Elena

It’s morning again. Nothing begins.

Impossible to sleep. Perhaps because Mario and Lito are finally home. Or from mixing pills. Or because yesterday I told Ezequiel that I’m not going to see him any more.

As I write, Mario is snoring louder than ever. As though, by breathing in, he’s trying to find all the strength he has lost. This racket doesn’t bother me today. It tells me he is alive.

He has shadows under his eyes, drawn features, no belly. There is a paleness about him that doesn’t seem to come from a lack of sunshine, but from somewhere deeper. A sort of white glow beneath the skin. There, between his ribs.

When Mario opened the door, I was shocked. I’m not sure whether he had really come back so diminished, or whether I had been expecting the robust figure who only exists in my memory now. He seemed in good spirits. He smiled as before. He had the look of a mission accomplished. As soon as I kissed him I felt like crying, running away. I had to switch quickly to Lito, hug him very tight, focus on his soft cheeks, his supple hands, and his agile body, in order to regain some composure.

Because they were late and I was becoming increasingly anxious, I had been unable to stifle the urge to call Ezequiel. It was then, almost at the end of the conversation, that I told him it was impossible to go on. That being alone these past weeks had deranged me. And that now I had to go back to my normal routine and my family duties. He agreed with everything I said. He told me he expected no less of me. That my decision was the right one. That he understood, really he did. And then, without altering the tone of his voice, he started describing what he would do to me when I next went to his house. I became incensed. He laughed and went on talking filth to me, and I started insulting him, and the rage of my insults turned into a desire to hit him, humiliate him, mount him. He started groaning into the mouthpiece, and I began to touch myself. Then I heard the sounds of the lock.

While I was heating up the dinner, I studied the inside of the oven and thought of Sylvia Plath. I uncorked the wine. I lit some candles. During the meal, I started to feel better. Lito kept telling me stories about their trip, he was so excited. Mario nodded, with a gleam in his eyes. If the evening had ended at that precise moment, if, let’s say, the ceiling had suddenly caved in on me, I would have closed my eyes believing I was happy.

Before dessert the three of us made a toast, laughing like any normal family, and Mario poured half a glass of wine for Lito. I couldn’t help wondering if he had done the same during the trip. I didn’t dare ask. We drank. We joked. We enjoyed our dessert. We put Lito to bed. The two of us sat down together. We held hands. And we stayed up talking until a glimmer began filtering through the curtains. Then all of a sudden Mario seemed to shut down.

Now he is snoring. I am watching him.

I fan him, feed him, bathe him, listen to him, try to guess what he is feeling. And I don’t know, I don’t know what else to do.

These blasts of pain throughout his body. They have no precise location, they meander. I go mad trying to discover where it hurts. As though his affliction were another skin.

He no longer leaves the house. Lito asks what’s the matter with him. I explain that Dad is exhausted after the trip and has a bad case of the flu. I’m not sure he believes me. He looks thoughtful. Occasionally he talks to me about a cap.

The pills aren’t enough. For him or for me.

My brothers-in-law arrive tomorrow. They give their opinions a lot, especially over the phone. But they are less keen on coming here and looking Mario in the eye. They barely touch their brother when they visit him. As if his body were radioactive.

Lito will be thrilled. He loves his uncles. He and Juanjo talk about cars and watch action movies. Those Stallone horrors. Juanjo’s taste in movies is rather peculiar. Stallone’s only noteworthy performance was in a porn movie, I seem to recall. Lito and his youngest uncle shut themselves in his room and listen to music online. My son is twenty years his junior, yet they have the same mental age. He sees much less of his other uncle, who has hundreds of children and dresses them all identically.

Of course Mario is happy about their visit, too. But happiness in him has become muddied. You need to dig down to see it. All of a sudden it appears, from beneath his hostile looks.

Juanjo is going to stay for a few days. And nights.

I make beds, make infusions, make food, make assumptions. Whenever I am on my own, I turn my phone off.

Mario’s brothers are coming in a few hours. And so is all the rest. What’s coming is That. Everything is descending on me. From time to time I leave the bedroom to take a cold shower.

I’ve just turned my phone on.

I couldn’t. Resist.

Full stop. Pointless to justify myself.

He was understanding. He let me hit him. Then we talked about movies.

He penetrated me only at the very end, all at once. It was like being healed.

