The Butterfly Effect

by Luis A. Santamaría

  He watched Doctor Salas as he entered his office. He did not appear to be more than sixty-five, and he was surprised to find that this person was far from that of any dimwit he had imagined, an image Grau had formed in his head after the testimony of his ex-wife, Violeta. While it was true that his hair was white and disheveled, two deep black eyes stood out inquisitively, as if stating who was in command. He looked more like a movie actor than a doctor: strong, sturdy trunk, thick hands, a gold Rolex on his left wrist, and straight steps that denoted a superiority complex. Grau suppressed a smile to remember the comparison that Violeta had made between her ex-spouse and Robert De Niro: she had hit it right on the nail, just missing the characteristic mole that the actor has on his right cheek. What surprised him the most, however, was the elegant suit he had chosen to show up in his office: a gray Italian suit, a blue tie immensely combined with taste, and shiny black shoes. Too much for this place, Grau thought. Where do you think you’re going?

  "Please, Salas, come in and sit down," he invited him cordially.

  The ex-doctor, showing a sour gesture that he did not seem to pretend to disguise, he approached the desk with determination, smoothed his jacket lapels with his hands, and sat down in front of the director of the center with his chest erect. Grau had thought that he might notice some sign of sadness or anxiety in his face, but it was not so. His gaze was indifferent and distant.

  "Are you Rodolfo Grau?" The newcomer asked.

  "Doctor Grau," the other corrected him roughly. “That’s the way it is.”

  The director stared at the old man's expression, as if waiting for some tentative reaction from him. He didn’t get it

  “Tell me Rafael, do you know why you’re here?”

  "Doctor Salas," he said wickedly.

  Grau grunted, as he didn’t expect to be forced to maintain a power struggle with his new patient.

  "You're no longer a doctor," he replied with unquestionable certainty. “In any case, Salas, do you know what you’re doing in this center?”

  “Social works.”

  "But why? What reason?”

  "I think you know perfectly well.”

  "I want to hear it in your own words," Grau insisted, tired from the lack of answers.

  "All right, Rodolfo, I'll cooperate with you," Salas said, accenting the name. The man, whose name had just been mentioned, clenched his teeth, but he sat patiently and waited. "I'm here because my daughter denounced me," Rafael said with a chill.

  “Why? What did you do?” Grau asked, though he knew the answer well.

  “I lied to her.”

  “About what?”

  The old doctor snorted and waved his arms in reproach.

  "Is this necessary?" He protested. “Tell me what my work will be here, and, above all, for God's sake, give me a decent room. I want to take a shower.”

  "Soon," the director promised, with the weary smile of a respectable man who is forced to deal with idiots. “But first, let's keep talking, why did you decide to lie about your son-in-law's illness? The probability of success was immensely remote.”

  "And yet it worked.”

  "Well, you're here, I wouldn’t say it worked," Grau said, and then let out a mocking laugh.

  “It doesn’t matter, does it? It worked, period.” Dr. Salas leaned against the back of the chair and smiled proudly.

  "You're a genius," the director said suddenly.

  “What do you mean?” He leaned forward again, always with exaggerated vitality. “No, no, the merit was not mine.”

  The interviewer typed on his computer, as if improvising, a few words on a notepad: "arrogance, sarcasm, humility." He paused as he realized the incongruity of his analysis, and returned to the conversation.

  "Who would be the merit of your evil idea, if not you?" He asked, making the question sound like a trap.

  "I don’t want to answer that question."

  “Where were you born?” The one with more authority changed the subject suddenly.

  “Marseille, France. Although by accident, my parents were from Ámber, just as I would be if my dear mother, who may rest in peace, had she not been in labor in the middle of a pleasure trip. I have lived in Ámber all my life.”

  "Tell me about your ex-wife, Violeta.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Grau raised his eyebrows in amazement and continued as if nothing.

  "Tell me about Sara Mora, your old student."

  "Fuck you again!" He repeated, this time pointing at Grau with his finger.

