Diorama

He tightened the final knot of his tie in front of the mirror, with the window open. Children’s voices rose from the street, merging with the sound of the waves at a distant beach. Some mornings the stench of the sea, like an outhouse, awaited them along the twists and turns of the roads, behind the houses with modern designs. The elevator descended slower than usual, and the elevator door gave rise to groans because sliding it shut only made it open again.

At the street door, that huge sign filled him with amazement—that sign with a strange name on it: Afranio Mármol, M.D. He wasn’t yet used to seeing his name displayed like a For Rent billboard. Until two months ago he was an unknown doctor without an office; now his house had become a waiting room smelling of bandages, with bronze statues, thousands of old magazines, black cushions embroidered with golden leaves and butterflies, and vases with giant tufts of flowers. He dreamed of a bright, modern office, but fate intervened: they sent him everything left in his mother’s house as if to some dumpster. And so all that shabby, unusable furniture piled up in the rooms where patients waited, shrouded in an impatient gloom, writing down their ailments. This waiting room would have scared him when he was little, like dentists’ offices. Doctors followed him throughout his childhood, doctors armed with their arsenal of thermometers, doctors who cough when they sign prescriptions, doctors who tap their fingers against bellies like drums. Now it was patients that wouldn’t leave him alone. The leaves on the trees rustling in the wind were the hands of patients crisscrossed by veins; women who passed him on the street were bright figures stripped of flesh in his anatomy textbooks, or charts depicting blue lungs with branching veins and red nervous systems marked with thin lightning bolts.

The morning was clear as the water’s edge; the scent of freshly cut grass drifted in from the parks, but at the hospital and the morgue he only breathed air stinking of chloroform from the red vials behind purple-tinted windows, amid sounds of pincers and cork stoppers.

At times it made him think of the countryside, blanketed in long stretches of alfalfa pastures: it was his maternal family’s ranch where he had gone to rest ten years ago. Throughout his life he had passed through dark tunnels of sadness, with fleeting thoughts of suicide that were dispelled on that bucolic ranch with alfalfa pastures. He remembered happy mornings beyond compare, when he had no other reason to be happy except the clear sky. For a long time he thought of this solitude like an old girlfriend, the memory of which was summoned only by a phonograph record or a particular perfume. A girlfriend with the scent of freshly cut grass, surrounded by the sky and sounds of the country.

He believed he was cured, there at the ranch, thanks to the buzzing of the bees and the insects that in harmony with the ringdoves would weave soothing blue patterns on the highest crowns of the trees. But as soon as he returned to the city, thoughts of suicide settled into his body once again. It was then that he chose to study medicine, and it was his patients who saved his life.

He left the hospital after rounds as if leaving the beach after sunbathing.

He walked three blocks before calling a taxi. He thought of his wife telling him he should walk to work. She said goodbye to him every morning with the same refrain: “You never exercise,” “You never exercise,” which echoed in his ear like the annoying buzz of a fly, already tiresome before it was uttered. He got in the taxi. He had to be at the patient’s house on Tacuarí Street at noon. They had phoned him five days earlier and asked him to make a house call—the man’s knee was wounded and he couldn’t go out. They told him to come at six o’clock in the evening. When he arrived at the house the doorman let him into the foyer and said ceremoniously: “The gentleman cannot see you now, he is with a woman and we are under strict instructions not to interrupt him.” He had to insist, and until he pulled out his identification card like a gun, the doorman wouldn’t waver. He heard the very loud voice of a man coming from one of the rooms, but the other voice was perhaps speaking in hushed tones because he couldn’t hear it. The doorman knocked at the door, tilting his head attentively to listen. The voices dispersed. The door opened, closed again, and after a moment opened once more with the housekeeper’s outstretched arm allowing him to enter.

The bedroom had no character: it looked like a bedroom in a department store window. The owner of the house, tall, thin and hollow-eyed, shook his hand. He was complaining of a pain in his left side. He stretched out on the bed, in striped shirtsleeves, and the fingers of Afranio Mármol began to play the drum against that pale man’s abdomen, stomach, and back. He still couldn’t give a diagnosis; the liver was inflamed, but that wasn’t cause for alarm. And so, changing the subject from possible illnesses, they began to talk about personal matters. That woman who until recently was in the room was his lover, for ages she visited him every afternoon. He couldn’t live with her for social reasons, but she came to see him every day, taking care of him like a mother would, applying poultices. She was surely spying on them now through the glass door. He lifted the curtain slowly: “Doctor, look over there.” Afranio Mármol turned around and didn’t see anything. “She is the one who arranged the flowers in that vase,” the pale man said, getting out of bed and putting on his jacket. And that’s how the consult ended that day.

The taxi arrived at Tacuarí Street, and the doorman who was there three days earlier smiled in the foyer with the conspiratorial air of clandestine visits. This time they let him in immediately. The closed blinds were heavy around that room lit by electric lamps at midday. It didn’t seem like the same room as before—the floral wallpaper was darkened by stains, and the department store furniture wasn’t that pristine after all. The pervasive odor of enclosure and the water stains made him look up insensitively at the ceiling for possible leaks. He abandoned the patient momentarily; he would have to sanitize the room before attending to the man. “Sir, why not open the windows?” He felt fussy like those who told him: “You have to exercise.” The sick man responded: “Doctor, it’s just that the sun is bothersome.” “Bothersome for whom?” “For her.”

His liver was no longer swollen, but he was still in pain—they discussed X-rays and electrical treatments but inevitably returned to private matters. She was a married woman. On Saturdays and Sundays she went out with her husband: those were deadly days. And today, “What day is it? I never know what day it is,” Afranio Mármol said. The patient frowned; this was a bad sign for a doctor. But the woman sang marvelously: “You don’t hear her, Doctor? Don’t you think she has a beautiful voice?” The house was hemmed in by silence, no cars passed on the street. “I don’t hear anything,” Afranio Mármol said. “She studied in a conservatory and sings in rural churches on Sundays. Listen to the high notes.” The silence made the furniture creak. They went into the study and the doctor, recovering his doctor’s cough, sat at the desk, lifted the lid of the inkwell (which was the head of an eagle), took the quill and slowly wrote a prescription. The owner of the house screamed: “Come, Doctor! My wife doesn’t feel well,” and ran, leading him to another room where almost everything was red, with a thick green quilt covering the big bed. The man knelt, looking intently at the empty pillow, and after standing up said: “Doctor, it’s nothing serious, right? Do me the favor of examining her.” Afranio Mármol moved his hands across the bed and responded: “No, it’s not serious, she’s not suffering, it’s nothing.” He tilted his head against the pillow to listen to the heartbeat of the woman until the man calmed down.