The twenty-fifth dawns with a tremendous hangover. The stairs of el Buti smell of vomit and urine or, at best, of spilt alcohol. The events of the previous night flood back to me with the rhythm of an unpleasant reflux, a mixture of food, white wine and that bad champagne. And with each retch, as if I were also bringing up leftovers of memory dissolved in the body, Iris’s face appears to me, her sudden mood swings, from ecstasy to tears and back to her cackle, her stories, the parade of dishes I’d like to erase from my mind, the fried frogs, the roulades, the cubes of jelly that wouldn’t stop wobbling, as well as the party on the street – these were all the images that had stolen into my dreams.
My head hurts so much that my only relief comes from complete immobility; I barely change position, even millimetres make it explode. I stay like that, face up, watching a corner of the ceiling where there’s a bend in the pipe that leads nowhere. It takes me a few minutes to make out two large beetles camouflaged by the grease covering this iron elbow, one on either side of it. They must be between four and five centimetres long. They are so still that anyone would think they were drawn on. It’s a strategy, as if they are studying their next step. Just as I’m starting to think they’re not going to move at all, at least not until I stop watching them, one of the two, male, female, impossible to tell, takes the initiative and begins to turn in circles like a dog chasing its tail. But it goes beyond that, it makes a decision and flies over the pipe to join its lookalike, as if to surprise it. But no, it was waiting. Each knew about the other, they scented each other, one supposes. They play, hyperkinetically, their legs clash until they freeze once more, this time both on the same side but facing in opposite directions. I can no longer tell which is the adventurer. All I know is that while one keeps moving its antennae, the other plays dead. Simón sleeps until half eleven.
My nursing duties aren’t suspended in spite of the holiday, but the timing is a bit more relaxed today. Tosca is in a bad mood, she regrets having had a drink. I’m stupid, she says but she doesn’t look that bad, she just likes complaining. She offers me a piece of sweet bread that falls apart on the way to my mouth. As I prepare the syringe, Benito, standing in front of the television, releases a seguidilla of farts. It’s not the first time he’s done it, nor does it particularly annoy me, but today, because it’s just occurred to him, or could it be that he’s beginning to trust me, instead of hiding them as he usually does, he amplifies them, duplicating them with his mouth in a counterpoint that’s as funny as it is repugnant. At the third or fourth fart, which is actually between six and eight, if you count the echo, Tosca, who didn’t even appear to notice, lets out a shout that makes everything shake: Benitoooo! But he pays no attention, and she doesn’t seem too bothered, it was just a shout, the necessary closure for the series of double farts.
Now that Tosca is beginning to feel the effect of the morphine, I avert my gaze and concentrate on Benito, who has taken refuge in a corner of the room. A dark, stooped mass, will he cry? Benito is one of those people who have such an impact at first sight, inspiring such intrigue as well as repulsion, that the natural instinct is to leave him alone. The idiot boy, cow-head. People aren’t keen to confront him, not so much because of what he might do to them, more because they don’t know how to treat him.
Apart from Tosca, who calls him by his name, everyone else in the building calls him Bear. Some, behind his back, call him She-Bear. His only formal occupation consists of managing the buckets of water that are hauled up the rope to the various floors of el Buti. Kind of like a water-boy. He is also in charge of putting the rubbish into giant sacks and taking them out to the pavement. Other than that, he devotes himself to watching television, eating and taking devices apart. A heap of junk, says Tosca, nodding towards Benito’s corner. Mobile phones, radios, speakers, printers, whatever he finds. He only breaks them apart, he doesn’t fix them or resell them. The pieces accumulate on a magnetic board, forming a mountain of screws, circuits, microprocessors, it’s impossible to distinguish the origin of any of it. The result, he’ll show me some time later, is some strange baroque sculptures suggesting torture, darkness and pain. Among his creations is a tower, at least a metre high, permanently oscillating.
On Saturday I go back to work. On the way to the zoo, something I can’t put my finger on is nagging at me, something outstanding, unresolved. I see Iris in the distance and everything becomes clear. I remember that she’s going to start working double shifts so she can buy her father a plane ticket, that she won’t be able to look after Simón any more. I have a week to find a solution.
I’m withdrawn all afternoon, half listening to Yessica’s Christmas stories. At two in the morning she went to a disco in the arse end of nowhere, so she says, out in the country, a party with some friends of her boyfriend, who never showed up. A complete downer. The worst thing was that the boyfriend didn’t answer his phone the whole night and only sent her a text message at three the following afternoon. If I see him I’ll kill him. She also tells me about a fight during the meal at her house, between aunts, uncles and in-laws, but I pay no attention.
I bump into Canetti and he reproaches me for not having gone up to drink a toast with him. I was worn out, I say, and he frowns to show that he’s upset. Annoyance makes him laconic, which saves me from his interminable chatter for once. The rest of the day passes without note. The threat of a storm that never breaks means fewer people come.
