The room was plunged in darkness. I stepped close to you and placed my fingers on your gray head. All around us, silence and heated air. The stillness was so deep that death seemed to be looming behind it. The plastic bracelet on your wrist bore your name. You had a cast on one leg, and another on one hand. Your arms were immobilized on both sides by countless tubes, which were in turn connected to the machines recording your vital signs. Beneath your closed eyelids, your eyes were pulsating. A ventilator supplied your oxygen.
The doctor had explained to me that besides various contusions, your fall had caused a severe closed-head trauma, with hemorrhaging in the cerebrum. In order to buy enough time for the swelling to go down, they had “put you to sleep.” A euphemistic phrase that would have annoyed you. Inducing a coma was the only way of reducing cerebral activity to a minimum and keeping intracranial pressure under control. He explained himself exhaustively, your doctor. Nevertheless, when I asked him if you could hear me or perceive another person’s presence at your side, he gave an ambiguous reply. “That’s not something we can know with certainty,” he told me. “But all the studies indicate that comatose patients lack perception.”
“Vera,” I said to you, and I couldn’t go on.
I felt a weight on my chest when I imagined the possibility that you were there, behind the body lying under the bedcovers; that you were on the other side of life, trying to speak to me. I took your hand and squeezed it hard.
It had rained, and through the window of your hospital room I could see the reflections of the first streetlights glistening on the wet pavement.
A nurse knocked on your door and without waiting for a response came into the room. She was a woman in her thirties, short in stature and broad in the hips. Her face seemed to have the transitory firmness of a ripe fruit.
“You haven’t eaten in hours,” she said to me while making notes on a clipboard. “Why don’t you go down to the cafeteria? Nothing’s going to happen to the lady.”
As I didn’t answer, she stopped her work for a moment and looked at me. Then she took a step backward and adjusted her hair, which was done up in a bun. Her cheeks reddened. I could tell that she felt intimidated by me.
“It’s good that you talk to her and keep her company. I’m sure she can hear you.”
I would have liked to ask her to say more, but her flushed face made me abandon the idea.
“My name is Lucy. If you need something, all you have to do is press this little button.”
When she went away, I sat in the chair next to your bed and dozed off.
At regular intervals, another nurse would come in to check your vital signs, and I would start awake. It was during one of those sudden returns to consciousness, sometime in the middle of that broken night, when I felt a pang of regret at knowing so little about you. About your origins, your family, your life. You’d had a husband and a son, Manuel Pérez and Julián, but you never talked about them. All I knew about your son was that he’d died of a lung disease at the age of thirty. The mystery you surrounded yourself with in order to face the world had resisted me too, despite our closeness.
After the news of your accident was made public, I couldn’t help noticing that no one came forward and claimed to be a member of your family. Even though the grief of those who did show up—writers, poets, men and women of letters—was obvious, none of them seemed to have known you very well. The only person I contacted was your poet friend, Horacio Infante. I didn’t have his number, but Gracia got it somehow. I had deduced from our conversations—even though you never stated it directly—that Infante meant a lot to you. On the telephone, his voice sounded shocked. I couldn’t help noticing, however, that he never showed up at the hospital. I tried to speak to him again, but I was unable to get hold of him. I left my cell phone number on his voice mail and told him to call me if he wanted to know how you were doing. I learned from the papers that he’d returned to Paris, his place of residence, a few days after your accident.
While the first blue gleams of dawn began to tinge the darkness, I thought that under the wrapping of your body, your heart was beating, and that you were that heart. Even though you couldn’t hear me, that was where you lived now. Secluded inside its walls, going on with your life, but in another form.
Confused by my sleepless night, I left the car at the hospital and returned home on foot, walking along the river. A pitiless light was growing in some corner of the mountains, showing itself above the snowy peaks and then crashing down onto the windowpanes.
When I reached our street, I saw the tramp asleep on some shapeless sacks. He was covered with a blanket, his back against the wall of a neighbor’s house. For at least a year, he’d been prowling around the neighborhood, and we’d got used to his presence, his smell, the sound of the empty cans he carried slung over his shoulder, banging against one another as he walked. He was a tall fellow with a small, birdlike head, and behind his ravaged appearance you could just discern the elegant man he must have been. He had never asked us for food or money, and it was hard to be clear about whether he refrained because he lived in another world, or for dignity’s sake.