  The director clasped his hands together and leaned against the desk.

  "I beg you to calm down, Salas," he said slowly. “I am your companion here, not your enemy.”

  The old man looked silently sideways.

  “Let's change the subject.” The director decided to try his luck on the other side. "I understand you were a wizard at neurology surgery. An eminence!”

  "Indeed, Rodolfo, you have said it. I was the best,” he said, this time puffing out his chest.

  "Doctor Salas, I can’t help noticing that you’re trying to denigrate me," Grau said, changing his tone with the intention of regaining control of the conversation.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’d like to know why? I am the director of this center, and as such, here everyone absolutely treats me with respect.”

  "You may be the one in charge of this place, but at the level of medical knowledge, Rodolfo, you don’t even reach the soles of my shoes," he said evilly. “I am the eminence, you said it yourself,” he added, and gave him a playful wink. Then he laughed to the extreme, throwing his head back, and the director was forced to imitate him, with something more than prudence, for the truth is that he had left him speechless. The old man was not a fool.

  Once they both regained their composure, Rodolfo Grau stood up and went to the door of the office.

  "There is something, Salas, that I would like to make very clear to you. This is a psychiatric center, or, as we like to call it now, a mental sanatorium. As soon as you cross this door again you will enter a mean and unpleasant world,” he warned.

  “I already know it. I have to do my sentence and pay for my sins, whatever they may be,” the old man protested, rather than asserted. “I will do what is required from me with the sick and I will wait patiently until the day of my release. If I had been able to choose,” he added ironically, “I would have booked a room at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid, and not here.”

  Ignoring his sarcasm, Grau opened the door and put his right arm on Raphael's shoulder, urging him to walk.

  "Watch out for the boys. Here the rules are very strict, you will see, because certain patients are dangerous. If any of them are agoraphobic and cannot go outside the enclosure, for example, we do not tolerate anyone, for ridiculing them, or to drag them out to the street. In these cases we impose very severe punishments.”

  "You’ll do very well, Rodolfo. We seem to begin to understand each other.”

  "There are inmates," insisted the director of the mental sanatorium, "who suffer different degrees of schizophrenia. For example, there are those who believe they are people who they are not, and we even have some who only interact with beings created in their own brain.”

  "I'll keep that in mind, director," Salas agreed.

  "What, then, can I count with your approval?"

  “So it is.”

  Grau accompanied the new addition to his room through the sad corridors of the center. There, he said goodbye to him.

  "Inside you'll find toiletries, pajamas, sheets and a pillow. I'll see you tomorrow, when I introduce you to the boys," he said, and invited him in with a wave of his arm. Then he slammed the door behind him and went down the corridor.

  Rafael Salas stared for a long moment at the door that had just closed. He was alone in what would be his room for the next few weeks.

  He untied his tie and laid it on the mattress of the bed, still unmade. He understood that he had many reasons to worry. He was th
ere to minister to the sick. Not in their treatments, because this was not his specialty, but in first aid, healing wounds, putting plasters on or, in the most undesirable case, he may have to clean the excrements and urine of the most disabled. What most distressed him was the sinister scenario in which he had to survive from now on. All his life he had been trained to open human brains and fix them, but he was incapable of dealing with mentally disabled people. He was not a brave man in the presence of madmen, much less to clean toilets. With all this, from now on he would have to live among a multitude of individuals whose tumors were not on the surface of the brain, but in their very depths: beings crippled of soul and instinct, in whose word could not be trusted, for they themselves lived in an unreal world. In all its cases, this was going to be so terrible, because one would have to enter (and try to understand) in a kind of parallel world that summarized the subsoil of humanity, the manure of society and the failure of evolution. And yet, he told himself, he had to feel grateful for being an old man, a factor that kept him from entering prison.

  After some incalculable minutes of rambling, Dr. Salas heard someone insistently knocking on the door. He was surprised, as he did not expect visitors on his first day. It will be Dr. Grau again, who wants to introduce me to someone, he tried to guess.

