Talking to Ourselves: A Novel

by Andres Neuman

  First it was the funeral parlour. Or, to be precise, the funeral parlours. Because there are many. A great many. All offering different deals. The hospital itself furnishes you with the contact numbers. As if this were part of the treatment. With the same efficiency with which they give enemas.

  One parlour charges less for the coffin, but extra for the transport to the cemetery. Another gives you free transport to the cemetery, but charges more to hire the venue for the wake. Another gives you a discount on the venue, but doesn’t carry a cheaper range of coffins. Yet another seems more costly, but their price includes taxes. Then you realize the other prices that seemed more reasonable didn’t include tax. And you are back at square one. And the queues of widows and orphans come and go. If dying is just another procedure, I prefer the rituals of any exotic tribe.

  As you dial number after number, enquire, write down, have misgivings, and hang up, you never cease to feel, not even for a second, like the stingiest creature on earth. Incapable of offering the person you love, the person you didn’t save, a decent repose. You suspect you are committing an atrocity, bargaining at a moment like this. That it would be nobler to bow to this extortion in silence and allow yourself to grieve. But, at the same time, as though you were being stabbed in the back, you resent the crass opportunism of this business, the bloodthirsty profiting from your loss. So you try again to find a figure that seems reasonable (how much is a reasonable death? what is a costly corpse?), a price, let’s say, that doesn’t oblige your corpse to claim riches he didn’t have. And you are back to square one with the phone calls, while the lines of widows and orphans keep coming and going.

  In the end, in the middle of a call to one of the parlours, I felt bad about all my bartering, and signed up to the first deal they offered, I gave them my personal details, my credit card number, thanked them, hung up, and instantly regretted having accepted a price Mario never would have accepted.

  Dictating the death notice was no easier. Dictating it: announcing the death of a loved one in the third person. Imagining someone is reading it as you are drafting it. Pretending you don’t know your husband has died, and that you are finding out from this announcement. He, in the third person, your beloved, in the second person, who will never exist in the first person again. Grammar doesn’t believe in reincarnation. Literature does.

  I must dictate the death notice straight away, they told me, or I’d have to wait another day, they explained. If I didn’t have the text prepared, they lamented, there was no choice but to do it on the spot. The newspaper was closing, they informed me. There was enough time to insert a normal death notice, a religious one, they corrected themselves, one that prays for the soul of the, and so on, they recited. But there isn’t time, madam, they said hurriedly, to start reinventing the format.

  As I improvised the text of the first death notice, I was tempted to give my name in place of Mario’s.

  I had to dictate the final death notice to a trainee with a twang, because everyone in the office had gone home. And it was a question, he said, of middits. If we didn’t send it off straight away, the notice wouldn’t get enderred. When the trainee said get enderred, I heard interred. The notice wouldn’t get interred. Afterward, he offered to read it back to me, to bake sure the text was coddect. I listened to it delivered in his voice, in the twangy voice of someone who was probably the nicest of all those who had answered me that night, I listened to my death notice full of apparent misspellings and impossible blunders. Then I went into paroxysms of laughter, a succession of muscular contractions over which I had no control, as though I had become tangled up in an electric cable, and the trainee with the twang asked me if I was all right, and I said yes and became electrocuted with laughter, and one of my brothers-in-law handed me a glass of water and a sedative.

  I went outside to get some fresh air. I noticed no difference between outside and inside. I called my parents’ house. First I spoke to Lito. I told him we would see each other very soon. That in a few days’ time, Mum was going to drive over and pick him up, and that on the way home we were going to stop and eat a double hamburger. I didn’t do a very good job of pretending. Then I asked him to let me speak to his grandma. When my mum took the receiver, I cried for a while. We didn’t speak. Even when she is silent, my mum knows what to say. I won’t make old bones knowing as much as she. Or I won’t make old bones. Afterward, I called my sister. Because of the time difference, I woke her up. She gave me her condolences in a voice thick with sleep, and talked to me about flights, stopovers, dates. Then I called a few women friends. They found the right words to comfort me. Two of them took taxis over. Suddenly it occurred to me that they were able to comfort me so effectively because they’d been practising what they would say to me for months. That made me feel worse. Then I thought about Ezequiel. I sent him a text message and turned off my phone.

  My brothers-in-law were waiting for me at the entrance to the crematorium. They were arguing when I got there. The undertakers had just arrived, but there was a problem: they had brought us a casket with a Catholic cross. An enormous crucifix stretching the whole length of the lid. I assured them I had ordered a plain one. In fact I wasn’t so sure. I had the feeling I was dreaming every conversation. Juanjo thought the casket with the crucifix was perfect, just what their parents would have wanted. His younger brother disagreed. The middle brother thought I should be the one to decide. What should we do, then, Madam? the employee from the funeral parlour asked. I replied without thinking, as though someone were dictating to me: Let God’s will be done. Juanjo took it as sarcasm and walked off. I heard him murmur: And on top of everything else, she blasphemes.

  I prefer not to think about the wake. Silence. Family. Crematorium.

