The Plimsoll Line

by Juan Gracia Armendáriz

  Óscar framed him with his fingers and winked his eye through the imaginary viewfinder of a camera.

  “You should only look through one eye and apply yourself to the vision at the moment the photograph is taken; everything comes down to applying the basic principle of limits. I can photograph a beautiful girl in a field of red flowers, I can photograph the bare feet of that same girl crushing the flowers . . . You have to decide, up or down. Everything else is literature, criticism, deferment. But I’ll tell you something, Gabriel, I have never developed my best photographs. All of them have yet to be made. Some images remain stuck to your retina. And when I blink again, one week, two months, three years later, they come loose from my optic nerve, like scales, and with every image that comes loose, I lose a memory. That’s fortunate, because it’s not easy to forget. In hotel rooms, I leave behind images and scales, like the contact lenses near-sighted people lose in plazas or swimming pools, but there are other images that never come loose, they stay there behind your eyelids, like glow worms. However hard I try to develop them, they remain stuck to the frontal bone, right here, above my eyebrow, but I can feel they are alive, warm, and I wonder what they’re expecting me to do with them. I imagine they’re the only photographs worth developing. Because, you know what?” he asked, lowering his voice. “A photograph, deep down, is an act of love.”

  He stopped looking at him through his fingers and arched an eyebrow.

  “By the way, Gabriel, have you been to see the doctor? You’re very thin, and you look paler than usual. How long has it been since you slept with a woman? That’s what you need, a good woman, a good lay. I know a journalist who’s a bombshell, I’ll introduce you to her. By the way”—he pointed at his empty glass—“one more Bombay Sapphire?”

  But it was later, when they were both yielding to the impulses of their drinking spree, and instead of one Óscar there were two, and instead of one Gabriel there were another two, and suddenly there were four guys drinking gin and tonic—not counting the empty stool that was also suddenly duplicated—and laughing, or groaning, or putting their arms around each other’s shoulders, precariously balanced on their stools, that one of the two Óscars, it may have been the original, or perhaps just his double, left a fistful of crumpled bills on the counter, buried his red face in his neck, hugged him, and staggering out of the bar, both of them clinging to the door to help them out onto the street, said,“You don’t know how much I loved Laura. You have no idea.”

  Several days later, his anxiety still persisting, he allowed a needle to be stuck into him in a blood draw lab and very diligently filled a jar with a urine sample he handed to the nurse on the other side of the laboratory counter, as if he were serving her a shot of whisky. Later he picked up the results and took them to his general practitioner’s office—a complete, exhaustive analysis the doctor either did not want or did not know how to interpret, simply listening to his chest, taking his blood pressure, and asking him, after a moment’s hesitation, what color his urine was, whether it was blond like beer, like a sailor, or oily in appearance, olive-green, with shades of sienna or ocher, perhaps accompanied by splashes of blood, or else off-white, perhaps transparent, like water, whether the act of urinating made any white foam or large bubbles, whether he had recently been going to the bathroom less frequently, whether he had noticed a smaller volume of liquid, or his urine was weak, perhaps in the last few months he had felt an itching sensation at the tip of his penis, and in the face of his hesitant answers, the doctor ordered that the analysis be repeated. Two days later, he called the doctor’s office and was referred to the nephrology specialist. By this time, doubt and fear were forming a yellow, scented cloud inside his head. Over the days that followed, he scrutinized his urine, counted the times he went to the restroom, filled plastic containers and noted down the amount of liquid, filled small, transparent glasses so he could observe the color of his piss against the light, like an oil taster, and finally resigned himself to the conclusion that there was little difference between the color of his urine and Bezoya mineral water.

  The nephrologist’s face was illuminated in the semidarkness with an aquatic iridescence. It took him a while to link this effect to the light being emitted by the computer screen. While the doctor compared the results of the lab tests, he glanced around at the shelves in the office, full of books and scientific magazines, the framed medical diploma on the wall, the certificates of attendance at international congresses, and the sporty detail of a bronze sculpture in the shape of a racket, whose pedestal read, “First Padel Tennis Championship, Golf Millennium Club.” He cleared his throat, stared at the tips of his shoes, and compared the doctor’s hands with his own. He had the impression all doctors had very thin hands, without any hair on their phalanges, and wore repulsive business socks. As if he had read his thoughts, the nephrologist waved his four-colored Bic pen, shuffled the papers, lifted his eyes toward him, and spoke briefly in English.

  “Something is moving on.”

