Talking to Ourselves: A Novel

by Andres Neuman

  What is to be done? Action seems terribly obvious: to care for, to watch over, to keep warm, to feed. But what about my imagination, which has also become ill? Is it wrong of me to plan ahead, to rehearse again and again what is to come? Am I preparing myself for the loss of Mario? Or am I snatching away what little I have left of him?

  I mentioned this to Ezequiel once, a while ago, when he was only Dr. Escalante. We were in his office. Mario had gone to the toilet. I took the opportunity to ask him about the appropriateness of planning ahead. I remember Ezequiel saying to me: If you don’t live in the present today, tomorrow you won’t know how to live in the future. I found his Zen-like tone rather irritating. I asked him to be more specific. But Mario came back from the toilet. And Ezequiel smiled and didn’t say anything anymore.

  I keep coming across books that are appropriate for hospitals. I don’t mean books that distract me (it’s impossible to be distracted in a hospital), but rather that help me understand why the hell we are there. Where I am not convinced we should be. Where I brought him to leave him in other people’s hands. Now, when I read, I search for him. The books speak to me more than he and I speak to one another. I read about the sick and the dead and widows and orphans. The sum of all the stories could fit into this list.

  “Then he took out a syringe,” I underlined last night in a short story by Flannery O’Connor, “and prepared to find the vein, humming a hymn as he pressed the needle in.” When they inject Mario I find it impossible to watch; they usually talk to him about something else while they are doing it, and I have the impression that what they say reaches his vein too. “He lay with a rigid outraged stare while the privacy of his blood was invaded by this idiot,” Mario says that what he most hates about being in a hospital is that as he gets worse, everyone feels obliged to put on a hopeful face for him. “He gazed down into the crater of death,” the crater!, “and fell back dizzy on his pillow,” every so often, Mario cranes his neck, lifts his head, and lets it drop again.

  Every night, between paragraphs, I watch Mario sleep and I wonder what he is dreaming about. Does one dream differently in a hospital bed? Because, to be sure, one reads very differently.

  Cold, always cold, he feels cold in summer; even though they cover him, he shivers. It is as if his skin no longer warmed him.

  Heat can be an extreme sensation, but it doesn’t accuse anyone. If one person is suffering from it, the other doesn’t feel at fault. When Mario grows cold, on the other hand, I feel I am letting him down. That I should keep him warm but don’t know how. I ask the nurses if they couldn’t perhaps turn the heating on, and they look at me pityingly.

  I find it hard to leave. In the hospital I sustain my mission. My mission sustains me. Life outside is becoming more difficult. I don’t know whether there is a name for this abduction. Fleming’s Syndrome? When I don’t look after anyone, no one looks after me.

  Every afternoon, when I open the front door and hang my bag on the coat stand, I realize how big this house is going to be. I walk through its emptiness. It seems to have been furnished by strangers. Not only is my husband missing, and my son, whom I call obsessively. I, too, am missing here. Although the objects appear intact, time has spread itself over them. Like a museum of our own lives. I am the only visitor and also an intruder.

  There is no one here. No one in me. The person who cries, eats, has a nap, goes to the bathroom, is someone else. I hesitate to see my friends because they always ask the same questions. I don’t evade them either, because I am afraid they will stop asking. When I go to bed, as I close my eyes, I have fantasies about not waking up. As soon as I open them, the ceiling caves in on me.

  I need some aggression. I need somebody to remind me I exist in myself. I need Ezequiel like a line. Like a gram, a kilo, a whole body. I am not talking about love. Love can’t enter when there’s no one home. Or if it does, it finds nothing. I am talking about urgent assistance. Emergency resuscitation. I want to be humiliated to the point where I no longer care. I want to be a virgin, not to have felt anything.

  I switch on the radio. I don’t listen to the voices. I turn on the television. I don’t watch the pictures. I go from YouTube to my bank, from Facebook to books, from politics to porn. The wheel on the mouse is reminiscent of the clitoris. The fingertip controls forgetting. I browse the headlines, I contemplate the catastrophe of the world through a glass, I slide over its surface. I try to absorb the absence of pain because I am not the one suffering in other places, in other news. Does this offer me any relief? Yes. No. Yes.

