Breathing Through the Wound

by Victor del Arbol

  “Open it,” she commanded.

  He had no need to. He knew what was in it. He’d heard the story hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. And yet Maribel began to repeat it, opening the box for him. She struggled to speak, overcome by an emotion as intense as it was heartrending.

  “Since the time he was a little boy, Teodoro was fascinated with stamps, coins and bills. He used to say that money got dirty being passed from hand to hand, but when it finally came out of circulation—which is what contaminated it—it was beautiful. That it became an object symbolizing the lifelong human endeavor to quantify, to give things a concrete shape, to overcome the arbitrary nature of simple exchange. A bill like this one, or coins like these, explain part of our desire to become civilized. He liked to imagine what they smelled like, fresh out of the mint or the press; liked to wonder how many pockets they’d been in; what places they’d seen; what things had been bought and sold with them; how many lives they’d saved or ruined; how much joy or misfortune they’d caused. He had one of the best collections in the country and spent his whole life on it, but it wasn’t complete—there were pieces he was missing, the very ones he obsessed over. Obtaining them was his dream, his passion.

  “A man with no dreams or passions is an empty shell, and it doesn’t matter whether the obsession is stamps or beer cans. When you’re passionate about something, you don’t stop until you’ve got it, no matter how absurd others may find it. It took Teo years to find the coins this box holds. He spent so much money he almost ruined us, and so much energy, it almost made him sick. You should know that, you should remember his face that morning, when he finally closed the deal. He was the happiest, proudest man I’ve ever seen, so full of life. I’d never seen him like that. He was practically levitating before our eyes. I think that was the moment I loved him the most. And at that very instant, the man who came to my house a few weeks ago as though nothing had happened—the man you say has the right to change—stole him from me. I felt his blood spatter on my face! I watched the coins fall from his hands! I couldn’t react. But still, I managed to put myself between you and the bullet that would have killed you, the bullet that ruined my life. I lost everything to save you. You owe this to me. You owe me that man’s life.”

  “Even if it means ruining my own?”

  Maribel did not reply. She stared at him fixedly. And the wound that Mr. Who had tried to keep from being ripped open began to bleed.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes Sara hated her mother. In fact, sometimes she hated everybody. Everybody but Eduardo. He was always safe from that vague feeling she got that, when she really thought about it, maybe wasn’t hatred exactly but more like a mounting unease she felt when she was around other people—a kind of edginess that she could hear under her skin, like water going down the pipes when she flushed the toilet. From time to time, the groaning sound grew louder in her head, and it got so loud it took up all the space of her thoughts. She didn’t know why it happened, there didn’t seem to be anything specific that triggered it. But happen it did, and she couldn’t stop it. She tried to stop it, and now she had an ally—her lucky cat. She hugged him tight, spoke to him and sang him songs, pretending she wasn’t hearing the sound she was hearing, that buzzing that sounded like flies trapped in her eardrum.

  The only way she could explain what happened was by simile, and the doctor said that that was good, that the images she used helped others understand her better. And the sound she heard in her ear was just like Eduardo had said, when he asked, Is it like when you trap a fly under a cup and then hear it banging into the glass trying to escape? He’d asked her that when she had tried to explain that she hadn’t kicked his bad knee to be mean, it was just that she was hearing that noise in her head and couldn’t make it stop. And that was exactly what it was. That was why Eduardo was different, because he was like her.

  Before running away she’d seen her mother sitting by the window. She was smoking in her bedroom, head held high, shoulders tense. The smoke distorted her face, or maybe it made a new one, unhappy. That was the look her mother got when something made her sad. And if she was smoking by the bed it meant that soon she’d start to sob, and then she’d start drinking and her tears would turn to lava—thick, cloying, burning hot. When she saw her mother like that, the volume of Sara’s rage increased and the flies started buzzing too close to her ear. And then she got the irrepressible urge to run away from home, to hide under a bench on the street—like she was now—bent over her knees, hugging her cat and covering her head with her hands until the noise stopped. She didn’t run away to punish her mother, or to be mean. Of course not, of course you don’t. It’s just that you have to run, and scream, because if you don’t your head is going to explode. Yes, Eduardo understood her. Years ago, he’d needed to do that sometimes, too, he confessed.

