The Shape of the Ruins

by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

  “Then you’ll do nothing,” said her father. It seemed like a question, but it wasn’t.

  “Sometimes,” said Benavides, “not doing anything is the correct thing to do.”

  “Thank you,” said Andrea.

  “Tomorrow you can leave,” said Benavides.

  “Yes,” said Andrea. “Oh, yes, tomorrow I’m leaving. I’m leaving this place, going home, to my own bed.”

  “To your own bed,” said her father.

  “Now I need you, Mr. Giraldo,” said Benavides. “To sign a few things for me.” And to Andrea: “We won’t be long.”

  They left. Andrea and I remained alone in the room. She was looking at the ceiling and I was looking at her and painfully aware that all the empathy in the world wouldn’t be enough for me to guess what was going through her head. She had just made the decision to die: Who does one think of when that happens? Where was her partner, if she was in a relationship? Where were her children? Maybe she was regretting errors she hadn’t rectified, or maybe she was remembering some long-ago moment of happiness. Or maybe she would be frightened: frightened of what was to come. I saw her blink once, twice, squeezing her eyes the way we do to get a tear out, and then she looked at me. “And what’s your opinion, Doctor?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You know my case. What do you think? Am I mistaken?”

  “That’s something only you can know,” I told her. Then I thought that was cowardice, even more glaring in the face of the courage Andrea had shown: not just in making the decision, but in asking another doctor. Someone less gutsy would prefer not to seek out other opinions, in case they made her doubt something she’d decided at the cost of so much effort. “No,” I said. “I don’t think you’re mistaken.”

  She kept looking at me.

  “I’m scared,” she said. “The problem is that I’m also tired. And I’m more tired than scared.”

  “Look, Andrea,” I said. “I cannot know what you’re feeling. Most doctors act like they do know, but it’s not true. They don’t know, they just read your medical history and try to guess. I can tell you one thing: Dr. Benavides is one of those who does know. And if he offers you his companionship and his support, you shouldn’t be afraid: you’re in the best hands in the world.”

  I truly believed this, of course, and I was sure Andrea would share that banal diagnosis. But had I foreseen her surprising question, I would have liked to tell her something else: that I admired her, that I envied her courage and her tenacity and her incredible maturity, that I was infinitely grateful (though I didn’t know why) for the privilege of having been present at this moment. No, maturity wasn’t the word I was looking for, maturity wasn’t what I was seeing in the body and eyes of this woman. It was sovereignty, yes, that’s what it was: sovereignty was what her body and her eyes were radiating. Death would take Andrea and her big eyes in a matter of months, but even at the moment of death, I thought, she would still be in perfect command of her body. And death would have no right to pride itself on anything. I thought: Death, be not proud. I translated the line into Spanish in my head and was about to say it aloud to Andrea, but then I thought Andrea might take me for a lunatic or insensitive, because who starts quoting old English poems at a moment like this (poetry is not a consolation or lifesaver for everyone, although it’s taken me years to discover that). But I couldn’t keep my mind from putting itself to the task of translating another of those lines: when death is called Slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men; when death is accused of dwelling with poison, war, and sickness. What this old poem was saying is that death depended on these instances, illness, war, poison, desperate men, kings, chance, and fate. Why, then, should death be proud, the poem said, and I thought, Yes, why? Andrea, however, had all the reasons in the world to be proud of herself, of her courage and her mettle, and also of the courage and mettle that had been very visible on her father’s exhausted face. But I couldn’t tell her. No, I couldn’t tell Andrea that, I couldn’t tell her that I barely knew her but was already proud of her, and death had nothing to pride itself on. Andrea picked up the electrical control of the bed and raised the back until she was almost sitting up, she leaned on her arms, made a straining effort, and her body, changing position, was no longer that of a dying woman.

