Paula (24 page)

Although the hospital is crowded with people in the afternoons, on Saturday and Sunday mornings it seems deserted. It is still dark when I get there, and I am so tired from the accumulated fatigue of the previous week that my purse is dragging the floor behind me. I walk through the endless, solitary corridors where even my heartbeats echo, and it seems I am walking the wrong way on a moving sidewalk. I am not moving forward, I am always in the same place, more and more exhausted. As I walk, I am whispering magic formulas of my own invention, and the closer I get to the building, to the long corridor of lost steps, to your room, to your bed, the more tightly my chest squeezes with anguish. You are like an overgrown baby, Paula. It is two weeks since you left the intensive care unit, and there is no change to speak of. You were tense after the move, as if you were frightened. Gradually, you have become more calm, but there is no indication of a consciousness, all you do is stare toward the window, absolutely motionless. I have not given up hope; I believe that in spite of the ominous prognosis you will come back to us, and even if you are not the brilliant and vivacious woman you were, you may be able to live an almost normal life and be happy, and I will be responsible for making it happen. Expenses have sky-rocketed. I go to the bank and change money that flies from my wallet so quickly I don't even know where it goes, but I choose not to make an accounting, this is no time for prudence. I must find a physical therapist, because the hospital offers only minimal services; from time to time two distracted girls show up—reluctantly—to move your arms and legs for ten minutes following some vague instructions from an energetic type with a mustache who seems to be their boss and who has seen you only once. There are too many patients and too few resources, so I exercise you myself. Four times a day I force you to move every part of your body. I begin with your toes, one by one, and work upward, slowly and firmly, because it isn't easy to loosen your fingers or bend your knees and elbows. I sit you up in the bed and pound your back to clear your lungs; I moisten the harsh hole in your throat with drops of water because the central heating dries the air, and to prevent deformation I place books at the soles of your feet and bind them with strips of bandage. I also separate your fingers with pieces of sponge rubber and try to keep your head straight with a collar improvised from a travel neck pillow and adhesive tape. These make-do measures are distressing, though, Paula. Soon I must get you where someone can help you, they say that rehabilitation works miracles. The neurologist asks me to be patient, tells me it is not possible to move you yet, much less take you halfway across the world in an airplane. I spend the day and much of the night in the hospital, and have become friends with the other patients in your room and their families. I give Elvira massages, and we are inventing a language of signs to communicate, since words betray her. I tell stories to the others, and in exchange they give me coffee from their thermoses and hefty ham sandwiches they bring from home. The snail-woman has been transferred to Room 0, she is nearing the end. Every day Elvira's husband tells me, “Your daughter is more alert,” but I can read in his eyes that deep down he doesn't believe that. I have shown them photographs of your wedding and told them the story of your life. They know you very well by now, and some weep quietly when Ernesto comes and hugs you and whispers in your ear. Your husband is as tired as I am; he has dark circles under his eyes, and his clothes hang loose on him.

Willie came again from San Francisco. He tries to come often, to ease this long separation that seems to go on forever. When we made our commitment four years ago, we promised we would never be apart, but life has taken it upon itself to sabotage our plans. My husband is pure force, with as many virtues as he has defects; he swallows all the air around him and leaves me shaking, but it really does me good to be with him. Beside him, I sleep without pills, anesthetized by security and the warmth of his body. When I wake up, he brings me coffee in bed and makes me stay an hour longer, resting, while he goes to the hospital to relieve the night nurse. He sits in the waiting room in his faded blue jeans, work boots, black leather jacket, and a beret like the one my grandfather wore, which he bought in the Plaza Mayor. Despite his outfit, he looks like a Genoese sailor from centuries ago, and I expect someone to stop him in the street to ask him for navigational charts to the New World. He greets the patients in a Mexican-accented slang, and sits beside your bed to rub your hands and talk to you about what we will do when you come to California, while the other patients watch with amazement. Willie cannot hide his concern; in his role as a lawyer he has seen countless accident cases, and he has little hope that you will recover. He is preparing me for the worst.

“We will take care of her, many families do it, we aren't the only ones. Looking after Paula and loving her will give us new purpose, we'll learn a different form of happiness. We can go on with our lives and take Paula with us wherever we are. What's the problem?” he asks consolingly, with that generous and slightly ingenuous pragmatism that seduced me the moment we met.

