Paralysis
Il faut savoir mourir, Faustine, et puis se taire,
mourir comme Gilbert en avalant sa clé.
—P.J. Toulet, Les contrerimes
I looked up the word “foxglove” in the dictionary. “I always associate you with flowers.” Such an ugly word, “associate.” A plant with purple flowers shaped like a thimble. Digitalis. No. Not just purple, lots of colors. Sky blue as well. I’ve taken all the clothes off the shelf and started throwing them on the floor. I have just enough time to arrive a few minutes early and relax in the waiting room, sit in the armchair next to the sofa looking at the painting of the tree, rock, sheep. I mean with enough time so I won’t be nervous or my heart . . . Sky blue. If I wear the red, it’ll seem like . . . The black would be more appropriate, but it’s too tight. A doctor in Barcelona examined me once without even asking me to take my dress off. It was hot like today. I was stretched out, and he was feeling my stomach, asking me if it hurt. It was a blue and white silk dress, from The One Thousand and One Nights, several shades of blue. Long sleeves, but with two openings at the top that left my shoulders bare. Where the devil is that blue slip? I’ll have a real problem on my hands if I can’t find it. I still have to wash. Maybe the bottom shelf. My foot hurts when I walk and when I move it from side to side in bed. But it’s fine if I’m sitting up nice and still. I have to tell him the tendons in my leg are sore. If foxglove came in just one color, like garnet red . . . Geneva. Foxglove. Leaves erect. Are you Genevese? The grass in the parks is starting to look parched, and the trees are turning golden even though it’s still summer. A city of leaves, green paths, gardens filled with flowers that seem to have sprung up on their own. Like the difficult path toward naturalness. Or spontaneity. Am I not Catalan? Mediterranean. Sirens and dolphins, lots of Ulysses. Thyme, rosemary, broom. Land of gorse and furze, lavender and fennel. I haven’t worn the blue slip for a long time. If I can’t find it and have to wear the red, what kind of impression will that make? I’ll tell him he’s nice, because it’s true, it’ll make him happy. It takes so little to make a person happy. What if suddenly I ask him if he likes foxglove? I’m sure nobody’s ever asked him that. A drop of blood. Seated on the examining bed, legs dangling, he’ll have me place my hand on his knee as he sits beside me. He’ll soak some cotton in alcohol and rub my fingertip, then, quick, he’ll prick my finger with the needle, all the while keeping his eye on me. I’ll bear the pain and try to keep the muscles in my face from flinching. I’ll breathe lightly so it won’t be noticeable. He’ll attach a suction tube and draw blood, fill it half way, then stand up, add a liquid to the tube, go back to his office as he tells me I can get dressed. Shoes, slip, dress. I’ll reappear, sit in the chair in front of his desk, and trams and autos go past, I mean cars and more cars, and the afternoon will wind to an end as he holds the tube with my blood up to the light and adds a few more drops of liquid. Seventy percent. I lower myself into the bathtub, quickly soap myself, and shower away the suds as the mirror fogs up and smells permeate. I brush my teeth, comb my hair quickly. The slip. I phone for a taxi. Cornavin. It’s coming from the Cornavin taxi stand. I go down to wait for it. The driver closes the door; I glance at my address book for the house number, I can never remember it. The dizziness begins. Just a bit, very slight. The same reaction I used to get when I was little, when I would smell the varnish on the trams. Ring-ring. The plane trees along Passeig de Gràcia. Starlings soaring above Plaça de Catalunya, tracing triangles and circles in the evening sky, a fury of wings and shrieks. The peacock tower near Plaça de la Bonanova. Under the bridge, near the church. Buy a votive candle and place it on the right side, straight up so the flame won’t gutter. Pull the wick up before you light it. Let’s walk the tram smells bad. Ring-ring and the tram passes us along República Argentina, heading down the hill. Be sure to buy the newspaper for the obituaries. Pont du Mont-Blanc. The Salève is unattractive, barren in places, but higher up the snowy summit is lunar. Majestic peaks the solitude of the snowdrifts sky crossed by eagles black wings snow storms hurricanes. The mountain that metamorphoses: distant, near, invisible in the fog. The fog off the Arve, down by the river, close to the ground. The bridge of the desperate, where the waters mix, the clear with the turbid, the Arve and the Rhône. Those who jump from the bridge are dead when they hit the water. The idea of suicide makes me feel important, and I sit up straight in my seat and watch Geneva drifting past: “Je pisse vers les cieux bruns, très haut et très loin, avec l’assentiment des grans heliotropes.” Going around a curve the taxi throws me against the door. How can I explain the anguish? The desire to scream. It’s wrong for him to do what he’s doing to me. Boulevard des Philosophes. I have to put one foot in front of the other to go down the stairs, and if I need to get up at night for a glass of water, I have to hold on to the wall as I walk because my foot . . . Ghastly. Nerves are a bad thing. All those days of sitting down did me no good at all. Nor did the scalding foot baths with salts. Just the opposite. Will it ever get well? Life is such a fragile thing, so difficult to keep it balanced till the end. I asked for little and gave a lot. What if I’m wrong, and I’m exaggerating what I did? I don’t think I’m deceiving myself, playing tricks on myself; I wasn’t brought into this world to play tricks. I get out of the taxi, pay, and go inside. The stairs are sad, the elevator ancient. The