He wants to see how I do it. I have his approval but not his confidence. We go together to find our next donor: one of those men who is thought to have sound judgment because he wears a clean suit. I don’t separate him from the others or offer him a seat. I tell him the donation will occur while he is still alive and that the sanatorium will administer his death. That his head will be severed from his body painlessly, or that the pain will be fleeting compared to dying of cancer, and that for nine seconds he will have an experience so intense that time will seem relative. That this internal temporal elasticity will allow him to narrate what he observes to us, in appreciation of the great gift we’re offering him, so that the revelation (we expect nothing less) can be of use to those of us who remain among the living. The epic language I use makes him cross his arms. After a moment, during which Ledesma asks himself why he’d agreed to this in the first place, the man stretches his neck to stand a bit taller and says, “Why not?”
The donor takes his seat in the device, serene because I have assigned him a higher purpose. Ledesma reflects on my intelligence, my fearlessness. Are you listening, Menéndez?
“As you will recall,” says Ledesma, “my original proposal relied on the donor’s ignorance. And, as no one challenged me on this”—he raises an admonishing finger—“we began the exercise under those terms. We are all aware of the results. But Doctor Quintana, whose dedication is beyond reproach, put on his thinking cap and proposed a new strategy, which we’re about to put to the test. Tell them, boss.”
That “boss” is worth several bonuses, but I feel like a small child being forced to play piano or recite a poem for distant relatives. I ready my deepest voice.
“If the donor doesn’t know what awaits him,” I say, “he will be entirely focused on processing the surprise of what has just happened to his neck rather than thinking in terms of a higher objective.”
“The hard part is conveying this information with care and dignity,” Ledesma says.
“As if that were so hard,” says Papini. “We do it every day. We did it with Beard’s Serum.”
“It’s not the same,” Ledesma replies. “I challenge you to ask someone for his head. Just watch what happens. How do you present the idea without causing the donor pain that could cloud his judgment? It requires tremendous sangfroid, tremendous scientific vocation, not mincing like a sissy. Look how skillfully Quintana overcame that obstacle! What’s your opinion, sir?”
“Doctor Quintana gave it to me straight,” the donor says. “Always appreciate that. Me, I’m right as rain.”
“A round of applause for our donor,” Gigena says.
We applaud. I see doubt flash across a few faces. Do they think I’m heartless? I’m more sensitive than all of you, but that won’t help me win Menéndez, and this grabbing the bull will, I think, because she’s the last one to stop clapping.
“Give us your best,” says Ledesma as he pulls the lever.
“There are people who don’t exist,” the head asserts, its eyes half-closed.
This is where it begins. The mark of the real Quintana. A perfect phrase for this parade of hypotheses. And although there are those who would argue it means nothing (as I myself would do, were my new role of go-getter not at stake), the amazement is contagious. It’s all Mr. Allomby can do not to start clapping like a jubilant peasant woman. Ledesma pounds a fist on the device and lets out an “All right!” that fills us with common enthusiasm. If we had hats, we’d be tossing them in the air.
“We can understand the phrase in one of two ways,” Papini says. “One: from his perspective, we do not exist. In other words, we are anchored in time and therefore invisible to him, as he is already in Eternity. Two: his perspective allows him to see something we cannot, and this something was with us in the form of a spectral presence during those nine seconds.”
“Something, presented in those terms, is not a verifiable object,” Gurian objects. “As such, I suggest changing course before the discussion is derailed.”
“Let’s not start setting up roadblocks,” says Ledesma.
“There is a third possibility,” Papini continues. “His atemporal perception allows him to see us as we were, are, will be, and even could be. He looks at you,” he says, pointing at Mr. Allomby, “and sees the sanatorium’s owner, but also the priest or lady of the evening you could have been in the outskirts of London. The number of potential Allombys is so great that, in the donor’s eyes, you effectively cease to be.”
“Excuse me?” Mr. Allomby sputters, indignant.
“Doctor Papini is speaking figuratively,” Ledesma says.
