Breathing Through the Wound

by Victor del Arbol

  Two weeks after receiving that news came a notice from the military command. His widow would have to pay burial expenses if she wanted to repatriate the body. In addition, she was officially no longer eligible for any State aid. But his mother was no longer the woman in that room, she no longer heard anything, no longer hoped for anything. Except that record, that song, that voice:

  Puisque notre amour ne peut vivre

  Mieux vaut en refermer le livre

  Et plutôt que de le brûler

  Mourir d’aimer

  He contemplated the near-empty parking lot beyond the ivy wall. This was not a wall to impede entry or exit, simply a discreet line separating two realities—inside and outside, here and there—and the vines and hedges just invited you to one side or the other. A gentle breeze stirred the fallen leaves of plane trees this way and that. On the other side of the wall surrounding the premises was a street lined left to right with identical terraced houses, each with the same red-tile roof and the same little stone wall topped with a well-manicured hedge. Exactly the same as the picture on the promotional brochure published by the residential community, as if the photo had been taken from the same spot, at the exact same time of day. “Paradise Community”: an idyllic residence, as good a place as any to die without getting in the way.

  The afternoon sun flooded the room, bathing it in a warm pale glow that detached the objects inside it from reality, making them seem somehow less solid: Andrea’s clothes on the bed, the brush on the dresser with its bristles full of hair, a pair of plastic clogs lined up demurely by the step leading out to the terrace. Still, it disconcerted him to note the crucifix above the headboard of her bed and a small bible on the nightstand. There was also a glass of water and a tube of blue pills. A shadow of doubt hung over Arthur’s expression. Yes, everyone had changed in that time, as he’d said to Diana just a few hours earlier. Andrea, too, no doubt. He breathed in the scent of a shirt draped across the back of a chair. His wife’s scent, at least, was one thing that hadn’t changed during those three years.

  Andrea was out in a little garden, tending to some tomato plants. She seemed content with a small plot of earth where she could sink her hands into the moist soil, pinch off yellowed leaves, water and fertilize, feel the roots, contemplate a tiny worm crawling up a stalk. Movement. Appreciating the flow of something that was alive. That’s what her life had been reduced to. She was lucky.

  A girl wearing the residence’s light-blue uniform appeared and asked him, with a fake smile, if everything was all right.

  “Everything is fine, thank you,” Arthur nodded, heavy-hearted. All prisons are alike, no matter what color they paint the cell walls.

  The girl looked out the window and adopted an informative tone.

  “Your wife is very happy here with us, there’s no need to worry. She’s taken up horticulture, and she’s actually a very good gardener.”

  “That’s good to know,” he replied, concentrating on Andrea’s figure, which was now hunched over, attaching stalks to a pole staked into the ground.

  “She’s improving, she really is. Her nightmares have abated and she almost never cries out at night. We spend a lot of time talking,” the girl added with secret pride, as if a good part of Andrea’s improvement were thanks to her efforts. Arthur stared at her with rancor: who was this girl, to be taking his place in Andrea’s life?

  “Would you mind leaving me alone?”

  He opened the sliding window and leaned out, resting his body on the sill. The cold air blowing in from the sierra whipped against his face. Arthur lit a cigarette, pretending not to know that smoking was strictly forbidden throughout the building. Who was going to care if for once the rules weren’t followed? The world was full of idiotic rules.

  “Andrea…”

  She looked at Arthur as if seeing him for the first time. “You’re as pretty as ever,” he added, gazing at her with mixed love and sadness.

  He was lying. It was a farce he could find convincing enough not to feel guilty about only if he avoided looking at her dirty pajamas; if he refused to notice that her hair was longer than she liked to wear it and had been hacked off unevenly; if he looked away so as not to see her broken, bitten fingernails; and did not glance at her lifeless eyes. The spectre before him was nothing but the ellipsis at the end of the memory of another woman, one who no longer existed despite sharing a few lingering traits with her former self. There was nothing left of the young bride from the photo, of the trip they’d taken to Algiers where they shared sweet childhood memories and roamed the same streets. Long gone were those nights in the desert, smoking pot on the fine sand by the light of a bonfire that didn’t go completely out until dawn, when they were both exhausted and satisfied after making love, shielded by the dunes.

  “I missed you.”

  She spurned his attempt to touch her. He could tell she made an effort to look at him with contempt, but she couldn’t quite manage it. Perhaps she was thinking that Arthur looked thinner, sadder, older. But she didn’t say a word.

  “Honestly. I thought about you every single day.”

  Andrea tried to come up with something hurtful to say, an insult: Well, I didn’t miss you, you son of a bitch. But she said nothing. Sometimes when she wanted to speak, she kept quiet instead. She couldn’t find the right words, the right tone, the right timing. Perhaps she kept quiet because, in her silence, everything was implicit, because she’d grown used to watching her own life like she was a spectator made of stone. Speaking was a waste of time; breathing was inevitable—but words she could hold in. What she truly wanted was for someone to get her out of there—not her room, or the garden, or the clinic. Out of her head. For someone to tear her from her head, her body, her guts, and carry her off someplace where there was no Andrea, because she no longer had the desire nor the energy to keep being who she was, but also lacked the energy to stop.

