by Lina Meruane
veins
But your artwork came out crooked, I said, exasperated but above all astonished at what he hadn’t seen. Crooked? You didn’t look hard enough, doctor. Lekz cleared his throat as if his years as a smoker were handing him the bill right there. It’s another hemorrhage. Don’t worry, muttered Lekz uneasily, grabbing a handful of his hair and pulling at it gloomily; bleeding a little isn’t so strange after an operation, he said. It’s nothing unusual, he repeated, there’s no cause for alarm. He insisted on calm, talking between his teeth before falling silent, shielded by his magnifying lens. His was not just any silence; it was a silence that emanated from his body. Lekz had stopped breathing. I had also given up on breathing. I was deciding to suffocate myself. It was so much silence that we—and not only us, the people in the waiting room, too—could have disintegrated, the world could have disappeared and taken Ignacio with it. I thought of him with dismay, I wondered about his anxious decision to stay outside. He’d announced it firmly, though at the last second he changed his mind and walked to the door with us. Lekz closed the door in his face. Ignacio must have returned to his chair; he’d be feverishly turning pages of magazines without paying an ounce of attention. Lekz separated his lips, his mouth sucked in air and inflated his infirm lungs, and he interrupted my silence with his words. There’s been a slight flaw. A flaw or a surprising imperfection, it’s true, he admitted. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before now, he murmured with premonitory bitterness. He was so close I could hear his nails scratching his neck, the vein throbbing at his throat. He took off the metal headlamp and explained falteringly that he’d left some ringleted veins uncut, some veins just in the center of the left eye. I left them there, he repeated, punishing himself with the repetition. I was convinced that. I thought. Maybe he was lying to himself and rubbing his eyelids, maybe it was true that in those hours he’d gotten all the veins. And if these were new ones? Veins from these past few days? Lekz was more alone, tenser and darker than his own shadow. I’ve never seen this before, but it’s possible one of my colleagues has. Or several. Or all of them. They can take a look at you. Our clinical meeting is this afternoon. That way we can be sure. I studied his post-Soviet grimace with my double and wobbly vision while he told me that I wouldn’t be asleep, only stunned with a touch of anesthesia. You won’t feel a thing, he promised, while he peered out into the waiting room and asked Doris to reserve a time in operating room four. You’re going to operate on her right now, doctor? said Doris in a sigh, although on the inside what she did was moo over the accumulation of simultaneous tasks. But she was a woman trained to moo at the world and lick the hand of a single man, her owner. Right now, Doris, the clinical operating room, bring in the associates for an outpatient check-up, murmured Lekz with the gentleness of all true masters.
disappearances
The city disappears, the hospital opens its doors and I disappear too, without saying goodbye to anyone amid its forms and fluorescent-lit hallways. This time I have an express ticket, and I use it to enter an operating room stuffed full of eye doctors of varying sizes and shapes, all distorted and a little double. I can halfway make out when Lekz appears in his green suit among the others wearing the same disguise. I halfway realize that they’ve all finished their morning surgeries but have stuck around to witness, along with Lekz, the mystery of my veins. I also half-hear their anecdotes, their condolences, their political comments, but I feel nothing. Nothing, either, when they announce the hit of liquid anesthesia. I only ask that the effect last longer than this collective violation, and much as I hate being manhandled, I decide to give in. I close my eyes for an instant so Lekz can open them again for me in a little while. And now they’re open, little by little. I hear other people’s voices, nearby conversations that I retain but only halfway. Someone utters the word vein and someone else repeats it until they make it disappear. Someone uses the word proliferation. Someone uses the phrase hormone-aided growth. If she were a man this wouldn’t have happened. I know that someone else peers over me and I think something about something, but what? There are bloody words everywhere. I know they are discussing my fate but I know I’m not sure what they’ve decided, and a sip of water reaches my mouth in the recovery room and then tea and bland crackers in a common room full of people. There are no eye doctors, no nurses, no Ignacio. I’m waiting for him to appear and go home with me. They won’t let me leave on my own, I could keel over, I could sue them for damages; I’ll have to stay here another night because Ignacio has disappeared. He’s not going to come tonight. Maybe not tomorrow. You’re never going to come back, Ignacio, is what I say to myself before my blackout.
