Martin is lying next to her, his eyes wide open and looking up at the ceiling.
The usual house sounds take over. The sound of traffic from the east predominates, because the sash window isn’t properly closed. However, the noise isn’t very loud, and she guesses it must be late already. She thinks she hasn’t heard a train go by for a while, but perhaps they have and she just hasn’t heard them—that often happens. There’s a murmur of voices from upstairs, slower now, quieter. Two voices, a man and a woman’s alternately, but she thinks the woman is talking more. Next to her, Martin is breathing regularly, with a whistling sound, which means he’s asleep.
Julia doesn’t mind getting up. She doesn’t like the dampness of the tissues she’s stuck between her legs. Martin, on the other hand, doesn’t understand why she bothers to clean off his sperm. They’ve talked about it from time to time; in fact, it’s the only thing they have talked about in connection with their sexual relationship. Julia’s need to get up and wash between her legs seems, to Martin, to mean that she finds him physically repulsive. She thinks he’s wrong. Back when she found him physically attractive, even very physically attractive, she couldn’t get to sleep if her thighs were wet, and she’s amazed that there haven’t been other women who’ve felt the same among those he’s been with. She’s always felt a little guilty about having to get up to clean herself, and she normally solves the problem by surreptitiously sticking a few paper tissues down there. She’s also always found it frustrating not to be able to go to sleep with her head resting on his shoulder. She doesn’t find it comfortable. She’s occasionally made an effort to try it, but she never manages and always ends up saying it’s just a movie pose.
As far as cleaning her vagina is concerned, she doesn’t think she has any friends she could talk to about it, which immediately seems foolish to her when she realizes that she could talk about it with Harri and that, in fact, Harri would be delighted to talk about it. But she herself is the one who doesn’t want to; it would require a lot of emotional effort, and it wouldn’t be worth it.
“You’re terrible,” she hears Lynn saying.
She’s asleep, of course, when the sound of steps on the stairs wakes her up, and whoever it is is already downstairs. She sees Martin’s profile, in sharp contrast against the cobalt blue sky, standing on the balcony that looks onto the garden. Watching life. He used to stand the same way at the back window, watching the young guys coming and going on the barge.
The sound of steps on the gravel, then the screech of the iron gate. Martin comes back from the window, and she closes her eyes so he’ll think she’s asleep.
16
By the time Abaitua leaves the bathroom, Pilar is already wearing a sleeveless beige linen dress. She looks at him from the corner of her eye, an instant, an indivisible moment in time, and then stands in front of the mirror. She starts putting lotion on her face, apparently unconcerned, opening her mouth and eyes wide to tighten her skin, but he knows she’s noticed something. And so she has. Just as he manages to escape into the dressing room, he hears her calling after him that he’s got something on his neck. He guesses what it is and checks in the closet mirror—a small love bite. It’s at the bottom of his sternomastoid. “Let me see,” says Pilar from the bathroom, apparently innocently, but he doesn’t trust her. Without answering, he tries to find a high-necked sweater on the shelves but finally decides to wear a normal shirt, because any sort of turtleneck would do no more than confirm her suspicions, and if it comes to that, he’d rather just not let her look at his neck. If necessary, he’ll tell her he doesn’t like being examined.
To an extent, he also likes playing with the idea of telling her that it’s the mark of a young woman’s passion, and as always when he toys with some crazy thought, he remembers that classmate of his spitting on the principal’s bald spot from up in the gallery. Fortunately, he doesn’t have to say anything, because Pilar doesn’t come into the dressing room, she waits for him in the hallway. She has a jacket made of the same cloth as her dress in one hand and a large black leather bag hanging from her other hand. She looks elegant. This time she looks into his eyes. She doesn’t look angry, quite the opposite, he’d say she looks conciliatory—he knows all the nuances of her different gazes very well—and he tries to show no feelings. Fortunately, he already has his pants on, and he does his shirt up slowly, trying to give the impression that he has nothing to hide. Perhaps that’s why she says “I’m in a bit of a hurry,” but she doesn’t let any anxiety show in her voice. Recently she’s been trying to be the first one to get to the clinic, she says. She’s operating today, too. “Simple things,” she says, and adds that she’s more worried about the shareholders’ meeting at midday. That’s how she tells him there’s a meeting.
