I can’t see one.
Stop, there’s a kiosk.
There is. Maybe the lucidity has all gone over to Lerena’s side. Given Suano’s limited vision, he hasn’t done too badly so far. The kiosk resembles the empty snack bar they saw on the way in, but the shelves are overflowing now with all sorts of goods, as if they had been stacked expressly to delay the travellers. Sitting on a garden bench, a worker in a brand new uniform is carving the handle of a spade with a jack-knife. Sitting beside him is a regal-looking old lady, rocking a baby’s portacot: it could be one of Moumby Sezala’s pastoral compositions. Lerena rushes to the sanit, relieves herself and splashes her face. On the way out, she stops to buy something from the dispensabot, puts it in her bag, and with an alarmingly unsure step, practically staggering, returns to inform Suano that all there is to eat is bean stew. Okay. He wolfs down two bowls in a flash. Although this stew should be easy on the stomach, Lerena is apprehensive and can swallow only a few mouthfuls, fighting down her nausea. She coughs up a little fibre. Her cheeks take on a bluish tinge, then she goes pale again. The old lady asks if she can tempt them with a freshly squeezed amashook juice. Yes, please, whispers Lerena, and she is heading for the bench when Suano takes her by the shoulders and redirects her to the mincar. Don’t be mashnoon, doctor; they’ve already got what they want from me, from us.
They continue on their way, now across the plains. In the end, they achieved their goal, says Suano: they stopped us from doing what we wanted to do. Lerena begins to cry again: What they did…she murmurs, and leaves the sentence hanging. It’s as if she has fainted. Suano decides to wait. And eventually she continues: What they did is nothing; they blanked us. The mincar drives on between the walls of country villas. It’s so unfair the way space is shared, she says. What they do, he says, people like that, is plunge you into unfamiliar waters. Maybe, she says, resting her head gently against the seat, as if it were a piece of fine china. So life is less of a burden if there’s no prize to be won? It might have more variety, he says. The night has stagnated. The mincar moves across the dark plain like a fly crawling on a photograph. Laconically, unhurriedly, they come up with explanations for why there are guides like Munava in the world and people who follow them. They’re inclined to understand. But understanding disgusts them.
And there is another current welling up now in Suano: disgusted by the harsh and dogmatic rigour of the Clearseers, he is beginning to feel the same way about his own asceticism. He has reason to be self-critical, but to find yourself disgusting is very uncomfortable.
This part of the trip is going nowhere, says Lerena.
I have a job to get back to, he replies.
A responsibility, she says. Well, it won’t be long now. They savour their uneasiness. They have been in danger together: that would be one way of putting it. In danger of losing their minds, especially. At the critical moments, they accepted the conditions blindly, as if they were so excited by the prospect opening up before them that logical thought would have thrown them off course, as if they had plunged into ordinary life, with its ups and downs, buoyed by a stupid confidence, maddened by the promise of sanity. There’s no other way they could express it, but the truth, we should admit, is that they don’t express it at all. Suano’s bones are aching, especially his jaw. And his tongue, intensely. The brawling in Lerena’s gut makes her bend over double, clenching her body around the lacerations.
Pain speaks through her like a ventriloquist. The dummy’s mouth of pale wood opens and mutters: When one of two lovers can sense she is dying, isn’t it right for her to watch the other, in the time she has left, to see if he’ll get by on his own or die of loneliness straight away?
Botilecue stares at the lines on the road.
I’m not playing this game anymore, he says.
But she replies: If I’m going to go on, I have to rest, Suano; I just want to sleep.
He has never heard her say anything like that; it shows how seriously ill she is, and although he was thinking a moment ago that it might be time to leave her alone, he’s not going to do that now or mention it because he really doesn’t know what he wants to do or should be doing. Nevertheless, the therapist in him supposes that this mental ground zero could represent a break with the past, and that she may be aware of this.
There are lights on either side of the road. He could take the opportunity to look at Lerena.
The time they have left is shrinking. Vitalist hotels and old casinos file past as they drive through the dull city of Alcidez. On the southern outskirts, Suano parks the mincar in the courtyard of an average-looking lodgitel, one of the Lescos chain. Through a window, they can see a girl with dark hair and milky skin behind the reception counter; she’s pretending not to have noticed them.