  I look up wake in the dictionary. The third entry is absurd: “Spend the night watching over the deceased.” As if, instead of watching over our guests, we were attending to the dead.

  Absurd and precise.

  I hadn’t read a single line since that day. What for. I always thought books, all books, spoke of my life. What would be the point of reading about something I no longer care about.

  But yesterday, in a drawer in his bedside table, I found a novel Mario had left half-finished. And I felt duty bound to read it from there to the end. It was a novel by Hemingway, an author I loathe. I started exactly where he had left off. It was strange working out the other half.

  Today I went back on the pills.

  I cried stones.

  Since Lito is back, it may seem like a contradiction, but Mario’s absence is more noticeable. The time I spent here alone was a kind of simulation. Its unusualness postponed the return to routine. What pains me most are my conversations with my son, when we talk about death in the kitchen.

  He asks me how such a big truck could get crushed. I tell him sometimes big things break more.

  He asks me why Pedro looks the same as before, if he had such a big accident. I tell him his uncle did a really good job fixing him up in the workshop.

  He asks me if he can go on another trip in Pedro. I tell him maybe when he is older.

  He asks if he can go and play ball in the park. I tell him he can. But my son doesn’t leave the kitchen. He remains there, seated, staring at me.

  I have thrown away his clothes. Except for his shirts, I’m not sure why. I stuffed all his belongings in bin bags, almost without looking at them, and I put them out with the rubbish. I went upstairs. I made dinner. After putting Lito to bed, I ran down into the street. The rubbish bins were already empty.

  A colleague had recommended The Foolish Children by Ana María Matute. I was slightly put off by the title. Now I understand why she kept insisting I read it. Death and childhood are rarely dealt with at the same time. We adults, not to mention mothers, prefer childhood to be innocent, pleasant, tender. In brief, the opposite of real life. I wonder whether, by shielding them from pain, we aren’t compounding their future suffering.

  “He was a peculiar child,” I under
line as I reflect on what Lito’s teachers tell me, “who never lost his belt, or ruined his shoes, or had scabs on his knees, or got his fingers dirty,” they tell me he doesn’t go to the playground during break time, he doesn’t seem interested in playing with the others, and is always drawing in a notebook or staring out of the window, “he was another child, with no dreams of horses and no fear of the dark,” and that sometimes he goes quiet, sits very still, and frowns, as though he were about to come to some conclusion he never reaches.

  But I don’t care about my qualms, I want to look after him anyway, protect him from everything, embrace him in the playground, talk to him as if he were a baby, lie to him, spoil him, erase for him every trace of death, tell him: Not you, son, never.

  Last night I dreamt I came home (except the house was bigger and it had a garden with orange trees), I opened the door and Mario greeted me wearing a costume. There was a party, and all the guests were dressed as skeletons. Someone handed me a costume. I put it on. Then Mario told me his death had been a joke, and the two of us burst into fits of laughter, violent, convulsive laughter, and with our guffaws the skeletons slowly began to fall apart.

  Each morning, when I open my eyes, I see the hospital. Everything is there, like a sticky sheet. The monitor. The drips. The oxygen mask. The shadows under Mario’s eyes. His defeated smile. Good morning, sentinel, he would say to me.

  Who was in greater need of that treatment: him or me? Was I experimenting with my hope through another person’s body? How could I have let them take him? What were we doing in the hospital: attending to him or detaining him? Were the doctors taking care of him or their procedures, their conscience? Did I keep him there in order to put off my loneliness?

  Again and again I go back to the image of his diminished body, his sagging muscles, his half-open mouth. I reproach myself for not remembering him at his best. I keep telling myself it is unfair to insist on this final portrait of him. But the wonderful, strong Mario doesn’t need my help. And it is as though the other, weak Mario were still asking me to care for him in retrospect. Sometimes I think that, by continually going back to him, this suffering Mario will finally be able to rest, will feel accepted.

  When a book tells me something I was trying to say, I feel the right to appropriate its words, as if they had once belonged to me and I were taking them back.

  “She has already started to wear sunglasses indoors, like a celebrity widow,” I was startled to read in a short story by Lorrie Moore, sometimes I do the same, using my photophobia as an excuse, so that Lito won’t see my eyes. “From where will her own strength come? From some philosophy? From some frigid little philosophy?” Actually, I don’t get my strength from reading, but I do understand my weakness.

  “She is neither stalwart nor realistic,” if I were stalwart I would surrender to loss forever, that would serve me right; as for realism, illness ends up turning it into daily ravings, so lucidity and hallucination become all mixed up, “and has trouble with basic concepts, such as the one that says events move in one direction only and do not jump up, turn around, and take themselves back,” events in life never move forward, they rewind ceaselessly, they repeat themselves, wiping out previous versions, the way we used to do with cassette tapes, the way Mario did with these recordings I am incapable of listening to without self-medicating, and which I have no idea when I should give to Lito.

