-law tugged at my left arm to take me to Daniel’s office.
“You have to see this, Arnau,” she said, as she turned on the light. My brother’s study was even smaller than my closet, but he had managed to fix it up with an enormous quantity of very tall wooden bookshelves overflowing with books, magazines, notebooks, and files. Occupying the center of that chaos was his work desk, covered with unstable stacks of folders and papers, surrounding, like high walls, some annotated manuscripts on which rested a pen, and next to them the closed laptop.
Ona went to the desk, and, without moving anything, leaned over the papers and put a finger on them.
“Go on, read this,” she murmured.
I still wore the backpack on my shoulder, but the urgency that came through Ona’s voice pulled me toward the table. There, where she was pointing with her index finger, were written some phrases in my brother’s handwriting, which, although perfectly understandable at the beginning, became almost illegible at the end:
“Mana huyarinqui lunthata? Do you not hear, thief?
“Jiwañta [...] You are dead [...], anatatäta chakxaña, you’ve tried to take the stick from the door.
“
Jutayañäta allintarapiña
, you will call the gravedigger,
chhärma
, this very night.
“The others (them)
jiwanaqañapxi jumaru,
all die everywhere for you.
“
Achakay, akapacha chhaqtañi jumaru
. Oh, this world will cease to be visible to you!
“
Kamachi
[...], law [...],
lawt’ata
, closed with a key,
Yäp
….”
Everything after that, as if Daniel had been losing consciousness while his hand kept trying to write, looked like a series of lines written with unsteady strokes and ended abruptly.
I stayed in suspense for a few seconds, and then incredulously re-read those notes a couple more times.
“What do you think, Arnau?” Ona asked, nervous, “Doesn’t it seem a little strange to you?”
I opened my mouth to say… I don’t know what, but not a single sound came from my throat. No, it was not possible. It was simply ridiculous to think that those phrases were directly related to Daniel’s illness. Yes, they described it point by point, and yes, they also sounded threatening, but who in his right mind could accept something as absurd as the idea that the last thing my brother wrote before falling ill could have something to do with what had happened to him? Could we have been going just as crazy as he was?
“I don’t know what to tell you, Ona,” I stammered. “Really. I don’t know what to tell you.”
“But Daniel was working on this when…!”
“I know, but let’s not lose our heads!” I exclaimed. My sister-in-law rested her hands on the back of Daniel’s chair and squeezed it so hard that her fingers were tense and her knuckles were white. “Think about it, Ona. How could that paper be the cause of his agnosia and his cursed Cotard delusion? I know it seems to be related, but that’s impossible, it’s…grotesque!”
For a few eternal seconds, both of us remained silent, immobile, with our gazes fixed on Daniel’s notes. The more I read those letters, the more a worried and suspicious fear grew inside me. And if that business really had affected him? And if he had been so impacted by whatever it was he had been reading and translating that his unconscious had played a bad trick on him, adopting that sort of curse and converting it into a real illness? I didn’t want to give Ona’s imagination wings, so I abstained from telling her what I was thinking, but the idea that my
brother had been able to somatize those words, for whatever reason, got to me. Maybe he was too captivated by that work, or too tired to study; maybe he had overworked himself, dedicating more time and energy to the duties of his career. Everything could, and should, have a rational explanation, as much as those scribbled-on manuscripts seemed to indicate that Daniel had been hypnotized… or something like that. What the hell did I know about stupid witchcraft and enchantments?