Eduardo let himself be led, docile, to a bench under an evergreen oak with a gnarled, desiccated trunk. He felt the urge to stroke Gloria’s beautiful face, so like and yet so unlike Elena’s, but cowardice hammered his fingers all the way down into his jacket pockets. For a few seconds they both stared straight ahead, very close, without saying a word. Eduardo listened to their hearts beating out of time, the different rhythms of their breathing.
“Sometimes I come here to say my son’s name out loud,” Gloria said suddenly. “As if by doing that I could invoke his presence—it’s crazy, I know. But without his name to repeat there would be no trace of his time on earth. When I call him, his face comes to me among the trees, or in a room, or sometimes sitting in the first few rows at a concert. I see his face in my mind, his little boy face, the unruly curls that were impossible to tame; I stroke his velvety eyelids and let myself be rocked by his voice and I feel like he’s still here with me, ready to take on the world, to chase his dreams.”
She could still feel the way he moved around in her belly, how uncomfortable he had been in the womb, how anxious to come out into the world that scorching hot, dry day in 1984, in the mountains of Cáceres. Gloria and her husband, Ian, had gone to the patron saint festival in her grandmother’s town, Aldea del Cano. The evergreen oak the town kids had chosen for the festival that year was astonishing—the largest Christmas tree in living memory. They dragged it in using two carts, tied together with thick ropes, which were pulled by two mule trains, and headed for the Plaza del Ayuntamiento, in the center of town. There it would remain, surrounded by kindling, until New Year’s Eve day, when they’d set it alight.
Ian was riding up on one of the carts, perched atop a bunch of dry roots, filming it all on a movie camera—totally absorbed, all worked up—waving like a government minister. He was radiant. Gloria waved back with a smile that took everything she had, holding her swollen belly. The baby would not stop kicking. Gloria was due, and the closer her labor got, the stronger the pains, the shortness of breath and dizziness, but she was trying to hide it so she wouldn’t ruin the moment for her husband.
From the corner of her eye she searched among the crowd in the plaza, trying to find the sign for the medical dispensary she’d glimpsed earlier, in case her son decided to come out right there on the dry red earth of the square, in a small town in the sierra, over a hundred kilometers from any city that might have a decent hospital that could treat her, in case of emergency. At first she’d thought she could hold out until night, till they got back to the city where there were real hospitals. But she was no longer so sure. Hiding from Ian the pains she’d started feeling that morning had been reckless; they were stronger than usual—maybe not quite contractions yet, but they certainly felt like them.
“I knew it was a boy. No one had told me—I wouldn’t let the gynecologist reveal the baby’s sex, compelled by a sort of family superstition: my grandfather always said the only thing you should hope for is what you get. But I knew; I was carrying a healthy, beautiful boy and he was going to be a musician, like all the men in my family, like me. I hadn’t said anything to Ian because he always wanted a girl and I didn’t want to disappoint him unnecessarily. It wasn’t a conscious secret, at least not at first, just one of those things you keep quiet because you can’t find the right time to bring them up.”
Eduardo nodded, despite not being sure he understood what Gloria was trying to say. Between him and Elena, there had never been secrets.
“What mattered was that my son was going to be born, was going to live a long life. That’s what I was praying for to the Virgen de los Remedios, the town’s patron saint, when Ian approached, his hair sweaty and disheveled, his shirt unbuttoned. He was holding a plastic cup of cheap wine. Rarely had I seen him look so happy. He told me what a great idea it had been to come up to this remote village, said he was getting fantastic material, and he was convinced he could sell it to the BBC. Then suddenly he looked at me and realized something was wrong. ‘Are you feeling okay? You look tired.’ I said yes, I was fine—I didn’t want to rain on his parade—but when I tried to smile, my face contorted.”
She had barely managed to reach out and grab the arm her frightened husband held out to her.
There was no time for ambulances or hospitals. Her labor was long, painful, agonizing.