  Eat, rise, sleep, yawn…she cared nothing about hygiene; if her caregiver took too long on the phone to her Puerto Rican boyfriend, or sat mesmerized watching a soap opera on television, she’d simply defecate on herself. She wouldn’t say anything even if she was covered in shit, didn’t bat an eye until that horrible stench roused the caregiver, who changed her diapers angrily, and insulted her—you disgusting pig—and sometimes even slapped her, if no one was around; and still Andrea hardly blinked.

  And all of that neglect was absolutely voluntary. It was the penance Andrea had imposed on herself. Sometimes she burst into tears for no apparent reason, in the clinic’s common area where the other patients were playing games, reading the paper or watching television. She’d sit in her chair staring out the window until her eyes turned red and then the tears flowed, gently sliding down her face, down her nose to her neck, falling onto her folded hands. Despite her silence, the doctors could tell when her will to live had ebbed dangerously: it was when she shivered, despite the room being kept at a comfortable temperature, or stubbornly pursed her lips, refusing to ingest the soup they tried to feed her. At times like that it became necessary to sedate her even further or, if things had reached an extreme, to lock her in her room, after ensuring there was nothing in reach that she could use to harm herself.

  In light of what the pain had done to Andrea—eaten her alive—it was almost impossible to recall her as she once was: sitting in an armchair in her office at the University of Paris, her back straight, correcting exams in red pencil, circling students’ errors and omissions, a resolute look on her face. “These kids don’t get it; Rimbaud’s poetry can’t be understood by the mind alone. It can only be captured by leaving your preconceptions behind. For the love of God, what is wrong with young people today? Are they scared to open their minds and think for themselves?” She always voiced her thoughts passionately, even when they were taking long walks from Rue Saint-Sulpice to Notre Dame, always winding up at some sidewalk café along the Seine. There they’d spend ho
urs, as if time were theirs alone, smoking gracefully, bundled up in heavy jackets and hats and scarves, Andrea talking about her true love, Rimbaud’s poetry, and his life.

  Arthur’s role in those routines was to be eager, attentive, hanging on her every gesture should she need another demi of beer or a pack of cigarettes, that he’d rush off to buy at the nearest newsstand. “Sometimes I think you only married me for my name,” Arthur would joke. And Andrea would gaze at him in a sort of mystic trance, before stroking his cheek somewhat condescendingly. “And because you’re French, and a poet,” she’d add, laughing. It was a laughter that paved the way to every desire, every form of paradise a man could imagine.

  When they met, he was twenty and had just enrolled in honors courses at the faculty of letters; she was an adjunct to Professor Cochard at the Sorbonne. She was thirty years old. But back then it hadn’t gotten in the way of his falling madly in love with her. He knew, the moment he saw her, that she too was a child of Algiers. No woman could be that beautiful—her brown skin, her long hair flecked with snow, her wide mouth so fond of laughter and poetry—without the influence of the glimmering white backdrop of his beloved city.

  Snow was falling elegantly over Paris the first time he laid eyes on her. To him, snow had always been a mysterious dance of flakes that whirled this way and that as if following a secret rhythm, and it left the streets looking like the set of a nostalgic movie, one involving trysts—though the people he saw on the street now were struggling to protect themselves with clumsy-looking ear muffs and woolen caps, unmoved by a landscape that, to them, was simply everyday, a nuisance. At the quays along the Seine, pleasure boats void of tourists sat bobbing in the water, and waiters at bistros shooed snowflakes like flies. That was when he saw her, in a long overcoat and beret set at an angle, watching in delight as a dog jumped up, trying to bite the snowflakes falling around his snout. She was in her own world, sitting on a platform almost motionless—soon she, too, would be a statue covered in snow. For a long while, Arthur simply watched, until finally she saw him, too.

  If he could erase the here and now, he would enjoy looking back on the nights that city gave them—clandestine music clubs; the smell of their smiling bodies sweating as they danced among prostitutes who were happy and sad at the same time; their late-night strolls through the Trocadero as a trumpeter played Miles Davis, marking the rhythm with the tip of his worn shoe against a sidewalk littered with smouldering cigarette butts. Each corner was a tale of oil and water; and the two of them kissed and made love in fire-escape stairwells.

  Where had that Andrea gone? Who was this bag of bones, this frail old woman, this soulless pile of muscle and skin who’d replaced her?

  “I want to take you home, to our home. Let’s go back to Algiers together.”

  She turned to him nervously, almost a twitch. Her eyes, once shiny, now flitted back and forth, erratic, empty. It was chilly and she pressed her arms to her belly, hiding her hands in the sleeves of the little knit jacket she wore over her pajamas. In profile, her eyelashes drooped like the branches of a tree heavy with fruit—pretty eyelashes, eyes that were dead.

  Arthur took a step forward and tried to stroke her shoulder, but Andrea pulled away, frightened. Arthur’s hand lingered in the emptiness, trembling. After a few seconds’ hesitation he took Andrea’s hand, holding it tightly.