She puts her large bag down on the floor and slips her jacket on.
“You could come.”
Déjà vu. He thinks of several mean-spirited responses. Asking where, acting hurt because he would have been happy to go with her if she’d told him further in advance, but finally he just says he can’t go. In fact, he’s pleased she’s so busy.
When they reach the hall downstairs, Pilar tells him about how an old woman who worked as a cook at her parents’ house in Otzeta used to cross the street when she left the house. She would cross herself and, without looking left or right, walk straight out into the heavy traffic on the avenue, causing the drivers to brake angrily, honk their horns, and swear. Abaitua doesn’t know why she’s telling him this now.
He’s about to go into the operating theater when Arrese appears and says he wants to speak with him as soon as possible. Unusually, he’s wearing a suit and tie, probably because, like Pilar, he’s going to the shareholder’s meeting later on. The patient is already on the operating table. An easy case, a myomectomy, so the most important thing is to keep the preoperative bleeding risk to a minimum. But there was an unfortunate accident the week before, and he wants to show the residents how to do it. Arrese promises it won’t be more than a moment, and Abaitua has no choice but to take his smock off and follow him. He has no idea what Arrese might want.
He’s only slightly surprised to find Orl in Arrese’s office. He’s sitting behind the desk, which is typical of his tendency to take the place of authority wherever he goes. There’s something about him that makes Abaitua uneasy, frightened even. His eyes, hidden behind the flashes of light glinting off his always spotless rimless glasses, suddenly appear, small but lively, as if to say they know something about him that not even he himself knows. Sometimes, to get over the nervousness Orl makes him feel, he tells himself that if he had to, he could take ahold of his pastel-colored tie with his left hand and knock him to the ground with a blow from his right. He isn’t proud of these remains of savage, macho primitivism, but knowing that he is physically stronger than some worrying interlocutor helps him to keep calm. Having that final recourse.
The opening chitchat, which can never be dispensed with, is about golf. He doesn’t understand them, because they always use technical terms and he’s never bothered to ask them to explain them. They encourage him, as always, to join the Basozabal golf club, and while they explain the membership fees to him, he tries to think of a sufficiently all-encompassing and silencing response to shut down the subject he thinks they’re undoubtedly going to bring up. Problems at the clinic are Pilar’s concern, and she’s quite capable of taking care of them herself. What’s more, as they know, he’s never gotten involved in the clinic’s business. Orl’s lenses reflect the window, the ventilation device, and the incinerator tower. He puts one of his fingers, which is the width of a scalpel, alongside his nose as he starts in on the subject. He says they want to tell him honorably—in their name and in the name of many of the members of the board, as well—that Pilar’s position, much as they all respect her wish to be loyal to her father and all that, doesn’t make any sense. The sale they’ve been offered is a deal they can’t turn down, what w
ith the crisis in the construction sector and the high speed train line and other infrastructure projects that are going to make the future of the entire area uncertain. Likewise, the conditions the public administrations are going to impose over the next few years are going to make it impossible to earn even the smallest profits, and they aren’t prepared to make the investments they would have to make in order to be able to compete in the new market.
Abaitua thinks he knows now why Pilar brought up the cook from Otzeta crossing herself and not looking left or right before crossing the road. He gives them the answer he had prepared, though not as forcefully, and without saying that Pilar is intelligent enough to sort out her problems on her own. As they know, she is very much her own woman, and he doesn’t think anything he might say will change her mind. In fact, the opposite could happen. In many of their discussions, instead of changing her opinion, she sticks more firmly to her own, often with an unwavering “And another thing!”—jumping at the chance to load up on new arguments. He feels pretty ridiculous, because he’s the only one who laughs at that. He takes his surgical cap off. In any case, the easiest way to get out of the situation is to tell them that he’ll try to convince her. He turns toward Arrese, because he prefers to say it to him, and just then there’s nervous knocking on the door. It’s the head midwife, and she’s obvious shaken up. There’s a problem in the operating theater, and they need help. “A resident’s having trouble,” she says, looking at Abaitua. He starts to get up, but Arrese puts a large, hairy hand on his shoulder. Abaitua would have a harder time with him if it came to a fight. Arrese tells the midwife that they’re busy, without taking his hand off Abaitua’s shoulder. He tells her to look in the cafeteria, she’s bound to find somebody there. The head midwife, after hesitating for a moment, straightens her cap and leaves.