  She felt better now. Really. She didn’t need to keep hiding. The ground was dirty and there were cigarette butts and sunflower seed shells poking her through her socks and sticking into her shins. She could go home now; she knew the way. She’d only run a couple of blocks. She’d dust herself off, fix her hair and walk calmly home. She didn’t want to go to the hospital this time. No, she was fine now. It had just been a little warning, so her mother would stop crying before she even started. When her mother was sad, Sara hated her a little bit more. And she didn’t want to hate her. That was another reason she liked Eduardo. Because her mother was like a flower blooming from within another flower whenever he was around. Because she’d put blush on her cheeks and giggle nervously when she dropped her compact on the floor. Eduardo chased away her sorrows and took them for himself—hers and everyone else’s. That’s why he was always walking around with his shoulders slumped, like he was carrying a heavy sack full of everybody’s grief.

  “I didn’t run away to be mean,” she said to her cat, wagging its plastic arm up and down as though it were playing yoyo. But her cat couldn’t lie to her, so she covered his eyes with her hand, because she felt a little ashamed.

  Sometimes you run away in order to be found. And she liked knowing that her mother and Eduardo were both out looking for her now. Together. She’d let them look a little more and then let herself be found.

  “That’s a nice cat.”

  The voice had no face, only feet. Or rather, thicksoled boots with gold rivets, right in front of her face. Sara looked up from the ground through the gaps in the wooden bench above her. A pair of eyes looked down at her, and above them was the sky. A pretty sky, orange and purple.

  “I can see you. And your cat, too.”

  Curious, she stuck her head out like a little mouse scanning the horizon before venturing out of its hole.

  “He’s not an ordinary cat. His name’s Maneki.”

  “That’s what I thought.” The stranger had crouched down, so the eyes now had a face. A face that Sara liked. There were faces she liked, and faces she didn’t. This one, she did. Uneasy, her eyes darted immediately to the package he was carrying under his arm. She liked packages. They sometimes contained things not everybody had permission to see. “You should come out from under there. Earthworms crawl on the ground, but butterflies fly. And it’s stopped raining, so your wings will be safe.”

  Sara smiled. How could he know she was hiding invisible wings that got damaged in the rain? She took the hand he held out and crawled out from under the bench.

  “That’s better. My name is Who. I think your cat and I are already acquainted.”

  “How could that be? I never let him go out alone.”

  “Well, cats are free spirits, you know. Maybe when you’re asleep, he jumps out the window to patrol the neighborhood. Maybe we’ve seen each other out on the streets at night.”

  There was no way Maneki got out at night, because Sara would get on her knees on the bed and watch closely. Mentally, she gave him orders (cats are very telepathic). Maneki sometimes obeyed her
orders, moving an arm or blinking slowly. And sometimes he didn’t (that just showed his independent character). Sara had never told her mother these things. She would have said they were figments of her imagination. But Eduardo believed her, even if he did warn her not to tell other people. Not everyone is prepared to accept certain things. People believe what they want to believe, and then what they believe ends up becoming what they call truth or reality. Sara understood what Eduardo was telling her. If she went around telling everyone that her toy cat came to life whenever she asked him to—without using words—or that she had invisible wings that got damaged in the rain, or that invisible flies buzzed inside her ears, they would give her a baffled look and assume she was dumb, or crazy. Or worse, they’d accuse her of not living in the real world and not accepting the truth.

  “Why are you hiding under a bench? Why not behind a tree or in a doorway?”