“What I’m saying is that a hypothesis can be drawn from the donor’s words. Is anyone taking notes?”
He wants to make me the scribe of his effervescence. Busy my hand. Annoy me.
“The hypothesis is that we are because we’re not everything we could be. In other words, Director Ledesma, the foundation of being is the absence of this variation, which is essentially to say that we exist in and by error.”
I hear it straight from his mouth.
“Prudence, gentlemen,” says Ledesma. “Let’s gather our samples first, then construct our analytic framework.”
“First the framework,” counters Papini, “then the samples.”
“I think not,” says Ledesma.
“Samples,” says Mr. Allomby. “And Quintana every day talks with donors, tells truth to all of them.”
Me? All of them? All by myself? Gigena stands to let me pass, Menéndez opens the door, and Gurian points a finger at me.
“Let’s see that magic, Quintana.”
This is how I want to remember us: splayed in the grass with our pants unbuttoned, our shirts covering our bellies and our indigestion. Masters of alcohol’s fumblings. Gurian removes his dentures to pick them clean of grilled meat, then stalks around on all fours in the throes of a miniature hunt until the teeth catch a beetle and return to his mouth. More wine to wash away the taste of insect. Is it bitter? Ledesma goes on reading the phrases collected during the day at the top of his lungs.
Donor eight: “welcome”
Donor nine: “just like I dreamed”
Donor ten: (no record)
Donor eleven: (no record)
Donor twelve: “Our Lady of Luján”
Donor thirteen: “he doesn’t love me”
Donor fourteen: “children last”
Donor fifteen: “no eyes or nose, but a mouth”
Donor sixteen: (no record)
Donor seventeen: “Denmark”
Menéndez went to bed. I hope she sleeps tight. She spent the whole day in my office, on the director’s orders, watching me unfurl my candor to one donor after another. In her eyes I was a gentleman, a man of superior intelligence and ample vocabulary, a kind soul who gave toy frogs to the donors to cheer their final moments with metallic tinkling.
Of all the sensations from the day, however, I am left with the smell of lemon emanating from Papini a few yards away as he grabs the papers from Ledesma and reads on.
Donor eighteen: “touch me”
Donor nineteen: “he who sees and breathes”
Donor twenty: “Argentina wins”
Donor twenty-one: (no record)
Donor twenty-two: “life to the monster”
Donor twenty-three: “thank you”
I say, out loud, that the phrases are too short for proper analysis. I kneel in the mud and reveal my vision. Multiple devices, in a circle. Donors looking at one another. The guillotines activating sequentially, every nine seconds. Each head picking up where the last left off to make a full sentence, a paragraph. A stanza, says Gigena. A string of words worth the expense and efforts of this team.
The doctor with the mole says that carrying out my fantasy would require considerably more donors and that we’d quickly run through the nation’s cancer cases. I tell him that cancer isn’t the only disease an imaginary serum can cure.
Ledesma says that the idea of a ci
rcle of heads forming an articulate statement is the closest thing to happiness he can imagine. That teamwork offers an advantage because it keeps egos at bay, and that if we Argentines could agree more often, we’d be a more powerful nation. We’d deny entry to the bestial hordes from Southern Europe. We’d roll cigars in the skin of our natives. We’d impose a new kind of Christianity, grounded in the values of the Pampas and pastoral toil. Cleanse the foreign pestilence of the Brazilian blacks. Reclaim Uruguay as our natural and legitimate backyard. Cast provincial Chile into the Pacific.
He falls into a bug-eyed silence. He thanks us for casting off the shackles of good manners in the name of scientific audacity and calls for a round of applause. For me. Starting tomorrow, the entire sanatorium will dedicate itself to making my vision a reality.
The wind in my face, in our faces, cracks open a sliver of lucidity. I think about Sylvia (now less than before), about how Menéndez will be mine by right and general consensus, how the donors were going to die anyway, and that I’ll need to cultivate a serious gaze, as if I were very tired, so no one can tell how easy it all was.