nurse is just a girl, young, short, her flaxen hair poking out from beneath her cap. She looks at me carefully, speaks very slowly, as if weighing each word, spelling it letter by letter. The correct words emerge, sure of themselves. I’m in the waiting room with the painting, rock tree sheep. I pull back the sheer curtain and gaze at the street. Foxglove. The elastic waistband has stretched and my panties are sliding down. I pull them up. I glance at myself in the mirror in front of the sofa, pick up a magazine, and sit down. According to the statistics, Geneva is the city that has the most cars in Europe and rains the least. I hear a door shutting at the other end of the apartment. I stretch out my leg and slowly move my foot from side to side. It hurts. I’m drowsy. I put down the magazine but don’t feel like looking at another. When I realize that I am filled with this terrible despair, I think about what he’s doing to me, though he denies it, says I’m just obsessed, the anguish settles under my heart like a huge beast and won’t let me breathe. There’s nothing to know I don’t want to know. Break this silence! Watching cars isn’t enough, I need something stronger to drive away the anguish that’s devouring me. All the pain I’ve caused him . . . just something he invented. It’s all fairy tales, fiction, tall tales. I shouldn’t complicate things. Nothing matters. What’s important today won’t be important two or three years from now. Not at all. Not to middle-aged me. Me, right in the middle of my life. The odor from the tram always used to upset me, and when I got home I needed to smell cologne and sometimes even lie down. How much is the foxglove compared to the Royal jasmine, the starry flower clambering up the wall along the ivy path? Above the white stars in the heart of Sant Gervasi de Cassoles, all the way up to the rooftop. Doing the shopping in the cool early hours. Every morning in front of the grocer’s lies a sad, shaggy dog whose owner pretends to tie him up with an invisible rope to an invisible pole, and he lies there calmly, convinced he’s tied up. In the early morning the gardens are still withdrawn; they must think night perseveres. If plants had eyes, they’d realize it’s never clear when night will end and the sun will begin to gild them and finally annoy them. They’ve closed the door, and I assume a reasonable face. Now he and the nurse must by tidying up, throwing away cotton, changing the linen sheet, disinfecting scissors and tweezers. He’ll wash his hands and come to get me: tall, wearing his impeccable white coat, calm, a smile on his face. So, tell me how you are. My foot aches, and nothing eases the pain. He was recommended by one of Rafael’s coworkers, and while taking his pulse at the house the doctor raised his eyes and saw the woman I’d painted on Canson paper, madly, with a damp cloth, soaking the paper. What is it? A fish? No, it’s a woman. And,
still taking Rafael’s pulse, he doubled over with laughter. I showed him more of my paintings. I think I broke the elastic waistband when I sat down. It would be . . . Halfway along the corridor I’d be paralyzed, not a true paralysis but because my panties would fall to the floor and shackle my feet. I have a strong urge to laugh and mask it with a tiny cry and cover my mouth with my hand. What is it? Is it a woman? No. It’s a fish. No. It’s a woman. Blue, purple, pink. A triangle for a head, half of her face streaked with fine lines, broken here and there by a wipe of a damp cloth. I showed him to the bathroom to wash his hands, and while he was sudsing them he whispered, “I don’t believe he’s ill; he’s pretending so he can be with you.” I was silent, but when he left I studied myself in the mirror in the foyer. A friend of mine once told me, there’s something inexplicable about your manner, something about you that I can’t put my finger on. I’m uncertain about what’s changed, but I’ve seen it coming on slowly, day by day. Stained teeth? Face full of pores? The whites of the eyes? The whites of her eyes are a bit blue, my grandfather used to say, have you ever noticed? Now it isn’t white or blue, but tending toward ivory, streaked with the odd blood vessel. What does a burst blood vessel mean? Just a little vein that comes and goes. I mean it appears then suddenly dissolves. If my red corpuscles were what they should be . . . They’re always low, and I have to take iron. My neck muscles have twitched. Tired of being in place since that first cry. Rebellious, these neck muscles. What’s the matter? Me and my neck against the light. When I laugh I raise my face, but when I’m worried like now because of the pain in my foot . . . What’s the matter? The look he gave me made me cover my neck with my hands. As he was washing I heard him say something about a disinfectant and I went over to him. What did you say? And he turned and whispered, his hands under the faucet, “There’s nothing the matter with him. He just wants to be with you.” When he left I went out on the terrace; he placed his satchel in the back seat and, standing by the car, looked up at me and waved good-bye. I closed the door to the balcony and gazed through the glass at the bruise-covered Salève. Nice man, the doctor. You should give him a watercolor. The one with the nest full of birds, their beaks stretched wide-open, spilling out, heads raised, more like seals than birds. Earlier, he’d said nothing was the matter with Rafael, he was only pretending so he could be with me, and I mentioned that my foot hurt. Told him I’d ask for an appointment so he could examine it, been troubling me for a couple of months. But I didn’t say we’d sent for him because Rafael and I had a fight, all through the night, no sleep, and he hadn’t gone to work and needed a a note from a doctor for an excuse.