It’s the rude bitch from the lodgitel on the way in, mumbles Suano. Let’s go somewhere else.
Lerena shakes her head wearily. It’s not the same girl. Yes it is.
No. It’s her twin.
Pfff.
I know it is.
And with that, Lerena slings the backpack over her shoulder, opens the door, pivots her body, plants her feet on the ground, and tries to stand up but loses her balance and bumps her head on the doorframe. When Suano rushes to help her, she collapses, sliding down his torso, and clutches at his belt. With a deathly giggle she lets him lift her up by the armpits and help her into the lobby.
The receptionist is doing sums. She switches on another lumilabra, and considerately dims it so as not to dazzle them.
You used to work at the lodgitel in…in…?
No no no; that’s my sister.
Suano shuts up. Lerena asks for a room, please.
When the girl announces that there are no vacancies, Lerena takes out some bitcards and spreads them on the counter. On hearing that the Majestine Suite is free, she waves her open hand over the cards, waits for the girl to take what she deems appropriate, collects the rest, turns around, and totters. Before she can fall, Suano is holding her. He carries her down an absurdly long corridor to the suite, about to collapse himself by the time he reaches the door, and lays her on the bed. Then he goes back for his bag. The window gives onto a garden containing an enormous buxus bush, and the moonlight shining in illuminates a superlative room. A subtle scent of cinnamon rises from the springy carpet. There’s a monitorium in the entrance way, a painting of a river pool, and a tray of fruit. Suano eats two plums and deposits the stones in a minbot for processing. This, he thinks boldly, is how it is, yes: money translates into comfort like this, not the life of an agapythium. He takes off his shoes and his coat, and sits down on the edge of the bed.
Lerena is naked under the deep red blanket; the back of one hand covers her eyes, while the other lies palm up beside Suano.
She murmurs: My mind’s split open; my brain’s cut in two; I’m trying to sew it up, Suano, one stitch at a time; I could hold the parts together before; but now I can’t, and they’re coming out, out through the cut…
Suano knows that he mustn’t rush her to finish the sentence. They remain silent until they hear the sound of a box branch rustling.
Lerena continues: These figures appear; I don’t know if they’re women or men or monkeys, holding something, food of some kind; I know I should eat it, but I don’t want to, and…
Shh, says Suano, deeply affected. Ssshhhh. This symptom – he has seen it before – is Unidentified Image Anxiety. Most people have it to some degree; it results from the subject’s self-enclosure. But when a patient can barely see what’s right in front of her, it can mean that an opening is imminent: a relaxation of surveillance, and therefore a return to health. It’s a minor portent. He has observed this in other patients but never experienced it himself, which must mean that Lerena is surpassing him in health. He will have to follow her. Mental development is not linear. This train of thought is interrupted by a faint, providential noise.
Lerena is massaging her belly. She burps; her face scrunches up in fruitless effort.
A few minutes later it is smooth again. Now she is wearing a dolphin’s involuntary smile; eyes wide open with hard, centred irises, as if trapped in the hope or the hopelessness of an endlessly repeated hour. Suano gets up and undresses, and although he considers the privacy afforded by that springy carpet, only the bed can offer him the prospect of a cure. He lies down, switches off the lights and rolls onto his side, facing emptiness. Alone in her purgatory of gastric noises, Lerena maintains a respectful distance. She moans in her dreams. Suano comes closer. He props himself up on an elbow and, leaning over her, smelling the combination of peppermint, fogwater and furious acids on her breath, contemplates the tentacular hair spread over the pillow, and bites his wounded tongue to keep himself from sobbing. If he doesn’t get a few hours’ sleep, he’s going to fall apart. Although she’s lying still, Lerena seems to be asking him not to disown his incipient erection; but the erection subsides.
Suano’s dispossessed clients – the generous thief, the puerile and jealous drunk, the muscle woman with her off-putting exuberance, the man who can never follow through, the pariah, routine cases all – would burst into wild applause, and so would I, at the sight of the doctor wondering, like an illiterate staring at a page, how a durable, devastating, dwelt-upon hatred such as he has nurtured for years can give way to this subtle, insistent effervescence, this resurgence of optimistic liquids from a source that had seemed definitively dry: there’s no sure way of knowing whether this is the prelude to a new love or the echo of an old one.
