The Plimsoll Line

by Juan Gracia Armendáriz

  The man opens his eyes. Bewildered, it takes him awhile to focus on the tiny crack that looks like a crater, over there, in the distance—a wrinkled spot lost on the pearl-colored wall stretching out in front of him, imitating a lunar landscape. The surface appears immense, as if when he opened his eyes, everything had taken on a novel quality it previously lacked, and so the space stretching between the tip of his nose and the pearl-colored wall is now a vacuum vibrating up and down, full of light, extending toward him and folding him in. The man feels he might explode and that that is getting mixed up with him, with his swollen eyelids, his hair stuck to his brow, the old sweat impregnating the sheets. For a moment, everything seems to emerge from the tiny crack in the wall, a muffled bellow that could demolish the partitions in the house and his consciousness. He feels he could cross through the air or disappear effortlessly until he attained the quietude of that tiny crater. Without fear. The man shudders, coughs again, and the impression of plenitude vanishes as soon as he realizes it’s still day outside and that under the pillow, he still feels pain in his arm from the injections. He senses he is still accompanied by a fragment of his last dream, of which all he can remember is a stranger’s smile and the pleasant impression of having flown over the valley. The crack in the wall regains its mute, insignificant appearance, as does the glass of water, the thirty pills of different sizes and colors, selected, one by one, from among barbiturates, sedatives, and sleeping pills, the alarm clock under the extinguished lamp on the bedside table . . . Suddenly, these objects seem to adapt to a closer world, within hand’s reach.

  He could repeat the same words, even parodying the severe, pedagogical tone his wife had used to tell him she was leaving him—“I’ve thought about it, I’ve considered it at great length, and now I know it without a shadow of a doubt. I want to end this. I want to go. We’re finished . . . we were finished a long time ago. You do realize, don’t you? It’s the best thing for both of us. And Laura would agree. Laura wouldn’t be happy seeing us like this.” While he doesn’t remember his answer, he does remember the first impression caused by these words uttered without drama in a restrained tone that could only be the result of practice and, therefore, of a well-planned strategy—a soft but heavy blow in the pit of his stomach that sometimes, when he awakes, like now, he recalls for no reason. That’s when the succubus of his bad dreams seems to prolong its habitual presence and remain seated on his chest, fully awake still, and watch him, leaning forward with the old smile of a Gothic creature, the expression of an elderly child that may just as easily dissolve into hysterical laughter as pull faces like a circus monkey or adopt poses indicating sadness, self-pity, or obscene grimaces of pleasure. The man twists his body, stretches out his pained arm, and the mattress springs creak again beneath the weight of his hip. With the heavy flight of an ugly bird, the succubus flaps over to the bedhead. It may stay there for the rest of the day, or only until the man leaves the room. It sometimes alights on his shoulder and accompanies him in his daily tasks, like a parrot, in order to murmur abject nonsense and interject confessions that acquire the tone of a short prayer or a litany of insults. Other times, it contents itself with offering fragments of memories, images, and words that appear to have been selected with the sole aim of adding anxiety to his rumination of pointless matters, the private clichés he will come back to later, repeatedly analyzing their limited meaning, like someone rolling a pebble around in their hand. The succubus may spend the day under the bed, dozing among the fluff and dust, or behind the wardrobe, or under the sofa, but the man knows that come evening, it will still be in the bedroom, breathing noiselessly, and he doesn’t worry about it anymore or get alarmed; he’s come to accept it as one accepts an inheritance, good or bad, or a family defect.

  The man links his wife’s words to the devastating feminine sincerity she would employ at critical moments, when he was incapable of making a decision. Ana would raise abrupt palisades against the inevitable—definitive gestures, rapid distraction techniques that, far from lessening the pain, brought it back with renewed vigor. That’s what happened on the night when, with an almost supernatural gaze, she confronted the young surgeon in the intensive care unit. He recalls the sequence of prior events as a succession of gestures whose final meaning he would never understand—him lifting the receiver, placing it against his ear, while on the other end of the line, a male voice trained in giving bad news—correct, prudent, gently imperative, well modulated—declared that his daughter had suffered a car accident. He held the receiver, pressing it very hard against his ear while listening to the voice, which explained, without going into detail, that Laura’s red car had gone under a truck, it had happened an hour earlier, on the brow of a hill a few miles from the ski resort. He relaxed the tension in his fingers and changed ears when the voice, with a demonstration of prosody worthy of a better cause, indicated that an ambulance had taken her to the city hospital. Without understanding very well something to do with a team of firefighters and the difficulty of the rescue operation, he jotted down the name of the medical center. He looked around in search of his cigarettes, then the keys to his car, but the voice, guessing his intention, asked him to remain calm, Laura was in good hands, all means had been placed at her disposal, so there was nothing he could do right now except drive carefully, without haste but without delay, to the city, where he should head to the medical center’s intensive care unit. He thanked him and very slowly detached the receiver from his ear. Ana watched him with a strange smile on her lips, pale, very still behind the preparations for the Christmas Eve dinner. Under the champagne-colored light, she asked if something bad had happened. “Laura,” he said, avoiding his wife’s eyes, “has been in a car accident,” and his gaze followed the figure of the cleaning lady who was busy poaching the lobsters for the dinner and now turned toward him, biting a finger, and he added, “it seems it’s serious,” and Ana stifled a scream. They got their coats. “Let my brother Óscar know,” he said before closing the door, and the woman nodded, still fingering her apron with hands red from the heat of the stove on which the lobsters were boiling.