  I saw her cover her face with her hands, not to cry, but to take a deep breath; her shoulders raised. When she uncovered her face, her expression had transformed: it was as if the decision had lifted a weight, I thought, as if the accepted desire to abandon the struggle and die in peace had brought here, to this room on the fourth floor of the Santa Fe clinic, to the hospital bed she occupied in the middle of the room, a new serenity. It was a moment at once terrifying and beautiful, but I didn’t know how to say where the beauty was. Of course, I could be misinterpreting the situation. That would not have been rare or unusual, either, for we spend most of our time doing that: misinterpreting others, reading them in the wrong key, trying to take a leap toward them and then falling into the abyss. There is no real way to know what goes on inside, though the illusion might be never so attractive: all the time vast spaces open between us and others, and the mirage of comprehension or empathy is just that, a mirage. We are all enclosed in our own incommunicable experience, and death is the least communicable experience of all, and after death, the most incommunicable experience is the desire to die. That’s what was happening there: between Andrea and me an immense abyss was yawning, for there was no common ground between her, who had decided to die and in some way no longer belonged to the world of the living, and me, who was firmly installed in that world, who could make plans for myself and for my family. I remembered another line: And soonest our best men with thee do go. It wasn’t true, of course (poetry can also lie to us, it is also capable of the occasional demagoguery), but maybe it was in this case.

  “What book did you bring?” Andrea asked.

  She’d noticed my gift from Benavides. I’d almost forgotten it: I had set it down on the edge of the sink, under the disinfectant dispenser, and seeing it again surprised me as an object found on the sidewalk at night might have done.

  “Oh, this,” I said. “Dr. Benavides just gave it to me. There’s an article of his in it.”

  “An article by the doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t say,” she puffed. “So my doctor is also a writer.” She leaned back a little more, or made herself comfortable. “And what is it on?”

  There was no sense in pretending. “On death,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” she said. For the third time I saw her smile. “I don’t like silly coincidences.” And then: “Unless it’s not a coincidence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, Doctor, don’t pay any attention to me,” said Andrea. “And what’s the article called?”

  “Dr. Benavides’s article?”

  “Of course. What do I care about the rest?”

  I turned to the table of contents and scanned it for Dr. Benavides’s article. I found it after “Explorations of Death, from Tolstoy to Juan Rulfo” and before “The Virtue of Suffering: Death as an Opportunity for Christian Charity.” The title was a single word, “Orthothanasia,” and its rounded shapes floated above its author’s name like a badly made cornice. I pronounced it and felt something in my mouth. “Let’s see, let me see,” said Andrea. I handed her the book and saw her squint to see better; in a fraction of a second I decided she was farsighted and used reading glasses, but that she’d given them up or forgotten them somewhere and not bothered to go back for them because in any case she wasn’t such a regular reader, or because her recent days had been filled with an intense depression and nobody reads a newspaper in the midst of a depression, or simply because what for anymore. I thought: Her life is a what for anymore. “Orthothanasia,” Andrea was saying and repeating, as if measuring the word before deciding whether to buy it. “Or
thothanasia.”

  “A correct death,” I said.

  “And what did you think of it?”

  “I haven’t read it.”

  “You haven’t? But it’s been underlined,” she said. “You didn’t underline it?”

  “I haven’t opened the book yet,” I said. “Dr. Benavides just gave it to me.”

  “Who would have underlined it? Do people underline things they’ve written themselves?”

  “I don’t write,” I said. “I wouldn’t know.”

  But for an instant I considered adding: It runs in the family. Benavides’s father also underlined things he read: a newspaper article on the assassination of Kennedy, for example. But I kept quiet.

  “It says here the doctor is a physician and surgeon, specializing in bioethics, full professor, and I don’t know what else. He has more titles than this contents page, our Dr. Benavides.”

  “Like I said: you’re in the best hands.”