Suano stretches out on his back. Murmuring rivers of feeling lull him to sleep.
When he wakes up, dawn has taken easy possession of the luxurious room. He has slept only a few hours.
Lerena is standing in front of the window, swaying limply, fervently, a bleak rain of hair on her shoulders, muttering something to the garden, like a nun beseeching God to stop a prophecy coming to pass. The leaves of the buxus sparkle with dawn light.
What are you doing?
Good morning, Suano.
Lerena.
She rests her forehead on the glass. I’m thanking Munava for what she taught us, Suano; for the money she wouldn’t take; I’m thanking her for not taking it; but also for the money itself; come and thank her with me.
He rubs the top of his head.
Come and say thank you, be good, says Lerena.
Suano gets up, pulls on his trousers and goes to stand facing the garden beside her. For a minute and a half, he recites more or less what he has just heard her say, but the term money keeps coming back and finally provokes a reaction. Revolted, he asks Lerena to stop, to stop it, now. Psstt, he hisses, come on, Lerena. Since she’s not moving, he takes her by the waist to get her away from the window. There’s a struggle. Let go of me, you blogun, she yells; let go of me. No, he says sharply, no superstitions.
This prohibition has a calming effect. Lerena pulls free, goes and sits on the bed. Maybe you’re right, she says, maybe, though I don’t know what about. She looks up: Come on, sit down. He does.
From her backpack, she extracts a papetex bag with a yellow string.
For you, she says, and hands it to him.
It’s a brass miniature: a horseman wearing a propylene suit, from the time of the Mancós war, with an oscillator slung over his shoulder; he’s mounted on a rearing palafreno, his left hand holding up the lamp of Reason. His clumsily painted face has a vengeful rather than jubilant look.
It’s very old, says Lerena. In all that pildraff they had in the kiosk, it was the only thing that stood out.
It must have been a toy.
Although Suano doesn’t take his bodily reactions as a guide, he’s not about to sing the superiority of the soul. The emotion overtaking him now comes from both soul and body, and he tells himself to be careful. Thank you, he says, trying to get the palafreno with its little tin-plated pedestal to stand up on the carpet. If they need to purge themselves of anything, it’s sadness, he thinks. The despot, the manager, the boss and the behavioural counsellor try to convince whomever they can that life is one task after another, each more onerous than the last. Every now and then they let us dance, so we can pretend we’re happy. That’s why love is so hard to refuse: the joy it brings is so powerful, however volatile. But Doctor Botilecue, who is fundamentally sane after all, would not categorically deny that reason, though it lights the way like his little horseman’s lantern, should be subordinate to desire; or in any case, he would not deny that all the reasonable norms of behaviour are formulated by individuals who are full of desires; otherwise there would be no work for therapists like him. He has no time to develop these thoughts, because he has noticed that Lerena is wearing one of her expressions. In this case, it is one that means: But I want to give you something more.
When she speaks, however, what she says is something else:
I feel awful, Suano, terrible…but you’re giving me strength because you make me happy.
Wow: success!
I mean it; you’re really good at showing how to handle failure. With you, I didn’t achieve a goal: I was able not to achieve it. It makes me feel powerful, using your words.
No, Lerena. They didn’t let you achieve it.
What.
They set a trap for you, that’s what it was, as if they knew you’d want to fall for it: a temptation you couldn’t resist, because of the way you are.
You’re right; it’s not the same thing. Uh, ughh.
As he asks her what’s happening, Lerena gets up and hurries to the sanit, taking careful little steps. She shuts herself in and the soundproofing muffles but can’t entirely mute a clamorous surge. Then some progressively deeper noises. After a while, the sound of running water. Although he would have to admit that he’s a little bit embarrassed for her, mainly he is glad to know that the poison from the bitcards is passing through her body, which he no longer hates as he did once, or at all, in fact, neither her body or nor her soul. By the time she comes out, Suano is beginning to feel hungry. There is also a knot in his stomach.
