He doesn’t remember having asked the patient whether he has children. Probably he does, because the man carries an old-married or fatherly look, there is a certain physical wear and tear, a burden of responsibility on his shoulders, of worry. It was the weariness, the vague overall exhaustion, that brought the patient here. The doctor didn’t tell the man that in the blood test he was ordering a specific analysis would be included. He didn’t want to alarm him, to offend him. “Who do you take me for?” the patient might have said. “What kind of life do you think I live?”
The man will be there in a few minutes, and the doctor will have to say those words, the name of the illness, spoken cautiously, with clinical objectivity, using the euphemism of the initials. Of course we will repeat the test, but I must also tell you that the chance of error is small.
Those words, spoken so many times, always neutral and yet horrible, the panic and the shame, and so much predictable anguish, and the never-mitigated bitterness of the doctor’s impotence. That is almost another form of contagion, a fatigue like the one his patients suffer, a vague, persistent, and inexplicable malaise, the awakening in certain specialized cells of the unnoticed guest, hidden for years, but also obedient to genetic codes that even now no one knows how to decipher, just as the ultimate nature of matter is not decipherable, the whirlwind of particles and infinitesimal forces of which all things are made, the light of my computer screen and the lamp above the keypad illuminating my hands, the shell I am feeling this moment, remembering a summer, two summers to be exact, alike and yet so different.
You will not swim twice in the same river, nor will you live the same summer twice, nor will there be a room that is identical to another, nor will you walk into the same room you left five minutes ago, the same darkened doctor’s office where you were only once, sitting across from a doctor who spoke slowly and asked shocking questions, and who nodded as he listened to your answers, attentive, fingering a white shell on his desk at the left side of his computer keypad, symmetrical with the mouse he touches almost secretively with long, white, hairy fingers as he looks for a file, the data the patient gave by telephone to the nurse when he called the first time asking for an appointment.
FROM THE BEACH we could see a row of white houses on the cliffs to the east, half hidden in the foliage of their gardens and surrounded by high whitewashed walls, their large windows and terraces facing south, toward the bluish line of the coast of Africa. We were told that high up in the naked rock, where no vegetation grew, was a cave with Neolithic paintings and the remains of Phoenician sarcophagi. I got up very early one morning, just as it was getting light, quietly put on my clothes and running shoes, trying not to wake my wife, and left the hotel, cutting through the deserted garden reflected in the mauve, motionless water of the swimming pool. In the restaurant, beneath unflattering electric light, the waiters on the first shift were setting up trays for the buffet, arranging china and silver on the tables, silent as sleepwalkers. I noticed with pleasure the spring in my step, the comfort of the running shoes in which I’d walked and run hundreds of kilometers. The cool air numbed me in my T-shirt, so I began jogging slowly, breathing easily, but instead of heading toward the beach, as I did every morning, I followed the highway curving up the hill. Because the hill was so steep, I quickly grew tired and slowed to a walk. Seen at close range, the houses we had viewed from the beach were even more imposing, protected by walls topped with broken glass, by security company warnings, and by dogs that barked from gardens as I passed and that sometimes hurled themselves against the gates, rattling bars as they stuck their muzzles through and growled. Except for the barking and the sound of my steps on the gravel, the only thing I could hear was the methodical click of sprinklers watering lawns that I couldn’t see but that emitted a strong aroma of sap and well-fertilized soil.
Now and then I glimpsed the silvery body of an enormous German-made car through the bars of an iron fence. I turned a corner, and before me lay the vertiginous expanse of beach and sea. The hotel looked like a scale model, or one of those cutouts my son liked to put together when he was younger: a picture-postcard blue pool, the line of windows. Behind one of them, my wife was still peacefully asleep in a night preserved by drawn curtains.
I found no path that would take me to the top, to the cave containing the Neolithic paintings. I abandoned the asphalt road, striking out through thick clumps of rockrose in which I thought there might be a path. I came to the road again, which narrowed between rocks and weeds before ending abruptly at a wall with a tall metal door painted a military green. Several dogs were barking behind it. I recognized the high terraces and arched windows we had seen from the beach: the house on the highest point of the hill. Beside the door, on a ceramic plaque, was a name in Gothic characters: berghof. I had read that name somewhere, in some book, but I didn’t remember which one.
I turned back. I was tired. When I reached the hotel, it was no later than 9:00 A.M., but it was already beginning to get hot, and the first German tourists, red from the sun and stuffed from breakfast, were beginning—with careful deliberation—to claim the best chairs, the reclining loungers arranged on the shady side of the pool. I opened the door of my room cautiously and listened in the darkness to my wife’s breathing, and smelled the shared scents of our lives. I sat on the bed beside her; she was wearing nothing but her panties and was sleeping on her side, curled up and hugging her pillow. To see you naked is to remember the earth. I brushed the hair from her face and saw that her eyes were open and that she was smiling at me. I remembered that word: Berghof.