  Sara looked Who up and down. He was a dark spot dressed in a white spot, with messed up hair and black fingernails. His voice sounded very childlike, as if the little boy who lived inside him had not grown as quickly as his body. The opposite had happened to her—her mind grew too quickly and her body couldn’t keep up, so even though she looked like a thirteen-year-old girl, she wasn’t. And that made it hard to be respected in the adult world, where people were inclined to go by appearances. That was just one more reason she liked Eduardo so much—he accepted what really was and didn’t get hung up about what things looked like. Eduardo took her seriously.

  “Because if I did, they might not find me. And I want them to find me.”

  “Well, are they going to take much longer? It’s going to get dark soon.”

  Sara shrugged.

  “You found me.”

  “But I wasn’t looking for you. At least, not for you exactly. That must mean something.”

  The evening’s last glimmer of post-rain sun was shining directly into Sara’s face. She held up one hand like a visor, to get a better look at him. She thought, right then, of the tin vase her mother kept in the entrance hall. It was an ugly vase, with no flowers. At least she thought it was ugly, so it must have been. A vase with no flowers. She thought of that without knowing why. That happened sometimes: she’d think of things that made no sense, for no apparent reason. She’d just get an image stuck in her mind and be unable to think of anything else. She didn’t know why the image of that ugly vase with no flowers suddenly made her feel so sad. Occasionally she seemed to get sad for no reason at all. She could be walking down the street holding her mother’s hand, singing a song she’d heard on the radio, and suddenly see an old person’s face, or a woman with the hint of a mustache, or a dog whose ear had been bitten, or the faded awning of an ice-cream parlor, and the song would vanish, taking refuge inside her, and she’d become silent and very sad.

  Out of the blue, when she saw Mr. Who—or actually when she saw him switch his package to the other arm—she thought of the vase, and of home, and the music disappeared. A vase with no flowers. A tin vase.

  “Would you do me a favor?” Mr. Who asked. “Would you give this package to Eduardo? Tell him it’s from Teodoro López Egea.”

  Sara took the package. She liked having a mission.

  “And now I think it would be better if you went back home. I think that’s what your cat is telling you.”

  Sara stared at him wide-eyed.

  “Can you hear Maneki, too?”

  Mr. Who smiled.

  “I told you, we already know each other from the neighborhood.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Martina crossed off every day that passed with a red “X” and circled future events in different colors—green for patients, yellow for holidays, blue for the last Thursday of the month. Why was Eduardo in a blue circle and not a green one like her other patients? Green was the color of hope. Blue is the color of nostalgia, the sky, the impossible. Seconds ticked by, turning to minutes, on Martina’s wristwatch. 10:45, 10:46, 10:47…And still he did not speak.

  He’d said something at 10:44. He knew the exact minute because, as he spoke he kept his eyes trained on the doctor’s petite, square-faced gold wristwatch. His eyes trailed from her watch-face to the fine downy hair on her forearm and paused for a second at a mark on her skin—a mole, slightly larger than a freckle, about the size of a lentil. He imagined she must have more on her body. A body covered in lentil-sized moles, which she probably had to lather with sunscreen when she went to the beach.

  The doctor had jotted down what he’d said in her little spiral notebook. There were his words. He couldn’t take them back: I killed them, even though he’s the only one that died. And in order to stress them, she’d underlined the sentence with two thick lines that bled through to the other side of the paper.

  At 10:48, he added, “I went to her house to see her,” as if his earlier words were incomplete, demanding an ending.

  If you discounted the two of them—discounted the office and the day-planner, the clock and the words on her notepad—it was as though the world were a lighter place, simpler, easier to bear. The last storm-front of spring was moving out over Europe, heading out to the sea. Beautiful sunlight shone down, and that unbearable heat that makes the clothes stick to your body had yet to build up. The interminable stream of economic exiles had not yet begun fleeing Madrid, laden with suitcases, in the hope of discovering some prosperous new paradise. The city was a welcoming place in early May, easy to love. Perhaps the psychiatrist was daydreaming about some studio apartment she’d bought on the coast, about painters applying a fresh coat to the walls, and repairing the rusty handrails. Maybe she was making mental notes, counting off the red days left until she, too, could escape. That would explain the detachment Eduardo thought he could sense in her circumspect expression, as though the words she’d written were an unsolvable algebra problem, her eyes shining vacantly.

