Talking to Ourselves: A Novel (9 page)

This unknown time, this section of me, is what I am perhaps trying to salvage. So that everything that has been done wrong, not done, half done, won’t crush me tomorrow. For us carers, the
future widens like an all-engulfing crater. In the centre there is already someone missing. Illness as a meteorite.

What is to be done? Action seems terribly obvious: to care for, to watch over, to keep warm, to feed. But what about my imagination, which has also become ill? Is it wrong of me to plan ahead, to rehearse again and again what is to come? Am I
preparing
myself for the loss of Mario? Or am I snatching away what little I have left of him?

I mentioned this to Ezequiel once, a while ago, when he was only Dr. Escalante. We were in his office. Mario had gone to the toilet. I took the opportunity to ask him about the
appropriateness
of planning ahead. I remember Ezequiel saying to me: If you don’t live in the present today, tomorrow you won’t know how to live in the future. I found his Zen-like tone rather irritating. I asked him to be more specific. But Mario came back from the toilet. And Ezequiel smiled and didn’t say anything anymore.

I keep coming across books that are appropriate for hospitals. I don’t mean books that distract me (it’s impossible to be distracted in a hospital), but rather that help me understand why the hell we are there. Where I am not convinced we should be. Where I brought him to leave him in other people’s hands. Now, when I read, I search for him. The books speak to me more than he and I speak to one another. I read about the sick and the dead and widows and orphans. The sum of all the stories could fit into this list.

“Then he took out a syringe,” I underlined last night in a short story by Flannery O’Connor, “and prepared to find the vein, humming a hymn as he pressed the needle in.” When they inject
Mario I find it impossible to watch; they usually talk to him about something else while they are doing it, and I have the
impression
that what they say reaches his vein too. “He lay with a rigid outraged stare while the privacy of his blood was invaded by this idiot,” Mario says that what he most hates about being in a hospital is that as he gets worse, everyone feels obliged to put on a hopeful face for him. “He gazed down into the crater of death,” the crater!, “and fell back dizzy on his pillow,” every so often, Mario cranes his neck, lifts his head, and lets it drop again.

Every night, between paragraphs, I watch Mario sleep and I wonder what he is dreaming about. Does one dream
differently
in a hospital bed? Because, to be sure, one reads very
differently
.

Cold, always cold, he feels cold in summer; even though they cover him, he shivers. It is as if his skin no longer warmed him.

Heat can be an extreme sensation, but it doesn’t accuse anyone. If one person is suffering from it, the other doesn’t feel at fault. When Mario grows cold, on the other hand, I feel I am letting him down. That I should keep him warm but don’t know how. I ask the nurses if they couldn’t perhaps turn the heating on, and they look at me pityingly.

I find it hard to leave. In the hospital I sustain my mission. My mission sustains me. Life outside is becoming more difficult. I don’t know whether there is a name for this abduction. Fleming’s Syndrome? When I don’t look after anyone, no one looks after me.

Every afternoon, when I open the front door and hang my bag on the coat stand, I realize how big this house is going to be. I walk through its emptiness. It seems to have been furnished by
strangers. Not only is my husband missing, and my son, whom I call obsessively. I, too, am missing here. Although the objects appear intact, time has spread itself over them. Like a museum of our own lives. I am the only visitor and also an intruder.

There is no one here. No one in me. The person who cries, eats, has a nap, goes to the bathroom, is someone else. I hesitate to see my friends because they always ask the same questions. I don’t evade them either, because I am afraid they will stop asking. When I go to bed, as I close my eyes, I have fantasies about not waking up. As soon as I open them, the ceiling caves in on me.

I need some aggression. I need somebody to remind me I exist in myself. I need Ezequiel like a line. Like a gram, a kilo, a whole body. I am not talking about love. Love can’t enter when there’s no one home. Or if it does, it finds nothing. I am talking about urgent assistance. Emergency resuscitation. I want to be humiliated to the point where I no longer care. I want to be a virgin, not to have felt anything.

I switch on the radio. I don’t listen to the voices. I turn on the television. I don’t watch the pictures. I go from YouTube to my bank, from Facebook to books, from politics to porn. The wheel on the mouse is reminiscent of the clitoris. The fingertip controls forgetting. I browse the headlines, I contemplate the catastrophe of the world through a glass, I slide over its surface. I try to absorb the absence of pain because I am not the one suffering in other places, in other news. Does this offer me any relief? Yes. No. Yes.

In the inertia of my searches to discover what it is I am searching for, almost without realizing I tap in: help.

The first result is “psychological help.” Online therapy.

The second result is the Wikipedia entry that defines and classifies the word
help
.

The third result is help in configuring broadband settings.

The fourth result directs me to the Twitter help centre: “
Getting
started,” “Troubles,” and “Report violations.” It sounds like the sequence of an attack.

The fifth result helps with editing content. Assuming the user has any.

The sixth result is from the search engine itself: help with searching.

I am not surfing. But sinking.

“In the past,” I underline in a novel by Kenzaburo Ōe, “a siren had always been a moving object: it appeared in the distance, sped by, moved away”, disappearing completely, while I gave, at most, a fleeting consideration to the imagined sufferer and then forgot about it, as you forget a sound you no longer hear. “But now, I wore a siren stuck to my body like an illness”, the illness rotating on itself, my back transporting it. “This siren was never going to recede”. Every time I hear an ambulance, I am afraid it is coming for us.

In a while, I’ll return to the hospital. I only had time to go home, take a shower, and change my clothes. I didn’t have a nap this afternoon.

He always accepts. But he never takes the initiative of calling me. His only initiatives with me (and he seems to reserve them, to savagely preserve them) take place in bed. I asked him whether
this is part of the protocol, or what. Ezequiel simply replied: This is in your hands.

Each time I go to bed with him, I feel disloyal not only because of Mario. Also because of Lito. I have the feeling I am neglecting him, abandoning him, when Ezequiel penetrates me. As though, when he does it, he reminds me I am a mother. Then I feel the urge to tell him to penetrate me harder, deeper, in order to give me back my son. I have monstrous orgasms. They hurt bad. He thinks this is good. He finds it healthy.

The more I see Ezequiel, the guiltier I feel. And the guiltier I feel, the more I tell myself that I deserve some satisfaction too. That from time immemorial heads of families have enjoyed their mistresses, while their foolish wives were dutifully faithful. And the more I push myself to escape with Ezequiel. Although I realize that in the end I am not escaping anything.

Every day, at some point, the room doors close in the hospital. All of them. At once. Then a metal gurney goes down the corridor. A gurney draped in sheets.

I look out and see these gurneys go by with a mixture of horror and relief. I watch the nursing assistants pushing them, I hear the wheels turning. Every day they take someone. Every day they bring a replacement. This stream of bodies isolates our room, where we are still safe. This stream also tells me that, at some point, someone will stick their head out of another ward and see me walking behind a gurney. And they will have the same
pointless
reprieve I have now.