All the while, Ian waited on the other side of the door that separated the examination room from the rest of the clinic. When the nurse came out, Gloria could see him through the gap in the curtain. He was anxiously scratching the chair’s upholstery with his fingernail, attempting to tune out the screams coming from the other side of the curtain.
After over an hour the midwife came out, still dressed in her festival clothes, shirtsleeves rolled up above her elbows, an oilcloth bib splattered with dark droplets. Ian stood to one side, adopting a composed, serene appearance, aware of the woman’s accusatory, suspicious eyes.
“How’s it going?” he asked neutrally, as if asking what the weather would be like tomorrow.
The midwife shoved him aside brusquely, strode to a glass cabinet and pulled out a pack of sterile gauze. “Not well, it’s not going well,” she said crossly, and then fell silent a moment, staring at the back of the room, measuring her words carefully in order to express precisely what she wanted to say. “Do you mind telling me what on earth you were thinking? Putting a woman in that state on a hellish road, full of curves and potholes. Can’t you see she’s about to give birth and here we are in the Godforsaken middle of nowhere?”
Ian blushed. The midwife lowered her head like a ram about to charge. She’d have loved to slap him around the head, the stupid jerk, not a drop of common sense.
She went back to the birthing room, but before walking in, she tilted her head at him. “The ambulance is on the way, but it will be another half an hour until it gets here. If her situation gets any more complicated, I don’t know how this is going to end. If you believe in miracles, start praying.”
Now, Gloria let out a cynical laugh.
“Ian, pray? Impossible. A godless Anglican—a subject of Her Majesty the Queen with St. George’s Cross; an arrogant, unpredictable man kneeling before Christ in a remote town in the mountains. That would never have happened. But neither of us died that morning. I suppose we were too excited about life, about finally meeting one another.”
When he was born, her son, also named Ian, barely weighed more than a sparrow, his little body fragile and discolored. He hardly even cried. Seeing him close up, Gloria felt a crack in her throat.
“I realized right away that something wasn’t right; the doctor took him from my arms immediately, alarmed. He was the color of just-burned ash, with that light look around his neck and the back of his head. Later, when they ran tests on him in Madrid, they told me that I had held him in too long during labor, causing his blood supply to be cut off for a short time.”
Gloria interrupted herself and stared pointedly into Eduardo’s eyes. Her expression was impenetrable.
“I cut off my own son’s blood supply, I got scared at the possibility of dying with him. In those brief moments of panic I’d have given his life for mine, I wanted to survive at all costs. And now I’d give my life just to have him here a little while longer. They told me that the trauma of that childbirth would affect my son, would result in consequences difficult to predict. Can you believe that? Consequences difficult to predict.”
Her voice trembled.
“I loved my son beyond anything imaginable, loved him more than anything. But there’s one thing that horrifies me. I’m starting to forget what he really looked like, what he smelled like, what he felt like, his voice. That’s oblivion, don’t you think? That’s true death.”
It was a few seconds before she looked up. Her eyes pulled Eduardo in, peeking out from beneath tortoise-shell glasses that gave her the air of an intellectual—an intelligent, fiery woman. Eduardo co
uldn’t help but think that she looked beautiful with that expression on her face, like Michelangelo’s Madonna. That was the first time he got the irrepressible urge to kiss her, the first erotic desire he’d had in fourteen years for any woman other than Elena. He had never cheated on his wife, never even been tempted to, even though sometimes Elena would punish him for any little thing with the words “don’t touch me.” What about Elena? he wondered. Had she ever cheated on him? Had she felt the temptation, the desire to cheat? Did she fantasize about other men when she was with him?
Unaware of the swirling thoughts she had awakened in Eduardo—or perhaps simply feigning ignorance—Gloria walked to the desk and took out the paper she’d been reading when he walked in.
“This is a letter from the man who killed my son. The mailman delivered it.”