At times my mind returns to the matter of Iris and Simón but I get nowhere. The time of year complicates things. I rule out a nursery, deciding that, if I have to pay someone, I’d be better off not working at all. In fact, I seriously consider the possibility of resigning and looking for something on the injection side of things. I’d often heard talk of the lack of nurses. I could even take Simón with me, I don’t think anyone would mind. But I get swamped by the idea, I end up in a muddle, I’m not used to thinking so much. To forget, I rest my eyes on a fixed point, a goose, a Coca-Cola sunshade, the sun broken up by starchy clouds.
I leave the zoo, avoiding the photographer with the pony; I cross the avenue, join the labyrinth of long queues at the bus stop and get off at the paved plaza full of bookstalls. I look around me and wonder how long it would take for everyone in my range of sight right now, pedestrians, drivers, people in cafes, those queuing to enter the chemist, cyclists, those hidden away in apartments, everyone, me included, to disappear.
I walk all the way round and pause at the last stall. The books are on shelves, in boxes, organised by genre, author and various labels: Bestsellers, Crime, Vampire, Self-Help, Borges and Sabato, Historical Novels, One4Five, Three4Twelve. The vendor, younger than thirty with thick, rather forced sideburns, like a caudillo or an Elvis impersonator, is talking on a mobile phone connected to earphones, slanting his chin slightly so as to speak into the mic. He looks straight ahead as if at me, but no, he’s looking beyond me, at the short horizon of traffic on the avenue. It really pissed me off, he says, falls silent and in a second adds: Yeah, he’s a fucking bastard, he just doesn’t give a shit. I stay there for a while flicking through the books with no real interest, more intrigued by this guy who is now laughing and spitting. In the Science Fiction section I come across The Marvellous Journey of Mr Nic-Nac to the Planet Mars by Eduardo L Holmberg.
On the flap, the author’s biography: A writer and naturalist, he was the first director of the Buenos Aires Zoological Garden between 1888 and 1904. In addition to his extensive scientific work, he wrote, among other books, Hoffman’s Pipe, The Bag of Bones, Insomnia and The Diabolical House. Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg, the very same man mentioned on the stamp of the bestiary I found in the skip in front of the Adventist church. Another coincidence, too much. Making timid signs so as not to disturb him too much, I ask the boy the price, he doesn’t stop talking and answers by showing two open hands. Ten pesos, I understand, but I don’t have enough. Another day, I say circling my index finger in the air. Before returning the book to its place, I read the first few lines, murmuring out loud: There is nothing more admirable than the perfect mechanism of the skies. Nothing is more pitiful than human ignorance.
In the evening, Tosca asks me to inject her with an extra phial of morphine. I’m not sleeping at all, she says. Two or three hours at most, it’s less every day. I’d like to think I sleep but I don’t at all. I close my eyes, that’s it. At the start, she doesn’t exactly feel pain so much as the shadow of pain approaching. It grows gradually, like a snowball, but when it grabs you it won’t let you go. Sometimes it makes her want to shout for me to come down and inject her again in the middle of the night. She feels like two big hands are squeezing the back of her neck, the scruff as she likes to call it, strangling her almost to the point of asphyxiation. A perverse game, sometimes unbearable. She pauses, coughs and continues. The worst thing is the lack of sleep, those long-nailed hands squeezing her neck become so real that she can’t help thinking that they belong to someone, that somewhere beyond there must be a body, a pair of arms and a head, someone contriving to fold away behind the headboard. And that mystery is precisely the thing that’s hardest to tolerate, even more than the pain. She’d like to be able to turn round and discover who he, she, it is, the one who shelters in the darkness to wring her neck.
Torture, she concludes and gives a long sigh that’s only interrupted by the agitation the tale has caused her. I agree to inject her with another dose. The same ceremony every day: I take the top off a phial, load the syringe, look for the vein, right arm in the morning, left arm now. Then Tosca, as if she didn’t think I was entirely convinced, or just to impress me, says what she’s never said before: Give me your hand, come here, touch it, it won’t do anything to you. I’ve already seen it, the first day, I studied it from a distance under the fabric of her nightdress, but I don’t know whether I want to touch it. What for?
It’s the size of a lemon, a tennis ball, a bull’s testicle, rough, ever so slightly more hairy than the skin surrounding it, definitely much purpler. The spud, she calls it. First I press it carefully, as if it were a delicate creature, the back of my hand on the ball of flesh, fat, tissue, that knot of cells that are quicker than the others. I barely graze it, just in case, to see her reaction. Tosca’s words resound in my head: It’s another being that lives with me, inside me. I continue, growing more confident, I become bold and press it without hesitating, covering it, my hand wide open, then cupping it. A curved, prominent nerve splits it down the middle, like a swollen vein, strange to touch. The most powerful, most terrible, most evident thing is its strong, regular heartbeats, not Tosca’s, which beat elsewhere, but those of this small, raw being. Gentle, she says to me, be gentle. We don’t want to disturb it so much that it wakes up. As she speaks I think how stupid I am, that I know nothing of pain.
