Talking to Ourselves: A Novel (8 page)

Juanjo came to look after Mario. Each time I explained some detail about his brother’s care, he gave me a look as if to say he already knew. Juanjo likes to have the last word. Not by winning the argument, but by being emphatic. He needs to impose his personality rather than his opinion. This is precisely why he is an easy man to please. He seems very obliging of late. I have the impression that, all of a sudden, he has recognized himself in his older brother. As if he could sense the danger to himself.

When it was time to leave, Mario appeared, impeccably dressed. He had even polished his shoes. He looked serious and had difficulty moving, concentrating on every step. He went down to the garage with us. I ran to the car so Lito wouldn’t see my face. Through the rearview mirror, I watched Mario bend over to embrace him and rest his head on his shoulder. It looked like he was playing an instrument.

My parents say Lito is fine. My parents say they are fine. My parents have always believed that things are less frightening when they are fine. Not me. When things are going fine, I think they are about to get worse and I feel even more scared.

When I spoke to Dad, he said almost exactly what Mum
had said to me. It is astounding that they still understand each other after a lifetime of marriage. They both offered,
independently
, to come and stay at the house. I told each of them no, that I prefer them to look after Lito, to shield him from this. Mum insisted I shouldn’t try to carry the whole burden on my own. Dad advised me not to try to appear stronger than I am, because it will only harm me more. Sometimes I can’t stand having such understanding parents. Not being able to criticize them frustrates me. They raised me in an atmosphere of
tolerance
, respect, and communication. In other words, they left me alone with my traumas. As though, each time I look for
someone
to point the finger at, they responded from inside my head: We aren’t to blame.

Lito told me his granddad still plays football. He sounded surprised. He doesn’t run very much, he gets tired, but he has a good aim and he can kick the ball with both feet. Granddad isn’t that old, he said.

There was no other choice.

I debated. I debated for weeks. Day and night.

There is no other choice, no other anything. He needs help. I need help.

But not the sort that came. Because he did come.

He turned up quite naturally. I had implored him to advise me over the phone. But he insisted on seeing Mario in person. He said it was his duty and this was his patient. And he announced a time. And he hung up. And, right on time, the bell rang.

When I opened the door to him, I felt a sort of whirling sensation. We hadn’t seen each other since my brothers-in-law had visited. I looked him up and down. In his tailor-made suit.
His hair was slightly damp. Ezequiel greeted me as though we scarcely knew one another. He pronounced my name in a neutral voice. He proffered his hand. His hand. And he went up to the bedroom. The bedroom.

He sat down beside Mario. He asked him a few questions. He helped him unbutton his pyjama top. He examined him
carefully
. He ran a stethoscope over his chest. He took his pulse, his blood pressure, his temperature. Mario seemed to trust him blindly. The tact with which he treated him, the concern with which he spoke to him, the sensitivity with which he touched him was admirable. Despicable. Ezequiel whispered, Mario nodded. I watched them from the bedroom doorway. Neither of them said a word to me.

And something else. Something that places me on a level with rats. Self-aware rats, at least. While I watched Ezequiel touching my husband in our bed, sliding his hands over Mario’s shoulders, his shoulder bones, his stomach, I suddenly felt jealous. Of the two of them.

When the examination was over, Ezequiel spoke to me alone. He described Mario’s condition to me soberly, in the voice of Dr. Escalante. He increased the dosage of one drug. He took him off another. He made a couple of practical suggestions. And he
expressed
his opinion about admitting him to a hospital. And he was right. And I told him he was right. And he walked down the stairs. And he proffered his hand once more. And he left my house.

Me. The rodent.

So this was how it was. This was it. Being there.

I’m surprised how quickly, in a place destined to break all our habits, we establish new routines. We aren’t creatures of habit:
the creature is habit itself. It sinks its teeth into its quarry and won’t let go.

I spend all my nights there. I try to see that Mario gets some rest. I give him water. I tuck him in. I ensure his chest goes up and down. I listen to him breathe. When he falls asleep, I read with a torch. I am afraid to switch it off. It feels like something will end.

After lunch I go home, and return to the hospital at
dinner-time
. Mario prefers to be left alone in the afternoons. He was insistent about this. He brooks no dissent. He finds arguing increasingly unbearable. Sometimes he lets his gaze wander, float. He looks at something that is apparently in his lap. A sort of miniature world we others can’t see.

When I go into the room, dressed in the clothes he likes, my hair styled for him, I can sense resentment in his eyes. As though my liveliness offended him. How are you, my love? I said to him this morning. Here I am, dying, and you? he grumbled. Yesterday he had replied: Eating shit, thank you very much. He refuses to let them increase the morphine. He says he prefers to be awake, he wants to be aware.

Try as I might, I can’t look at Mario with the same eyes,
either
. Suddenly his every act, every trivial gesture like yawning, smiling, or biting into a piece of toast, seems to belong to a
remote
language. His silences make me anxious, now. I listen to them intently, I try to interpret them. And I am never sure what they are saying. I think of what they will say to me when this is all I have, a background silence.

Pity has its own way of destroying. It’s a noise that disturbs everything Mario says or doesn’t say to me. At night, by his bedside, the noise prevents me from sleeping. When the light goes out, a sort of glow surrounds, or perhaps encroaches on everything Mario has done. The past is already being
manipulated by the future. It is a dizzying capsize. An intimate science fiction.

Last night I took with me to the hospital an essay Virginia Woolf wrote about her own illness. I was curious to know whether this text would guide me or drag me down further. Yet I sensed I was going to find something there. Something in the language
Mario
now speaks. I fell asleep almost at the end. When I woke up I wasn’t sure I had actually read it. Until I saw what I’d underlined. With nothing to lean on and my unsteady hand, they looked like crossings-out.

“We cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we
become
deserters,” that is the ambivalence of the sick, which
explains
why I sometimes feel angry with him. He has been shot down, yes, he has been shot in the back. But because of this he has left us. As though he had abandoned us to join a war no one else knows about.

“To hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear,” or Alonso Quijano, De
Pablos
, Funes, “has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her,” or
Garcilaso
, Bécquer, Neruda, “but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry,” hence this desperate need of words?

“What ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness,” and these great trunks topple for both the sick and their carers, both endure a second operation that amputates
something akin to their roots. “When we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature,” or perhaps it isn’t so strange: Who wants to make a fire from the wood of their own tree?

Since Mario has been sleeping at the hospital, I have to be on standby during the night. My nerves are electrified from not taking tranquillizers. One day my head will shut down all of a sudden, like when a fuse blows. Delayed sleep is degenerating into a habit. Into a sort of insomniac workout. My normal state is this mixture of lack of rest and inability to rest. And so I write.

Sometimes I find myself watching the other patients and their relatives, and I have trouble telling them apart. Not because they look alike (health is so painfully obvious that it makes you ashamed in front of the sick), but because, deep down, we are all doing the same thing: trying to salvage what we have left.

By caring for our sick person, we are protecting their present. A present in the name of a past. What am I protecting of
myself
? This is where the future comes in (or hurls itself out of the window). For Mario it is inconceivable. He can’t even speculate about it. The future: not its prediction but the simple possibility of it. In other words, its true liberty. That is what the illness kills off before killing off the sick.