His forearm throbbed, lacerated by needle marks. Sara had taken a while to find the fistula, and now the pain spread under the surgical tape like a jellyfish sting, but this sensation seemed to absolve him, and it extended up through the tube that kept him connected to the machine and through the vision of his blood warming the plastic, being sucked toward the membrane. He was still there, like the armchair, like the pigeon, he hadn’t gone, and this idea kept his spirits up, so he breakfasted with gusto. He couldn’t concentrate on reading the newspaper, so he amused himself by gazing at the light coming from the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. He imagined Tere, small, large-headed, in the slightly obscene light of the tubes, her tawny-owl face pressed against a green carpet in the darkness of a dining room, dressed in a pink nightdress, her legs positioned as if ready to jump. Her thighs were chubby and very white. She had lost her glasses in the fall, and out of the broken lenses poured water that soaked the linoleum. He saw her mother enter the dining room and kneel down next to her. She covered her thighs with the edge of her nightdress. She squeezed her face, pinched her cheeks. Stood up, moved away from the body, walked around the room a little, and raised her arms to the sky, like a silent film actress. Somewhere in the house, possibly in the hallway, a phone rang, but nobody picked up.
When he opened his eyes, he was overwhelmed by an impression of distance. The ceiling seemed very high, a mute, insolent color. He saw a nurse passing through the air, which appeared to be made of the same matter as fever, but she did so in a way he’d never seen before, moving effortlessly, like an astronaut, while that phone kept ringing in the hallway. Ángel slept with his eyelids half open and his face stuck to the pillow. A glob of saliva was gathering in the corner of his mouth. He felt the absurd certainty that something serious was about to happen; he didn’t want anything bad to happen to Ángel, he wanted to say something, to warn him, while the phone kept ringing somewhere in the room, and not even the nurse, walking past him again on her way to the corridor, seemed to notice. So he made an effort to lift himself up on his elbows. “Ángel, wake up!” he shouted, but he had the impression his words vanished like air from a spray bottle. He was aware that he really could go, like Tere, and that it was going to happen very quickly. The impression of light dizziness turned, little by little, into slow-motion vertigo and a slope it was extremely easy to slide down, weightlessly, while his words disintegrated into particles of vapor. The impression of alarm subsided, and the rings of the phone sounded ever more distant. He felt himself letting go. He could no longer hear the sound of the phone. How easy it is to die, he thought, and it was agreeable to feel himself being overwhelmed by this comfortable insensitivity. It was simple, too. There were no literary pleonasms, no philosophical nauseas, no rhetoric of anguish. It was as commonplace as turning off the mechanisms on a machine one by one, releasing the cables without nostalgia or Tenebrae services. It was pleasant, reassuring. And, above all, peaceful.
An intense cramp brought him back to consciousness, a knife penetrating his leg on the back of his knee and climbing up the inside of his thigh to the root of his buttock. The process repeated on the other leg with the precision of a scalpel. He howled in pain, rigid, between the footrest and headrest, and the light from the fluorescent tube fell suddenly onto his eyelids, but he couldn’t focus on anything except for the figure of Sara moving back and forth across his field of vision among the little lights jumping from the center of his forehead and then over the oxygen mask somebody clamped against his chin. He could see Sara moving between disks of light, violet flowers, islets of blood plasma. He felt elastic bands around his ears and the air tickling his nostrils. It was a pleasant lightness that entered his lungs and cleaned his field of vision. He noticed the figure of another nurse. Saw her inject some liquid into the saline tube. Still half asleep, Ángel watched what was going on. His cheek was furrowed by the wrinkle on his pillow. This detail calmed him down, as did the glob of saliva that had clotted in the corner of his mouth. Sara kept on watching him from the foot of his armchair, her hands on her hips. He couldn’t be sure whether it was a look of relief or reproach, but little by little his leg muscles relaxed, and he felt himself going down, or up, effortlessly changing place from some previous location, until he was again sitting comfortably in the imitation-leather armchair. He grabbed the chair and took a deep breath, though it sounded more like a snort. The ward manager took off the oxygen mask. She smiled, then pursed her lips. You see now? she seemed to be saying with that expression, and he nodded in exhaustion, gripping the armrests, and kept nodding with relief after all the nurses had moved off down the hallway.
He had to get used to being there again, to fall back in time with the glup-glup of the machines. The sound struck him as reassuring, domestic, like the hum of a fridge. He needed to click his tongue again, detect the salty taste of saline, move his toes, blink. Such trivial actions confirmed he had returned to a halfway point between pain and imperturbability. Nobody could live breathing pain, not for long, while imperturbability, on the other hand, invited you to settle into it, leave everything behind so as to be rocked in a place without time or space, always one step away from salvation and beatitude, but also from corruption and tedium.