  He lowered his eyes, blinked, and at his gesture of surprise, repeated “something is moving on” in a neutral voice, without any inflection, from the other side of the methacrylate table on whose unblemished surface his slim fingers without any hair on their phalanges were reflected. He felt he was just waking up, as if the expression “something is moving on,” pronounced in language-academy English that was a bit stiff and no doubt learned—he thought afterward with a chronic sufferer’s resentment—in order to give lectures at international nephrology congresses had acted like a spell, opening an invisible frontier between them, a liquid surface, like the inside of a fishbowl. That’s why he immediately felt certain that, having said “something is moving on,” the nephrologist and his industrious young man’s beard already belonged to a place as near as it was unreachable across the methacrylate table and the screensaver’s aquatic light.

  He summoned enough energy to uncross his legs, lean over that liquid surface, and ask,“What do you mean, doctor?” His voice sounded a little high-pitched to him.

  “Something is moving,” said the doctor in Spanish.

  He considered looking out of the window and, as if declaiming something in front of an audience, adding, “The clouds, the birds, the cars . . . ?” But he kept quiet.

  The doctor pointed at his abdomen with his pen.

  “Your kidneys, Mr. . . ,” he searched for his name in the report,“. . . Ariz.”

  “My kidneys are moving?” he looked at his tie, as if he’d just discovered a stain.

  The doctor waved his pen around again.

  “On the contrary, they are ceasing to work. They are coming to a halt, they are stopping,” the doctor raised his hand, as if wanting to reassure him at the same time. “That’s what I meant before: something is moving on.”

  He felt that he understood everything and nothing, that everything was moving and stopping in a dance representing something he couldn’t fathom but must have some meaning; his body, and other bodies, his classes, J. M. W. Turner, the yellow color of his tie, Polanski, his latest art review, the hydrangeas he had just pruned in the garden . . . all of it swirled around in his head, forming a puzzle of encoded messages he should have interpreted in time to prevent circumstances bringing him to the point he was at now, seated in front of a doctor who was looking at him with strange haughtiness and saying “something is moving on.”

  He raised his hands as if to stop a beach ball at chestheight, a gesture that resembled the last line of defense for something to stop or to start moving, he couldn’t be sure.

  “Why are they moving? I mean, why aren’t they moving?”

  The doctor sat up straight in his chair, and his trimmed beard was no longer reflected in the glass of the table.

  “What I mean is your kidneys are not working. That’s the main thing. We’re going to repeat all the tests, but you had better get used to the idea you’re going to need a new kidney.”

>   He rubbed the small of his back with apprehension.

  “I feel fine . . . ,” he said.

  The doctor swiveled his chair in the direction of the computer. The click-clicks of the mouse made the pause more intense.

  “Age?” he asked without looking away from the screen.

  “Fifty-two.”

  “Profession?”

  “University professor.” He hesitated for a moment and added,“And art critic.”

  “Married?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Children?”

  “No.”

  “Any family history of nephropathy?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “Diabetes?”

  “No.”

  “High blood pressure?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Smoke?”

  “One a day.”

  “One cigarette?”

  “One pack.”

  “Drink?”

  “Occasionally.”

  The doctor stood up and came around the table.

  “Mr. Ariz,” he looked at him calmly,“the likeliest outcome is that you will have to undergo dialysis treatment, I don’t know if you understand what that means . . . You will be put on a waiting list for a kidney transplant. That’s the procedure in these cases. You should know that hundreds of operations like this are performed each year.”

  The doctor struck him now as very tall. He glimpsed a pair of striped pants under his lab coat. He felt ridiculous, because fear was presenting itself in the guise of a young man with a trimmed beard who wore sport cologne and who, having assured him there could be no doubt as to the diagnosis and written “End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD), advise immediate dialysis treatment” in his report, would probably go and play a game of padel tennis at the Golf Millennium Club.

  He pointed to a gurney.

  “Please lie down there.”

  He felt cold while taking off his clothes. It smelled of bandages and iodine. A nurse appeared at the door, followed by two doctors. The woman’s voice sounded imperative. “Get undressed.” He felt the blood descending from his head to his toes. He looked at the ceiling. He thought he could see the profile of his figure on the stippled surface, a white stain he must have confused with the doctor’s white coat. He was certain his body was getting lighter on the metal stretcher and could float, if he wanted it to, over the table and the pages of the lab results and fly out of the window, limp and weightless, like a beetle, but this impression only lasted until the moment the doctors gathered around the gurney, and then he was invaded by a sense of vulnerability, especially when various slim fingers without any hair on their phalanges began to press on various parts of his abdomen, and the nurse hooked him up to a blood pressure monitor while other fingers wrapped in latex but no doubt without any hair on their phalanges busied themselves at the intersection of his forearm, searching for a green-colored vein the size of a shoelace.