“No!” I replied, not realizing I was shouting. “I won't listen to your dark predictions. Paula will get well!”

“You're obsessed. She's all you talk about, all you think about. You're falling off the edge so fast you can't stop yourself. You won't let me help you, you don't want to listen to reason. You must put some emotional distance between the two of you or you'll go nuts. And if you get sick, who will look after Paula? Please let me take care of you. . . .”

The healers come in the evenings; I don't know how they get in, but they are determined to bring you energy and health. In their everyday lives they are clerks, technicians, officials, ordinary people, but in their free time they study esoteric sciences and attempt to cure with the power of their convictions. They are sure they can charge the spent batteries of your sickly body, that your spirit is growing, renewing itself, and that from this immobility will emerge a different and better woman. They say I must not look at you with a mother's eyes, but with the golden eye, and then I will see you floating on another plane, imperturbable and indifferent to the terror and misery of this hospital room. They also, however, counsel me to be prepared, because if you have fulfilled your destiny in this world and are ready to continue the long voyage of the soul, you will not come back. They are part of a world organization and are in communication with other healers, so that they, too, will send you strength, just as the nuns are in contact with other congregations praying for you; they say that your recovery depends on your own will to live: the ultimate decision is in your hands. I don't dare tell any of this to my family in California, I know they would not look favorably on these spiritual physicians. Ernesto does not approve of their invasion, either; he does not want his wife to be a public spectacle, but I don't see how it can harm you, you're not even aware of them. The nuns participate in the ceremonies, too; they ring the Tibetan prayer bells, burn incense, and implore their Christian God and all the heavenly court, while the other patients watch the healing ceremonies with a certain reserve. Don't be afraid, Paula, they're not dancing with feathers pasted to their bodies or wringing roosters' necks to sprinkle you with blood, they merely fan you a little to remove any negative energy, then place their hands on your body, close their eyes, and concentrate. They ask me to help, to imagine a beam of light entering the top of my head, passing down through my body and coming out of my hands toward you, to visualize you healthy, and to stop crying, because sadness contaminates the air and perturbs the soul. I don't know whether any of this does any good, but one thing is sure: the spirit of the rest of us in the room has changed, we're happier. We have decided to control our sadness: we tune the radio to lively music, we share cookies, and we warn visitors not to come with long faces. The story hour has also been enlarged, now I'm not the only one telling, everyone is taking part. The most loquacious is Elvira's husband with a geyser of anecdotes; we take turns telling each other our lives, and when we run out of personal adventures, we begin to invent them, and from so much embroidering and giving free rein to our imaginations, we have perfected our form, and people come from other rooms to listen. In the bed where the snail-woman used to be, we have a new patient, a small dark girl covered with cuts and bruises, raped by four brutes in a park. Her belongings are marked with a red circle and the staff will not touch her without gloves, but we incorporate her into the strange family in this room, and wash her and feed her. At first, she thought she had awakened in an insane asylum, and covered her head with the sheet and shivered, but little by little, between the Tibetan bells, the radio music, and our baring our souls, she gained confidence and has begun to smile. She has become a friend of the nuns and the healers, and because she can't lift her head from her pillow, she asks me to read her gossip about movie stars and European royalty. Opposite Elvira now is a patient named Aurelia, who has been transferred here from the Department of Psychiatry; she suffers from convulsions and must have an operation for the brain tumor that causes them. At dawn on the day scheduled for her surgery, she carefully dressed and put on her makeup, told each of us goodbye with a warm hug, and left. “Good luck,” “We'll be thinking about you,” “Be of good cheer,” we called as she went down the corridor. When they brought the bed to take her to the pavilion of torture she was gone; she had left the hospital and would not return until two days later, after the police had given up looking for her. A second day was set for the operation, and a second time they could not perform it, now because Aurelia had stuffed herself with half a
serrano
ham she had hidden in her purse and the anesthetist said he would be crazy to work with her under those conditions. Now the surgeon has gone off on his Easter vacation and who knows how long it will be until an operating room is available but, at least for the moment, our friend is safe. She attributes the source of her illness to the fact that her husband is “imminent”; from her gestures, I deduce she means “impotent.” “It's
his
dinkus that doesn't work and
my
noodle they're going to split open,” she laments with resignation. “If he could just do it, I'd be happy as a clam, and being sick would go right out of my mind. All the proof you need is that my spells began on our honeymoon, when old limp-wick was more interested in listening to boxing matches on the radio than in my nightgown with marabou trim.” Aurelia dances and sings flamenco; she speaks in rhymes and, unless I keep a close watch, she sprays you with her lilac perfume and paints your lips bright red. She makes fun of doctors, healers, and nuns alike, she thinks they are all a gang of butchers. “If your daughter hasn't been cured up till now by her mother's and her husband's love, then there's nothing to be done,” she says. In the meantime, the police drop by to question the raped girl, and the way they treat her you would think she was the perpetrator, not the victim, of the crime. “What were you doing alone in that neighborhood at ten o'clock at night? Why didn't you scream? Were you on drugs? This is what happens when you go out looking for trouble, Missy, I don't know what you're complaining about.” Aurelia is the only one with enough brass to take them on. She plants herself before them with her hands on her hips, and bawls them out. “Cut that crap, this isn't what you're paid to do. It's always us women who get the short end of the stick.” “Keep out of this, now,” they reply indignantly, “this doesn't have anything to do with you,” but the rest of us applaud, because except for her seizures, Aurelia is amazingly lucid. She has three suitcases of flashy clothes under her bed, and changes several times a day; she piles on the makeup and whips her hair into a mousse of bleached curls. At the least provocation, she strips to show us her Renaissance flesh, and challenges us to guess her age and to look at her waist—the same measurement as before she was married. It runs in the family, she says, her mother was a beauty, too. And she adds with a touch of pique that her attributes don't do her much good since her husband is a eunuch. When he comes to visit, he sits dozing in a chair, bored, while she insults him and the rest of us make a tremendous effort to pretend we don't hear.

