Martutene
Page 70
They’re in a crowd of people, and the young doctor suggests they have a drink. They could sit down at the outdoor terrace over there. Lynn thinks it’s a great idea, and she looks at Abaitua as soon as she says so, as if to ask if she’s done the right thing in accepting, and he says he’d gladly stay but he’s in a bit of a hurry, he’d like to go by the hospital before noon. That gives him the chance to get away and also to make it clear that he’s a hard-working doctor. The young doctor’s face is covered in sweat, and he’s definitely pleased. So that’s it, then, he says—“Entonces nada”—as he takes Lynn by the elbow. She smiles naturally and pulls a purple flower out of her bouquet to give it to Abaitua. Then she lifts up her hand and wiggles her fingers in the air.
They don’t give each other two kisses to say goodbye. After taking ten steps, he ventures to look back but doesn’t see them, just a bit of Lynn’s head, her blue kerchief and cherry-wood-colored bun next to the statue of Sarriegi. He isn’t jealous of the biochemistry-obsessed resident. He’s young, but too fat.
However, if Lynn doesn’t decide to go back to the States soon, he’ll end up having to deal with that before long. One day he’ll see her holding hands with a young man, perhaps on the Pasealeku Berria at dusk. It isn’t the first time he’s had that thought. He’s even come up with candidates. Young doctors at the hospital, ones he thinks attractive and bright, and he’s thought that he would be glad for Lynn, and for himself, too—that way this story, which he can’t decide what to do about, would be over once and for all.
He knows there’s something pathological about the whole thing.
He’s well aware that he can’t be sure of anything before it actually happens. He would never have thought that Pilar’s affair—if you can call it that—would have affected him so much. She had been sitting on the edge of the bed when he put a hand on her shoulder. He thought she looked troubled, and that moved him. That was why he’d put his hand on her shoulder, to comfort her. He still wasn’t aware of what was going to happen, it was unthinkable for him that she could go to bed with somebody else, that she could even be interested in going to bed with somebody else; he wasn’t furious yet. He was just sorry for her—she who was usually so measured in expressing her feelings—sorry to see her looking so inconsolable. On the edge of the bed, like in that painting by Hopper. The memory of that scene is more immediate and devastating for him at night. Now it’s day, a beautiful day with a warm south wind.
The nurses at all the desks he goes past are only talking about one thing: the weather is more appropriate for going to the beach than for going to work. More than one of them is astonished to see him there—admires him for it, too, he’d say—outside his working hours.
So the weather’s beautiful. A woman who probably doesn’t have many days left to live says the same thing. Her husband is sitting next to her and holding one of her hands. It seems he hasn’t given her much of a life. He admits as much himself. Abaitua convinced him to make up for it a bit by being at her side while she died, sensing that the wife loved him a lot and still does. Abaitua normally uses his intuition in situations like this where his medical knowledge is of no use and he feels he could use an expert’s advice. Protocols don’t cover everything. The woman tends not to complain, thinking pain is inevitable. “We’re fine,” she normally says when he asks. The husband doesn’t say anything. A few days earlier, he asked for some sedatives for her, because he couldn’t deal with the anguish of seeing her like that. Abaitua thinks his presence there helps the man to stay put. Abaitua makes her promise to call the nurse if she feels any pain; there’s no need for her to suffer.
He still finds it surprising how important culture is when it comes to dealing with illness and death. There are too many people in the room. Children, nieces, and nephews, all competing to show their respect for the patient. If it goes on a long time, and it certainly will, signs of tiredness and malaise will begin to appear, desertions, instances of negligence they will blame each other for, anger. He advises them to take turns and relieve each other, to economize their strength. Patients mustn’t be allowed to tyrannize people, either. She’s happy to see her whole family around her. Unlike some others, she wants to experience everything right up until the end.
It’s sad when there’s nothing you can do or say, when your only worry is that the patient might realize that your only desire is to leave the room and close the door behind you as soon as possible. He doesn’t feel very comfortable right now as the patient tells him about her urinary malfunction, with too many details—of course, for her, it’s the most important thing in the world—while what comes to his mind is that it wasn’t a good idea to leave the txipirones—the baby squids he just bought in the market—in the car in this sunny weather.