  3

  He began to live between parentheses. This was the only way he could explain to himself the distance that seemed, from that moment on, to open up between his body and objects, between words and actions. It was as if Gabriel Ariz were no longer Gabriel Ariz but two different Gabriels, one from before and one from now, who did not complement or attract each other in the least; rather, the two Gabriels, on either side of the parenthesis, repelled each other like two like-charged magnetic poles. In this scission, thought failed to find its corresponding expression, the word to name anything successfully; and yet the world carried on being there, while he, feeling impotent between the two Gabriels—the one from before: autonomous, ironic, prudent; the one from now: dependent, held back by the weight of his body—could do nothing to adapt to its pace. It was like watching life through the window of a train. He stretched out his arm and grasped only air, or that’s what it felt like when, having recovered from the paralysis his diagnosis had sunk him into, he had to take the necessary steps to be granted indefinite leave. He signed the pieces of paper the head of personnel held out to him from the other side of the glass and completed the procedure with a simplicity and lack of involvement that accorded very well with the distance that seemed to have sprung up between himself and his surroundings. “I’m sorry, Professor Ariz,” said the civil servant in a low voice, straightening up in his seat on the other side of the glass, but he smiled, as if these words were not addressed to him but to a body double who had taken over his functions, the Gabriel from now, and the civil servant smiled in turn, feeling sorry for this poor devil signing at the bottom of the form.

  He had the false impression he’d attained a certain imperturbability of spirit, a kind of ataraxia that never ceased to amaze his acquaintances, though this mask of stoicism was not the product of an ascetic process but of pure anguish. His departmental colleagues received the news with surprise and a measure of commiseration. His daughter’s death, his divorce from Ana, and now his own physical indigence painted a dramatic picture for his colleagues, a picture he disliked intensely, but such judgments made it much less likely it wasn’t him this was happening to but rather that other guy, the Gabriel from now, behind whom he sheltered and masqueraded as if this projection were a decoy whose purpose was to attract the heap of existential absurdities toward itself and keep him, the real Gabriel, safe from everything, sitting up in the balcony, as though he were just another spectator of the whole melodrama.

  All of this was too unfair, he went so far as to think in a fit of self-pity. Nobody except for him employed this useless judgment, or others like it, which irritated both Gabriels, the one from before and the one from now, his colleagues at the university merely forcing a smile before coming out with somber statements that slid over him like tributes paid to a statue. The dean of the department had added,“Some people will be happy, but we’ll be here for whatever you need, you know that, Gabriel.” It wasn’t necessary to be any more explicit; it was well known that his position in the university hierarchy would be rapidly filled by one of the many lecturers waiting for the chance to occupy a vacant chair. So he left the dean’s office and prepared to gather his things. He was helped in this task by a PhD student he had taken under his wing, who now watched as his protector exited the stage, abandoning him to the stormy waters of departmental hiring politics. He noticed on the young man’s face an expression of sadness and annoyance as he piled books into packing boxes. The days he spent arranging the move and signing bits of paper were a succession of slow-motion images of which he wanted no part, so he decided to avoid ceremonial farewells. The desk attendant helped him put his things inside the trunk of his car. He shook his hand, which was dry and hard, like a chicken’s foot, and drove away from the university campus.

  Several days later, he had a telephone conversation with Óscar that was cut off due to interference and an almost nonexistent signal. He heard his own voice repeating, like an echo down the line, the phrase “I’m fucked, Óscar,” and the voice of his brother speaking in gusts from an SUV crossing a massif in the Andes. He managed to catch that he was doing a photo-essay on the origins of the Maoist group Shining Path, and he tried to explain to him that his kidneys weren’t working and he would have to receive dialysis treatment. The conversation was so confused that the words artificial kidney, dialysis, and Shining Path crossed several times, repeated by the echo on the line. “Shining Path?” he asked, just at the moment his brother seemed to have grasped the situation, but then he heard a curse on the other end of the line. Óscar explained that their vehicle had just broken down. The nearest indigenous village was five hours away. He managed to make out something to do with the car’s radiator. “It’s shitty luck, Gabriel, it’s really shitty luck,” he said. There was then a silence that resembled the hollow of a tunnel. “I’ll be back in Spain in November, as soon as I’ve shot three rolls of film.” It was stupid to try to explain any further, and he concealed his apprehens
ion behind a forced joviality that was designed to keep his own fear at a distance. Which is why he said “I’m fucked, Óscar” and, as a way of toning down the selfpity implicit in the previous statement, added,“we should celebrate.” Their roars of laughter could be heard in unison, nervous and strange, until the call was abruptly terminated.