I got hold of a colleague who asked no questions. She agreed to ring me at home at a prearranged time and, following my instructions, asked to speak to me. Pretending I was busy with something else, I let my brothers-in-law pick up the phone. The moment they passed me the receiver, my colleague hung up as agreed. I carried on talking to myself and concocted a meeting at her place to prepare the school exams. I was surprised by her willingness. I thought she was more prudish. She has three children.

That’s what we talked about, movies. Ezequiel doesn’t like classic movies at all. He makes fun of my taste, thinks they are pedantic. He says I consider any old nonsense in black and white a gem or the predecessor of something. He says today’s movies can’t hide behind these excuses. They are either good or bad. Full stop. I have started using that stupid expression of his, full stop. That’s his approach to life. And to movies. If the characters suffer, he’s interested. If they have fun, he’s bored.

Ezequiel told me he had just seen a film starring Kate Winslet. He’s crazy about Kate Winslet. He says she’s as beautiful as a plain woman can be, or as thin as a fat woman can be. Winslet’s lover is a premature ejaculator (in other words, he’s a man) and after a fuck, she reproaches him: It’s not about you! Ezequiel explained that at the beginning he thought this was a good expression. But that later he had realized it was a lie. A piece of pseudofeminist demagoguery, he said. I was immediately on my guard, tried to gainsay him, but he continued undaunted. He said the premature ejaculator’s problem is the exact opposite. The poor guy is incapable of feeling any pleasure. He has no idea how to get any. He has to begin by enhancing his own pleasure. Making it more complex. Only in this way can men pleasure women as well. “We have to be good in bed out of pure selfishness. A useful selfishness.” That is what he told me. “And then the others thank you. The same as in medicine.”

He rarely gets out of bed, he feels sick, and when he does get out of bed he feels worse. It’s as if he is walking along the top of a wall. His voice quavers. It doesn’t matter how much he eats, he continues losing weight. His muscles, his bones, his veins ache. We can’t keep up the deception that this is the flu. He still goes on pretending. Every time Lito goes near him he grins like a dummy, takes out the thermometer, cracks jokes that make me want to weep. I sometimes think that deceiving his son brings him a measure of relief. Within these fictions, he is still not critically ill.

I change sheets, cook, keep quiet. I come and go like a sleepwalker. I think things I don’t want to think.

I have just left Lito at my parents’ house. He is going to stay with them until school starts. I prefer to spare him this memory. If they take him to the beach house, even better. Childhood always seemed easy there. My sister says she is looking for flights.

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.

This unknown time, this section of me, is what I am perhaps trying to salvage. So that everything that has been done wrong, not done, half done, won’t crush me tomorrow. For us carers, the future widens like an all-engulfing crater. In the centre there is already someone missing. Illness as a meteorite.

What is to be done? Action seems terribly obvious: to care for, to watch over, to keep warm, to feed. But what about my imagination, which has also become ill? Is it wrong of me to plan ahead, to rehearse again and again what is to come? Am I preparing myself for the loss of Mario? Or am I snatching away what little I have left of him?

I mentioned this to Ezequiel once, a while ago, when he was only Dr. Escalante. We were in his office. Mario had gone to the toilet. I took the opportunity to ask him about the appropriateness of planning ahead. I remember Ezequiel saying to me: If you don’t live in the present today, tomorrow you won’t know how to live in the future. I found his Zen-like tone rather irritating. I asked him to be more specific. But Mario came back from the toilet. And Ezequiel smiled and didn’t say anything anymore.

I keep coming across books that are appropriate for hospitals. I don’t mean books that distract me (it’s impossible to be distracted in a hospital), but rather that help me understand why the hell we are there. Where I am not convinced we should be. Where I brought him to leave him in other people’s hands. Now, when I read, I search for him. The books speak to me more than he and I speak to one another. I read about the sick and the dead and widows and orphans. The sum of all the stories could fit into this list.

“Then he took out a syringe,” I underlined last night in a short story by Flannery O’Connor, “and prepared to find the vein, humming a hymn as he pressed the needle in.” When they inject Mario I find it impossible to watch; they usually talk to him about something else while they are doing it, and I have the impression that what they say reaches his vein too. “He lay with a rigid outraged stare while the privacy of his blood was invaded by this idiot,” Mario says that what he most hates about being in a hospital is that as he gets worse, everyone feels obliged to put on a hopeful face for him. “He gazed down into the crater of death,” the crater!, “and fell back dizzy on his pillow,” every so often, Mario cranes his neck, lifts his head, and lets it drop again.

