“Yes, it’s cancer,” I confirmed.
“And . . .” His lips could not form the word.
“It has already spread,” I added.
“Dear God!” His voice sounded choked and muted. “Where on earth did she get that?”
Since there was nothing more I could do, and because it was he who had brought me to the house, I set about providing him with some facts about the disease. Darkness was slowly filling the room. He remained utterly still, but it was evident that his entire being was under tension, even though the only sign of this was the occasional quiver of an eyelid and a nervous twitch at the corner of his mouth. I told him the banal facts that are known to all of us, namely, that cancer is a disease of unknown origin and, despite the certainty with which it can be diagnosed, it is not yet amenable to any truly effective course of treatment. (On rereading these scribbled notes, lost for so many years at the back of a drawer, I repeat: there was no effective treatment then, and there still isn’t now. The only difference is that surgeons have grown more skillful and outcomes are more hopeful: nowadays, no one considers a diagnosis of cancer as an incommutable death sentence, as they did in those days. Today, there are straightforward cases where a complete cure is likely, but the truth is that, then, any prognosis was pure speculation. And you almost always ended up watching death drawing inexorably nearer and being unable to stop it; the doctor simply surrendered his patient to God’s will.) I went on to explain that it was an insidious disease, which could disappear only to reappear later on, alive and kicking. While I talked, his head sank lower and lower onto his chest—he seemed so utterly cast down that I could not help but feel sorry for him, thinking to myself how even stubborn, persistent human pride could be reduced to this. I patted him on the back.
“Don’t lose heart. Beyond our own meagre human resources there is always God’s will, and He can do anything.”
“Ah!” he replied weakly, “God’s will . . .” And, after a pause, “Do you need to examine her again?”
“I do,” I said. “I’ll need to make a definitive diagnosis.”
“In that case, I shall leave you to it.”
There was a clear note of relief in his voice. He left the room, and I returned to my patient’s side. She no longer had her eyes closed and seemed to have been waiting for me.
“Did you tell him?” she asked, indicating the door through which her husband had just gone.
I sat down beside her again, not knowing what to say. Should I lie? But she had probably been told all there was to know by the doctors in Rio. Lying would only arouse her distrust.
“Yes, I told him,” I replied, aware that she would notice even the slightest change of expression.
“Ah!” she exclaimed, as if a weight had suddenly lifted from her shoulders. Then after the briefest of pauses, she placed one hand on my knee: “Now, please tell me: how much longer do I have to live?” Her eyes looked deep into mine. “How long? Don’t lie. I want the truth, the whole truth. How long do you think this wretched disease will let me live?”
I wasn’t fooled by the frank tone in which she said this, because I knew she was moved solely by despair, or something worse than despair, sharp and unremitting, fermenting in her soul like a concentrated ache, as ferocious as the thing gnawing away at her body. And it was easy to see why she focused on that question—because she had been beautiful, because she still was, because she had loved and been loved. What other factors could bind her to the simple drive to exist? I sensed it less in her words than in the hand that emerged from beneath the sheets and, like the hand of a shipwrecked sailor, take hold of my knee. And so I lied, I dared to lie, convinced that anyone else would do the same, because truth has its limits and slips away at exactly the point where our need for compassion steps in:
“I don’t know,” I said. “The disease might go into remission, and you could live for many more years. Or at least, as many years as you wish. There are various examples of cases like that.”
My words must have sounded strange in the stillness of the room. She drank them in, but obviously wasn’t fooled. She let her head fall:
“No,” she exclaimed wearily. “I know there’s no hope. But even so . . .” and, lifting her head, she said quietly, almost vehemently: “I just want one or two months.”
“Oh, you’ll have much longer than that,” I protested. “But if one or two months is what you really want, I can guarantee that you will have them. I give you my word.”
“Thank you,” she said, and sighed. She seemed calmer.
I resumed my examination, and as I became more familiar with the terrain, I began to ask myself whether I might not have been a little hasty in giving her my word. It could also have been the effect of the darkness, and so I asked her to turn on the light. She pointed to a small red lamp attached to the headboard. That should be enough. I turned on the lamp and continued my work. My first reaction had been absolutely right: in the light, what I saw was even more dispiriting. Dona Nina was in a very bad state: various dark blotches radiated out from one side of her breast—which was almost entirely dark purple in color—and extended from front to back, indicating a series of tumors that would be very difficult to remove. The affected area was too extensive, and there would be no point in operating. Besides, she was not in good overall health, for her general resistance and energy levels seemed very low—the skin on her back was broken here and there, like the skin of an overripe fruit, revealing the flesh within. I could not judge the full extent of her illness, but, to put it bluntly, she seemed to be rotting away inside.
I felt too perplexed to continue my examination.
“You should have gone to a doctor long ago,” I told her. “What you have done is absurd, almost a crime.”
With her head drooping and her hair falling forward over her face, as if she no longer had the courage to sit up straight or to look me in the eye, she said:
“I didn’t feel a thing. There was no pain. Even now I can’t feel anything, only a kind of tightness, as if someone were pulling at my skin.”