Gloria (it’s stupid, but I don’t know how to address you, if I should put Señora before your name, or Dearest—though clearly not that—if I should keep my distance by addressing you formally, or use the informal tú…).
By this time, you may know that the Council of Ministers has signed off on my pardon. These are my last few hours, the final minutes in this cell, and I’m spending them writing you this letter before the sun rises, as my cellmate snores in the bunk above me and the searchlight on the prison yard wall is all I can use to guide my lines on this paper. I can hear a dog in the distance barking, furious at something—maybe the huge moon, which looks full of holes—behind the wall. I can also hear coughing, the quiet murmuring of restless conversations; the walls of a cell are not nearly as thick as they lead you to believe. And I want to write to you here, now, while I’m having all the same feelings I’ve had these past three years, in the same place, because I am certain that the second I walk out the prison gate it will all start to be forgotten, as soon as I take my first step of freedom. Soon the imprint left by this experience will seem ephemeral, a black hole in my memory, one I’ll dredge back up over and over again until it has been completely deformed, until it becomes fictional—an anecdote to tell people who know nothing about what goes on here.
I know you hate me. It couldn’t be any other way. I understand that you fought to the end, first to have the harshest sentence possible imposed and then against my pardon. It’s the least you could do, the least I would have done if I were you. So I accept the possibility that the minute you receive this letter you’ll see who it’s from and tear it up without reading it; but I trust that in the end your curiosity, the very revulsion and contempt you feel for me, will compel you to read these hasty lines. I would have liked to be able to tell you this face-to-face, but I gave up long ago on the hope that you would ever come visit me in prison, as I asked you to several times during my first year, and my lawyers have made very clear that I am absolutely forbidden from going anywhere near you or contacting you from the moment I gain my freedom, so this is my only recourse.
There are so many things I’d like to tell you, but words turn vicious when forced out by anger. And you have suffered enough; you’ll suffer for the rest of your life. As do I. I am sorry, Gloria, sorry for you, and for me, for us. I wanted you to know that in my freedom lies my penance. The bars that imprison me are not made of steel, and there is no jailer who can open this door for me. Perhaps that will console you.
Rimbaud wrote:
What do we care, my heart, for streaming sheets
Of blood, hot coals, and countless murders, the long screams
Of rage, every weeping hell upsetting
All order; the North wind still scouring the debris
Erase me from your heart, Gloria—today, now, sooner rather than later, before my deadly venom poisons you.
Yours,
ARTHUR FERNÁNDEZ
Gloria slowly took the letter from Eduardo’s hands and then stared at it for a long time. She wasn’t reading it, just staring at it, as though trying to imagine Arthur leaning over the windowsill, writing by the light of the perimeter wall searchlight.
“He’s being released…and this is all he has to say to me.”
Eduardo contemplated her expression for quite some time. It was empty, like a gigantic rock blocking out the light. And then calmly and serenely, Gloria tore the sheet of paper in two, and then again, and again, until it was nothing but tiny scraps she held in her fist. She raised it and opened her hand, and the pieces fluttered down chaotically.
What are words that go unheard? Anvils, sledgehammers that keep pain from ever dying.
* * *
—
Gloria was wrong. True death is not oblivion but constant memory, the inability to escape a fateful moment that, by sheer force of repetition, becomes unreal, invented, like a movie whose ending you know because you’ve seen it a hundred times and so add something each time, some new pinprick to help keep the suffering alive. Eduardo didn’t want to think of Elena’s lips as she spoke, didn’t want to think of her perfect teeth…
He couldn’t even forget her teeth. For a very long time, he’d kept her toothbrush in the holder, and he’d see it there each morning, its white bristles and ergonomic handle beside the mouthwash and the dental floss. He thought it would always be there, her toothbrush, a fallen swan in a glass cup, nestling his.
Death meant imprisoning the day your wife and daughter died in a red circle on the calendar; it was the agonizing countdown, the minutes bringing you closer and closer to that moment, the tick-tock of the clock, as if counting time were the only thing you could do between one anniversary and the next. For fourteen years.