4
My name begins to spread. It settles into casual conversations, remarks about the hue of my voice, furtive insinuations among the nurses, vile comparisons among my colleagues. I am split by this prism of Quintanas, Menéndez. Take your pick.
I sense the trap inherent to love and its by-products: give up being what you want, abandon your whims, offer an ear, a shoulder, a hand; offer yourself up entirely and piecemeal to sign on the romantic line, when it’s obviously impossible to love someone all the time. These concessions will be my payment when I’ve got you by the neck and have torn you a few new holes.
A botanical digression: Thompson Island, a small landmass in Tierra del Fuego, is the only natural habitat of comemadre, a plant with acicular leaves whose sap produces (in a leap between taxonomic kingdoms that warrants further study) microscopic animal larvae. These larvae devour the plant, leaving only tiny particles behind; the remains then spread to take root in the soil, and the process begins again.
If the larvae are extracted under laboratory conditions, the plant grows unchecked until it can no longer support its own weight and dies without reproducing.
The larvae, meanwhile, can easily survive in a liquid medium or hibernate indefinitely in the form of a black powder.
A few farmers in Tierra del Fuego have taken to planting comemadre as a measure against pests. It has been proven that rats love the taste of the plant and that they die within days of eating it, consumed from the inside out by the larvae.
This is my botanical digression. I show Ledesma the test tube containing the larvae. I won’t be telling him about how I learned of the existence of comemadre, or the crude, coincidental encounter that brought it into my possession. I don’t like to share the details of my life outside the sanatorium.
I lower my voice. I tell him the storage room in the basement is full. We need to find a way to empty it. The incinerator? Fire is filthy, and filth is a dead giveaway. Those are my exact words. It’s more hygienic to inject these larvae into the bodies and make them disappear without a trace.
And more expensive. The acquaintance who gets them for me has substantial overhead. Ledesma hugs me. He whispers that Mr. Allomby will cover every cent. I linger in the embrace: I’ll let him go when I’m good and ready.
Furious, Mauricio Albano Ruiz storms into Ledesma’s office, asking why they postponed his donation. He interrupts our embrace. He demands his payment be returned immediately, in full.
The Argentine aristocracy’s limited history works to its disadvantage. One battle against the royalists or a grandfather who signed the constitution can’t compare to the sagas of European castles that span hundreds of years. As a result, many patrician families paradoxically renounce their history in their homeland, fixing their memories instead on distant ancestors on the other side of the ocean. Their memories are faulty: Edinburgh is not in England. They inherited a piece of furniture from the Netherlands adorned with allegorical figures and a coat of arms they don’t understand, but not the byzantine manners of their forebears or an interest in falconry. They’re satisfied to have a cow win a prize at the Sociedad Rural, get bored at the Jockey Club, and fume over tardiness like common bureaucrats.
Ledesma tells him about the change of plans and the new devices being installed in the basement. But Mauricio doesn’t want to see them. He paid for a singular death, not to finish the sentences of a bunch of illiterates and turn a sacred moment into something base, promiscuous.
We ask him to be patient. He threatens to break his confidentiality agreement and publish the details of the experiment in a major Buenos Aires newspaper. We explain to him that we have nothing to hide.
He starts screaming again. The uproar reaches Mr. Allomby, who steps into the office, shakes Mauricio’s hand, and invites him to make his donation right then and there. His mentor, Doctor Papini, will measure his head and activate the device. I’ll be in charge of transcribing his words.
Ledesma grabs me by the lapel. He orders me to go with Papini, not lift a finger to help him, and ask for his letter of resignation as soon as the cut is made.
With a tug on this string, I’ll open the door that leads to unemployment; with this other one, I’ll close the door that leads to Menéndez. I need to show him that what just happened in Ledesma’s office was a disgrace and that it was his fault for putting the entire experiment at risk over the whim of a suicidal dandy. I consider my options for giving him the news: keeping a few feet between us, wearing a smile that says “It’s not as bad as it seems,” keeping relatively still.
