Eric checks Mahavir’s skull and abdomen, which is half the size of an adult palm. He manoeuvres the baby with his hands, very slowly, and touches him with extreme delicacy. I don’t take my eyes off him. We’ve done four sessions and I still haven’t confessed that I’ve noticed an improvement in Mahavir’s abdominal distension and that on the days he works with him, the baby is intensely relaxed. But the osteopath with the prominent thorax wants to go further than just colic and explains that he still needs to explore the potential mechanisms of skin stimulation to provide both physiological and psychological benefits. I realize that I’m having trouble holding his gaze and I need to keep putting my hair behind my ears or bringing my hand to the nape of my neck, as if not paying much attention. When he says “positive impact” I scratch a section of skin behind my ear, which doesn’t actually itch in the slightest. I lose control somewhat when I see him focused, his hands inside the incubator and touching Mahavir as if he could disintegrate at any moment and slip through his fingers. His intensity while working disturbs me, I feel a kind of envy. He is wearing the old, worn-out string and leather bracelets of a thirty-year-old fan of the Athletic Club of Bilbao with a paternal grandfather who still lives in Getxo, Basque Country. He was born in Barcelona but 142remembers the 1982–3 league on his grandpa’s shoulders, cheering on the footballers from the shore. He tells me that while lowering his eyes in a way that makes him vulnerable, still clinging to the bond with his grandpa and with a football club. At Christmas he’ll travel to Morocco with four friends. They haven’t reserved hotels, they’ll wing it, with rucksacks, he says. Let me come with you, I think desperately, but I just glance at the monitor. He isn’t wearing a wedding ring. His skin is tanned even though it’s winter and his hair curls slightly at the back of his neck as if he were still a boy. He’s surrounded by the triumphant halo of a spoilt child who will do just fine in life, someone used to meeting goals, whose parents raised him with a rare mix of tenderness and discipline to believe he’s the best. In a few short hours I’ll learn that he rows in the Canal Olímpic, as the space separating our faces is foreshortened with words like portside and starboard. He will smell like mint gum trying to cover up the scent of tobacco, but that will be later on. Now he is silently handling Mahavir inside the incubator, until he turns and seeks out my eyes again.
“Do you think that today I could work the diaphragm area? He’s very tense from constant crying and I think I could relax him. I know you’ve told me no many times and…”
“Go ahead,” I say with a sudden burst of sympathy.
He looks at me with surprise and smiles gratefully and I clear my throat. I scratch again behind my ear where nothing itches, and finally I hide my nervous hands in the pockets of my scrubs and we don’t say another word to each other. 143
The day has started to clear. There is a mist covering the flowerbeds in front of the hospital with a bluish light. When I’m about to get into my car I see the osteopath beside the car park exit. He’s trying to light a cigarette as he cups his hands to protect it from the wind, his face tilted, his eyes squinted from the heat of the flame. I think about my neat, empty kitchen, about the insipid food, about the hum of the fridge. I remember the ballerina and I fantasize about the first steps she took to get close to Mauro. I close the car door and walk over to the osteopath without really knowing what I’m doing. I just want to feel as daring as she did.
“Hey, Eric. I saw you here… from over there.” I turn to point to my car and can’t believe how ridiculous I look and sound. He doesn’t seem to mind. “Do you want a ride?”
“No, don’t worry about me. I have my motorcycle. But thanks for the offer.”
“Well, we can talk about it at the next session, but I just wanted to say that I’ve noticed an improvement in Mahavir, a very slight but definite improvement.”
His face lights up. He exhales smoke, turning his face a little and twisting his lips to the left without taking his eyes off me, excited. I fill him in a little on the changes in the baby’s vital signs.
“Wow! That makes me happy.”
He tells me about a study done with chimpanzees separated from their mothers by a transparent screen that simulated an incubator. 144
“The chimpanzees could see, hear and smell their mothers, but they couldn’t touch them.” He pulls a strand of tobacco from the tip of his tongue with his little finger. “The study noted chronic activation in the HPA core, and it wasn’t until they introduced physical contact with other infants,” he pauses to exhale smoke again, “that the chimps who’d been separated by the screen began to develop normally.”
I don’t tell him that I’d read that study a few times, I let him think he’s impressing me. I imagine the transparent screen and I hear the shrill cries of the agitated chimps futilely searching for contact with their mothers. Look at her, smell her, hear her, but don’t touch her. She won’t hold you. The cruelty of transparency. Suddenly it becomes unbearable to me. I take him by the arm and ask him if he’s busy, I mean if he wants to celebrate Mahavir’s improvements, with me.
He laughs almost soundlessly, with a frank innocence that’s contagious, as if he had no plans, and wasn’t surprised in the least by my reaction. He looks younger than ever and for the first time our roles are reversed, I’m waiting on an order from him, for him to make a decision. He stubs out what’s left of the cigarette on an iron railing and takes a few steps away to throw it in a bin. In that distance between us, the outlines of where the night was heading begin to take shape.
“Where do you want to go?”
That’s when he’ll put some mint gum into his mouth and I’ll draw closer to him, dying of embarrassment, to whisper into his ear I don’t know but I’m cold. I follow a motorcycle to Sants and find parking with no problem. Go up crooked 145stairs, drink beer from a can in a flat I’ve never been in before. There is a fish tank lit up with a fluorescent bulb and an oar hung on the wall, a shelf with very few books and small objects carefully positioned: dice, glass marbles, trophies, a Rubik’s cube and a graduation photo.
“Excuse the mess, I wasn’t expecting guests.”
He types something into his mobile and I imagine a hologram of Eric’s four friends laughing at Eric’s comment about having brought an older woman home. Define “older”, they say, smirking inside. “I don’t know, forty-something,” and with four emojis they’ll turn me into the anecdote of the year, and when they’re atop some dune, when they’ve crossed the Atlas Mountains, they’ll want to know if experience is a bonus and he’ll tell them to piss off, scooping up a handful of fine cold sand in the desert morning and throwing it at them amid the shouts and laughter of men still teenagers at heart. Before the shadow can continue leading me down the path of self-destruction, I pull off my jeans, turtleneck jumper, spaghetti-strap camisole, socks and underwear. I get gooseflesh all over. The morning—when I put on the clothes now scattered over the floor—is so far away that it seems impossible it was still the same day as this one now.
“Tell me again about the therapeutic effects of touch.”
He looks at me with attentive eyes and smiles timidly because he doesn’t know I’m totally serious, and then everything becomes a knot of flesh and skin and tongues and we never leave that small living room and we do it on the sofa, where he must eat sushi made in a Chinese restaurant for 146supper and spend hours fiddling with his mobile. He moves too quickly and the sofa is too narrow, but it’s good enough, I tell myself, it’s good enough as a stimulus, Paula. That he wanted you even if just for this shag. I touch him to make sure he’s there, because I don’t hear anything. I grab him by the arse, I grip his shoulders, his breathing builds in intensity and now he’s letting out short, muffled cries. Nothing, really. He is mint smoke and ash. He comes a few minutes later and drops his heavy head on my breasts and in that distance before in the car park, that space between where I stood and the bin, it had already been agreed that there would be no displays of affection, that the weight of his head against my body would reveal his innocence and my guilt, it had already been agreed that I would imagine Mauro alive and watching the whole scene and that I would look at him with revenge in my eyes, all alone and all empty. In that distance it had already been agreed that I would struggle to get home and to sleep, only to dream about chimpanzee babies pressing little hands against the transparent screen, shrieking with loneliness, hysterical from the absence of touch, desperate and punished with no hugs.