At least you can see this one, touch it, says Tosca. My sister’s was much worse, a horror, it was right inside her like a poisonous gas, like a ghost. First in the uterus, then the lungs, blood, bones, everywhere. Metastasis, she says loudly as if she’d said Magnificent. She really had a bad time of it, and the treatment was even worse. It left her bald, shrunken, wrinkled, like a raisin. One day I’ll tell you all about it, she says and concludes: Violet was killed by the medicine.
I become engrossed staring at the ochre phial of morphine, thinking about illness, about matters of the body and about decomposition, the time it takes for flesh to disintegrate. A matter of days or months, depending on the climatic conditions, I studied it a while ago. I wonder what Jaime looks like by this stage. It also occurs to me that one day I’ll tell Simón, assuming that he’ll be the one taking care of it, that when the time comes I want to be burnt to ashes.
Tosca brings me back to earth with her hoarse voice: Get me some water, girl, I’m dying of thirst, she says, and after three gulps she spits on the floor. The sight reminds me of Iris, the vomit that never came on Christmas Eve, her features drawn, as if halted by reins pulling at her jaw to stop her from bolting. The difference with Tosca is that her reins are inside, rolled up under her skin, in the form of cancer.
Before injecting her, I ask whether she knows anyone who could take care of Simón in the afternoons. I don’t call him Simón but the boy, like she would say. I explain that my friend isn’t able to do it any longer. A long silence and she calls Benito over. Go and find Sonia, she says. Benito leaves and I inject the morphine. Tosca tilts her head, inflates her chest and slackens. I stay, watching her false teeth submerged in a glass. She now removes them before every injection because her mouth goes to sleep and she hurts herself on them.
Instinctively, like a child left home alone who takes advantage of the occasion to search his parents’ room, I stand up and head for Benito’s hideaway. I snoop around his things, the junkyard. An extraordinary world, jam-packed with everything, which in some way explains the size of his head. The bed is too short, he must sleep with his legs hanging out. I take another three paces and decide to step through to the other side of a glass-bead curtain. A dark tunnel, access to the basement, the entrance to a garage that never was, an inexplicable space. In some strange effect of angles and refractions, the scant light illuminates from the waist up, as if the scene were submerged in muddy water. In front of me, a door invites me to spy. I lean into a windowless bathroom, brought in from somewhere else: a bathtub with feet, a tank with a chain and a chequerboard floor. Remote in space and time.
A snap of fingers summons me and I jump back into the room. Tosca has returned from her trance. Where did you get to, girl? I thought you’d split. I gesture to the curtain and Tosca nods, understanding what I’m saying, my curiosity. A pause and I clear my throat: Between you and me, when you want, you can take a bath. I thank her with a smile. Sitting on the edge of the bed again, something comes out of my mouth which I regret as soon as I utter it, convinced I’ve said something really stupid: Better? She shrugs, deflecting the question back to me with her chin raised. And suddenly she lets her arms fall, as well as her head, she relaxes her facial muscles, unlocking her jaw in slow motion, like a rehearsal for death. And what seemed like sarcasm or a challenge before becomes serenity and candour. She says: Much better, yes.
I think about the delayed effect of the drug. As I’m beginning to see, after the injection, after the narcotic peak produced by the fluid entering her body, the balsam, the nothing, the dreams, when she opens her eyes there is a vertiginous comedown, as violent as the ascent, during which she doubtless recovers awareness of her surroundings, what is real, what the senses detect, colours, light, the aftertaste of bile, the roughness of the hands, and the presence of the tumour and all that it is. But fortunately that ends too. Accustomed to the comings and goings, it would seem that, in desperation, the mind comes back to offer a helping hand to what remains of the morphine in the blood and constructs a plateau of well-being, the true effect, the good, long-lasting one, but one that also finishes, gradually abating towards morning.
That’s where Tosca is, entering the field of relief, when Sonia appears. For a moment, no one speaks. Not the woman who’s just entered, nor the giant escorting her, nor the woman lying back in bed, even less me, observing them all as I bite my lips. But the reasons for the silence are different, particular to each of us, timidity, mental retardation, expectation, torpor. It’s Tosca who’s directing the scene, taking all the time her body requires to intervene. But when she does, it’s without words, a repeated, sluggish gesture, like a drowsy traffic cop, tracing an imaginary line with her index finger joining me to Sonia. I take a while to interpret it, which exasperates her slightly, even though she lacks the strength. She wants me to talk. Sonia listens to me with a concerned expression. She’s a slim woman, more than that, skinny, with fine features, hair to her waist, men’s clothing. In order to think, Sonia opens her deep black eyes wide and looks at me, but not exactly at me, more at the portrait of the Virgin of Syracuse hanging a few centimetres above my head. She stays like that for a good couple of minutes, more gone than concentrating, as if she’s forgotten the question and doesn’t know how to get out of the situation, what to invent. Until she wakes up, gives a slight jump and addresses Tosca as if she were the only valid interlocutor. She says: Herbert, it could be Herbert. Tosca, still silent in her cushioned morphine cloud, gives two eternal nods.