There was something childlike—no, something more like anguish—in her voice, into which fear was now creeping. I asked her in a tone of voice, which, quite unintentionally, had something of the confessional about it:
“Since when?”
“Oh!” She raised her head, eyes shining. “A long time. More than a year, I think.”
Haltingly, like a wounded man hauling himself forward by stages and stopping to lean against a wall to recover his strength, she told me she’d had a lump in her breast, colorless and no bigger than a cherry stone. One day, quite how she wasn’t sure, she had crushed that stone and it had swelled up. She had treated it with poultices and homemade remedies, but to no avail. Then she’d discovered a dark stain under her breast, like a large bruise. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw other such stains spreading onto her back. She had prodded them with her finger, but they didn’t hurt. Even so, she had begun to feel afraid, but had still said nothing. The truth is, she had never imagined that it could possibly be . . . (She stopped, lacking the courage to say the word. And yet, from inside the nucleus of her fear, the word resounded throughout the room, as if cruelly unmasked by some spirit in the shadows.) She had carried on with her life, and everything that was rational in her strove to forget about the illness. But then she got up one morning and found the sheet stained with blood. Trembling, she had gone to the mirror and run her fingers down her back. When she looked at her fingers, they were covered with blood and pus. That was when she announced that she needed to go to Rio, where, without a word to a soul, she had found a doctor. She had said nothing about being ill, just that she needed to go alone. She hoped I would understand these precautions (there was an unexpected edge of humility in her voice as she said this), and would understand that, for her, illness had always been something shameful. She had watched her own father dying, sitting in a chair, stubbornly refusing to go to bed, never complaining about all his
ailments. Finally, she was grateful, infinitely grateful to me, for sparing her the task of telling her husband. She was sure that, until then, he had interpreted her silence quite differently.
I nodded. She stopped speaking, and between us fell the sudden silence that always descends when everything has been said, and we look at the other person and realize that the subject has run its course. I stood up.
“Will you write a prescription?” she asked almost pleadingly.
“Of course.”
I went over to a small table, took my notepad and pen from my pocket, certain that all efforts would be entirely futile. Even so, I scribbled a few lines—mere palliatives. I turned and placed the piece of paper beside her.
“I’ll come back later,” I said.
She smiled sadly at me. And as I left, I felt sure that I would never see that woman again.
43.
Continuation of André’s Diary (ix)
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I waited—the next day and the next and several more. I waited a week, two weeks—I waited a whole month. After that meeting in the drawing room, I was unable to see her alone again. My despair, however intense, was mitigated by two overwhelming factors: firstly, the knowledge that she was not far away; secondly, that her absence was not of her own choosing. I knew she was ill, but what that illness was, I could not imagine. And besides, what was the point of knowing, when any illness would inevitably interrupt the course of our relationship. It was enough to know she was gravely ill—I had only to observe the atmosphere in the house, the look on people’s faces, the doctor coming and going. It was easy enough, too, to pick up comments made in the hallway, because, with the freedom that such extraordinary events always provide, the servants had crossed the clearly demarcated frontier of the kitchen and begun to invade the house. And if that were not enough, I had only to listen to my own instinct; and my own dread of learning the truth told me everything I needed to know. All day, trying to fill the hours with mechanical, meaningless tasks, I sensed that, at any moment, I was about to bump up against an insurmountable wall, and this, far from slaking my burning thirst, only increased it. Nothing could quench my desire, and, incapable of freeing myself from the image filling my whole being, I realized that what had begun as a fantasy and then become love, had, inevitably—exacerbated by recent events—become an obsession. Those hours dense with waiting had at least one advantage, namely, that I was free to come and go without anyone noticing or bothering me. I did not exist for the others—a curious state—even though the evolving drama kept me implacably imprisoned in its vortex. But what did I know? Nothing, only that permanently closed door. I walked past it several times a day, and when I was sure there was no one else in the hallway, I would touch it and even stroke it with fingers heavy with fever and desire. At other times, I would try to escape and would lie, swaying, in the hammock, my eyes closed to the bright light of day, or I would take up a book, paper, pen, ink, and try to immerse myself in studies I should long ago have finished and which I continually postponed. My father occasionally remarked, although without any great conviction: “You need to do something.” But in that house, where nothing was normal, who really cared about that hypothetical thing, my future, who thought about what I should or should not become, or considered what might be good or bad for me, either now or later. During that time, I could already feel, quite intensely, the presence of a phenomenon which I would one day describe as the Meneses’ backwardness and basic lack of foresight. We were waiting for something that would not be long in coming; the atmosphere was charged with an intense electricity that seemed about to explode, and that was all we needed, as if any future action depended solely on that.
This inactivity only inflamed my imagination. Unable to see Nina, I felt her ever more present. What she had done in the past, far from moving further off, came closer. And as time passed, those images only multiplied. The book would fall from my hands. I would stop the task I had only just begun and close my eyes: I could see her with such indescribable clarity! Now she was leaning over me, and I could feel her breath on my cheek, now her body was emerging out of the gloom, and I could see every detail of her hips, the curve of her breasts, her elegant legs. The blood would grow hot in my veins, and, blind and choking, I would rush off to splash my face with cold water, hoping to break the spell.