* * *
—
Summer, late August, 1991. They had made love in tangled sheets, slowly. Eduardo ejaculated onto Elena’s stomach and collapsed by her side, breathing fast. She gave him time to recover, they smoked a couple of cigarettes and then did it again, her way this time, passionately, almost violently, excessively, like a fight in which kissing vies with biting, tenderness with roughness; an animalistic game in which the seam that joined their souls tighter than any other bond was revealed through moaning and talking dirty.
“We could just stay here like this, forever,” Eduardo said afterward, when they should have been getting dressed, because Tania would be back soon; and yet there they were, lying in bed, letting their stuck-together skin slowly pull away in its own unhurried time. Eduardo reached out a hand and placed it on the curve of Elena’s hip. His fingers dropped down over the valley of her belly and came to rest between her legs. And he left them there, almost motionless, his fingertips just barely grazing the lips of her vagina, feeling the heat it gave off.
“Sure, why not?” Elena giggled, biting one of his pink nipples.
They laughed together, complicit, and then fell silent, breathing in time, she with her head on his belly, he absently stroking her freckled shoulder. Lying there in bed, just looking at her, Eduardo could see everything about his wife’s nature, all in one glance. His eyes were the only thing capable of expressing what he felt for her; words could only distort it, ruin the totality of moments like those. That was the reason he loved to gaze at her as they made love—sometimes slowly, their rhythm quivering and contained, sometimes wildly, her fingernails clawing his hips. He needed to look at her so that he could penetrate her eyes, too; needed her to look at him with her eyes wide open, like they were both part of the same hallucination. He needed it in order to reach ecstasy, in order to stop thinking and disappear, and simply feel.
It wasn’t just physical attraction, wasn’t just a primitive, visceral desire that Elena aroused in him. It was much more than that. After being married so many years, nothing, in essence, had really changed. If anything, the rough edges of their madness had softened, the sharp corners had been filed down and now rested on a more stable plane; the wild exploration of his first few years, his desire to conquer her territory by hacking his way with a machete, had been replaced by a conscientious study of the lay of t
he land, a methodology of maps, valleys and rivers that he analyzed, taking notes in his mind like a topographer. Surprises were no longer abrupt and disconcerting but a gentle discovery of different things, like the tiny streams of water that sometimes gurgle up from underground when the earth’s surface has been mined. He no longer had to force his way; he walked calmly and the way was revealed to him. And Elena was his way.
“We could stay like this forever,” she said, repeating Eduardo’s words, her body folded over his legs. Her violet dress was floating in the window, hung out on the line with two pegs. The wind played with the dress, fluttering it up and dropping it down, fluttering up, dropping down, briefly revealing glimpses of the harsh landscape, the rocks, the beach, the little boats in their slips, staked to the shore. Time and space were marvelously ungraspable, the sounds drifting in from outside bathed in a soft, beautiful afternoon light.
Eduardo sat up to reach for a glass of water on the nightstand. He took a long sip and sighed, staring at the ceiling. A fan spun lazily, its long blades revolving slowly, circulating the hot air in the room.
“We should really take a shower and get dressed. Tania must be about to walk in. By the way, I haven’t seen her all day.”
“She must be in town with her friends. There’s a going-away party today. Let her enjoy her last few hours on vacation.”
Eduardo frowned. To him, Tania was still that tiny body he had to crouch down to if he wanted to say something, and he took refuge in his own vague obliviousness, in opting not to know too much when his daughter reacted to something in a way that told him she was slipping through his fingers and he couldn’t do a thing about it. For Elena, though, their daughter had become a compendium of dilemmas large and small, which had to be dealt with ad hoc. Sometimes it was an irritating, gruelling job, and other times her relationship with her daughter was full of secret satisfactions, confessions, shared fears; it was a means of returning to the crossroads of her own adolescence.
Breathing Through the Wound Page 10
