The story of the 201st Squadron is like something from a satirical novel by Jorge Ibargüengoitia.
After the declaration of hostilities, the Mexican government took three years (1942–1945) to ready an impressive army of two hundred ninety-nine men, of whom no more than thirty-six could be strictly considered weapons of war: fighter pilots. There were two simple reasons for the delay: Mexican soldiers lacked training, and our bureaucracy has been slow since its infancy. Before sending off his squadron, Ávila Camacho had to sign heaps of decrees that included the creation of the Air Force, various official name changes, applications to the senate, and so on. The group finally went into action on June 17, 1945. And it seems they didn’t do badly. Unfortunately, their mission came to an end on August 26 of the same year, not long before the Japanese surrender. We Mexicans should use this chronology as a mathematical table for calculating national productivity: three years of bureaucracy is equivalent to two and a half months of concrete policy.
The members of the 201st Squadron were trained in the United States, but not by other combatants: they received their instruction from the WASP: Women Airforce Service Pilots; a highly professional group, progressive in terms of their working practices and ideology, but without combat experience, who were, of course, no favorites with the machos like Greg “Pappy” Boyington, who controlled the North American army. (In fact the WASP disappeared in ’44, and it wasn’t until 1970 that they won the status of Second World War veterans.) All this speaks eloquently of what the aviators of the neighboring country thought of our pilots. I can’t be certain they were wrong: but in any case, why was it better not to allow the WASP to fight?
Of the thirty-six original Mexican pilots, two died during the first training sessions and six were discharged on medical grounds (the writer Marcelo Yarza claims, without offering sources or proof, that they failed the drug tests). After a couple of replacements, the 201st eventually consisted of thirty aviators who left for the front in the Philippines … Without planes. The P-47 Thunderbolts belonging to Mexico—which the Aztec Eagles should have piloted—never arrived in the combat zone. Our compatriots had—once again—to borrow. Can you guess from whom? The North American army provided eighteen fighter planes, and even tolerated the Mexican flag flying next to the Stars and Stripes. But twelve of the pilots belonging to the squadron never left the ground. Which really made them Phantom pilots.
The whole escapade cost the country seven lives and three million dollars, at least half of which would have been better spent if someone had dropped the bills like leaflets over the mountains of Oaxaca.
But I digress: What does the 201st Squadron have to do with my mother, leukemia, infusion pumps, and the opening—in 1951, with a design by Mario Pani—of the Civilian Hospital, now the Saltillo University Hospital?
Shortly after the president informed the Mexican citizenry that they were at war with Germany, Italy, and Japan, a group of businessmen from Saltillo got together to discuss the matter (I guess, given the outcome, this chat must have taken place in a cantina). Scarcely interested in what was happening within their own community, but dismayed by the fate of the world, the businessmen decided it was their civic duty to support the president in this epic adventure. Between them, they collected a million pesos and sent them to Manuel Ávila Camacho with a note stating that the sum should be put toward the military budget. Ávila Camacho—who must have been very busy, and in a bad temper, his hand numb from signing so many air force decrees—snubbed them: he returned the gift, saying it would be better to invest their resources in something that would benefit the city in which they lived. The story, sadly, makes no mention of the foot-stamping tantrums of the bellicose Saltillo businessmen. But there is a record of the fate of those million pesos: they were used to start work on what is now the U.H.
Poetic justice.
I don’t know if Mario Pani was aware of the aeronautical delusions that gave rise to his project. But the truth is that, seen from above, the building he designed for my city is shaped like a plane suffering from degenerative disease: the snub nose, short, thin wings, a slender fuselage, and a chubby tail. Even the lobby, from a pedestrian’s viewpoint, looks like the flying saucer of a Leninist extraterrestrial. And what’s more, the interior distribution of space bears a resemblance to the Battlestar Galactica.