Abaitua wrings his own cap between his hands. He says he’ll do what he can to convince Pilar but he can’t promise them anything. Pilar is very much her own woman. Orl says, “She loves you more than you think.” He leans back in the chair, and the intense sky blue reflected in his lenses wipes out any meaning his eyes may have held. Then he talks about the benefits of golf—it’s a sport you play against yourself, and also one in which players of different standards can compete against each other—and after explaining all of that to Abaitua, he goes on to tell a joke about clubs and balls that he doesn’t get but that makes Arrese laugh out loud. They also talk about a golf website, and some sort of forum. Then all of a sudden, he spreads his hands out on the table—very white hands, very thin hands that could fit through the hole of a stitch—and says, “That’s all.”
They get up and go out to the hallway. “By the way, I forgot: Teresa Hoyos’s husband’s been admitted.” Arrese tells him with an air of confidentiality but so that Orl can hear, too, and the latter nods to confirm it. He’s in the ICU, in a coma. “By the way,” he said, as if it were in some way connected with what they’ve just been talking about. “By the way, Teresa Hoyos’s husband’s been admitted.” He’s just been with her, and she’s distraught; her husband’s prognosis is bad. Abaitua tries to work out how old the man—who he hardly knows—must be.
They’ve reached the nurses’ station. Beyond it, at the waiting room door, a man is making energetic gestures, and the head midwife and a resident are trying to calm him down, but Abaitua shows no interest in finding out what’s happened. He shows more interest in the contents of the file he’s just picked up from the counter. It’s made of blue cardboard, with elastic straps to close it, and there’s a yellow Post-it note on it. Abaitua sees his name on the Post-it, and the supervisor tells him “the American girl” left it there for him. Arrese looks at the file, turns it over to check the other side of it, turns it back over again, and lifts up the Post-it to see what’s under it. He doesn’t seem to want to give it to Abaitua, who takes it out of his hands. He knows what’s in it, a questionaire for him to correct, and he isn’t sure whether to open it or not, so that Arrese can see it’s work, but he thinks it’s beneath him to have to do something like that. In fact, he’d rather not take the risk, improbable though it is—highly improbable—that Lynn might have put something in there that would hint at their non-work relationship. “By the way,” Arrese says once more. “By the way, that gringa’s got a good head and all that, but her tits aren’t bad, either.” He laughs out loud. When Orl asks who the foreign girl he’s talking about is, Arrese has to tell him. A young sociologist they’ve sent to the department to get in everyone’s way. “And to trail around after this one,” he says, pointing at Abaitua, “just like all of the rest of them, young and old.” He laughs again. Now it’s Orl who puts his thin-fingered hand on his shoulder. A paternal gesture that doctors are particularly good at and particularly hate having done to them. He should take care, Orl says, you never know what these floozies might be after.