The dandy waits outside. Arranging the devices in a circle was my idea, but it was Gurian who came up with the universal lever to trigger the blades. There it is, in the middle of the room, announcing the inadequacy of my vision. Papini takes out his anthropometric insect, spreads its legs. He still doesn’t know this is his last night in the sanatorium.
“The proper ape is lazy, Quintana. Do you know how many of the donors were atavistic? I needed to go back to the books to make sure I had it right. Most of them were partial, moderate, as if they’d mixed with us. You can’t study a dog by applying parameters meant for a wolf.”
He’s tired. He’s not my enemy anymore, not entirely, either because he doesn’t want to be or because his love for Menéndez didn’t survive the loss of a tooth and he’s grateful I laid down the law. Which is why he pretends I’m listening to him.
He wants to do everything by the book. It’s his first time. He tries to choose the best guillotine for Mauricio, but we don’t know which is first in the sequence. Just in case, he wipes each of them down with the sleeve of his suit jacket.
“My brother Mauricio is upstairs,” Mauricio says when we open the door. “Would it be all right if I invited him in?”
I ask why.
“I want him to be present,” Mauricio says. “It’s my dying wish.”
I explain to him that dying wishes were invented to clear the consciences of next of kin or soldiers on a firing squad, but that there’s no need here because everything’s already squeaky clean, as befits a scientific experiment. He should say good-bye now.
“Send him my regards,” says Mauricio.
After measuring him, Papini shows him to his seat and, before closing the device around him, shakes his hand vigorously. Mauricio notices the filth on his sleeve. Papini steps back and pulls the lever.
The sequence begins with the device opposite Mauricio, who calculates with a glance how long he has left: sixty-three seconds. The sound of the second blade fills the room, right on time. The third and fourth seem to follow more quickly because their echoes overlay the others. Mauricio can feel the vibrations in his body; he turns to watch their approach.
“Please, make it stop,” he says.
It’s not an outrageous request. But our consternation lasts until the next blade. We’re being asked to discard—in fourteen
seconds, thirteen—our professionalism in favor of a gauchada. Terrible way to describe a good deed. It likens my generosity to that of some lousy, manure-caked gaucho who throws salt over his shoulder to ward off bad luck. I tell Mauricio it won’t be possible.
I offer to walk Papini out. I wish he’d been a bit more assertive about his dismissal, fighting with Ledesma or dragging Menéndez across the floor, forcing her to dirty her smock, to flail around, fists and knees futilely thrashing, so I could stage my heroic intervention. He already said good-bye to Gurian, who wished him a bright future at some other sanatorium, and Gigena, who advised him to stay on his toes. He didn’t ask for Menéndez and probably didn’t run into her in the hallway on his way out. Bad luck. Just like his first and final head: no record.
I give him a firm handshake when we reach the door. He looks down at the metal frog I’ve left in his palm.
“We had a good run, didn’t we, Quintana?” he asks without taking his eyes off the frog.
I say yes. I see no reason not to.
Today the ants spill out of the crack without forming a shape; they spread across the wall like the insects they are.
The bodies in storage are ash. Mr. Allomby holds me by the jacket so I can peer down the hole without risk of falling while I devise four or five ways to turn the tables. Benevolently, though. I’m in excellent spirits.
In two days we’ll begin the sequential decapitations. Gurian and Gigena expect the results to be more like poetry than prose, given the predictably fragmentary nature of the statements. A fortune-teller’s opacity: ethereal nouns, verbs with no easily identifiable subjects. Most of the donors have a hundred-word vocabulary, including articles and prepositions. Under these conditions, it would be hard not to lapse into poetry. At least, Ledesma says, we won’t run into too much irony, which complicates interpretation. Gigena purses his lips and, after a little “hmm” that softens his disagreement, says that irony is not the exclusive purview of the educated, and that it can be seen outside small-town corner stores in the form of insulting nicknames. Oinking, for example, at a slim young woman.
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