As he’s about to leave, he remembers that before seeing Lynn at the Bretxa Azoka, the chubby neonatology resident was starting to tell him something about the child with choanal atresia. Curious, he decides to stop in at the maternity ward to find out. In the waiting room, there’s a group of residents. On seeing him, they make no pretence about stopping their lively conversation. On the other side of the door, there’s almost complete silence, broken only by the tired, exhausted crying of a child. The head nurse who looks like his mother is at the desk, the one who always gives him a hard look because her own son is in prison. Or that’s what he thinks at least—she reproaches him or at least lets him know she’s hurt because his son is free. Each time he sees her, that gesture of hers, nodding slowly with an expression of sorrow on her face, reminds him of his mother. He was planning to walk straight through, but a young nurse stops him. She had one of her ovaries removed a couple of months ago, and she’s doing just splendidly now—“de cine.” But that isn’t what she wanted to talk with him about. Has he heard the latest? It sounds mysterious. Abaitua is sure she’s going to tell him about the choanal atresia patient, and he’s right. After looking left and right, with a gesture of confidentiality, she quickly tells him what he already knew: the child was born thirty days ago—he didn’t think it had been so long—and ever since then, all their requests for Orl’s people to operate on him have fallen on deaf ears. It’s an operation that can only be performed by the head of the department, and he’s very busy. That was all the troubled ENT specialists who came to see the child dared say. According to what some of them have led her to understand, it’s all because somebody wants to make the waiting list longer, in order to be able to do the operations that don’t get done in the morning in the afternoon, so that they’d get to be paid overtime. So now all this time’s gone by without anybody doing anything to stop what’s happened from happening. And what’s happened is terrible: unable to breathe through his nose, the child went blue in his mother’s arms and they had to revive him, the reanimation took far too long, and the result was serious anoxia. The woman’s air of confidentiality, arising from the fact that she’s whispering, is increased by the feeling in her words and her constant glances at her other colleagues around them to confirm what she’s saying. “The poor child’s a vegetable now.” That’s how one of them confirmed the nurse’s words, sadly nodding her head in just the same way as the head nurse and his mother do. There’s a poster on the privacy screen behind him, one he hasn’t seen before and must be new. The paper’s shiny, which, with the sunlight on it, makes it difficult to see completely, but there’s a beautiful child on it feeding from a swollen breast.
And what do they want him to do about it?
He keeps quiet and doesn’t say that, of course, not with all of them agreeing that things can’t be left at that, somebody has to do something more than just crossing their arms. A tracheotomy, at least. Or take the child to another center. Something. The one with the cysts on her ovary is the angriest. She’s the most confident, she goes so far as to say that somebody should grab Orl by the ear and drag him out of the Basozabal Golf Club, even knowing that he’s Abaitua’s brother-in-law’s brother. She talks about t
he tyranny within the service, doctors often remaining idle because they aren’t even allowed to remove a pair of tonsils. Then it’s Arrese’s turn. Clumsy and incompetent are the nicest things they have to say about him. Always in a whisper, discreetly. They can speak with him about it, because he’s different, a real doctor. He’s sure that’s partly why, but it’s also because they see him as one of them, as being frustrated, to an extent, stripped of power, and he would rather not be their accomplices in that sense. He guesses their indignation is a result of personal bitterness, a secret desire for vengeance in their hearts, a despicable happiness stemming from a horrendous event that opens the way for them to take action against the people who don’t value them as they should be valued. They want there to be disasters, so that they’ll be given justice. He’s often had to combat that dirty feeling.
They tell him that serious though the matter is, it isn’t the worst of it.
He would rather not know any more, but he can’t get away now. The worst thing is that Orl and Arrese told the mother that it was she who suffocated her son, while she was breastfeeding him. They all look at him to see how hearing those words will affect him. What does he think about that? He thinks it’s cruel. But he realizes that’s insufficient. It’s insufficient in terms of their indignation, and so he repeats it, saying again that it’s horrible, because that’s what he thinks, but they keep on looking at him, as if expecting something more than just that simple statement from him, as though he had some special responsibility there, and that makes him deeply angry.
There’s an explosion of light at the end of the hallway, which makes him close his eyes. The tired crying has stopped. He thinks about the resident, who must be having his little cup of coffee near the Bretxa Azoka with Lynn. He also remembers the squid he’s left in the car, it’s probably in the sunlight, and he tells them he has to go.
He could also add that it’s his day off, but he just says he has to deal with an emergency, without putting much conviction into his words and without moving from where he is; finally it’s the head nurse, who’s been standing there with her arms folded listening to the others talking, who helps him get away by telling the girls they’ve got work waiting for them, and they all disappear into the newborn nursery. The head nurse then nods two or three times, as if confirming some thought she’s had, with that mixture of disappointment and sorrow he knows so well.
That expression on her face that means ona hago hi—you’re a piece of work.
She walks off down the corridor without saying a word, and Abaitua follows her, because that’s the way he’s going, but then she stops in her tracks after half a dozen steps, and he does the same. They’re in front of a door with a small window in it. Through it, they can see the same poster as before, but now it’s possible to read the slogan—Breastfeeding Is An Act Of Love. And they hear the child’s tired crying again. He goes up to the door to widen his field of vision and sees them sitting there. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him it’s them. The mother has a white blanket on her lap and she’s playing with the tassels on its edge. She looks quite distant, disconcerted perhaps, maybe wondering why there’s nobody wrapped in the blanket. There’s a man next to her, bending over and looking at his hands, who seems very far away. Abaitua steps aside. He doesn’t’ want them to realize he’s there, and taking a step back, he looks at the head nurse. Her eyes are sad, full of reproach as well as tiredness. She asks him—with the moral superiority that being from his mother’s town and having a son in prison lend her—if he doesn’t think it’s about time something was done.
Do something. As his mother would have said, “Gizona, gizon denak”—the man who’s a real man.