He wondered where he was now. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t be able to escape from the room, nor could he accept the possibility of spending the rest of his life in this position, adapting himself to the rhythm of the dialyzer, anticipating the symptoms of a fainting fit without return. He stayed alert, but the rest of the morning passed without incident. The light of the fluorescent tubes heightened the impression of a prolonged sleep, as if the very air in the room had acquired a liquid, salty consistency. From the street could be heard the sound of car horns, which seemed strangely in time with the beeps and warning lights on the machines the nurses had already started disconnecting with all the hullabaloo of a gambling den. He’d have given anything to be the first to be disconnected from the tubes. In fact, anybody would have wanted to be first, but he’d come to dialysis twenty minutes late, so now he had no choice but to watch the other patients already peeling themselves off their armchairs and walking weightlessly and noiselessly toward the scales. He felt Ángel’s hand stroke his shoulder. “Take care,” he said, dragging his feet. He attempted to relax. Time seemed to dilate, heavy and somnolent, in the room. The machine continued pumping his blood through the pistons. If nobody stopped the process, the machine would carry on purifying his blood until it turned it into a very fine sheet. He considered the absurd and terrifying possibility of the nurses going off and leaving him there, all forgotten. How long would he be able to last? He would have to shout to make himself heard. But that could never happen, at least not while the pigeon in the window, dirty and complacent, continued delousing itself. There was something insulting in the insipid gluttony with which it searched for parasites among its feathers. And yet there was also something reassuring, like the signals emitted by a marker buoy at sea. The cleaning staff spread disinfectant over the floor, and the smell was not all that unpleasant, rather it struck him as reminiscent of chlorinated water. Finally, he felt himself being detached from the tubes. Sara performed the operation at great speed, as if wanting to make up for the needle pokes. She led him by the arm to the nurses’ station. They took his blood pressure. He should eat as soon as he got home, they said. A very young doctor entered the room. He looked like an intern, or a resident. The head of the nephrology department had already been informed about his mishap. He leaned toward him as if searching for a sign deep within his eyes. Asked him how he felt. He didn’t know what to say, except that he felt very weak, and when he said this, he had the impression his voice was a very thin wire. “The truth is I just want to go home. That’s all,” he added. The doctor wrote something on a piece of paper. Sara took his blood pressure again and measured his pulse. Then they let him go. He got dressed and went back through the corridors, the elevator, the revolving door of the clinic, but couldn
’t recognize the tune of the piped music, which seemed to emanate from the walls of the building, or the fresh air beating against the corner of the taxi stand. He got in the car without the driver even realizing it. He closed the door, and the driver jumped in his seat. He turned toward him, between the seats, looking very pale, as if he’d just seen an apparition. He recovered from his fright by tuning into the radio. The man was convinced he had become transparent.
During the day, his skin has stuck to his cheekbones, acquiring an eroded pallor. The door to the remote possibility of a visit having been closed, the mirror shows him the image of a man with ruffled hair and an urgent look. It’s an image that repels him, fleeting, glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. He reaches the shadow of the entryway and drops his parka, gloves, and keys. He has the impression he has gotten back from a long journey. He has closed the door, and everything has been left on the other side; the faces, words, and fears no longer belong to him, he has left them outside, like a scattering of objects tossed into a ditch. The weariness of his figure in the mirror is proof that he is safe, as if the fact of having returned home excused him from weighing up other uncertainties. Polanski mews at his feet, he feels the cat’s claws digging into his ankle. Limping, he walks toward the kitchen. He rids himself of the animal by moving it aside with the inside of his boot, as if pushing a ball, and the cat retreats toward the kitchen, narrowing its green, resentful eyes at the abruptly slender figure of the man now leaning against the doorjamb, as if drunk. He can still feel the points of light jumping off his forehead, like a school of silvery fry leaping onto the table and moving through the space of the kitchen, above the cat, though the animal seems not to realize and focuses its gaze, fixed and horizontal like the surface of a pond, on the man. He has the impression he is an evaporated body, transfixed by air, the body of a traveler who despite having reached the arrival gate at an airport, is unable to adjust to the new surroundings. He should buy a blood pressure monitor, he has to jot this down on a sticky note, write Buy blood pressure monitor, and stick the message to the door of the fridge. He forces himself to eat—a portion of mold-encrusted Bimbo bread and a few slices of cheese. He rescues a cup of cold coffee from the thermos and adds three spoonfuls of sugar. It smells of cold ashes. He wonders when he made this coffee. A sip is more than enough; it is, quite simply, awful. He curses himself for not having any Coke in the pantry, so he forces himself to drink the coffee. He accompanies the purgative with a handful of sweet peanuts bought from Jeremías. He tells himself he should revive the habit of bread and eat real bread, crusty, freshly made; there are towns in the valley where you can find loaves straight out of Don Quixote. He imagines freshly baked bread, crunchy, real. He no longer perceives the lights that were jumping off his forehead like sparks from a grindstone; they have disappeared into the air of the kitchen, and everything acquires more precise limits around him. He again feels the force of gravity, the weight of his shoulders, of his legs, the weight of his teeth, as well. Polanski mews loudly now. The reproach doesn’t pass unnoticed; he forgot to give the cat its ration of Whiskas before leaving the house. On opening the fridge, he is assailed by the rancid smell of leftover food. From behind a few soggy mandarins, he extracts the can of pet food. He scrapes it clean, depositing the lumps into the plastic bowl. He pats the cat’s head in a conciliatory fashion.