I wish I could hold every detail of those July days in my mind as completely as I hold this white shell, because if any of it, essential or trivial, is lost, the equilibrium of things may tip out of balance. In my student encyclopedia I read the story of how for want of a horseshoe nail, an empire was lost. How many small coincidences were needed for Pablo Casals to find Bach’s suites for cello in a stall in Barcelona filled with old manuscripts? This shell is dragged by waves for a year or for two hundred, and is thrown so hard against a rock its outer edge is nicked, then it lies buried in the white sand of a beach that fades into the horizon toward the west so that one July afternoon Arturo can find it, and so that I in turn may have it here now within reach of my hand, as part of the familiar kingdom of the sense of touch: the plastic of the computer keyboard, the rough wood of the table, the porcelain of the coffee cup, and paper shining in the light from the lamp where I am writing words that are indecipherable to anyone except a pharmacist.
THE DOCTOR IMAGINES he is speaking with a friend, telling him the story, he who confides in no one but his wife, the story of those two summers, of the second summer, the one of repetition, the return two years later. If there is something I truly yearn for, it isn’t youth, it’s friendship, the mutual affection that joined me to others when I was fifteen or twenty, the ability to talk for hours, walking around my deserted city on summer nights, recounting every detail of who you are, what you want, what you suffer, to do nothing but talk and listen and be together, because often we didn’t have money to go to a bar or a movie or play billiards. Hands in our empty pockets and heads sunk between shoulders, we leaned toward one another to share thoughts and conspirings. I miss that bashful male tenderness, feeling accepted and understood but not daring to express gratitude for it—not the rough male camaraderie, that boasting or poke of the elbow or drooling wink at the sight of a desirable woman.
He imagines he’s talking now to a friend from thirty years ago, they’ve kept in touch and maintained the old loyalty, strengthened and improved by time and by the experiences and disappointments of their two lives. He invented friends when he was twelve or thirteen and found himself alone, no longer a child but not yet an adolescent, not a youth, as they used to say—too bad such a beautiful, precise word isn’t used anymore.
Now my son is at the point of entering his youth, beginning to be independent of me, though he isn’t aware of it. He would tell his
friend this, if he had one, if he hadn’t lost the ones he had because of distance or negligence or a slightly bitter current of skepticism that the years have accentuated and from which only the core of his life is safe, his wife and son, and maybe also his work in this darkened consulting room. It is calming to tell things to a friend, though words are imprecise, and it is worth the effort to transmit an experience in every detail in order to make it intelligible, free of the melancholy and self-pity that slip into a memory that hasn’t been shared. When I go home and my wife notices I am self-absorbed and asks me if something is the matter, and I say nothing—the strain of work, the oppressive persistence of illness on those new faces that keep showing up every day, faces of the newly exiled—it is a silent betrayal.
We went back that summer, the doctor recounts, or he would if there were a friend to listen. We had only ten days there, and did almost nothing but swim and sunbathe, read on the beach or by the hotel pool, go out occasionally in a rented car to have dinner or drive around the town. I got up early, ran a few effortless kilometers along the hard sand near the shore where the tide had just gone out and the sand stretched smooth and shining in the first light of day. I liked coming back to the hotel and waking my wife and son, having breakfast with them by a window in the restaurant that overlooked the palm trees in the garden. In everything we did there was perfection, a harmony among the three of us that corresponded to the external beauty of the world, to the full moon and the wind at sunset the first night we walked down to the beach and huddled together to protect ourselves against the cold, corresponded to the purity of the form of a shell, and to the taste and aroma of fish roasted over coals that we ate on the terrace of a restaurant beside the sea. My wife and I, my son and I, my wife and my son, my son watching as we hugged or kissed, my wife watching the boy and me as we walked with our heads close together along the beach, looking down, searching for shells and crabs, I watching the boy as he dribbled sand over his mother’s feet.
Two summers later, they return to the same hotel, during the same days of July, with afternoons that stretch with golden laziness toward the dinner hour. Everything is the same, and yet he catches himself spying on himself, looking for some flaw in the repetition of his earlier enjoyment, uneasy, disheartened without reason, irritated by inconveniences that he knows he should attach no importance to, the room that this year doesn’t look out over the sea but onto a patio with palm trees and the windows of other rooms, the east wind that keeps them away from the beach the first few days, provoking a bad mood in his son, who turns surly and locks himself in his room to watch television hour after hour. He’s thirteen now, and the shadow of a mustache darkens his upper lip. He has lost his child’s voice; it changed without our noticing, and we will never hear it again. Two years in our lives as adults are nothing, but in his life they are a leap from larva to butterfly. His big eyes, crinkled in laughter, the expression so like his mother’s, don’t look the way they used to. You look into them, and he isn’t there. His father must convince himself not to feel desolation and resentment. “The boy misses his friends in Madrid,” his wife tells him, smiling with a benevolence he envies. “Don’t you realize that he’s going to be fourteen? I wonder what you were like at that age.” He watches himself as carefully as he examines the face of a patient or palpates his abdomen or listens to his breathing through the stethoscope, looking for symptoms.