Arrived home, I took off my clothes and snuggled up to Gracia. Her warm skin aroused my senses, but she was sleeping and didn’t react to my attempts to make love to her.
I woke up a few hours later. My body ached all over. Gracia came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel from chest to knee. She went to the window and pulled the curtains wide open. I could see your house, with its wooden shingle roof and the vegetation that covered it. I thought that Arthur and Charly must be hungry. As soon as I got up, I would go over and feed them.
“Good morning,” she said in that husky voice of hers.
Her eyes were red, as if she hadn’t slept much or she’d been crying, and I was touched by the slight tremor in her chin.
Her skin, always sun-browned, looked even darker against the white towel. She sat in the middle of the bed with her legs crossed, gathering up her long, wet hair at the base of her neck. Gracia possessed indisputable self-confidence. I never asked you about that, but I know it’s no virtue as far as you’re concerned. You used to tell me that a creator’s sole possessions were her fractures, her uncertainties, her questions and her idle pursuits, and the constant doubt about the ultimate reason why things are. Only through those cracks, you said, could something grow that had never been there before. But Gracia had no creative aspirations, and the self-assurance she displayed in all the areas of her life brought her ample benefits and rewards. She had studied engineering, but at twenty-two she’d begun to work in television. Now, fourteen years later, she was one of the news anchors on the most popular channel, and her energetic temperament entered the homes of millions of Chileans every day.
“I didn’t hear you come home. Tell me about Vera,” she asked. Her expression showed her distress.
“They’re putting her into an induced coma. Given her age, the possibility that she won’t wake up again is pretty high.”
Gracia squeezed her eyes shut, as if an image had appeared before her pupils and wounded them. Then she shook her head from side to side, and droplets of water from her hair gleamed on the window. She gathered up her hair in a knot again and looked at the wall where she herself had framed the drawing of the facade for my museum project. It was a drawing that reminded me, every morning of every day, that one day not so long ago I had won an important prize, and maybe I still had hopes that the project would be built.
“That’s very tough, what you’re telling me,” she said, embracing herself with both arms.
It had always been difficult for me to know what Gracia was feeling or thinking.
When I first met her, I longed to drown the feeling of distance that had hampered me ever since my childhood, to drown it in our love. It was you, Vera, who made me see how puerile that longing was. It was you who showed me that beneath our skin there’s a private world with its own structures and its own landscapes, a world no one else can ever enter. Gracia never appreciated you. And you knew it. She blamed you, in part, for my “lazy days,” as she called the long wait to begin construction on the museum. More than a year had passed, and the authorities still hadn’t reached an agreement concerning the project. There was always someone trying to steer it forward, but also someone with more clout running it aground. Power struggles, different studies, other priorities. There was no lack of reasons to postpone it month after month. And in the meantime, I’d been left hanging.
Every day I got up thinking about some aspect of the design that could be improved, a new material, a steeper angle, a wider corridor, and no day passed without my opening the archives in my computer and adding or eliminating a detail. During that time, Vera, you were always there. By your side, I never felt anxious about the idle passage of the days. There were other things: our conversations, our walks, the discovery of the universe that surrounded you.
“It’s horrible. I…,” she said, and then she stopped.
“What?”
“Nothing, nothing. It’s just that life changes so abruptly, so cruelly.”
I imagined that Gracia might be referring to something else, something related to herself or to us. I wanted to ask her, but she’d already left the bed and disappeared into the depths of her closet. Things that matter, I thought, are too raw, too disturbing to be uttered. Too overwhelming. I slipped farther under the sheets and went back to sleep.
At ten that morning, I went down to the kitchen and made myself some coffee. A few minutes later, I was going through the little gate in the back of the yard, the one I’d built to connect our yard to yours. Winter had given us a gift, a day filled with light you couldn’t see. A luminous, low-lying little cloud of dust was seeping around the vegetation. Arthur and Charly appeared between the bushes. Arthur, with his customary calm, looked at me incuriously and sat down on the stone path, while Charly attached himself to my legs, sweeping the air with his tail.