eye for an eye
I opened my eye, and there was the little girl with the patch over one side of her face, the girl shooting the electric ray of her gaze at me. In that single uncovered eye is concentrated all the fear of hospitals that now falls like an ax onto my cornea. While outside the street revives—a gust or a whisper in the distance—and the sun peers indignantly through the gaps in the curtains to track us with its flame; while light bulbs swayed slightly in the ceiling, moved by the incessant march of Filipinas changing shifts; while I struggled to wake up, the dazzling, chilling blue of her eye had already been awake for hours, aimed at me. I half-closed my own eye, trying to protect myself. (I looked for you, but you hadn’t appeared.) I blinked, unable to convince myself that I’d emerged from an anesthetic void only to fall, struck down by the gaze of a little girl who was waiting for her doctor too. The creature didn’t take her eye off me, didn’t hold back a gram of that pupil. It was her eye against mine, but mine was just an iris tattered by operations, a faltering pupil. Was she a demon, a sprite, a post-op hallucination? At what point had this girl arrived, so little and so bewildered at finding another cyclops like herself? She was a couple meters away, perplexed; she didn’t complain or scratch at the skin around her patch, and I looked away. And in that deflection that was the only possible escape, I realized the little girl wasn’t alone. No. Around the girl were clamped the fingers of someone who must be her mother. Don’t stare at her like that, murmured the woman, and her voice echoed off the room’s high ceilings. Don’t look at her, she’s looking at you, she repeated, though without the slightest modesty she brazenly ran her own eyes over me: both of hers staring at my lack of one. It’s not polite, she explained, though still blasting me with her gaze. My naked eye was looking at the blurry girl, and then the mother, who was wiping the oil from her forehead, and then at the daughter, confused, waiting for something to happen. Have they taken one of your eyes too, I heard the mother say. Did they have to cut out a cancer. It wasn’t a question but rather a recrimination, a reproach that the mother unsheathed to show that her suffering was superior, the suffering of a mother facing her daughter’s single but devastating eye. And then I remembered my mother, my mother thrusting her old eyes on me as we said goodbye, and I thought about Ignacio, his two flawless black eyes, his eyes he didn’t seem aware of; and I also thought I would be left very alone without my eye if I lost it; I’d have an orphan face. And then. If you care so much about your daughter, ma’am, I said, challenging her, daring her to a duel with herself. If the loss hurts you that much, give her the eye that she’s missing. Give it to her right now, though it’s still too big for her.
proof
(I know that you were committing a slow suicide by nicotine while our fate was being decided. The hours passed by you and you didn’t see them, Ignacio, nor did you see the nurses or the janitors mopping under your feet. You didn’t see anything until you saw Lekz saying goodbye to the court of eye doctors and walking desolately down a hall. His face was shrouded, his arms hung burdened and lifeless by his sides, and Lekz told you we’ll talk tomorrow, we’ll talk about everything, with Lucina, more calmly. For now it’s best you take her home, and you get some rest too, he said, avoiding your name. And he said goodbye without looking at you, leaving you standing in the air, suspended, with the chance for a sudden but mayb
e premeditated escape, the guilty flight that would one day bring you tamely back. You had nowhere to go, I had become your only place, you told me all this later, don’t you remember? How you felt the need to flee. You went out to buy another pack of cigarettes, to walk through the warm night that suddenly smelled to you like violets, and you walked away following that scent like a goose chasing spring, but the violets disappeared from the breeze and suddenly you were in a square planted with weeds and soulless benches frequented by ruined old men in pants that no one washed, old men who slept alone, each by himself under cardboard sheets until the snow, the ice came, and then. Then? You said aloud, but no one heard your question because you were alone. Like the old man you would soon be, in the future, thinking about that girlfriend you’d abandoned in the hospital, erupting in blood. And then nothing, you shouted, terrified of your own howl, suspicious of the anguished murmur you heard. Were they yours, all those voices arguing savagely inside you? Was it true, had Lucina or her voice really said that to you before she went into surgery? You shook your head, no, it’s not true, then nothing, nothing, you repeated like crazy, but the voice pecked at your head, it wouldn’t let you erase the words I had thrown at you only a few hours before, my voice asking for that, the ancient proof of love. Only one, Ignacio, the proof is only one, I would never ask for both. The smallest proof I could ask you for, scarcely larger than a marble. I asked you because I had no choices left, because I had understood even before Lekz did that all his science had failed. It’s not true, you told yourself, and you repeated that our conversation had not happened, that I would never have dared, ever, but then you started to think otherwise, that I had asked you for something you held so dear, and my request was so vivid, so exact, so simple, that you couldn’t have made it up. Which of us is crazier, you asked, and I know you let out a peal of dry laughter trying to think of something other than my voice, something beyond me; you went on repeating with sudden happiness that the thing you would give me would unite us forever, it would make us equal, turn us into mirror images for the rest of our lives until death. And even after, my voice told you in your head, though we knew nothing about after. What matters is now, that’s what I’d told you, turning my face away when you wanted to put an end to the discussion. Put an end to it as though it had never happened. But what the fuck are you asking me for, Lucina, you asked me, blaring your voice in the park, talking to the air and the rats, the pigeons. How could you even think I’m going to give you that, you said, without daring to name what I was asking for. Just that. But how could you think of that, you said in silence, kicking some burned sticks with rage, with justified distrust, suddenly wondering, jealously, if there was another man who could say yes, yes, Lucina, yes, I do want to be yours forever. A guy capable of saying it and feeling it literally. I know that you were tortured by your own indecision, your difficulty in answering my request with a round yes or an equally definitive no. Listen to me, Ignacio, I’d said. Don’t you think I’d do the same for you? My question resounded, it echoed back to you, it filled your mouth with retching, with bile—because you’d gone hours without eating—empty vomit just imagining that you would give me that and you’d have to live looking at me afterward. And you went on killing yourself with puffs of smoke while I slept, strangely tranquil, dreaming of your myopic and beautiful gaze, dreaming free of that shameless question that now you shouldered in the night. I only ask for one. Lenses won’t help me, colored glass is worthless. You tried not to think about that, you directed your attention to the flame of the match, you counted how many seconds it took to cool and how long your finger could stay pressed against its ember. I know you tried to empty your mind, staring at those skeletal trees that one by one were losing their leaves in the wind, and there you still were at dawn, going in circles around the square and in your head, wishing I hadn’t given you that condition when I said goodbye. If you can’t commit and give me what I want, don’t come back tomorrow.)