One night while he is waiting for his wife to get ready for dinner, as she is talking to him from the bathroom, combing her hair before the mirror, trying a new lipstick, he sees a blond woman lying on a bed in a room on the other side of the patio. It’s too far away to be able to make out her features, to tell whether she’s young or attractive or just a figure his imagination is crystallizing, the blond, barefoot foreigner on the steps of a train one early summer night long ago. She is gesticulating, talking to someone he can’t see. A man’s silhouette appears in the window. The man bends down to the woman, and something slow and hazy takes place. The doctor presses to the window, to see more clearly, excited, because the movements of the two bodies in the room across the patio are rhythmic; his mouth is dry, like that of a teenager choked with desire.
It lasts only an instant. He turns away from the window when his wife comes out of the bathroom; he fears being discovered by her, or blushing and causing her to ask the reason, which would make him blush even more. The two figures in the other window dissolve like fragments of a dream in the clarity of waking up. His wife wears a form-fitting black dress and black high-heeled sandals; she has put on eye shadow and painted her lips a new, softer shade of red that goes with the deep tan of her skin, and she smiles, offering herself to his male scrutiny, seeking his approval. Now the troubled, secret inspector finds no flaw in the quality of his emotion, he hears no false note, senses nothing feigned or forced; his delight in looking at his wife is the same as it was two summers ago, or twelve years ago, it hasn’t waned, hasn’t been contaminated by habit. He looks at her dark, bare legs and is as captive to desire as the first time, in another hotel room, and he drinks her in with all the lust women have always kindled in him. Even when he was twelve he would stand bewitched after school, watching the girls in the first miniskirts, and once one of his young and beautiful aunts bent over him to set down his dinner and before his eyes was the white, trembling flesh of her breasts in her low-cut dress, perfumed, shadowy—the delicate female flesh he now smells and strokes and gazes at as he puts his arms around his wife, trying to pull down the zipper of her dress, to run his hands up her thighs with urgent need.
She bursts out laughing and tries to draw away, flattered and annoyed, always amazed at the suddenness of male desire. “My lipstick is all over your face, we’re late for dinner, and our son’s waiting.” “Let him wait,” he says, breathing through his nose as he kisses her neck, and when, as if invoked by their words, their son knocks at the door and tries to turn the doorknob, he sighs, “It’s a good thing we locked the door.” That will give them time to compose themselves, to calm down, and when they come out, the boy gives them a look that may be slightly censorious, or maybe it’s only questioning, even a little mocking. “What took you two so long to open the door?”
THERE ARE RAPIDLY blinking lights in the darkness beyond the broad white band of waves breaking on the sand; with the new moon, the speeding launches of the tobacco and hashish smugglers breast the foam, along with emigrants coming from the other side, from the darkest line of shadow, the coast of Africa. Aesthetic contemplation is a privilege, but sometimes a lie: the beautiful, dark coast we are seeing this night from the restaurant terrace, the scene onto which we project tales and dreams, adventures from books, is not the coast seen by those men crowded into boats rocked by the sea, on the verge of capsizing and dying in waters murkier than any well, dark-skinned fugitives with glittering eyes, pressed against one another to protect themselves from cold and fear, trying to conquer the feeling of being impossibly distant from those lights on the shore they have no guarantee of reaching.
Some are returned by the waves, swollen and livid and half eaten by fish. Others you see from the highway, dashing across open land, hiding behind a tree, or flattening themselves against the bare ground, terrified, tenacious, looking for the road north taken by those who preceded them, beleaguered heroes of a journey no one will speak of. When we drive back from the restaurant toward the hotel, we come upon two Guardia Civil jeeps beaming their spotlights on the dunes near the highway; with his face against the back window, the boy, as excited as if he were at a movie, watches as we pass silently whirling blue warning lights and the silhouettes of two armed guardias. What would it be like to hide in this moonless night, wet and panting, lying in a ditch or one of those cane fields, a nobody with no belongings, no papers or money or address or name, not knowing the highways or speaking the language, the doctor thinks later, in bed, lying close to the woman sleeping with her arms around him, both of them exhausted and drained by the greed of love.
He wakes with the first light, clearheaded and rested, but doesn’t get up, he barely moves in order not to leave her arms. He watches the gradual dawn like a silent and patient witness, drowses with eyes half closed, then feels the spirit and energy to get up and put on his running clothes: a favorable sign that their happiness will be repeated, that things will be exactly the same, his wife’s and his son’s love, the fullness of every sensation, as strong as his pleasure in thrusting deep within her. That memory is so vivid that he gets out of bed with an erection.
At that hour of morning, the colors on the seashore have the faded tones of an old postcard, the blues, grays, greens, and roses of a hand-colored photograph. He begins running along the highway curving up the cliff, at a fast pace, with long, energetic strides, pumping his arms rhythmically, noting in his Achilles tendons the effort of the climb, his lungs expanding in the sea air, his whole body weightless, moving with a physical joy he never experienced in his youth. With every curve the precipice is more dizzying and the view more sweeping: Tangiers in the distance to the west, a white line in the fog-free blue, the Rif Mountains, where flat-roofed villages cling to ravines just as they do in Alpujara de Granada.
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