He refuses to let this woman—who he’d happily strangle—make him feel guilty. He looks at his watch and says, “It’s very late,” and with that, he disappears quickly upstairs, the same ones he once fled down to get away from Lynn.
As he goes along the badly lit green corridor, he’s ashamed to realize that he’s spent half his life fleeing and the other half paralyzed by fear. He’s not familiar with this part of the hospital but thinks it must be connected with the ICU. If that’s right, he decides, he’ll go visit Teresa Hoyos; otherwise, he’ll leave the building. (Whenever he decides to let chance rule his decision-making, he remembers Saint Ignatius of Loiola on his mule—or had it been a donkey?—standing there next to the Moor who’d mocked the Virgin Mary’s virginity; he let go of the reins and decided that if his mount took the same path as the Moor at the next turning, he would kill him, otherwise, he’d let him live.)
The doctor on duty in the ICU says there’s nothing new as far as Teresa Hoyos’s husband is concerned. Apparently, she’s reading a book by herself in the waiting room.
She’s wearing a black or very dark-colored sweater and pants. She has one leg crossed over the other and a shoe balancing on her foot up in the air. The doctor tells Abaitua that if he’s her friend, he should try to convince her to go home, she isn’t going to achieve anything by waiting there. Even so, it’s normal to be afraid of going away, to want to stay there in case her husband comes out of the coma. Wanting him to know that she’s been there, that she hasn’t abandoned him. She closes her book and puts her face in her hands. Abaitua says he’ll try to convince her, but some other time, he’s running late, he says, and he looks at his watch without seeing what time it actually is.
It’s easy to clean fresh squid like that, so fresh it’s still the same intense color of the sand at the bottom of the bay. Almost too fresh. He could put it away and take Loiola out to a restaurant, but he’d rather have lunch at home. He’ll cook it in its ink, although it’s not the best thing to eat straight away, because it’s a stew. Modern people say it’s a way to spoil the ingredients, but he likes to have that type of stew from time to time, and so does his son. Cut plenty of onion into small pieces, put it in the frying pan, and then cook the squid on medium. Pour in half a glass of wine, add the ink, an (optional) spoonful of tomato sauce, and allow to cook. He’s not in the mood to put the sauce through a sieve.
To cook, just like to operate, he has to be relaxed, and he isn’t. He’s feeling unhinged by the way the nurses laid into him—“something has to be done” definitely meant let’s see what you’re going to do about it—and having to have lunch with Loiola doesn’t make him feel any calmer, either. Things seldom end well when they meet, though not particularly badly, either, and less and less so, but their meetings never live up to his expectations. To an extent, it’s because he always has something to say about what the boy has or hasn’t done or should do. Because he gives him advice clumsily, he recognizes that. Because he doesn’t accept him as he is. He thinks that’s what spoils their encounters. That and his wishes, and his anxiety. Really, the fact that they don’t get together very often means he feels the need to tell him all the things he’s been thinking about and saving up to mention to him. So sometimes he decides to keep quiet, and then his son asks him if he’s angry, and so he replies he doesn’t have anything to be particularly pleased about. He also admits that he can’t stop criticizing and correcting—his way of talking, his manners, the fact that he keeps his elbows on the table when he drinks, for instance—in a way he would never dare do to any other adult, in a way he’d never let anybody else do to him. Pilar’s called him out on it. You don’t tell an adult person you’re eating with not to lean over their plate so much, or not to make so much noise with their chair, or not to open their mouth so impolitely. And he replies that even though his son is an adult, he’s still his son, and he drives him up the wall. Every time he sees him, he has to make the firm decision to hold back and be tolerant. Pilar says that, too, that the important thing is to keep the relationship going and that his attitude is just putting that at risk, because it gets their son’s back up. So he’s decided to act sensibly, forget about trivial matters, and just deal with the important issues. The most important thing is to encourage him to go to the Sta
tes, and in that sense, to make things as easy as possible for him. After that, he has to tell him that there’s no need for him to commit to working at his grandfather’s clinic, the idea his mother’s suddenly had, against everybody else’s opinion, shouldn’t condition what he studies or his overall future in any way whatsoever. Without in any way criticizing the level of commitment that Pilar has taken on since her father’s death or the romantic side of the whole thing, he has to point out to him that as well as the fact that he’s free and shouldn’t let himself be conditioned by others, it’s very difficult to make a health center profitable while at the same time practicing medicine properly, and as if that weren’t enough, the clinic’s full of old sharks and his mother would be better off getting as far away from them as possible. In fact, it’s just occurred to him that he wouldn’t put it past those cold-hearted jerks to dump a corpse on Pilar’s operating table in the hopes of getting her out of the picture. But he obviously isn’t going to say that to his son. Nor is he going to say anything negative to him about the surge of loyalty that Pilar’s shown for her father’s work lately, or anything that might give him the ridiculous idea that he feels he’s been taking a backseat to Pilar’s increased responsibilities and workload. Quite the opposite, he’ll say he’s proud, and that’s true to an extent—what’s more, her having a lot of work right now makes things easier for him—and he’ll try not to be sarcastic or ironic, that’s the main thing, because Loiola’s very sensitive.