  “Oh, don’t talk nonsense, Doctor,” she scolded me. “I know I am, but it’s not because of his diplomas.” I immediately saw on her face an expression of embarrassment, as if she regretted being impolite, when all she’d done was denounce my frivolous or stupid comment. “Listen, listen to this,” she said then. She half closed her eyes, held the book close to her face, and read: “Physicians’ feelings of guilt at the death of their patients emerge from the profound negation that contemporary medical science accords natural death. That’s underlined. We can recall Alexander the Great, who is said to have exclaimed, ‘I am dying from the treatment of too many physicians.’ That’s also underlined. Here’s a long section. Almost the whole paragraph is underlined.” Andrea began to read: “I received a phone call from an old friend,” she said, but then she stopped. She carried on reading in silence; in the silence of the room I saw her eyes moving, but her mouth did not speak the words. “Ah,” she said then.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  She closed the book and handed it back to me. “Nothing,” she said. “What’s taking them so long?”

  “You’re not going to keep reading to me?”

  “They’re taking too long,” said Andrea, but I had the impression that she was no longer talking to me. “Paperwork, always red tape. Even to die in this country you have to do paperwork.”

  The miraculous buoyancy had vanished from her face, from her gestures. “Even to die,” she repeated, and then started to cry. Something in Benavides’s article had produced this metamorphosis; I realized, with some panic, that I didn’t know what to do. “Andrea,” I said, because in difficult situations we tend to use people’s names as charms, imputing magical properties to them. But she didn’t hear me: she was crying with her eyes open, at first soundlessly, then allowing herself a little girl’s delicate sobs. I sat down on the edge of the bed, beside her, without knowing if this was something doctors did or if I was violating some rule, written or unwritten, of behavior or even ethics. Andrea hugged me and I let her hug me and soon was hugging her as well. I felt under my palm the hardness of her vertebrae and then I heard her speak. “I don’t have any stories to tell,” she said. “What do you mean, Andrea?” I asked. But she didn’t want to explain anything. She pulled back. Then I heard footsteps in the hall and the latch of the door as it opened, and I jumped up, as if to avoid being caught out, as if Andrea and I had been doing something forbidden: flirting or inappropriate contact masking an illegitimate attraction. There, on the sheet, the imprint of my weight remained when Benavides and Andrea’s father walked in. I thought that the man had just signed for the death of his daughter. Benavides was going to say something, but I beat him to it:

  “I’ll wait for you outside, Doctor,” I said. “Take your time.”

  I left the room and returned the way we’d come. Carmencita opened the glass door and said good-bye: “Have a nice evening, Doctor.” But I didn’t leave: there was no one in the waiting room, and I sat down there, in front of a muted television where three men in ties and a woman in a tailored suit argued over something so important it deserved their simultaneous gesticulations. I opened the book, looked for the article, found the sentence Andrea had read out loud and read what followed, the phrases underlined by Benavides with intentions that were perhaps less transparent than one might think. It was a brief paragraph-long tale, which told of a friend of Benavides with a hematologic problem by then incurable. “He was clear that the possibility of continuing with transfusions indefinitely no longer made sense,” wrote Benavides, so he had decided to abandon all treatment and begin to die a natural death. “Sharing with him and his family his last days in his house, with gentle nursing care, in a serene and restful way, listening to his stories of times gone by, long before mine, I received one of his many teachings. I was able to see what was a good way to die.” I looked up; on the screen, the woman was still gesturing and talking with a twisted sneer on her face. I thought: It’s a sneer of hatred. I turned back to the book: “His universe was gradually reduced to the room, his close family, and his memories,” wrote Benavides of his friend. “One afternoon, he closed his eyes like when we fall asleep after an arduous day’s work, with the satisfaction of a duty fulfilled.” The woman on the screen was showing her teeth, jutting out her jaw, running her dark tongue over her lips, hating her opponents or those who contradicted her, but I wasn’t thinking of her, I was thinking of Andrea and what she’d tearfully told me: “I have no stories to tell.”