  In the car, Ana recalled that Laura had arranged to meet her friends Sandra and Claudia after dinner. Young people nowadays, she reflected, are in the habit of going out to have fun on Christmas Eve, perhaps she should inform them, tell them not to worry, but he focused on the road, the slightly spectral light of the fog lamps, while calculating that the journey to the hospital could be completed in under seventy-five minutes, so while he kept his foot on the accelerator and asked Ana to light him a cigarette, he imagined he could see the objects for the Christmas celebration on the table, the cutlery, the amber light of the lampshades, and the voice of Frank Sinatra, New York, New York, cradling an atmosphere he now imagined as sunk in spacious desolation, dropped noiselessly on top of the room, like a sheet, and this descent must be reflected in the glittery baubles and the wrapped presents they’d left piled at the foot of the Christmas tree, but all of this was being swallowed up by the mist, as if these details already belonged to a faraway world, while they advanced without talking, and this impression of now unreachable distance became more obvious when Ana tuned into a radio station playing music, a Bach fugue, and even more so when they left the mountain pass behind them and reached the first houses of the city. When they entered the hospital parking lot, he turned off the radio, looked at his watch, and said, “Seventy-two minutes,” as if the fact of having reached the entrance to the hospital in seventy-two minutes, not a minute more, not a minute less, was a margin, an argument that could be used in support of Laura’s cause, but Ana, out of the car by now, looked at him without seeing him, and he followed her clumsily, her fur coat in his hand, trying to place it on her shoulders in a vain gesture of politeness, first while they were walking over the icy asphalt of the parking lot, then in the corridors of the hospital.

  He believes he felt something akin to compassion, at least for a few moments, when the doctor mum
bled excuses adorned with incomprehensible medical jargon in order to conclude that the serious injuries sustained by Laura in the accident were “incompatible with life” and he was very sorry, really and truly. He wondered what this nonsense meant, while at the same time shifting his gaze between the surgeon’s flustered face and, he wasn’t quite sure why, the cellulose mask he wore crumpled under his chin, drawn by the elastic bands that stretched across his jaw, trapping his ears, like the elastic bands of a child’s mask. He remembers he managed to shake off this absurd fascination and, still having found no answer to his question, raised his eyes back to the now silent face of the doctor, who remained standing opposite them with drooping arms, as if considering the effect produced by his words. This interval of silence, however, was very short, for Ana hurried to break it. “Get out of here, leave us alone, please,” she said with a forcefulness that days later, when he recalled the scene, he judged to be incoherent. Perhaps she, too, had failed to comprehend the significance of the medical euphemism and that’s why she expressed herself with a coldness inappropriate for the situation. Or perhaps not. He doesn’t know, nor can he ever, but he remembers it as though he were a spectator observing the scene reflected in a pane of glass—his wife’s profile and, opposite it, the surgeon’s green apron, spattered with drops of dried blood, both reflected in the window of the ICU, which was screened by slatted blinds behind which Laura lay dying, surrounded by a useless mesh of tubes, saline bags, and artificial respirators; the silhouette of Ana with her index finger bent in the direction of the surgeon’s mask as she said “get out of here, leave us alone.” But he doesn’t recall the doctor’s reaction; perhaps he attempted to mutter a less laconic apology, or awkwardly formulated an explanation as to the importance an organ donation could have at that time, that must have been it, which is why she pushed the piece of paper away and, pointing at his cellulose mask, said “leave us alone and get out of here.” He was the one who, with bureaucratic automatism, signed the documents held out to him, the authorization for the extraction of Laura’s organs, which for a moment appeared in his mind as still-living objects, pieces of a lizard’s tail jumping around and moving off to hide in anonymous cracks and warm fissures, and scratched his signature at the bottom of the documents, then shook the doctor’s hand, which felt as fragile as a bird’s foot, though he couldn’t be sure about this, it may only have been a false impression within the sequence of events; in the next few days he shook lots of different hands—soft, invertebrate hands, arid, stubborn hands, damp hands, icy hands, invisible hands of smoke. He then watched the doctor disappear behind a tuft of blond hair, while he embraced his wife, still not understanding, aware of her suddenly soft body that felt limp in his arms, and her voice repeating in his ear,“Oh, please . . . oh, please . . . oh, please.”