The hospital faces north. To the east and west of the lobby (that is to say, of the flying saucer) stretch two-story annexes: wings. The west wing houses oncology and radiotherapy; the east is occupied by the ER. The upper floors are offices. The main body of the building, with three floors and a basement, is to the south (from the air, we could say in the tail of the plane). To get there from the flying saucer, it’s necessary to ascend ten steps and traverse a long, narrow corridor, very like those in science fiction movies connecting the bridge to the main deck. This corridor—along one of its walls is a minimuseum illustrating the evolution of medical technology through a beautiful collection of surgical instruments—leads to a second reception area with elevators and a waiting room equipped with a television set and hideous blue armchairs. The southern section covers almost the whole medical spectrum: from maternity to intensive care, and even the morgue, located, of course, in the basement. On either side of the edifice, courtyards were constructed. While the eastern one has been almost completely engulfed by the parking lot, the western courtyard still retains its original design of tree-lined gardens, the ground covered by a mosaic of melon and deep red, and is in such a state of abandonment that it is an excellent spot to smoke and read when the night air is not too cold.
Male medical is on the first floor of the west deck of what I have termed “the tail”: the southern end of the building.
There, in a corner of the starship, Mamá is fighting the second round of her personal war against leukemia.
With pyrrhic victories.
In December she was discharged. We celebrated with a taquizo on her birthday. Then, at the end of February, she was deeply moved to hear that Mónica was pregnant. She practically forced Diana to give us some blankets and the cradle that had belonged to my nieces.
Then, in mid-June, while Mónica and I were in Berlin, Mamá was readmitted: the leukemia had floored her once again, as was to be expected. At her express request, the doctors agreed to allot her the room she’d had before.
History repeated itself: sleepless nights at her bedside and weeks of poison. After the last chemo session of this second round, the body of Señora “Charles” went into remission again. They showed her blood count to Valencia, suggesting she could go home in a few days. The optimism lasted only a couple of hours: that night her temperature rose to 104. We had to stuff her with Tylenol and put bags of ice under her legs and the back of her neck. The following morning we tried another blood test. After a thorough examination, I was called out of the room and given an explanation:
“It’s not up to us now. Lupita has caught a nosocomial infection. We don’t know what it is or where she picked it up. We’ll go on treating her with broad-spectrum antibiotics.”
Second base: infection.
Fever must be one of our most commonly used metonyms. In it, the symptoms of withdrawal from hard drugs and viral hallucination coexist. Hitler’s destruction, the bureaucratic megalomania of Mexican presidents, the civic narcissism of a smalltown businessman, the visions of an architect who designs hospitals in the shape of a mother ship. Mystical purity. Thomas Mann spying on adolescents in the lobby of a Zurich hotel and Alexis Texas modeling fluorescent swimwear for Bang Bros and Vincent Vega dancing with Mia Wallace, internally connected to the syringe. The agony or extreme cruelty of old sick people beneath dirty blankets. All the cold, all the heat, the toxic water sweated out in a bed. Almost all of it always in a bed. In a bed or on the verge of collapse. There’s no route to the absolute that doesn’t pass through a fever station.
As a child I used to like having a fever. It was a condition that made Mamá particularly affectionate. One o
f my earliest favorite texts is a very short story in verse by Stevenson in which a sick child designs military strategies on the mountain chains formed by his legs under the sheets. Mamá would read this to me, or The Little Prince, or “The Little Florentine Scribe” while I was burning up. She would touch her lips to my forehead, bring me chicken soup, carry me in her arms to the bathroom. I pay her back now checking the expiration dates of her drugs and lulling her to sleep with Puerto Rican or Cuban songs: I haven’t seen Linda, can hardly believe it. Because I’m her son. I’m no mad dog.