  Why had he gone to see Maribel? He didn’t know, he really didn’t. In the almost fourteen years that had gone by, he’d never felt the need to—except once, when his nightmares had become so intense they seemed to be some sort of code, charting his guilt, speaking to him in a language he didn’t understand. Often, it is only after feeling the compulsion to do something that people try to find reasons to do so. In all honesty, he’d simply turned up at the door of her apartment building, walked up the stairs, and rung her bell without thinking. He hadn’t been expecting anything. He had just felt the need to do it. The need to go there.

  Martina jotted something down at the top of the paper, above the underlined sentence—an addendum—the writing so small that Eduardo couldn’t read it. His arms were crossed over his chest, wrapping himself in his solitude. Stop that, he used to say to Tania after he’d given her a talking-to and she’d taken the same defensive stance, as if sticking her hands under her armpits somehow created a shell that words bounced off, falling dead at her feet. It didn’t matter how much he shouted at her. As long as Tania’s arms were crossed, there was no getting through.

  “How did it make you feel, seeing Maribel after all those years?”

  The second he’d rung the bell, Eduardo had gotten the urge to run back down the stairs. And as soon as the door opened, he wished he were invisible, wished he were anywhere but there, but it was too late. He saw a woman in a wheelchair, legs wrapped in a plaid blanket, wearing a fake-silk kimono. Her near-white hair was scraped into a severe bun.

  Did she remember him? he wondered. She most certainly did; she hadn’t forgotten him for a second.

  “You’ve taken a big step, Eduardo. Forgiveness heals wounds, but you can’t expect things to suddenly be the way you want them to. It takes time,” Martina said. He felt like he was listening to a nun. One who was locked in a cloister, her only contact with the outside world a revolving hatch through which she slipped pills, prescriptions, and useless advice. The only thing left for her to do was make the sign of the cross. In the psychiatric litur
gy, the equivalent was to hand him a prescription for a tranquilizer without his having to ask for it.

  Eduardo contemplated her fingernails, their bone-colored polish, above the paper. We’re making progress. Toward what? Forgiveness. Whose?

  “Did you want to ask me something?”

  Sometimes two worlds are totally irreconcilable, they exist entirely in opposition. She held out the prescription to him.

  “No, nothing, Doctor.”

  “Okay then, see you in June.”

  Perhaps, thought Eduardo. Perhaps.

  * * *

  —

  He decided to walk. It was a nice day and there was no reason to waste it underground on the metro. He didn’t feel happy, but he bought some flowers without taking the florist’s advice. “Any kind, doesn’t matter,” he’d said. Which had offended the girl, who suddenly wielded the pruning shears sticking out of her leather apron like a gun. She removed her green gloves and pointed to a few just-watered bunches on the counter: daisies, roses, verbenas. Eduardo nodded, as if to say they were all fine. He was just trying to lend some cheer to that flowerless tin vase that made Sara so sad. In the end he bought daisies, white and purple. The blue ones were more expensive. Walking down the street holding them that sunny morning, he’d have looked like a man in love were it not for how dejected he looked as he gripped the flowers, as if he was walking a poodle that insisted on stopping to sniff other dogs’ pee on every lamppost. He had the air of someone who’d been rejected. Perhaps that was why some people, especially women, shot him compassionate glances.

  When he got to the corner of Calle León, a crowd of people blocked the way. Fire trucks were pulling up, sirens blaring, and a dense cloud of smoke billowed from the top of a block of buildings. Ash floated in the breeze, carrying the smell of wood and plastic. Eduardo managed to push his way through the curious onlookers and saw police cars and ambulances up on the sidewalk in front of an antique dealer’s. One fireman was tearing down the wooden door with a pickax as another was breaking the storefront window. The police were trying to control the gawkers while an emergency services worker hung a canvas curtain so the doctors could work in peace.