You ate evil.
Some of it’s already gone through me.
He asks her if she can face breakfast. She nods without looking at him, and gets dressed. The monitorium in the entrance hall takes their order: cafito, mineral water and curative alonut buns. They look out at the garden as they eat. Aware that each mouthful is hard work for Lerena, Suano can’t enjoy the taste of the buns. Pain goes on, and that is why no story has an end. Lerena has let her cafito go cold, but she fixes her gaze on the swirl in her cup, hoping this concentration will help. She is struggling to stay awake. She sets the cup down and lies back on the bed.
Be honest with me, Suano, she says. For you, is it something eternal, love?
Pretending to swallow carefully, he pauses, and gathers his courage in the pause.
I wouldn’t have liked the world without you.
Ah, past tense; but you weren’t wondering how long it would last. Lerena closes her eyes, as if to confirm that she is not under hypnosis. She says: I was, I was wondering.
I don’t think you loved me, to be honest.
Meb, but I know it was better with you; I was better with you, easier.
Ease is the springtime of the subject.
I don’t care if I recover or not.
Suano abandons his breakfast. He picks up the triumphant equestrian figure, examines it in the light from the window and strokes the tiny, dream-worn face. There’s no getting away from sadness.
Sensing the quietness of their voices, the room’s system diffuses an opalescent luminosity; at once the space around them seems to shrink. Lerena is indifferent to this display of sheltering care. She becomes pure determination again, but in a new way now.
I’m learning to love, I think; I’m going to learn.
Whether or not this can actually be done is something that Suano has often pondered in his therapeutic work, both with patients and on his own. Generally, he concedes that there is a kind of learning in love, a way of gauging
how far one has fallen this time as compared to past occasions, but he feels that it’s harder to learn how to love a specific individual. Now, however, he’s starting to think that this too may be possible, if it means setting out to retrieve a feeling that has been forgotten but not entirely quenched. Perhaps the desire to learn radiates from an ember of love for that person, still there somewhere, half buried or ignored.
The imminence of a lukewarm ending, sad as it is, cannot reduce them to silence. They are on a threshold. What is behind them is of no use, for anything at all. And if there’s anything ahead, the shape of it is still invisible. If they weren’t both in such a bad way, they might even stop to chat with the receptionist – not the black-haired, white-skinned girl from last night, but a fair-haired, middle-aged man with faded eyes, who recites a plains proverb for their benefit: Bent-over body proof against ill. They walk past holding themselves erect, but bow a little all the same to avoid any bad vibrations, and as they reach the door Suano whispers that the man is an albino. I like it when you hear people thinking more than the words they say, she replies. Walking beside him, she leans on his arm. He doesn’t get a chance to ask her what she meant: in the parking lot they come up against the inevitable once again.
By way of a farewell, some gang has come down from the Felinezo to put another dent in the roof of the Diminut, with a wooden club, it seems, the smaller kind prescribed by their criminal traditions. For good measure, they have taken the spare tyre. And the mechanistor. Lerena collapses onto the seat. Pack of smiggits, Suano says to cheer her up. It’s an allegory of what they did to our heads. But they don’t get it: you can fix a panel, and we can get over a few clocks on the arkle.
Take it easy, Suano, we’ll be fine, Lerena assures him, and it’s as if she were saying, This guy is so naive.
His newfound faith in her predictions is brightening the prospect of what might otherwise have been a dull and insipid stretch of the trip.
An overcast day: crinkled vapours and flimsy clouds pull away from the sky’s grey clay, as if someone were modelling it. The light is greasy. Sirens are sounding; a trickle of drainage: the mincar no longer keeps the world out. In the fields, almond trees ripe for harvesting, then the amber gases of a cement works. Lerena stretches a trembling hand towards the dashboard. She fumbles, groping at the air. She has lost the way back to steadiness. Noticing this unleashes a blank, corrosive anxiety in Suano, but neither the noticing nor the anxiety enables him to find a route map in his head or heart. Lerena is equally lost. There is no ideal in view, promising to reveal itself; they are all alone, defenceless against the phosphor of feelings.
Melodrome Page 10