  In the inertia of my searches to discover what it is I am searching for, almost without realizing I tap in: help.

  The first result is “psychological help.” Online therapy.

  The second result is the Wikipedia entry that defines and classifies the word help.

  The third result is help in configuring broadband settings.

  The fourth result directs me to the Twitter help centre: “Getting started,” “Troubles,” and “Report violations.” It sounds like the sequence of an attack.

  The fifth result helps with editing content. Assuming the user has any.

  The sixth result is from the search engine itself: help with searching.

  I am not surfing. But sinking.

  “In the past,” I underline in a novel by Kenzaburo Ōe, “a siren had always been a moving object: it appeared in the distance, sped by, moved away”, disappearing completely, while I gave, at most, a fleeting consideration to the imagined sufferer and then forgot about it, as you forget a sound you no longer hear. “But now, I wore a siren stuck to my body like an illness”, the illness rotating on itself, my back transporting it. “This siren was never going to recede”. Every time I hear an ambulance, I am afraid it is coming for us.

  In a while, I’ll return to the hospital. I only had time to go home, take a shower, and change my clothes. I didn’t have a nap this afternoon.

  He always accepts. But he never takes the initiative of calling me. His only initiatives with me (and he seems to reserve them, to savagely preserve them) take place in bed. I asked him whether this is part of the protocol, or what. Ezequiel simply replied: This is in your hands.

  Each time I go to bed with him, I feel disloyal not only because of Mario. Also because of Lito. I have the feeling I am neglecting him, abandoning him, when Ezequiel penetrates me. As though, when he does it, he reminds me I am a mother. Then I feel the urge to tell him to penetrate me harder, deeper, in order to give me back my son. I have monstrous orgasms. They hurt bad. He thinks this is good. He finds it healthy.

  The more I see Ezequiel, the guiltier I feel. And the guiltier I feel, the more I tell myself that I deserve some satisfaction too. That from time immemorial heads of families have enjoyed their mistresses, while their foolish wives were dutifully faithful. And the more I push myself to escape with Ezequiel. Although I realize that in the end I am not escaping anything.

  Every day, at some point, the room doors close in the hospital. All of them. At once. Then a metal gurney goes down the corridor. A gurney draped in sheets.

  I look out and see these gurneys go by with a mixture of horror and relief. I watch the nursing assistants pushing them, I hear the wheels turning. Every day they take someone. Every day they bring a replacement. This stream of bodies isolates our room, where we are still safe. This stream also tells me that, at some point, someone will stick their head out of another ward and see me walking behind a gurney. And they will have the same pointless reprieve I have now.

  Knowing what will happen, how and where, every gesture contains an element of deception. I bring him newspapers, films, sweets. We call Lito, we chat with Mario’s brothers, we speak of happy memories. I smile at him, I caress him, I make jokes. I feel as if I were part of a conspiracy. As if we all were forcing a dying man to pretend he isn’t dying.

  I have the impression that families, and doctors, too, perhaps, soothe the sick in order to protect themselves from their agony. As a buffe
r against the excessive, unbearable disorder which the ugliness of another’s death creates in the midst of one’s own life.

  “Writing about illness,” I underlined last night in an essay by Roberto Bolaño, “especially if one is seriously ill oneself, can be an ordeal. But it is also a liberating act,” I hope this applies to us carers too, “exercising the tyranny of illness,” this is something we never talk about, and it is true: the oppressed need to oppress, the threatened want to threaten, the sick yearn to disrupt the health of others, “it is a diabolical temptation,” we carers also have temptations, especially of the diabolical variety.