From the beginning of our friendship, you had insisted that I could go in and out of your house whenever I pleased. For that purpose, you’d given me a copy of the key to the main entrance, and moreover you would leave your kitchen door unlocked. It was instantaneous trust that united us. You’d even shown me where you kept the key to your strongbox.
“If you ever have to open it one day, Daniel, take out everything you find inside and throw it into the trash. There’s nothing worth anything, nothing but an old woman’s knickknacks. And as for the papers, burn them. I don’t want the dogs sniffing around my life after I die. Agreed?”
I didn’t understand why you were entrusting me with such a personal mission. It was the first time that I thought about your family, about the people who used to be by your side and who for some reason had disappeared. One day you’d go too, and maybe that day wasn’t so far off. Your presence in my life had changed me in a way that wasn’t visible to others—except Gracia—and for that very reason was much deeper and more meaningful. You had deposited something inside me, and you’d asked me to keep it. There it had remained, and now that you weren’t around, I was afraid it would gradually disappear.
I entered the hall and saw the pool of dried blood. Everything had stopped in one chaotic, provisional moment. Silence reigned, a silence broken by the vague, subterranean noises of the heating system. I stayed in the entrance area for a while, looking at the staircase, and then I climbed the stairs, imagining how your back, your shoulders, your knees, your head must have struck every one of them. When I reached the top step, I looked back down. The shadows of the trees came through the hall window and darted back and forth across the wall like fish. I kept walking toward your room, but I halted in front of the open door without going inside. The bed was unmade. You must have fallen in the morning, maybe a little while before I found you. I went back to the top of the stairs. I wanted to reproduce your steps and elucidate the circumstances of your accident. According to the doctor, it hadn’t been caused by a sudden loss of consciousness: the scratches on your arms showed that you’d tried to steady yourself against the walls as you fell.
I retraced my steps over the short distance between bedroom and stairs several times, and then I went back down. Although the staircase showed signs of wear and tear, it was solid. The handrail was firmly attached to the wall and easy to grip. The steps were carefully thought out and well proportioned, with risers seven inches high and treads twelve inches deep, for maximum safety. The most important consideration in their modest design had clearly been practicality. As I looked at the steps, a thought crossed my mind for the first time: maybe your fall hadn’t been an accident. You were a strong woman, in complete control of yourself and your body. Your movements succeeded one another elegantly and precisely. On our walks, it was you who set the pace. There were even some times when you went so far as to poke fun at me: “Come on, let’s lengthen those little strides, you’re walking like an old dandy,” you’d say as you passed me. I tried to recall the image of you lying on the floor, the position of your arms, the angle of your legs, your naked pubis, but the vision was too raw and an internal filter, unable to fix it in my consciousness, rejected it. I went out into the yard to feed the dogs. Then I went back inside and threw myself on the floor, in the exact spot where you’d fallen. What were your thoughts, I wondered, as you lay there, in that second before you slipped into unconsciousness?
Some constellations I had never noticed before were portrayed on the ceiling. The figures, thin lines traced on a light blue background, made me think of the ones that watch over travelers from on high in Grand Central Station in New York. I remembered your obsession with the universe and the stars, and their persistent evocation in your writings. That drawing on the ceiling may have been the last thing you saw.
A current of cold air went through my arms, my legs, my backbone. I remembered the wide-open kitchen door, and suddenly what a few minutes ago had been nothing but a vague hunch turned into a certainty: you hadn’t made a misstep; something or someone had caused your fall.
I searched the Internet for the number of the PDI, the Investigations Police, and gave them a call. While I was telling a weary-voiced woman what had happened, I felt a strong urge to hang up. I knew what she was thinking, and what everyone I disclosed my suspicions to would think, namely that you were an old woman who stumbled and fell down the stairs. It must happen every day in every corner of the world, hundreds of times, thousands of times, older women and older men suffering fatal accidents, and it never occurs to anyone to think that anything other than the victim’s old age might have been the cause. I had no proof. There was nobody now who could testify to your physical strength and the precision of your movements. When I finished my explanation, the woman informed me that the first thing I would have to do would be to procure a medical report corroborating my suspicions, and with that in hand I’d be able to apply to the public prosecutor and request that the PDI begin an investigation.