The Plimsoll Line

by Juan Gracia Armendáriz

  The procedure has been enacted without variation, the nurse has continued spreading jam on the bread, and he has eaten it with one hand in order to then fall asleep next to the machine with his left arm motionless and bread crumbs in the folds of his pajamas. This repetition of actions—five hours, three times a week—has put him in his place, among the other patients occupying other dialyzers—Ángel, dozing next to him with a radio pressed against his ear, dreaming of cakes and swimming pools; Andrés, a Jehovah’s witness who, in Ángel’s words, approaches his treatment as if he were buying shares in the real estate agency of Heaven; Marcela, a palmist and tarot card reader who has an astrological phone-in show on a local radio station, which envelops her in an aura of mystery, something that, in Andrés’s words, the hospital workers compensate for by giving her extra attention; Ambrosio, an ex-miner who drinks and eats with suicidal abandon; and Tere, a small, deaf girl with the face of a tawny owl, whom he has never heard say a word or seen reading anything or listening to the radio, who only ever stares out of the window at the pigeons delousing themselves on the sill, as if she didn’t know why she was there, and who on occasion, whenever Sara misses the fistula and a small jet of black blood emerges from the hole, shudders slightly and emits a squeak very similar to the sound of a badly oiled door.

  At the start of his treatment, he would become quickly overwhelmed by tiredness and close his eyes, and his brain would activate a superficial sleep that merged with the fermented smell of iodine, disinfectant, and sweat, a fleeting, fragile sleep, like on a bus journey. He dozed, attentive to the slightest movement of his arm. It usually happened that his mind would wander, leaving the room, and at that pleasant distance he would become unaware of his body, to the point that his arm, relaxing, would slip off the armchair. This slight movement was preceded by a sudden feeling of vertigo. He would then wake up, and the fluorescent light from the tubes on the ceiling would flood his abruptly open eyes. The first time, he blinked on feeling a slight tear in his skin. He thought he saw the succubus of his bad dreams climbing toward the lights. He blinked again to push away the steadily growing pain, but his arm kept swelling under the tape like a bladder. The process ground to a halt, and the machine emitted a shrill alarm that shot through the room and the dreams of the other patients, bouncing off the ceiling, against the windows, zigzagging over the tiles, like light from a laser pen, until it reached the nurses’ station at the far end of the corridor. He stared in amazement at his swollen arm and the loose needles.

  “Oh my . . . ,” exclaimed a nurse, heading for the machine. He saw her pressing buttons and clamping tubes. She proceeded to rummage around under the skin of his arm with the needles. It seemed to him she did this with an electrician’s fluency. He clenched his jaw when he felt the tiny steel tips digging under his skin and swore under his breath.

  “Oh my . . . ,” exclaimed the nurse again, continually moving the needles in search of the bloodstream until, finally, the blood went back to circulating through the tubes. She put surgical tape over the wound and wagged her finger, as if telling off a child. “Don’t forget to practice with your rubber ball, fifteen minutes a day,” she insisted, “you have to strengthen those veins. And as soon as you get home, put some anti-inflammatory cream on that forearm, you’re going to get a good bruise.”

  He watched her head recede toward the nurses’ station, her updrawn hair bouncing on the back of her neck, suntanned, gymnastic, and was suddenly overwhelmed by an extravagant mix of gratitude and guilt.

  He repeats “in-put, out-put; in-put, out-put” in the knowledge that it’s not the needles or the machine but he who is living under a parasitic, dependent regime, since the real burden is his body and not the machine, which will always remain focused on the perfect logic of its surroundings, deaf and dumb, oblivious to the fact that he is a man rather than anything else with a circulatory system—a horse, a monkey, a cow. This idea envelops him in a deceptive sense of self-complacency he isn’t always capable of avoiding, since it confirms his suspicion that he is living in constant deferment, between parentheses. Once connected to the machine, he only has to worry about the feeling of guilt concerning his blood and the fear of it being wasted as it passes through the tubes. Like all patients, he knows he is under obligation to inspect his own excrescences, not without a certain fearful satisfaction. The machine is running, and he notices every change, every arrhythmia, oblivious to anything not ascribed to that state of siege. In this way, man and machine each continue in their own space.

  The doctors have their names embroidered in blue thread and their pockets full of ballpoint pens, felt tip markers, and pencils. The head of the nephrology department is in the habit of squeezing the feet of patients while reading the results of their latest analyses. The others merely nod in silence, knowledgeably, huddled around the ward manager’s notebook, and after their rounds, once the director of the nephrology department has squeezed, one by one, the feet of all the patients, they move off down the hallway, forming a hermetic group of healthy, freshly showered men who leave the pleasant aroma of cologne in their wake. He thinks they already constituted a separate group before they entered the room, like all the other men and women not in the hospital—people walking down the street on their way to work, the bus driver charging passengers for their journey, the lottery ticket vendor stationed at the door to the healthcare center—because at heart and in practice they are in another place. Or perhaps he’s the one who’s in another place. This impression of foreignness begins in his body and spreads outward, as if the fact of having a sick body transported him to another sphere of reality and conferred on him the suspicion of a crime. At times, this impression crystallizes and turns into resentment; he catches himself staring at another driver through the window of the taxi, somebody who is smiling or talking to himself while listening to music or going over the day’s tasks, stopped at the light, in his car, without realizing that next to him, reclining in the seat of the taxi taking him home or back to the clinic, someone is envious of his healthy complexion, his glistening eyes, his absorption in the music or some banal concern, and for a moment would like to be that carefree driver returning home after a day’s work, to take his place, and for that man to suddenly feel the exclusion and the affront of illness and spend five, six years, or possibly the rest of his life, connected to the machine, “in-put, out-put; in-put, out-put.”