  “What did Mallarmé mean when he said the flesh was sad and that he had read all the books? That he was sated with reading and sated with fucking? That, beyond a certain moment, every book and every act of carnal knowledge is a repetition?” I very much doubt it, that moment could only be marriage, “I believe Mallarmé is speaking of illness, of the battle it unleashes against health, two totalitarian states or powers,” illness not only takes control of everything, it also rereads everything, makes things speak to us of it. “The image that Mallarmé constructs speaks of illness as a resignation to living. And to turn around this defeat he unsuccessfully opposes reading and sex.” What else could we oppose?

  The two of us lie on our backs in his bed, shoulder to shoulder, covered in sweat, catching our breath, floating in that fleeting moment of oblivion. I tried to go from my body to the idea. I think better after I have felt my entire body.

  I asked him whether, beyond genetics, he believed psychological factors were at work in illnesses such as Mario’s. According to some theories, Ezequiel replied, we become ill in order to find out whether we are loved.

  I dressed and slammed the door.

  I called my mother in tears. She told me I was right to get it off my chest. Immediately, as if through telepathy, my sister called me. She asked me how Mario was and told me about some flights she had just found.

  When I contemplate him, skinny and white as any sheet, I sometimes think: This isn’t Mario. It can’t be him. My Mario was different, not like this at all.

  Yet at other times I wonder: What if this is the real Mario? And rather than having lost his essence, what remains is the essential part of him? Like a distillation? What if we are misinterpreting our loved ones’ bodies?

  I have just said goodbye to Ezequiel from the door of our house, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, as if we had no neighbours, after talking to him, arguing with him, having two sessions in bed with him, in our marriage bed.

  It all started with a coffee. I sent him a text message and he replied instantly. He was thinking about me a lot today. And I needed a bit of company, he said. And he wasn’t far from my place. And we could at least have a coffee. And, and.

  I think he came here with this in mind. The idea of going this far excited him. Well: there it is. There is nothing more for us to defile.

  For God’s sake. He came here with this in mind?

  I’m going to take a couple of pills. It’s not as if there is much in me that can be fixed.

  “In bed, at night,” I underlined in a Justo Navarro novel, “I was crushed by the horror of things being exactly the same as when I was alive although I wasn’t,” I know Mario is scared to death of dying in his sleep, which is why he doesn’t sleep, “and so I counted my teeth with the tip of my tongue to rid myself of the fear of being dead, and I fell asleep counting my teeth. And I woke up: the fear was greater right before opening my eyes,” every night I try to make him fall asleep and I am alarmed every time he does, I do my best to make him rest and then pray silently this won’t be his final rest. Some waiting is like a slow death. It is stifling waiting for a death in order to start my own life again, knowing full well that, when it happens, I will be incapable of doing so.

  Last night I dreamt Ezequiel was examining my husband, he could hear something in his skin, he performed an emergency operation and extracted tiny foetuses from him.

  Mario

  … like we were having a coffee together the day after tomorrow, right?, I rest for a while after lunch, and as soon as I open my eyes the words come to me, sometimes I even dream what I’m going to say to you, and then, when I say it, I feel like I’m repeating myself, actually we wouldn’t be able to have a decent cup of coffee here, okay, so they give you some black, or dark brown stuff, a sort of baby poo, thank God your mum gets it from the machine downstairs, she always rushes back up, poor thing, so it doesn’t go cold, how about a green tea?, the nurses sometimes ask me, you don’t want a green tea?, listen, I tell them, do you think this calls for tea?