Every night, between paragraphs, I watch Mario sleep and I wonder what he is dreaming about. Does one dream differently in a hospital bed? Because, to be sure, one reads very differently.

Cold, always cold, he feels cold in summer; even though they cover him, he shivers. It is as if his skin no longer warmed him.

Heat can be an extreme sensation, but it doesn’t accuse anyone. If one person is suffering from it, the other doesn’t feel at fault. When Mario grows cold, on the other hand, I feel I am letting him down. That I should keep him warm but don’t know how. I ask the nurses if they couldn’t perhaps turn the heating on, and they look at me pityingly.

I find it hard to leave. In the hospital I sustain my mission. My mission sustains me. Life outside is becoming more difficult. I don’t know whether there is a name for this abduction. Fleming’s Syndrome? When I don’t look after anyone, no one looks after me.

Every afternoon, when I open the front door and hang my bag on the coat stand, I realize how big this house is going to be. I walk through its emptiness. It seems to have been furnished by strangers. Not only is my husband missing, and my son, whom I call obsessively. I, too, am missing here. Although the objects appear intact, time has spread itself over them. Like a museum of our own lives. I am the only visitor and also an intruder.

There is no one here. No one in me. The person who cries, eats, has a nap, goes to the bathroom, is someone else. I hesitate to see my friends because they always ask the same questions. I don’t evade them either, because I am afraid they will stop asking. When I go to bed, as I close my eyes, I have fantasies about not waking up. As soon as I open them, the ceiling caves in on me.

I need some aggression. I need somebody to remind me I exist in myself. I need Ezequiel like a line. Like a gram, a kilo, a whole body. I am not talking about love. Love can’t enter when there’s no one home. Or if it does, it finds nothing. I am talking about urgent assistance. Emergency resuscitation. I want to be humiliated to the point where I no longer care. I want to be a virgin, not to have felt anything.

I switch on the radio. I don’t listen to the voices. I turn on the television. I don’t watch the pictures. I go from YouTube to my bank, from Facebook to books, from politics to porn. The wheel on the mouse is reminiscent of the clitoris. The fingertip controls forgetting. I browse the headlines, I contemplate the catastrophe of the world through a glass, I slide over its surface. I try to absorb the absence of pain because I am not the one suffering in other places, in other news. Does this offer me any relief? Yes. No. Yes.

In the inertia of my searches to discover what it is I am searching for, almost without realizing I tap in: help.

The first result is “psychological help.” Online therapy.

The second result is the Wikipedia entry that defines and classifies the word help.

The third result is help in configuring broadband settings.

The fourth result directs me to the Twitter help centre: “Getting started,” “Troubles,” and “Report violations.” It sounds like the sequence of an attack.

The fifth result helps with editing content. Assuming the user has any.

The sixth result is from the search engine itself: help with searching.

I am not surfing. But sinking.

“In the past,” I underline in a novel by Kenzaburo Ōe, “a siren had always been a moving object: it appeared in the distance, sped by, moved away”, disappearing completely, while I gave, at most, a fleeting consideration to the imagined sufferer and then forgot about it, as you forget a sound you no longer hear. “But now, I wore a siren stuck to my body like an illness”, the illness rotating on itself, my back transporting it. “This siren was never going to recede”. Every time I hear an ambulance, I am afraid it is coming for us.

In a while, I’ll return to the hospital. I only had time to go home, take a shower, and change my clothes. I didn’t have a nap this afternoon.

He always accepts. But he never takes the initiative of calling me. His only initiatives with me (and he seems to reserve them, to savagely preserve them) take place in bed. I asked him whether this is part of the protocol, or what. Ezequiel simply replied: This is in your hands.

Each time I go to bed with him, I feel disloyal not only because of Mario. Also because of Lito. I have the feeling I am neglecting him, abandoning him, when Ezequiel penetrates me. As though, when he does it, he reminds me I am a mother. Then I feel the urge to tell him to penetrate me harder, deeper, in order to give me back my son. I have monstrous orgasms. They hurt bad. He thinks this is good. He finds it healthy.

The more I see Ezequiel, the guiltier I feel. And the guiltier I feel, the more I tell myself that I deserve some satisfaction too. That from time immemorial heads of families have enjoyed their mistresses, while their foolish wives were dutifully faithful. And the more I push myself to escape with Ezequiel. Although I realize that in the end I am not escaping anything.