It was high summer, no breeze stirred the lifeless, sun-scorched leaves. And it was as if that same sun had seeped into my very being and, dizzy with light, I would suddenly be overcome by a fever no remedy could dispel. I would wander aimlessly about the garden then, my forehead dripping with sweat, my pulse racing. An infinite rain of white blossom fell from the low canopies of orange trees, and bees, attracted by the acidic scent, filled the shadows with a monotonous, persistent buzzing. This only further exasperated me, and I would flee, and, in my madness, break off a flower, crush it roughly to my nose, and watch as the petals wilted in my fingers. From a distance, I would gaze at the window of the room where she lay and, thinking I saw some unusual movement, would race back to the hallway only to learn that nothing had happened and everything was stuck in the same stagnant state. And the door before me stayed obstinately shut. I would grow desperate, curse myself and others and God; and time, so indifferent to my clamorings, continued to stretch out the long, empty hours. I would take refuge in my room and, there, lying on the bed, would hug my pillows; the obsessive images returned, a bare leg, her throat, her parted lips, and, yes, why not say it, her cunt open and waiting, simultaneously alluring and horrific, like lymph oozing a strange mixture of honey and blood. There were moments then when I would have been capable of anything; the familiar female smell—in which, like orange blossom, sweet mingled with sour—clung to me, dissolved into the shadows cast by my gestures and resurfaced wherever I was, asleep or not, to reimpose its irresistible dominion. Exhausted, I would hear invisible bees buzzing around my head.
Today, at last, the opportunity presented itself. We were in the drawing room—where, lately, my Uncle Demétrio had taken to spending more time than usual—when my father came in, announcing he was going to Rio. He seemed very upset and explained that he intended to consult a specialist, because he could not bear to watch his wife slowly dying. (It’s odd, but the death he was speaking of had no reality for me at all. It was as if he were talking about something that was happening to someone else entirely. That death, which I feared and suspected, belonged to me, and could only be revealed by my lips.) He added that he would be back in two or three days. This news appeared to displease Uncle Demétrio, and I watched them talking and gesticulating on the far side of the room. What did I care what they said! My father—never one to change his plans—declared that he would leave anyway. Sitting quite still in my chair, I was struggling to contain the tumult in my heart, because I sensed this would be the chance I had so longed for. Given all the comings and goings in Nina’s room, I realized that things were not looking good; and soon, thanks to Betty’s efforts, my father was ready to leave. From where I was sitting (in the warm complicity of that corner of the room, with its rocking chair, its shade, its glimpse of garden through the open window . . .) I could hear him issuing his final orders. Confused as to what was going on, the servants clustered in the doorway, looking first down the hallway, then out at the garden where the buggy was due to arrive. When it did, my father said goodbye and went to meet it, carrying just one suitcase. And when the sound of the wheels had vanished completely, and the house, as if nothing in the least unusual were going on, had slipped into its usual state of repose, I got to my feet. No voices, no slamming doors, no clatter of something being dropped—the Chácara, by force of habit, was sinking back into its customary slumber. I set off, determined to cross the frontier that I had, until then, respected. What did I care about obstacles and possible prohibitions? I went over to the window and looked out, then, ears and eyes alert, I peered up and down
the hallway; finally, controlling my excitement as best I could, I set off for that closed door.
As soon as I opened the door, I was taken aback by the smell that met me, a faintly nauseating blend of flowers and rotten apples. (A repugnant smell, but nothing like what came later, when she was dying, and in which one could sense, indeed, almost feel, the breaking down of human flesh: a huge and precocious task, as if jealous hands could not wait to undo in the darkness the complicated amalgam that made up that woman’s body. No, when I went into the room, I could still feel the presence of an intact being; in the bed lay the one creature I cared about—perfect and alive and whole—and for whom I had been longing all those days. Put like that, it may not seem very much, because words betray us and create a mere appearance of truth, but how else express the feeling that was drawing me to the edge of that bed? Let me explain, if I can: I did not exist, I was merely part of a ruined, meaningless alliance. And the person lying beneath those covers, was not her, it was me, a separate, diffuse “me” doing battle with the darkness and the terror, but which nonetheless represented the most vital and most important part of myself. Is that blasphemy? Will that scandalize the ears of those who hear me or the eyes that see me? I felt that nothing separated us, no air, no wind, and that whether bound together or not in that sacramental act of love, we constituted two pieces of the same landscape seeking each other out in order to live the one existence for which we had been destined.)
I stood, not daring to move, because my whole being was in the grip of a kind of paralysis. I know how difficult it is to talk about love, but however clumsily I do it, will there be no one out there who will understand me? I mean only that I did not exist, did not feel alive when I was far from her. When we were apart, whatever flame burned inside me dwindled down to a mere handful of cold ashes. And yet what I wanted was to burn again, to burn tirelessly, so that the same fire would burn the woman who had inspired me, and if she was destroyed, condemned by whatever cruel law rules our wills, then let me be destroyed too, because what use would we be in the world if one of us did not exist?
Chronicle of the Murdered House Page 47