At eight in the morning, a nun comes in and puts a gram of Tylenol in the infusion pump. At ten past eight, she returns, disconnects everything, and explains she’s put the wrong drug in: this is the interchangeable generic version and we’d bought a branded product. She changes the mixture, reconnects the pump, and leaves. The pump begins to beep almost immediately. Someone comes to fix it, but the machine switches itself off exactly every ten minutes for over an hour, until the head nurse arrives and supplants technology with a piece of Mexicanicity: she measures out the dose by rule of thumb. I don’t trust this system, so I spend the next hour watching the solution drip from the bottle into the IV tubing: one drop every thirty seconds. I use Mamá’s cell phone to time the drips and it turns out the nurse had calculated the positioning of the roller clamp with spine-chilling accuracy. Around midday, a mature, well-built care assistant comes and stops the drip again. She explains that the best way to lower the fever is by taking a shower. Let’s get on with it, she says, nodding toward my mother’s scrawny body. I explain I’d prefer to leave the task until my sister arrives. But the assistant, who is taller than me and must weigh twenty pounds more, firmly claps me on the back and says: Come on, you’re not a man now, you’re a loving son, don’t let me down. I carry the limp body, undress it, and, with a bit of a balancing act, put it in the shower. Mamá’s nipples emit that characteristic plastic stink that bodies marinated in the rancid vinegar of chemicals exude, plus something I’ve inwardly christened “the excipient unit dose smell.” She lowers her eyelids and whispers, “Twenty inches, twenty inches.” When I’m about to turn on the water, the internal medicine team shows up on their daily round. They practically snatch her from my arms and cover her with a gown again. They beg me to leave the room while they examine her, “showing all due respect.” Outside, one of the general medicine students, a woman who sometimes flirts with me, offers me a coffee and suggests I don’t try the shower again: when a patient can’t manage on her own, it’s the job of the hospital staff to help. On the other side of the corridor, the well-built care assistant is standing at the door to the nurses’ bathroom. Each time the medical student turns away she frowns at me and rotates the palm of her left hand back and forth at chest level. Her lips silently articulate the classic, ambiguous threat: “You’ll see, you’ll see …” I’m called back into the room, asked to force Mamá to take her dose of Ensure each morning. Mamá generally spits out most of the dietary supplement onto her gown and my shirtsleeves. The doctors call a nurse and ask her to bathe Mamá and put on clean clothes while they exchange opinions in a technical language supposedly incomprehensible to the layman, but that, by now, seems just pedantic. The general medicine student comes into the room, sits down next to me on the sofa, puts a hand on my thigh, and looks straight into my eyes until I feel uncomfortable. Suddenly, without any measurable transition, a doctor I’ve never seen before turns and says:
“Things are going well, eh? Don’t worry. There’s been no change, which, in this case, should be considered good news.”
They leave.
Shortly afterward, the youngest doctor returns. Dr. O.
He says:
“I just want to check …”
He examines her again, concentrating on the area around the back of her left shoulder.
“She’s got fluid on that lung. I’m thinking of removing it by making a surgical incision and inserting a tube under the clavicle. What do you think …?”
Most of the doctors do not consider me a thinking being: they just give me instructions. Dr. O., in contrast, talks to me as if I were one of his colleagues. I understand he does this out of deference to my humanity, that essence of which, through the last months, has been hijacked by what was once a woman and is now a useless old rag. I understand, but refuse to tolerate it. Maintaining a dialogue with me based on the principle of free choice is a lamentable assault on etiquette.
“It’s up to you,” I reply with a shrug.
He addresses me informally, like a friend. I speak to him formally, like an elder, even though he’s ten years younger than me.
Another doctor enters without knocking. I don’t know his name: he comes around only occasionally. He’s very tall and, although he also seems young, is almost completely bald.
“Still trying?” he says irritably.
“She has to be aspirated,” responds Dr. O.
“It’s not your decision. Valencia has already given instructions.” Then, turning to me, “Have they brought you the prescription?”
“No. I haven’t been given any prescription.”