•
“Do you like foxglove?” I like you just the way you are now, so attached to flowers. God first planted a garden. I can get by without flowers, get by perfectly well. Vases filled with flowers are scattered around the terraces of the buildings in front; they bring them out at night so the flowers won’t wither. There are boxes with white petunias and red geraniums. Whiter than white when the sky is low and gray and threatening to rain. The gardeners in the park below bend over the plants, caring for them. The most profound thing about it . . . I mean I believe it is profound. More profound than simply falling in love. I get a lump in my throat when I think about the garden at home, wretched but full of flowers. The flowers at home . . . the ordinary rosebush that I grafted to the finest rosebush of all, and the graft killed them, took all the sap for itself. Deep inside that impalpable, pulsing thing is what we call a soul. Man is the wisest of all. All of him primed so that his brain lives. King man, tiger man, lion man. Man man. If the world is man then I too am man. But man is more because all of his ribs are his, while woman is made from a man’s. Woman bound to man associated with man rib wrenched from his ribs bones of man she is all man fading disappearing. The tragedy of living that man must endure from the moment he is born. War, revolution, incomprehension, stupidity, love. And death that laughs as it strips the flesh from bones, aided by white, eyeless worms, moving and moving, piled on top of each other, slithering through the windows of eyes between the teeth when no tongue is left no uvula or palate no pink gums embellishing the teeth. Like a man, and as such, my pleasure in flowers is the greatest expression of the will of God. One part feminine one part masculine. The artist. Half of an apple embedded in the other half I don’t know what I’m up to. In this weather the vases are filled with gladiolas proud flowering swords. Maybe there are people who love them, I’m referring to flowers, but there are probably few like me who want to weep because suddenly the sky is gray threatening rain and words spring to my mouth: lilac camellia love-lies-bleeding Joseph’s coat . . . King Jaume Royal jasmine, starry jasmine that climbs as it arbors up the marquee, sunroot chrysanthemums dahlias flower of bergamot mad flower of the coral pomegranate and first of all to bloom the almond tree blossom. The white rose delicate flower flower of the Japanese almond tree pregnant with hard almonds placenta of roasted almonds. Angelica. Behind the flesh within the flesh I am the flowers. You, whom I have loved so deeply, what do you think? That if I weep . . . many people rejoice when they make others weep. The pleasure derived from domination, victory! It has taken me a long time to realize. At this moment the pure truth my truth is that the worn-out elastic waistband will trip me half way along the corridor. I am the flowers and this allows me to vanish, do without them. I have just put on the Kreutzer sonata. I am no longer at the doctor’s office, I do not think about anything that I am saying, I am not excited. I am writing. I am writing but I can’t communicate the tremendous jumble of impressions I want to communicate. In real life no one can. Attempts, trials, experiments. Indian skirmishes with the Sioux who are the cleverest. Doesn’t make sense. The sonata on the turntable as I fill pages. I talk about myself. But I don’t. Then someone intelligent will come and say: There she is with all the cleverness of a writer who wants to deliver but can’t and when she confesses to the Lord, she’ll find herself empty-handed. I’ll say nothing. I’ll talk without talking about myself, offering nothing. I’m paralysis itself. But I’ll be empty-handed because truth is spoken by no one and besides it’s slippery. Water that slips away. And the Kreutzer sonata reminds me of my first reading of Tolstoy, when I was transported. I stop writing and listen. It is true that it is hot, I am listening to a sonata, the flower boxes on the terraces have petunias and red geraniums. Here in Geneva. And it is true that I am myself if I’m not someone else. The knob turns, the door opens, and the doctor greets me. With a gesture he has me walk before him down the corridor and nothing happens to the worn-out elastic. I enter his office. The lamp has a green shade. A porcelain hand, palm upward, sits on the table, a sign of friendship. In a corner stands a vase with red roses. Seven. I have only a moment to glance at them. The doctor sits behind his table reads my