stop
Behind an Ignacio steeped in the smell of cigarettes came Lekz, like an aseptic and pallid angel, suddenly gray, exhausted circles under his eyes. He did not look good. Am I going to die, doctor, or are you? Lekz made an awkward and resigned grimace. I fuzzily saw him lower his face and swell up with air. He would wait outside with Ignacio while I got out of bed and got dressed. And in the minutes that passed while I pulled up my skirt over my dirty underwear, put on my sweaty socks, my boots, pulled on my undershirt, scarf, sweater, and my anxiety over the verdict, I watched an infinite number of treasured and uneven memories parade before my sick eyes, memories of the times when I’d pretended my illness didn’t exist, moments that were falsely happy when I’d made myself think I could be someone else; they’d debilitated me and left me at the mercy of an estranged solitude that was mine alone. And I came out with my head high, ready to hear what Lekz had to tell me in the little office the hospital ceded us. The doctor cleared his throat more than ever. Lekz and Ignacio cleared their throats and I did too, it was contagious; I cleared my throat before singing to them, coldly, I’m ready, I’m all ears. I saw Lekz knead his head with all his fingers. I saw him rub his face, not knowing how to explain to me but resolved, no beating around the bush now, like a teletype machine, like he was reading a telegram. There are veins in your left eye. Stop. They’re new ones. Stop. Soon they will break the retina. Stop. For now the other eye is calm, but the blood is going to come back. Stop. You’ll be blind in no time. Stop. It was definitive. The blood, its possibilities, they had never really disappeared. They were part of my eyes. I felt Ignacio’s sweaty hand sliding over mine, Ignacio as a whole seeping away toward the floor. Ignacio now an insane color. Ignacio, I told him, leave me alone for a moment with the doctor. And when I heard the door close I leaned my elbows on the tiny, reeking table, I leaned forward and I told Lekz to light a cigarette for me. I know you smoke in secret, hiding it from your wife, from your patients, and most of all from Doris, hiding from yourself. I can smell the tobacco on your breath. Don’t say anything, and I’ll keep quiet too. Anyway, it doesn’t make sense to try to stop the destruction of my eyes anymore. Lekz opened an invisible little drawer and handed me a cigarette. He lit another one for himself, almost grateful to share his secret. I saw the blurry reflection of the lit end lighting up his eyes in the desolation of that Saturday. I saw my own puffs of ghostly smoke in the air while I thought about how to put it. We only have a transplant left, doctor, you owe it to me. Transplant, repeated Lekz in an agonized voice. Transplant, Lina, he mumbled, no longer doubting my name, and he added a couple of words that got tangled up on his tongue. A transplant is very delicate, he told me, but he was talking to himself in that solemn tone of his. Really very delicate, he said, as though I didn’t know. It’s only been tried on animals, never on humans. Doctor, I retorted, and I leaned so close to him my smoke burned his cheeks, I’m nothing but an animal who wants to stop being one. Lekz lit a new cigarette on the old one and, opening my file, thumbing through the infinite pages of my history, making a morose doodle around my ever-shorter name, he told me no. It wasn’t possible, he said. There were no eye banks, because no one donated dead eyes. It was believed, said Lekz, that memory lived in them, that the eyes were an extension of the brain, the brain peering out through the face to grasp reality. Some people thought the eyes were depositories of memory, he said, and others still believed that the soul was hidden there. It’s my only chance, I interrupted, and he was wasting time that I needed; my chance and yours, doctor. I stood up, squinted my eyes so he would feel like I was looking at him, that I wasn’t going to allow him anything but an immediate yes. Lekz looked at me in shock, his lips trembled, full of words that now he didn’t even dare to think. He cowered down a little in his chair. I heard his fingers drumming somewhere. Lekz was gathering a slow courage in that office, so silent in spite of the sound of the cars crossing the city. The world was so silent, I thought, Lekz so hushed in spite of his nervous fingers, Ignacio so lost in some hallway, pacing anxi
ously, Chile so far away and mute. And that’s what I was thinking when I found myself saying to him, illuminated, electrified, unsteady but sure of what was going to happen. Don’t move, doctor, I whispered. Wait for me here, I’ll bring you a fresh eye.