“Wet food again, Polanski,” he says. His voice retains a wiry consistency. He notices the cat has grown quite fat in the last few months, in fact, it has the hairy belly of a circus lion hanging off it; he, on the other hand, has grown a lot thinner. He forces himself to digest his meager lunch until he feels his blood flowing and his body acquiring a definitive consistency, similar to that of the wood of the table. Now his hand is his hand, his chest is his chest, his legs are his legs, his gums are his gums, too, Laura’s diary is Laura’s diary.
On the side table, the answering machine is blinking. The red light seems to demand his attention with a wink of urgency. He halfheartedly presses the listen button. Ana wants to talk to him, as soon as possible, she adds details concerning the arrangements for selling the house, some of which require his approval. The answering machine mechanism stops, but the red light keeps blinking, the recorded voice announcing another message, so he again presses the listen button. The machine reads out Óscar’s number. His voice does not conceal his concern or tiredness, though the tone is jovial. “Hello, Gabriel, I’m back. This trip was really worthwhile; you should see where I’ve been . . . to the promised land. Ana called me to say she’s been trying to talk to you for several days. It appears she’s on the verge of closing a deal to sell the house, but she can’t locate you. Where on earth have you been? I called the clinic, and a nurse told me you gave them a real fright. You just can’t be left alone. Are you all right? If you don’t return this call, I’ll come around to pick you up tomorrow at noon. We can have lunch together. My treat. Take care.”
He imagines Óscar tanned by the sun of Singapore or Timbuktu, with his camera still hanging around his neck, his plane tickets, his passport, his luggage still unpacked, sleepless and dirty in the middle of his room, collapsing into the armchair to have a snooze while images of deserted beaches, palm trees, and coral reefs peel away from his retinas like fish scales. He imagines him right now next to the phone, snoring loudly, crushed by the fatigue of his journey.
He climbs the stairs slowly, feeling calm at long last, as if the silence now filling the house had fallen lightly on his shoulders, oblivious to the presence of the anonymous observer who walks alongside him, accompanying him. He is grateful for the solitude of his bedroom. He turns his body to the wall, and the mattress groans beneath his hip. He folds his arm under the pillow. He is grateful for the proximity of objects, is calmed by the wall, the glass of water covered in bubbles, the pills, the alarm clock. Everything is there, within arm’s reach. He feels the warm shape of the cat nestling between his feet.
Perhaps everything consists in remaining very still in the light and, like a skin beneath the sheets, breathing in the air that comes with a slight fragrance of saltpeter, since the sea, though distant, can be felt here, reaching all the way from the other side of the mountains, the same direction from which storms choose to cover the valley. From that direction comes the air, movement, a desire for action, a panting for life that issues forth in bursts from the most isolated depths, but also from the closest vicinity. This certainty comes to him at times when everything around him takes on an elegance more real than reality itself, if such a thing is admissible or even imaginable once the moment has passed. When that happens, space takes on its exact, overwhelming dimension. Reality reveals itself with a smoothing of edges. And then something wonderful occurs. Radical surprise, the deepest Assumption. But that doesn’t happen right now.
If the succubus of his bad dreams were to say to him, “Make a wish,” he would ask to be able to mold himself to the geological quietude of stones. He manages to evoke the shape of a rock, like a tortoise shell, an eons-old stone, a smooth shape a passerby could lie down on in order to regain his strength. He would like to be a smooth, onion-colored rock, a rock that stays in the sun, on the other side of the undergrowth, hidden from the passerby who in order to discover it would have to leave the path and go in the direction of that sun glinting through the leaves and sparkling on the chalky surface with inclement whiteness—a rock. Quite simply. He can feel the morning light warming the lichen-covered surface, which is coated in frost from the cold of night, then the heat of that sun now turning in the vault of heaven, having warmed the earth in its ascent. He could feel around its rugged, prehistoric-animal surface, the first geological layer, until he reached its inner nooks and crannies where very primitive organisms move, articulated insects, tiny spiders the size of a pinhead, secluded wrinkles, cobwebs, crusts, acorn caps, fragments of pine nuts, brief putrefactions, microscopic excrescences of a hidden, silent life. Somewhere warm and dark, like a nest.
The Plimsoll Line Page 15