  Behind the door, the ex-doctor met a black man with small stature and a lively gaze. His hair was an afro, but not very long, and an unblemished white robe betrayed his occupation in the center: he was one of the doctors. The little man of color shook his hand with a radiant smile that occupied half his face.

  "Are you the new one?" He wanted to know with catchy good humor.

  “The same. And you are..." Rafael said, and leaned over to the newcomer's chest to read the label on his robe, “Saul, curious name.”

  "Saul Morgan," the visitor confirmed. “A real pleasure, it is Dr. Salas, is it not?”

  The man snapped his mouth shut and put his hand on Saul's arm.

  "Yes, but you can call me Yayo.”

  Only one night had passed since she'd stepped into Oxford, and Sara Mora had already regretted her decision to stay with a foster family.

  The first impression had been good. She soon found the road that led from the bus station to the house that had been assigned to her by the agency. After a leisurely stroll along the long Banbury Road, (an avenue that traveled through the city from north to south), it had reached Victoria Road 48th, home of the Connors. The street was not long, and it was purely residential: no shops, no banks, no offices; only beautiful duplex apartments with roof tops finished in a sharp peak, which Sara felt was a very British style. The young girl's enthusiasm was growing until she rang the bell and was greeted by her new family. The most Kafkaesque experience would begin as she passed through the doorway.

  A twelve-year-old boy who introduced himself as Nick was in charge of welcoming her and showing the house to her. His parents (or as Sara later learned, his mother and stepfather) had gone out. The young woman, whose level of English had been rusting over time by disuse, barely understood a word of what the child was explaining. More than uttering words, he spat them out!

  The bedroom that had been assigned to her upstairs wasn’t all that bad; it was spacious and reasonably clean. But the bathroom... "Mother of god!" cried Sara when she came in for a shower that night. Neither was she expecting a twenty-square-foot polished bathroom, but of course it was a surprise to discover that three spiders with thin, elongated legs, which seemed to come out of nowhere, hung from the ceiling above the shower. Sara almost fainted when she had to shower under such repulsive company.

  After the spider problem, meeting the rest of the family was less traumatic. Nick's mother (and mistress of the house) was a strange forty-year-old named Claire. She had disheveled hair, she was used to shouting at the rest of the family and every time she became nervous, the veins on her neck swelled. Her more humane side, on the other hand, came to the surface when she talked, grunted or played with Rolly. The main entertainment of the Connor's little pooch was to lick the cutlery and dirty dishes from the dishwasher.

  If the company of spiders and the dog-scrubber were unexpected obstacles in her goal to stay clean and healthy, true surrealism would arrive later that night. The young woman was about to go up the stairs to her new bedroom, when she heard strange, sharp sounds, as if they came from a cave, on the other side of the living room door. Nick, who was passing by, tried to explain to her through cautious whispers that on the other side of the door Kurt was in the middle of one of his prayers. Apparently, her mother's new husband followed the guidelines of Buddhism to the letter. He went to meetings weekly and claimed to be less violent if he recited certain private songs every day. "He is a good man, now that he has Buddha," the boy explained to Sara's stunned gaze.

  “What does he do?” She tried to vocalize in the best English she could.

  "Forensic." It was Nick's brief answer, and then he turned and left.

  It was the first time Sara heard that word, but it wasn’t necessary to search the dictionary for its obvious meaning. The man had already given her goose bumps, someone she had not yet seen in person.

  Sara thought of how to solve the serious spider problem as she went out Tuesday morning with the intention of taking a walk in the center. Cowboy jeans, leather boots and a thin brown jacket of the same material were enough for that sunny day. Despite the good weather, she felt let down. Now that she was here, she didn’t know where to start. Or, rather, she didn’t dare to do what she had to do. And her new host family didn’t invite optimism for the next few days.