medical history raises his head and I explain the story of my foot. I have an unorganized foot, been like that for a couple of months. I explain to him all the home remedies I’ve applied. He doesn’t laugh sits seriously. He’s Swiss. As I speak I unfold myself and look at the light on the balcony, the sliver of sky, tiny piece of sky, color of Lac Leman, just a speck of sky behind the glass door to the balcony. The doctor’s hands on his desk and my file, my name, my age. I tell him my right arm was once half-paralyzed for four years and I couldn’t even write my name because I couldn’t hold a pen and didn’t have a typewriter never had a serious illness except a serious operation in Limoges after the French withdrew an old doctor performed it, had a little white beard, his blue eyes examining me. So far away. Everything disappears. I don’t know what I tell the doctor who looks at me and I ask him if he wants to know anything else. He doesn’t reply. I could initiate a corny little scene, talk about the scent of the roses in the vase, the quality of the petals, une rose d’automne est plus qu’une autre exquise, but a few steps away the melodic contour of the violin takes flight, all because a man had madly scribbled notes across five lines—I could have said a staff but that wouldn’t be me, I would have said five lines
. It is true that the roses in the vase are highly perfumed they were christened nocturne it is true that the doctor is silent and a curious complicity is established. A man and a woman. A chastity belt used to serve as an innocent defense because of this mysterious thing that is suddenly created between a man and a woman, imperceptible, but present. As slight as the dust of butterfly wings. I feel the need to explain many things and quickly. Liking Geneva didn’t come easily. I was bored to death without the Louvre, the museums, the old streets, the wide avenues. Rue de Prony. I was settled in Paris for God knows how many years. The Jardin du Luxembourg with all the saintly queens of France Saint Clotilde was missing a finger can’t remember if it was the right hand or left. When I say that the Salève is unattractive the national pride is offended and a voice reaches me from the mouth above the white coat framed by the light from the balcony. From above, seen from below. The magic fades. The sonata that inspired me I now find irritating. It’s much too good, too, too much. Stop that blasted violin, stop it. No, it wasn’t on the day of the red roses that I told the doctor that the Salève was the most hideous mountain in the world. The sonata made me write it. I grind my teeth the typewriter ribbon is stuck I fix it. I. We all stop living at the age of twelve. That’s why I continue to have this passion for flowers. It can’t be explained, nothing can. Men are asses. Sheltered by the mother hen from infant to school to university the first girl we don’t know what to do with life. Swirling skirts, an embrace and let’s get married. My wife’s pregnant and then the cliché children are the greatest thing of all for his children a father must be willing to die mother too they are all dead because of a germ that will slowly devour you forever. Very careful pregnant again maybe this time it’ll be a boy since we already have a girl and everyone thinks how nice to have the pair and then it’s another girl. The skin on my chin is rough and my hair is falling out. A lotion? Is there a remedy for baldness? The stomach swells and the tailor has to alter the clothes, stomach spilling over trousers. The children grow up all of them are away for the summer now I can enjoy myself a bit. The children laugh at their father and the father grows old. A man can go blind lose the use of his voice be ravaged by rheumatism but they say his desire never ceases. A woman passes by and he’s consumed by . . . Yes, there are excellent husbands and loving children. I like flowers what a bore stop talking stop saying that your life came to a halt at the age of twelve as if you had died with soft skin and teeth of pearls and clear eyes like water sparking green beneath leafy trees. I honour you, Eliza, for keeping secret some things. Why did Sterne sneak in here like that? To establish in an unsubtle way that I’m a cultured person who reads Sterne. I’ve never finished a book of his. Not Letters from Yorick to Eliza or Tristram Shandy or The Sentimental Journey. But then maybe I enjoy tricking people and I actually do like Sterne. No way of knowing. Other emotions other manifestations of tenderness.
The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda Page 21