In the birthing room, half a dozen people in white smocks stand pale and sweating around a young woman who looks calm. She asks them again and again to tell her husband that she’s OK. The man Abaitua saw at the nurses’s station, apparently. He was kicking up a fuss because they made him leave the room. Abaitua takes her hand and promises to speak with him. The resident tells him she’s a first-time mother, thirty years old. They admitted her half an hour earlier with a painless hemorrhage and a blood pressure of 140/90. No albuminuria or glycosuria. Good fetal heart rate, 144 beats per minute on the mother’s right-hand side. Judging from her sanitary towels, they estimate she’s lost around 150 ml of blood. But she’s still losing blood. They think it’s abruptio placentae, even though her abdomen is flexible and palpable, she’s been in no pain, and there’s no sign of uterine contraction. Fortunately, they say, the problem has been reduced to almost nothing, and she’s hardly losing any blood now. The resident who tells him smiles. It’s just a trickle. He’s a young guy from Otzeta, he has kind eyes and looks honest. Abaitua is sorry it’s him it’s happening to. It’s vasa previa. The blood vessels of the placenta, fetus, or umbilical cord have covered over the entrance to the birth canal beneath the fetus and are being torn. It isn’t the mother who’s losing blood, it’s the fetus. And it’s already lost too much.
The blood volume of a full-term fetus is around 250 ml. He orders a cesarean section, which should have been done an hour earlier.
He remembers Lynn. The nurse on the poster with her index finger held up to her lips to ask for silence reminds him of her. “Just relax”—that same finger held up.
After piercing the amniotic sac, no meconium comes out, but there’s 100 ml of fresh blood along with the amniotic fluid. The fetus’s heart rate slows down all of a sudden. A minute later, it’s undetectable.
The resident is at his side and cleaning up; he can’t hide his tears. Abaitua comforts him—the death rate in cases of vasa previa is very high, between sixty and ninety percent. It’s never diagnosed until afterward. That’s the way it is. The young guy knows that. “If you’d been there when she was admitted, it wouldn’t have died,” he says. It’s half criticism, half praise.
He remembers the first time he ever lost a life. Many years ago. He never thought it would happen, and nobody ever prepared him for it. He had to learn it for himself. That’s what’s happens with all of the most important things in life—how to find love, how to face up to death—and everybody seems to accept that that’s the way it is.
Arrese shoves open the door, and it swings back and forth for a long time. It’s a habit that drives Abaitua up the wall, even more so now, when he’s just told a stretcher-bearer to please respect the tranquility befitting of the setting. Arrese wants to know what’s happened to make the man in the waiting room so shaken up, and Abaitua feels a trace of satisfaction when he tells him. A vasa previa we got to too late.
Arrese’s expression doesn’t change. He shrugs.
“Shit happens.”
“Somebody’s going to have to tell the father.”
There are o
nly two residents remaining, the rest have all left at some point—the chubby neonatologist resident, who’d been there shortly before, isn’t there any more—and they both take a step backward instinctively. The anesthesiologist and two nurses are looking after the mother in silence, and another nurse is gently cleaning the dead baby. Abaitua knows that in the end, he’ll be the one who has to tell the father, but he doesn’t think it fair to accept that fact right away, just like that. He isn’t to blame. He’s about to say that his myomectomy patient has been waiting for him for a long time now, when the supervisor comes in. The father’s kicking up a real fuss, and they can’t calm him down. The supervisor, too, is highly agitated, beside herself, and Arrese asks her to calm down. He orders her to calm down. “Calma al pueblo” is what he says—let there be peace. Abaitua is certain about what Arrese is going to tell them. He’s going to repeat once more the recommendation given to him by his professor of obstetrics at Zaragoza for this type of situation. And Abaitua is right, that’s just what he does. If a child dies in birth and, consequently, the father shows signs of getting overexcited, the thing to do is to tell him, with all the seriousness one would expect from such circumstances, that they’ve done everything humanly possible to save the baby’s life but, unfortunately, they haven’t managed to, and that now it’s the mother’s life that’s at risk and so they would like him to settle down, to let the doctors and nurses get on with their work, and if he is a believer, he should pray for science to achieve a miracle with God’s help.
“Mano de santo,” he says—hand to God, it works. And he mimes washing his hands. Fortunately, nobody laughs. Without waiting any longer, Abaitua says that he’ll tell the father.
Stick to the truth and admit mistakes, if there are any. When you behave like that and share people’s pain, they understand and forgive. He thinks that’s what the residents should be told. He asks the young guy from Otzeta if he’s up to speaking to the father, and he nods in reply.
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