It’s raining outside and my son is home, though it hardly matters if he’s going to leave again. I’ll sit still so as not to scare him. It’s starting to thunder. I unplug the television, the washing machine, and the rest of the appliances. The time has come to confess, as soon as María gets home. I can’t carry on with this craziness.
All right, I have to tell them something: there were no phone calls, no one ever rang up to insult me, I’ve only just realized that nothing happened and that it was all a product of my isolation, the ghosts your imagination conjures up and the impossible conversations you find yourself involved in. I’ll be brief and direct, no digressions, no bullshit, and none of them will dare question me.
When are you giving back the Nissan? Diego asks Armando. The steel in his voice is much deeper now; gradually he will become an adult and his body and thoughts and physical strength will adjust to this voice, which seems too big for the scrawny boy my son still is. After your mother’s checkup, two days from now, Armando says. Are we all going to the hospital in the Nissan? Diego asks. Don’t you want to go? Armando says. Yes, of course I want to go, we’ll all go to the checkup, Diego says.
It’s hardly surprising that he’s taken aback; only once has he ever been in one of the cars allocated to his father, for that strange family outing to the beach. Armando did not permit state-owned assets, as he liked to call them, being used for personal reasons. Your mother wants to go to the hospital on her own, he says, we argued about it earlier today. I barely blink; I’ll wear them down through exhaustion. She’s gone through the treatment more or less on her own, he says, we have let her do it her way, but there’s been no improvement.
Anyone who’s never been ill thinks that illness is all-encompassing. But if healthy people occasionally fall ill, and occasionally relapse, why do the healthy assume that the sick don’t have occasional bursts of health, days when the illness does not manifest itself and our bodies and our minds recover their customary vitality?
They might believe me and they might not. I know what they’re thinking, but it was a side effect of the disease, a delusion brought on by the heavy doses of medication I’ve been taking. I gradually started to believe it and I felt that everyone else should believe it with me. I’ve not been deliberately deceiving them for months, it’s not like that.
I go out over to the balcony. I stare at the storm clouds, at the rivulets of water streaming down the glass. I endured many downpours during the “difficult years.” You never knew when they might happen. Sometimes it was no more than a threat, a lowering sky. Sometimes they hammered down suddenly, as though angry, and disappeared just as quickly. Sometimes they did not even reach land, but other times, more often, they landed with such force that rainwater formed whirlpools around the storm drains.
I would run into the house with my teacher’s briefcase under my arm, shoes wet, tights sodden, blouse plastered to my back, skin covered in goose bumps, bones limp, muscles frozen to the core. My buttocks would stiffen, my nipples stand up. And yet, once home and safe, I felt my features heightened, a certain elegance in an area located between my lips, my nose, and my eyes, the focal point of the face, those proportions that affirm or disaffirm beauty.
María arrives home from work soaking wet. She kisses us all and tells Diego she’s happy to have him back. She sets some packages on the kitchen table and goes into her bedroom to change her clothes. Then she tells them to keep an eye on me. I feel the need to pee and I head to the bathroom. Are you asleep or awake, Mariana? What’s going on with you, woman? Why wouldn’t someone like me want to die? Why would a person—not just me, anyone—not want to die? Why would a person who is neither dead nor truly alive but has death within reach not want to decide once and for all?
I don’t want to die, but not because I want to live. If death is all there is, if death is all that lies ahead, why would I want to rush to meet it, to add death to death? And how is it possible to add death to death, if death is singular and eternal, and whether it comes today, or tomorrow, or twenty years from now makes not the slightest difference since in every case the length of time is the same?
They call my name; I recognize the sounds that make up the name rather than the voice making them. I know what they are saying, but not who they are. The voice is disguised, like the voice in the telephone. It reaches me as though through a funnel.
There is foam in my mouth and blood in my throat. I’ve never managed to develop a system that alerts me when a seizure is about to happen. They happen and that’s that. I should be vigilant, but I keep up my vigilance until the very moment when I am about to black out, conspiring against myself. I want to get up, but I keep postponing the moment, connecting one second to the next and the next, and when that moment passes, which it is, which it has, in the position I find myself in now, in this other moment, that already is, that will be, that has been, crumpled on the floor.
Armando crouches behind me and slips his arms under my shoulders. He lifts me up; I see myself reflected in the bathroom tiles. The building has tilted slightly and is teetering. Within the generalized ache, I feel a throbbing in my collarbone, my forehead, my shoulder, and my right knee. Small outposts located in the area bruised during the fall. As consciousness returns, the body emits its signals. The first flash is pain. Suffering is peace.