  Then I thought I understood. I understood (or believed I understood) that this brave woman had been undone by Benavides’s tale: those affectionate words about his friend who was ill beyond recovery, the man who told him stories about the distant past, beside his close family, wrapped up in his memories. At thirty-odd years of age, Andrea was too young to have stories to tell or memories to protect her. “I have no stories to tell,” she’d said, and the more I thought of it, the clearer it seemed that this moment of profound sadness had overcome her as a consequence of an underlined sentence in the article by Benavides. A sentence about a man who, like her, had stopped belonging to this world, who had taken, as she had, the free and sovereign decision to die a natural death, who had defeated death, as she had: had told it not to be proud; had reclaimed that pride for himself. Yes, the two of them were equals, that anonymous, dying friend and Andrea, the patient: the patient Andrea. Only one thing distinguished them, and that was the stories they could tell to those who wished to hear them, the memories they could surround themselves with in order to die in peace. That tiny difference, I understood or believed I understood, had provoked a sort of epiphany in Andrea the origins of which I was unable to track or even conjecture, but which left me in such a state of distraction I didn’t notice the moment the glass door opened and Benavides arrived at my side.

  “Which way are you going?” he said. “Would it be too much trouble to give me a lift? See if we can finish these incomplete conversations.”

  I was going to the opposite side of the city: I was going south and he lived in the north. And besides, it was almost eleven at night.

  “No trouble at all,” I said. “Conversations need to be finished.”

  * * *

  —

  WE WERE DRIVING north up the illuminated avenue, repeating together the route I had taken alone nine years earlier, and doing so in silence by imposition or order of Benavides. As we pulled out of the clinic parking lot, it had felt urgent to ask him about the extremely strange mise-en-scène we’d just shared; I asked him, in other words, why he had stuck me into that whole matter: why he had lent me the white coat, why he had forced me to participate in that imposture, why he had thought it necessary or beneficial or perhaps amusing for me to witness his conversation with a patient and the moment when that patient decides to set out for her own death. But Benavides, without taking his eyes off the windshield and the Carrera Novena stretching out in front of us, answered: “I don’t want to tal
k about that.”

  “Let’s see, Francisco,” I said. “First you put me into such a situation. You oblige me to pass for someone else and see something that has nothing to do with me. And now you say you don’t want to talk about it?”

  “Exactly. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “But it’s not that easy,” I said. “I’m going to need . . .”

  “Outside the hospital,” said Benavides with a hint of impatience, “I do not speak of my terminal patients. It’s a decision I made many years ago and it still seems the best decision I ever made. One has to keep one’s lives separate, Vásquez, if not one can go crazy. This is exhausting, it sucks one’s energy. And like any other person, I have limited energy.”

  It seemed like an excuse to me, of course. But it was such a sensible excuse, and the tiredness on the doctor’s face was so plausible, that I could do nothing but accept it. I had also left Andrea Giraldo’s room feeling that I’d left my strength inside it: tangled in the sheets I’d sat on, or maybe absorbed into the body of the woman who’d decided to die: those fragile bones that my embrace had briefly encircled in an attempt to offer a little clumsy consolation to someone who seemed to need it. After twenty blocks of perfect silence, I realized Benavides had closed his eyes. He seemed to be asleep, but his neck was straight: he wasn’t nodding off, his chin wasn’t dropping onto his chest. I didn’t dare to pull him out of the refuge he’d improvised, for that’s how I imagined it, a refuge, what he needed at that moment. For my part, I still had the same questions: What had Benavides sought by tricking me into a scene for which I was not prepared? What did he want me to see or hear, if that’s what it was about? Did he know that Andrea would make her decision at that exact moment? And what had happened with the book? Had he planned that Andrea and I would somehow end up leafing through the pages of his article and reading the sentences he’d underlined? Had he given it to me with that intention? When he left the room and left us alone, had he foreseen what ended up happening? This idea had also passed through my head that long-ago night when I first met Carballo: that Benavides knew and controlled much more than he seemed to control and know.