  At times, both Gabriels, the one from before and the one from now, fight to cut each other off in mid-sentence, they contradict each other, and the one from before is unwilling to see himself projected onto that apprehensive, rancorous straw man, while the Gabriel from now attempts to escape from the present moment, drawn by the gravitational force of his body, and tries to project himself onto a future that, like the past, is nothing more than conceited verbiage. This fight was not stopped but exacerbated by Ana’s visit, every time he felt the look she gave him, having warned him on the phone she was doing this “only because I want to see you, find out how you are, if you don’t mind, of course, it’s been ages since we last saw each other, besides I want to discuss some matters of a practical nature that have yet to be settled.” He wasn’t ecstatic about the idea of his ex-wife seeing him prostrate on the armchair, but decided that the possibility of contemplating her from this perspective would be like watching her through a shop window, buttressed by the prestigious distance of a chronic sufferer. And so he agreed to it. She looked different to him, slim, she was carrying a tiny cowhide handbag over her shoulder, and she entered the room with a lack of inhibition he judged inappropriate for such a place, walking on heels that sounded very thin, clack, clack, clack, and produced a series of beats on the tiles. There was no trace in her of sorrow, or of the social manners he presumed should be adopted in this sort of place, rather she appeared more energetic and beautiful than before and, above all, brimming with health. She leaned forward to kiss the air a couple of millimeters away from his cheek and pulled up a stool to a sp
ot near the machine. He neither wanted nor was able to ignore her crossed legs swathed in black tights, or her thick sandalwood perfume, or her eyes, which looked back and forth between him and the machine as if she were in front of two speakers and didn’t rightly know which of the two to address, the man or the machine, the Gabriel from before or the one from now. But this moment of doubt lasted barely the time it takes to blink, and her voice sounded deeper, free of hesitant inflections, perfectly adjusted to the meaning of her words, when she said with curious ease, while glancing at the tubes,“The truth is, Gabriel, I imagined it would be worse than this, much worse.” The man forced a smile, sat up in the chair, and placed his elbow on the armrest. “You’ve taken the words right out of my mouth, Ana. That’s just what I was going to say. It’s all a question of habit.” She talked about the house, about lawyers and possible buyers, and the man nodded in an attempt to occupy the masculine place he thought corresponded to him in the matter of the sale of real estate, but his ex-wife talked without looking him in the eye, as if somebody were moving behind him, glancing at the ties of tubes and their rhythmic, antenna-like quivering, taking care to describe all the latest progress, the names of agencies that could handle the paperwork. “Apart from that, I’m doing OK, quite OK, to tell the truth. I don’t want to pressure you, but my lawyer is taking care of all the necessary steps and thinks there won’t be any problem finding a buyer. We’ll do all of this as good friends, you know, without haste but without delay.” He nodded, taking pleasure in gazing openly at her lips, but she didn’t seem perturbed by his silence. “I don’t know how you can still live there, at the house. Something could happen to you, I don’t know, an accident or something, and you’re all alone . . . why don’t you move to the city? I’m sure Óscar could help you find an apartment, a studio, something more in keeping with your situation.” He reveled in staring at her lips and maintaining a silence that used to drive her crazy, an old trick that now had no effect. Ana uncrossed her legs and smoothed her skirt. A nurse offered her a glass of water, which she accepted. “How is Polanski?” she asked. He looked at her knees, which were very close together, and her white hands. “Hunting moles,” he replied. Ana looked at him over the rim of her white, plastic cup. “The nurses seem very kind,” she smiled. The man went through the farce of recovery. He assured her he was feeling better since the treatment began and was comfortable at home, he had more time than ever to read, though he read very little and didn’t write at all, he’d stopped reviewing art, at least for the time being, but he went on long walks, took care of the garden; no, he wasn’t going stir-crazy, not at all, quite the opposite, in fact he’d never felt so well, though he admitted Ana’s proposal was quite sensible, a studio in town would be more than sufficient for him, especially bearing in mind the constant taxi journeys required by his treatment. In town, he might be able to hire a cleaning lady to take care of the housework. Ana gestured sympathetically and consulted her wristwatch. “I don’t want to pressure you, just think about it. I only want what’s best,” she said. He remembers Ana hesitated for a moment on getting up from the stool, blew him a kiss off the palm of her hand, and then her quick steps and her tiny cowhide handbag and the sandalwood perfume disappeared down the tiled corridor.