  In fact, he didn’t understand anything. He had a memory of tobacco-colored stones and plaster guardian angels. He retained the impression of air on the back of his neck, and a few faces, not many—that of his brother, Óscar, swollen behind ample aviator sunglasses, the weight of his hand on his shoulder, though they didn’t say anything to each other, alongside other, equally contorted faces turned toward Ana. He told himself he had to protect her, but he couldn’t, because at the same time, he had to make an effort to stop those same faces arousing his own pain, which, since the start of the day, had remained anaesthetized beneath his coat. He managed it until he felt a cold sweat descending from the nape of his neck to his tailbone, followed by a wave of nausea and the unstoppable reflux of a watery soup of María Fontaneda cookies, very strong coffee, and black kiwi seeds. He moved away from the group of mourners and vomited into a rosebush. He was given a bottle of water and forced to swallow a pill as he sat on the stone edge of something. Somebody fanned him. It occurred to him that this made no sense, was ridiculous—nobody has a fan in December, with that cold frosting the glass of the bottles on the walls and the windows of the cars parked at the entrance to the cemetery, but a woman, the cleaning lady, was fanning him, and he started to feel better. He felt his buttocks frozen on the stone lip. The bitter taste of bile disappeared, and everything returned to a very pleasant evaluative neutrality. He remembers when the burial finished, he even came up with a few words of consolation for a pimple-faced girl that was crying while gripping the railings at the entrance. “Go home,” he said, trying to prize her fingers off the iron bars. And he remembers Óscar’s terribly pale face behind the sunglasses as he rocked back and forth, his feet very close together, in the corridor of the funeral home, concentrating on the toes of his garnet-colored moccasins, his arms weak and drooping. How strange it all is, he thought to himself, because everything was happening with stunned slowness after seeing so many familiar faces, one after the other, and trying out different ways of offering and receiving condolences—a squeeze to the arm, pursed lips—not knowing what to say, because, to be honest, there wasn’t much to say, or perhaps there was, there was so much to say and no way of doing so that it involved a gesture that expressed impotence, disbelief, and pain all at the same time, though the result of such expressive willfulness ended up being more of a dumb gesture—a disconcerting grimace and vague smile.

  He wished it could all be over as soon as possible and nodded in response to every polite formula or expression of condolence, hidden behind Ana, swallowing saliva constantly but without managing to get rid of the ball bearing that had been stuck in his throat since the morning and wouldn’t dissolve, even though he sucked on violet-flavored candies, until the two of them were back home alone again in the evening. Ana ran herself a hot bath, and he smoked on the porch by himself, the cat on his lap. It was raining, and the water melted a convex layer of ice that covered the garden. The hydrangeas were frozen, and Polanski purred continuously on his stomach. From above came the sound of the water tank, and the faucet filling the bath. Only then did he cry at length, minutely and without respite.

  And yet when Ana declared she was leaving, there was nothing, no scenes or weeping, and although he was tempted to give free rein to the actors studio he’d always sensed inside himself, hidden beneath his jacket, ready to reveal his long-suppressed dramatic vocation, he managed to restrain himself in time, and this effort at self-restraint still fills him with satisfaction. Although he barely managed to suppress a slight gesture of horror, he didn’t give way to the recourse of overacting; he did, however, stare at his wife in some alarm at the allusion to their daughter, a recourse he judged to be as deceitful as it was effective in the situation, which he also managed to exploit by introducing just the right amount of drama. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to conceal his relief, since when all was said and done, his wife had just demolished the partition wall he himself had been eroding day after day, and in her words, which she considered forthright and perhaps even original, he glimpsed a kind of long-awaited liberation. The fissures were finally giving way, sending cracks up and down the building. So the sudden feeling of vertigo in the pit of his stomach was a physiological reaction that responded more to the certainty that something long desired was finally happening than to any innocent declaration of marital breakup. After all, everything was reaching the point he himself had foreseen, evidence that strengthened him in a conviction he’d assumed with everyday cynicism and according to which he was a sentimental man, bad and sentimental, which was based on irrefutable proof—his uncanny ability to get somebody else to do for him what he would never have dared to put into practice on his own, to exhaust the options open to his opponent until finally forcing them to make a decision they, in their ingenuity, believed to be the fruit of their own free will but which was in fact nothing more than the logical conclusion of a long-drawn-out and well-planned siege. Victory through attrition, exhaustion, a process in which time loses all consistency and his opponent’s intellectual capability is reduced, since once the final maneuvers—prolonged silences, moderate but well-aimed reproaches, false compassion, reconciliation, hurried intercourse, and bac
k to the beginning—have been exhausted, the other loses the match in the false belief that they have won it. This is why, when his wife said “we’re finished and you know it,” his innate dramatic vocation contented itself with a slight, episcopal nodding of the head—“You’re right, Ana, you’ve taken the words right out of my mouth.”