Every day, at some point, the room doors close in the hospital. All of them. At once. Then a metal gurney goes down the corridor. A gurney draped in sheets.

I look out and see these gurneys go by with a mixture of horror and relief. I watch the nursing assistants pushing them, I hear the wheels turning. Every day they take someone. Every day they bring a replacement. This stream of bodies isolates our room, where we are still safe. This stream also tells me that, at some point, someone will stick their head out of another ward and see me walking behind a gurney. And they will have the same pointless reprieve I have now.

Knowing what will happen, how and where, every gesture contains an element of deception. I bring him newspapers, films, sweets. We call Lito, we chat with Mario’s brothers, we speak of happy memories. I smile at him, I caress him, I make jokes. I feel as if I were part of a conspiracy. As if we all were forcing a dying man to pretend he isn’t dying.

I have the impression that families, and doctors, too, perhaps, soothe the sick in order to protect themselves from their agony. As a buffer against the excessive, unbearable disorder which the ugliness of another’s death creates in the midst of one’s own life.

“Writing about illness,” I underlined last night in an essay by Roberto Bolaño, “especially if one is seriously ill oneself, can be an ordeal. But it is also a liberating act,” I hope this applies to us carers too, “exercising the tyranny of illness,” this is something we never talk about, and it is true: the oppressed need to oppress, the threatened want to threaten, the sick yearn to disrupt the health of others, “it is a diabolical temptation,” we carers also have temptations, especially of the diabolical variety.

“What did Mallarmé mean when he said the flesh was sad and that he had read all the books? That he was sated with reading and sated with fucking? That, beyond a certain moment, every book and every act of carnal knowledge is a repetition?” I very much doubt it, that moment could only be marriage, “I believe Mallarmé is speaking of illness, of the battle it unleashes against health, two totalitarian states or powers,” illness not only takes control of everything, it also rereads everything, makes things speak to us of it. “The image that Mallarmé constructs speaks of illness as a resignation to living. And to turn around this defeat he unsuccessfully opposes reading and sex.” What else could we oppose?

The two of us lie on our backs in his bed, shoulder to shoulder, covered in sweat, catching our breath, floating in that fleeting moment of oblivion. I tried to go from my body to the idea. I think better after I have felt my entire body.

I asked him whether, beyond genetics, he believed psychological factors were at work in illnesses such as Mario’s. According to some theories, Ezequiel replied, we become ill in order to find out whether we are loved.

I dressed and slammed the door.

I called my mother in tears. She told me I was right to get it off my chest. Immediately, as if through telepathy, my sister called me. She asked me how Mario was and told me about some flights she had just found.

When I contemplate him, skinny and white as any sheet, I sometimes think: This isn’t Mario. It can’t be him. My Mario was different, not like this at all.

Yet at other times I wonder: What if this is the real Mario? And rather than having lost his essence, what remains is the essential part of him? Like a distillation? What if we are misinterpreting our loved ones’ bodies?

I have just said goodbye to Ezequiel from the door of our house, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, as if we had no neighbours, after talking to him, arguing with him, having two sessions in bed with him, in our marriage bed.

It all started with a coffee. I sent him a text message and he replied instantly. He was thinking about me a lot today. And I needed a bit of company, he said. And he wasn’t far from my place. And we could at least have a coffee. And, and.

I think he came here with this in mind. The idea of going this far excited him. Well: there it is. There is nothing more for us to defile.

For God’s sake. He came here with this in mind?

I’m going to take a couple of pills. It’s not as if there is much in me that can be fixed.

“In bed, at night,” I underlined in a Justo Navarro novel, “I was crushed by the horror of things being exactly the same as when I was alive although I wasn’t,” I know Mario is scared to death of dying in his sleep, which is why he doesn’t sleep, “and so I counted my teeth with the tip of my tongue to rid myself of the fear of being dead, and I fell asleep counting my teeth. And I woke up: the fear was greater right before opening my eyes,” every night I try to make him fall asleep and I am alarmed every time he does, I do my best to make him rest and then pray silently this won’t be his final rest. Some waiting is like a slow death. It is stifling waiting for a death in order to start my own life again, knowing full well that, when it happens, I will be incapable of doing so.

Last night I dreamt Ezequiel was examining my husband, he could hear something in his skin, he performed an emergency operation and extracted tiny foetuses from him.