  “The Husband begins too many of his sentences with ‘What if,’” I begin each day rewinding my actions, wondering what would have happened if I had taken better care of him, what if I had realized sooner that he wasn’t well, what if I had convinced him to see the doctor sooner, what if I had accepted his initial reaction, what if I had agreed to his idea of rejecting treatment from the start, what if I had acknowledged that it wasn’t working, what if I had allowed him to say goodbye to us at home, what if we had told our son the truth, what if, what if. No one is saved from the “What if.” No “What if” saves anyone.

  He called.

  Today. He called.

  Him.

  He said (yesterday, Ezequiel) he hadn’t wanted to disturb me before. (Disturb me.) That, out of respect, he had chosen to keep silent. (Respect. His for me.) Are we going to see each other? he asked. (See each other. Him and me.) I don’t know, I replied. You don’t know or you don’t want to? he asked. I don’t know if I want to, I replied. And I hung up.

  What offended me exactly? His untimely reappearance? But everything about Ezequiel is untimely. This was precisely what excited me about him.

  Or did it offend me that he took so long? That he didn’t insist from day one? Did his respect bother me? Or his discretion? Or the possibility that he had forgotten me? That he was capable of repressing the urge to call me, to see me, to defile me?

  Yet if he had begun calling me on day one, what would I have done? I would have hung up on him. And so?

  And so, here I am. This is me.

  What are you writing, darling? asks my mother, who is staying with us for a few days. Nothing, I reply, nothing. It’s good for you to express yourself, she says smiling. And she goes out, leaving me a cup of tea. I wonder whether my mother expresses herself.

  Did I reach a point where I wanted Mario to die? I woke up with this question. I woke Lito up with this question in mind. My son opened his eyes and I had the feeling he could read it. I hugged him, kissed him, buried myself in him, swallowed my tears, I told him I had a cold.

  As Lito walked in to school, I watched him turn his head toward the car.

  What is the difference between taking pity on a sick man and deserting him?

  I threw up between classes.

  Ezequiel has not called.

  “It is a commonly held idea,” I protest through a novel by Javier Marías, “that what has happened should be less painful to us than what is happening, or that things are easier to bear when they are over with,” and it is the opposite: while things are happening we have to deal with them, and the anaesthetic comes precisely from dealing with them. “This is equivalent to thinking that someone dead is less serious than someone dying,” someone dying at least asks you for help, justifies your pain. “There are those who say to me: keep the good memories and forget the end,” what sort of advice is that?, don’t we remember books, movies, love affairs partly because of their endings, largely because of their endings?, what degree of forgetfulness does it require to remember a beginning without its end? “They are well-meaning people,” they are idiots, “who don’t realize that every memory has been tainted,” grief spreads through memory like an environmental disaster.

  “The effects far outlast the patience of those who appear willing to listen,” they call me, ask how I am, and, when I tell them the truth, they are disappointed or try to contradict me, as though it were wrong of me to go on being upset when I have such loyal friends, such steadfast relatives. “Every misfortune has a social sell-by date, nobody is made for contemplating suffering,” or happiness for that matter: the only thing we tolerate in others is monotony, the tendency not to exist, “this spectacle is bearable for a time, while there is still some turmoil, and a certain possibility of prominence for those watching who feel indispensable, playing the role of saviour,” but why don’t you call us when you need help? they complain, what are friends for? what is family for? They are confusing SOS with OSS, what I call Obligatory Sentimental Service.

  When someone you slept with dies, you begin to doubt their body and yours. The once touched body withdraws from the hypothesis of a re-encounter, it becomes unverifiable, may not have existed. Your own body loses substance. Your muscles fill with vapour, they don’t know what it was they were clutching. When someone with whom you have slept dies, you never sleep in the same way again. Your body doesn’t let itself go when it is in bed, your arms and legs open as though clinging to the rim of a well, trying not to fall in. It insists on waking up earlier, on making sure at least it possesses itself. When someone with whom you have slept dies, the caresses y
ou gave their skin change direction, they go from relived presence to posthumous experience. There is a hint of salvation and a hint of violation about imagining that skin now. A posteriori necrophilia. The beauty that was once with us remains stuck to us. As does its fear. Its hurt.

  I promise not to write until he calls.

  This is what you get for being proud.

  For being proud and a whore.

  But, but.

  He called. Again.

  And not only that. He also begged me.

  He told me he dreamt of seeing me again. Incessantly, he said. In a serene voice. I didn’t think this was enough. I refused. He asked what he had done wrong. I laughed. I asked him if his question was serious. He kept saying yes, in an increasingly anxious voice. I told him not to worry so much, because he had a legion of widows to console. He asked me if I was trying to humiliate him. I asked him if he was trying to humiliate himself.

  Then he wept. Ezequiel wept.

  I hadn’t felt such distinct pleasure for a long time.

  Confronted with death, our emotions tense up, stretch, almost snap. They veer from paralysing pain to hyperactive euphoria. The other’s death throes are more or less fleeting. Not these conflicting emotions. As though the survivors’ inner arc had collapsed, leaving them capable of either extreme. Of the greatest empathy and the greatest cruelty. Animal loyalties and wartime treason.