  “In-put, out-put; in-put, out-put . . .” Ángel has spent the whole morning snoring lightly, curled up like a hedgehog. The man stretches his arm out and touches the needles through the surgical tape. He has the impression his body has been emptied on the inside, but at the same time, this impression of emptiness is not incompatible with a sudden heaviness that settles onto his joints, his feet, his eyelids, as if the slightly foul air in the room were an added weight. The hum of the artificial kidney moves away, and he senses his body descending, and there is a dot of light in the middle of his forehead, something subtle, a very fine, luminous pinpoint. He senses that this is where sleep resides, he tries to hold on to it, with superstitious certainty. He almost can’t feel the imitation leather of the armchair stuck to his back or the voices of the nurses reciting weights, temperatures, and clinical numbers, and these voices from the adjoining room seem to ease his descent through a camera obscura whose screen he must pass through to keep on going downward. He walks, and there are birds and tabby cats and ravines whose bottoms cannot be seen, because he notices a sound that lends the scene a strange harmony, and this encourages his passage through the entryway of his house, which is now decorated with extravagant surgical motifs—a metal coatrack of saline bags, tubes, and syringes on the porch. Polanski walks among beige-colored pajamas, and the man feels a vengeful impulse, but there’s no need to give the cat a kick, because at that precise moment, it disappears with the illusory effect of a magic trick. The man walks through this stage set toward a woman who seems to be waiting for him, naked on the blue sofa, her legs swathed in black tights, and while it looks like his ex-wife, her face does not possess his ex-wife’s features, and there comes over the face a strange familiarity that reminds him of Laura, there’s a green cloud that smells of freshly squeezed lemons, and she seems not to notice it, all she does is stand up and stroke his arm without smiling, without showing any signs of affection, with a seriousness that seems to search out the depths of his eyes. The man feels a strong desire to touch her, to encircle her naked breasts with his hands, and to rub her nipples, as small and hard as coffee beans, with the tips of his fingers, but the woman withdraws, because there’s something running around on the floor. He moves away on feeling himself being bitten by the cat, which clings to his arm and rips the skin with its back paws. An intermittent sound forces its way into his dream. The machine stops, and the dream melts away, and the man wakes up with the light of the fluorescent tubes pouring over his face. Sara tinkers with the machine, and the alarm signal ceases. “A bubble of air, that’s all it was,” she murmurs, and the man nods, and the machine goes back to working invariably, with the gentle rattling of a watermill. He sighs and closes his eyes, searching for the green mist that smelled of freshly squeezed lemons and for the woman with the black nipples who calmly and resolutely surrendered herself to him, but on this occasion it seems he dreams of going back to teaching at the university, back to attending book launches and roundtables, because it has all been a misunderstanding, and his kidneys are functioning like turbines, two perfect machines that give him back his strength, and he starts writing essays on contemporary art again and rescues himself for a short, dreamlike moment that may only last the time it takes to blink, but that he wishes would last for the fifty minutes of a class in which he explains, with brilliance, with lavish erudition, the aesthetic and conceptual principles of Mark Rothko’s meditative painting.

  Ángel yawns beside him.

  “It’s almost one o’clock already,” he says, gesturing with his jaw at the clock on the wall.

  The midday sun has opened a crack in the clouds, and although it is only lukewarm, the light infuses the streets with an icy clarity. They can hear car horns and the noise of bus engines. In strange harmony, the room rouses itself with yawns and coughs. The nurses start disconnecting the artificial kidneys.

  The man’s body is a dry sponge, a mass of earth without water. He clicks his tongue. The salty taste of saline fills his mouth. He feels his stomach, which is soaked with sweat, and tries to clean the breadcrumbs that have stuck to the skin of his chest. Sara fiddles with the tubes on the machine, and the blood quickly returns to his body. She pulls the needles out of his forearm. In her latex-gloved hands, the tubes and needles resemble an arachnid. Sara chucks it into a surgical waste container or together with the iodine-soaked bandages. She covers the wound with gauze. The man stands up, and this movement releases a stench of grime from his pajamas. He walks over to the scales as if he were walking on a glass roof. He weighs himself while holding the cords of his pajama pants in the air. “One hundred fifty point three five pounds,” says the ward manager.

  He drops into a chair. The floor looks whiter than usual, and
something opens in it, a luminous hole he could, perhaps, disappear through. The little lights shining like shooting stars indicate that his blood pressure has gone down a lot, something that seems to pass unnoticed by Ángel, Tere, the Jehovah’s witness, the palmist, and Ambrosio, who is already smoking a cigarette in the anteroom, since they have all passed sleepily through the little lights, a bandage on their arms, drawn by an irresistible feeling of self-absorption, enclosed in bubbles of air, heedful of any signs of decline, of their intimate crumblings, gentle internal deflagrations, oblivious to the lights accompanying them and the vertigo that seems now to occupy the whole room and, further off still, the other side of the hallway. He offers up his arm so they can take his blood pressure. He decides to wait for the lights to stop jumping off his forehead. He tests the ground as if checking the stability of a skylight. He needs to feel the firmness of the tiles, and that he won’t fall through the hole and disappear like in a conjuring trick. Sara goes with him to the reception area. “Eat something when you get home,” she suggests before closing the door.