  The impression of unreality slowly waned, to be replaced by the certainty of guilt and an imperious need for physical investigation. He had read somewhere, though he couldn’t remember where,“During illness, unknown lands come to light.” At the time, the sentence had struck him as a lyrical imposture, unless the lands in question were those of his own corporeal geography. Beyond that, there was nothing of interest. He adopted the habits of a retiree. He would trim the hedge in the garden, crumble half a loaf of bread to feed the birds, and then wrap up warm to watch the decline of evening, lying on the chaise longue on the porch. He would observe the slightly oblique autumn sun slowly losing height and stretching its shadow across the crumb-strewn lawn. At such moments, he thought he heard a breath being held somewhere on the other side of the fence, at the forest’s edge, but as soon as he seemed to abandon himself to this contemplation and the sky acquired a mint-colored lividness, those “unknown lands” revealed their true dimension, something so close it forced him to stretch on his deck chair and uncross his legs, which were swollen from retaining water. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his body, but glimpsed nothing more than a black box, a dark, rather lightweight volume that appeared to have been deprived of its weight. This initial impression forced him to make an effort at restraint, as if he had to take a step back in order to locate a much earlier point in the geological layers of his own anatomy. “There they are,” he thought then. The hollow pieces, the volume and disposition of his internal organs, that map spread out below like an inner city. He could locate the half circumferences of his lungs, two dark segments that offered greater optical possibilities when seen from up close—two arborescent areas harboring unlikely passages through the forest of alveoli. Some were impregnated with tar, like tiny coal veins, delicate bellows mistreated by his tobacco habit. Who knows, he thought, if they would collapse on being touched by a gentle deflagration of carbon monoxide, shrinking away like embers. Further down was the stomach—slow, resentful, ruminant, a bag vulgar brown in color, a long-suffering abdominal cavity, a forever remembering entrail. He could sense his intestinal circumvolutions, a labyrinth growing narrower and wider through a long network of galleries, a tubular heap where poisonous, fetid gases installed themselves from time to time, rising to his chest in the middle of the afternoon with the alarm of pectoral flatulence. “My stomach is sad,” he started saying, because he felt it doubling over with a heavy weight toward the waterline of his navel. He didn’t like his stomach, let alone his intestines, perhaps because of their resemblance to worms, which at the time were plaguing the garden. During such morbid investigations, he preferred to stop at the liver, so weighty, so autonomous, brilliant, colored crimson red, like a bottle of wine brightened by the light, perfect as a precision instrument, standing firm despite the functional imbalance caused by his kidneys having gone on indefinite strike, despite having filtered a large number and variety of drinks over the past thirty years—poisonous anise liqueurs, merry ciders, earthy pomace brandies, civic beers, unpretentious reds, sugary potions in suspicious hues, mint and strawberry liqueurs, sloe-flavored anisettes, village-brewed spirits with euphoric effects, fulminating demijohns of gin, which he phased out as he began to sit at long tables of refined cutlery at the homes of Ana’s friends and relatives and his backside molded itself to the Chair of Aesthetics and Art Theory. The exhibition and gallery openings, book launches, invitations to conferences, and cocktail parties offered him a new alcoholic menu he grew used to as quickly as he dismissed the bitter taste of strong wine—champagnes, cavas, cocktails, vodkas tasting of iced lemon, cognacs aged in fine oak barrels, armagnacs, whiskies tasting of pitch . . . My liver? Fine, thanks, he thought, longing for those liqueurs that were now as forbidden to him as Bezoya bottled water. He then moved up to the heart and its percussion of blood, the heart, serious stuff, the size of a bird enclosed in a fist, throbbing between the bars of the ribcage, to the left of the sternum. He descended through the artery, moved through the left ventricle to the center of the muscle where the pulsing started, the beating that on occasion and for no apparent reason would turn into stuttering heartbeats, off beat, a drum roll that grew and pushed against his thoracic cavity, or further up, even, against his frontal sinuses and eyeballs. They were murmurs, arrhythmias, worrying signs that, taken together with cigarettes, a sedentary lifestyle, cholesterol, and his renal deficiency, could, as the doctor had informed him, bring about a collapse. During such afternoons of morbid contemplation, he learned to familiarize himself with these warning signs, going so far as to dream up scenes in which everything began with a feeling of stiffness in his left arm, a pain that spread to his chest and the base of his neck. In the scene, he was watering the hydrangeas, lifting his eyes to the sky, as if seeing it for the first time, with primitive amazement, and suddenly the hose leaped out of his hands and onto the lawn, like a snake, spraying water everywhere, and he staggered and fell to the ground. He could feel the wet grass under his chest and a few droplets on his forehead as he dragged himself in the direction of the phone to call for help, in the presence of Polanski, who gazed at him impassively from the other side of the window. And so he realized he only had time to lie down on his back and observe that strange, beautiful firmament. But these were mere tricks of the imagination, strategies of anxious free time. After a while, he learned to listen to his body and pressed his ear against his skin, filled with a comfortable sense of moral insensitivity.