  What was the name of that café in Comala de la Vega?, La …?, what was it called again?, La Dama?, no, well, you know the one I mean, I threw up there more than anywhere else on the trip, I’m afraid I’m always going on about bodily functions, right?, hospital turns you into a body, the thing is we stopped too often that day, and it was so late there was no choice but to end up there, in Región, I was starting to see double, my legs felt shaky, I hated the idea of taking you to that dump, I was worried about you and I was worried about Pedro, to be on the safe side I tipped the security guard, a ridiculous amount, I gave him, enough for him to change the upholstery for us, and as we were going in I, ah, one other thing, the Internet at the motel did work, there was a gizmo behind reception, but, how can I put it, I was worried it would suddenly open up a load of porn pages, stupid, huh?, I sound like my mother, as if you weren’t able to watch anything you like at home, do you watch porn already, son?, and will you like the same things as me?, the weird thing is that right there, in the bar in that dump, I know you and I had a memorable moment, it was, I was paying, right?, you still hadn’t finished your dessert, and I could see, Lito, that you didn’t want to, or to go to bed, or anything, and while I was waiting for the change I started looking round at the guys in the bar, some of them were really young, and suddenly it struck me I would never see you that way, at that age, leaning on a bar, and then I had, I don’t know, a sort of attack from the future and I thought: Well, if I can’t wait, then why not now, and I went over and asked if you wanted a drink, I swear I would have let you have anything, whisky, tequila, vodka, anything, and you ordered a Fanta, and it was fantastic, maybe this was why we made the trip, to have a Fanta in a motel with prostitutes, and then everything was worth it, until that disturbed man came over, that phony magician.

  Look, I had to, I have to tell you what that man was after, I know it annoyed you us walking off like that, which is why I’m telling you this, even if it makes me want to throw up again, anyway, maybe you remember, who did he speak to first?, or rather, who did he touch first?, it was you, Lito, he fondled your arm, just a little, not much, and afterward he spoke to me, playing the joker, typical, I don’t think he realized I was your father to start with, I dread to imagine what he thought then, that’s why I said out loud: come along, son, but it was no good, the son of a bitch didn’t stop, he went on talking to you, like he didn’t believe me, or worse, like I, look, I swear, I was about to smash the guy’s face in right there, to stamp on his ribs and crack his head open, I could see it, I tell you, I had it all worked out, exactly where I’d ram my fist, how to grab the chair and which part of his body I’d slam the chair legs into, everything, everything, I was a split second away, and then I realized I couldn’t do that in front of you, I’m always telling you not to fight, poor kid, but to outsmart your schoolmates if one of them picks on you, so how the hell was I going to explain this?, well, there it is, now I’ve told you.

  Ah, and another thing, next time someone picks on you at school, smash his face in for me, understood?, because on top of all that, the next morning the guy, it’s unbelievable, I don’t know if you noticed, when we went down to—.

  They come in, they go out, they adjust this, they adjust that, I’ve no idea what they’re giving me, I don’t even ask anymore, it’s humiliating, all that’s left is for them to put me in
nappies, I didn’t want this, why doesn’t your mum come and take me out of here?, why don’t the visitors look me in the eye?, the worst of it is that I’ve learnt nothing from all this, what I feel is bitterness, before, how can I put it, I thought suffering was of some use, like a set of scales, if you follow me, a bit of suffering in exchange for a conclusion, weakness in exchange for some knowledge, crap, it’s all crap, and besides, how vain can you be?, as if pain could be organized, no, pain is pure, it has no purpose, if there’s one thing I can tell you for sure, son, it’s this, don’t teach yourself how to suffer, don’t ever learn, look, from the moment they diagnose you, the world immediately splits into two, the camp of the living and the camp of those who are soon going to die, everyone starts treating you like you’re no longer a member of their club, you belong to the other club now, as soon as I realized this I didn’t want to say anything to anyone, I didn’t want pity, I just wanted some time, at work, for example, if you talk about it at work, your colleagues stop telling you their problems, they stop asking you to do things even though you are still able to, they stop telling you about their plans for next year, in short, they erase you from the club’s topics, it’s not just the illness, the others take your future away from you, too, even your family, you know?, they don’t consult you about anything, you’re no longer a relative, you’re just a shared problem, and in a hospital, well, what can I say?, it’s even more obvious in here, the living watch the dying, son, that’s basically what happens in this fucking place, I want to leave here, I want to piss myself in my own home, the living watch the dying, yes, or now that I think of it, there’s a third club in here, a club whose members believe they can be saved, there’s a narrow bridge between the other two, right?, and that bridge is filled with people in gowns, arms outstretched, arses bare.