  She zipped the jacket halfway through and redid the previous day's route down Banbury Road. On the way she fell headlong into the Museum of Natural History, so she used it to entertain herself by looking at dinosaur bones and stuffed animals. She then went downtown, where the Radcliffe Camera fascinated her, a colossal circular building built in the 18th century as a scientific library. Nothing else surrounded her; she found St. Mary’s Church, from whose tower she observed the city as a whole.

  Sara had read that at the foot of St. Mary’s Church they had opened a coffee shop, and her stomach was starting to growl. She ordered a delicious chocolate muffin and a cappuccino. She sat on the grassy lawn in front of the church and turned her face toward the sun to feel the comforting heat on her skin.

  Two college students were chatting, also sitting in the grass, stared at her. They made her uncomfortable. The smaller of the two, a blond full of freckles and with the face of a bad boy, broke the ice with a petulant, “heeeey sweetie...”

  The foreigner, blushing, looked away, and as she never ceased to feel the mischievous eyes of the cute guys penetrating the back of her head, she turned her body and gave them her back.

  But Sara was going to discover the stubbornness of the new English generations. The other man, who had just witnessed his friend's courtship with amusement, approached and asked permission to sit down, proving to be several levels of gallantry above his colleague.

  "May I invite you to another coffee, my dear? You have the impression of being short of company,” he said; with such perfect English that even Sara understood every word without problem.

  That the boy was handsome was evidence. And he hit the nail right on: she was unaccompanied! She hated feeling like this. If her mother were there, she would move heaven and earth as long as she accepted the offer of the English man, and thus be able to see her only daughter clinging to a man's arm. But Sara had no intention of pleasing her mother. She didn’t want men in her life; not even with a perfect English accent nor any other.

  She mumbled something in pathetic English trying to indicate that she was declining the offer. Then she took a last sip of coffee and vanished from there, ashamed until, she lost sight of the two boys. She took Catte Street, a university transit, and the presentiment suddenly invaded her that someone was following her. As a product of a reflex att, she turned her head casually in disguise to examine the environment, and
found that the two Englishmen were still in their position, sitting on the grass at St. Mary and involved in their own affairs. But Sara, convinced that she was the victim of one of her last paranoia, still felt someone's eyes on the back of her neck. Passing beneath the particular Bridge of Sighs (named for its indisputable resemblance to its Venetian namesake), she entered the alley in the hope of misleading her observer, if indeed he existed.

  The historic St. Helen’s Passage was no ordinary alley. A little more than a meter wide, the rays of the sun didn’t reach it. Its brick-red walls meandered in an orange light from a pair of lanterns, which would have made it a nightmare-like walk except for one of the walls at the entrance, a poster seduced most drinkers with the following text: THE FAMOUS TURF TAVERN, AN EDUCATION IN INTOXICATION

  What Sara found when she reached the end of the passage put a smile on her face and erased her pursuer from her mind. A quaint little house with a low roof, dating back to the 13th century and encased in between old buildings, was a pub. At the front there was a small patio with a wonderful charm, in which customers enjoyed brewed beers and appetizer dishes on some tables and wooden benches. Sara noticed that the outer wall was decorated with slate posters where the most illustrious visitors to the Turf had been drawn with chalk. Chuck Berry, Elizabeth Taylor and Bill Clinton were three of the celebrities who most called the doctor's attention.

  There were no free tables left, so she entered the premises and allowed herself to be invaded by its British atmosphere of past ages. Comforted by the smell of varnish and the dim lighting, she approached a corner of the bar that was vacant and asked for a beer and a combined meat dish garnished with broccoli and mashed potatoes. It was not particularly tasty, but she didn’t leave a crumb on the plate.

  What Sara Mora didn’t expect was that the pleasant lunch was to be interrupted.

  It had been less than half an hour since she had reached the pub, and the number of diners had doubled. It was about twelve-thirty at noon, and both locals and tourists were starting to leave their homes to enjoy the sunny Tuesday. Sara looked around to make a mental picture of the magnificent appearance of the interior of the room when she was forced to stop the inspection, at a point that caught her eye. She had to stare to make sure her eyes didn’t betray her.