For several hours, the doctors go back and forth over the issue of draining the liquid that has taken up residence in her lung. One comes in and asks, “Hasn’t the porter come for her yet …?” and goes back out without waiting for an answer. Five minutes later, the bald one reappears: “Don’t allow them to take her until we have authorization from the hematologist.” I feel like I’m trapped in a Marx Brothers movie. Finally the hematologist rings Mamá’s cell phone and gives me a direct order: no one is to do anything until there’s been another case review.
A few minutes after that, the bald one returns to our room, wearing an expression of bureaucratic triumph.
“Has the hematologist spoken to you?”
I nod.
“So we’ll leave it at that, right?”
I nod again.
“Have they brought the prescription yet?”
“No. They haven’t brought the prescription.”
“Don’t worry. It’ll be here soon.”
The procedure for obtaining medicines in the U.H. goes like this:
The doctors order medication at the nurses’ station.
The prescription is passed to a family member.
The patient’s family member goes to the social work area, where someone approves the documentation.
The patient’s family member returns to the nurses’ station and asks one of them (the majority refuse this request) to sign the paper and add his or her identity card number.
With this data and the prescription, the patient’s family member goes to the pharmacy and hands his request to the dispenser.
The dispenser gives an estimated price.
The estimated price is taken by the patient’s family member back to the social work office to be stamped.
Back at the pharmacy with the stamped document, the member of the patient’s family is given the medication.
The medication then has to be handed in at the nurses’ station by the member of the patient’s family.
For the handover to be official, the person who receives the medication from the member of the patient’s family must be the same one who signed the order and authorized it with his or her identity card number.
The whole thing takes an hour or two, depending on the length of the line in each department.
I doubt the U.H. imposed these rules from either administrative ineptitude or bureaucratic cruelty. In fact, I think they do it out of pragmatic solidarity: time here passes at a snail’s pace. The Kafkaesque procedure for obtaining medication is their version of occupational therapy.
(All of a sudden Émil Cioran’s little books on antipersonal development for adolescents come to mind. The one, for example, in which insomnia reveals to him the most profound sense of the trouble with existence: it impelled him toward unlimited spite: walking to the shoreline and throwing stones at some poor seagulls. Jeez, w
hat a punk. For me—also a chronic insomniac—the condition is pure melodrama: just an unshackled state of mind. At most, it makes you a little cynical. No: the real inconvenience of having been born doesn’t lie in some unified meaning that can be narrated. It is rather this perpetual cold turkey of structure, these withdrawal symptoms of signification. The desire to symbolize everything, the anguished need to convert anodyne stories into prose. For example, bureaucratic red tape, whose inquisitorial in-significance is the nearest thing to the Malleus Maleficorum medieval twenty-first-century Latin America has been able to put into practice.)
Occupational therapy.
The first week is the worst. The days seem like disemboweled Trojans. As if you were trying to read (or write) a novel for the first time, and what you found as you progressed were disturbing images, sentences impossible to reduce to a specific function within the story, unconnected scenes, febrile intonation. Then, gradually, boredom wins out. As if you’d spent hours watching a drop of Tempra fall into a tube. And you begin to see things with a time lag. The geometry of your enclosure. Its history, which silently settles out from very diverse sources. Articulation: the physiological epiphany that allows you to sense the precise places your voice comes from. The spectral nature of your characters when you manage to isolate them … Inhabiting something (or somebody) is acquiring a habit. And in that habit, those of us addicted to hard drugs have a certain advantage. I inhabit (I haunt) a hospital. Every new day of enclosure damages me organically, and at the same time it provides me with some necessary detail for the plans of my house.
a) The visitors’ restrooms are outside, to one side of the flying saucer, opposite the entrance to the ER. You have to pay two pesos to use the facilities. They are supposed to be cleaned every four hours, but perpetually smell of shit and bleach. By tacit accord, pornographic magazines are always to be found under the waste bins in the men’s room. You can flick through them, but afterward they are supposed to be replaced for the benefit of the next user. Not even the cleaning woman dares remove them. New issues invariably appear each Tuesday.
Tomb Song Page 8