  “I know it was my fault, Andrea. If I’d been here, with the two of you, if I’d realized what was happening right before my eyes, I could have avoided it. But I haven’t lost hope. Things are different now. I’ll get Aroha back, she’ll come back to us.”

  Andrea studied her husband’s fingers, imprisoning her there, holding her like claws. She felt an irrepressible urge to slap him, bite him, beat him with her fists.

  There are certain parts of truth that cannot be measured or calculated, and there’s no way to know exactly how much of a lie resides within. It becomes confusing to look at the person speaking, because the contrast between their expression and their moving lips overwhelms—the pieces, quite simply, do not fit. She knew that Arthur was lying, yet again. Covering the hole Aroha had left with something else, with anything, a house, a yacht, a car, jewels, a stupid book, pretending nothing had happened.

  “Let me go.”

  Arthur didn’t obey. In fact, quite the opposite, he squeezed her wrist tighter, as though trying to leave the marks of his lost presence on her skin.

  “I can’t change the past. But I’ll fight to get our family back, to go back to the beginning, a new start.”

  Andrea looked at him without seeing. Arthur’s shape, reflected in her pupils, was no different from the tomatoes in her garden. Slowly she loosened his vice grip, finger by finger, as though it were a dead body that had entered rigor mortis. Without a word, she turned her gaze to a capsized flowerpot and ignored Arthur as if he weren’t even there. She made a tremendous effort not to let him see her cry.

  The last thing in the world she wanted was to be consoled by that man, a man she’d once loved with the same intensity with which she now detested him.

  * * *

  —

  The telephone in Arthur’s room rang several times before he picked it up.

  “What took you so long to answer?” fired an unfamiliar voice, skipping the preliminaries. It was a man’s voice.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Is this Arthur Fernández?”

  Arthur confirmed that it was. The man on the line had a commanding tone, his Spanish slightly accented, though Arthur couldn’t place it.

  “I need you to go to Casa de la Panadería. You know where that is?”

  “Of course I do, but if you don’t tell me who this is I’m going to hang up.”

  “Diana sent me. Name’s Guzmán. I’ll be waiting in twenty minutes. Be on time or I’ll be gone.”

  “What’s so urgent?”

  “You ought to know. You’ve been waiting for me.”

  “Why don’t you come to the hotel?”

  The only response was the harsh grainy sound of a dial tone on the other end. The man had hung up.

  Arthur held the phone for a moment without moving, perplexed.

  * * *

  —

  He had to take a detour to get to the Plaza Mayor. There were a lot of streets under construction. Madrid is in a constant state of reinvention, as though the city were never finished. To make matters worse he ran into a noisy crowd of protesters, holding signs and making their way to the Community of Madrid headquarters, chanting things he couldn’t understand. It had started to rain, but that didn’t scare off the marchers, who took refuge under plastic ponchos and colored umbrellas. To one side of the crowd the riot police, looking ominous, studied the flood of people.

  He might have been five minutes late, maybe ten. The plaza was almost empty. The outdoor cafés had their chairs all stacked up under the balconies that lined the square. A few idlers stood smoking, watching the rain and looking melancholy. Normally the place was full of life, the bustling cafés full of customers, and there was a weekend flea market where people bought and sold stamps, books and coins; it had a nostalgic air, as though trapped in the Italianate days of its magnificent buildings. Arthur’s eyes scanned the place popularly known as Casa de la Panadería—The Bakery House—despite it now being a municipal building. It was on the north side of the plaza and had old balconies from which the Bourbon monarchy had once looked out, to watch both plays and executions.

  He waited a little while, prowling up and down, but no one paid any attention to him. He saw a couple of pedestrians—a woman with an enormous umbrella taking up the entire space with the vast expanse of its tines; and a Japanese man who stared up at the sky, looking cheated; plus a wet, dirty dog, and a couple of kids splashing around in puddles. Beneath the arcades were small commercial establishments, some bricked over, a few still in business. In the olden days, those vau
lted-ceilings had contained artisans’ workshops, gold and silversmiths’ shops, gambling dens and brothels, even cells during the Spanish Inquisition. Arthur wandered into a few places—a trinket shop and a Bolivian mini-mart. In neither of them did anyone seem to notice him. Furious, he left the arcade.

  And then someone approached. A guy of medium build, nothing remarkable about him, a guy like any other—with one exception: the hand holding his enormous black umbrella was horrifically burned, and his pinky finger was missing its top phalanx.

  “I was about to leave. You’re late.”

  Arthur felt an immediate revulsion for this stranger. His deep voice sounded as though he were speaking from inside a vault; it didn’t match his harmless appearance in the slightest. And that’s what was so disconcerting, so unpleasant. Or maybe it was his breath.

  Guzmán was chewing mint-flavored gum and smoking a black tobacco cigarette.

  “Let’s go someplace we can talk quietly.”

  They walked to a place a few blocks from the plaza. There were very few customers at that hour. It seemed to be a pub that, in the mornings, attracted office workers and students avoiding their studies. But a smell leftover from wild nights lingered, permeating the walls and the barstools’ mustard-colored upholstery. Guzmán leaned on the bar looking annoyed, and shook out his hair like a dog. He left the dripping umbrella between his legs and rubbed his hands together.