Willie is finding out where to take you, Paula—we need more science and fewer exorcisms—while I try to convince the doctors to let you leave and Ernesto to accept the necessity. He doesn't want to be separated from you, but there is no other alternative. This morning the two girls from rehabilitation came and for the first time decided to take you down to therapy on the ground floor. I was ready in my white uniform and went with them, pushing the wheelchair; there are so many people in this place, and everyone has seen me so long in the corridors, that no one doubts I'm a nurse. The head therapist needed only a superficial glance to decide he couldn't do anything for you: “Her level of consciousness is zero,” he said, “she cannot obey instructions of any kind, and she has an open tracheotomy. I can't be responsible for a patient in that condition.” That decided me to take you from this hospital and from Spain at the first possible moment, even though I can't imagine the trip. Even taking you a couple of floors on an elevator is a exercise that requires military strategy; a twenty-hour flight from Madrid to California is unimaginable, but I will find a way.

I obtained a wheelchair and with the help of Elvira's husband sat you in it, tied to the back with a twisted sheet because you crumple as if you had no bones. I took you to the chapel for a few minutes, and then out on the terrace. Aurelia, in the blue velvet robe that makes her look like a bird of paradise, went with me, and along the way made faces if anyone seemed too curious and stared at you. The truth is, Paula, you do look awful. I stopped the chair facing the park, among the dozens of pigeons that gather for bread crumbs. “I'm going to cheer Paula up a little,” Aurelia said, and she began to sing and dance and twirl her hips with such gusto that we were soon surrounded with spectators. Suddenly, you opened your eyes, blinking at first, dazzled by the sunlight and fresh air you hadn't had in such a long time, and when finally your eyes focused you saw before you the novel spectacle of a plump middle-aged woman in blue dancing an impassioned flamenco in the midst of a whirlwind of startled pigeons. You raised your eyebrows with an expression of amazement, and I have no idea what passed through your mind, Paula; you began to cry with heartrending sadness, tears of impotence and fear. I hugged you, and explained everything that had happened, that for now you can't move but gradually you will recover, that you can't speak because you have a hole in your throat and the air doesn't reach your mouth, but when we close it you will be able to tell us everything, and that your task at this stage is just to breathe deeply. I told you that I love you, Paula, and will never leave you alone. After a while, you grew more calm. You never took your eyes from my face, and I think you recognized me, but maybe I imagined that. In the meantime, Aurelia suffered one of her attacks, and that was the end of our first adventure in the wheelchair. It is the neurologist's opinion that the crying doesn't mean anything. He can't understand why you continue in this static condition; he fears brain damage and told me that he has scheduled a series of tests for the beginning of next week. I don't want more examinations, I only want to wrap you in a blanket and run with you in my arms to the other side of the earth, where you have a family waiting for you.