5
I saw them too late, when there was no more chance of escape. I felt afraid, and then I saw them. Halfway down the corridor, just a few steps from Radiology. Two policemen standing next to a door. Arms in gray uniform shirts, pistols in holsters. They were listening to a third man, who was in street clothes. He was speaking in a low voice, barely moving his lips, which were so dark, they looked as though he’d been eating licorice. It was summer; the hospital was empty. The man’s eyes moved toward me. They looked like little glass spheres; they pounced on me there in the corridor. He was practically taking aim, staring at me, and then one of the policemen turned and looked at me, too. The elevator was at their backs, a few steps past them on the other side of the hall. I kept walking, but I felt hollow, like a puppet. A week had passed since the atrocities of that other afternoon, when I’d had too many drinks on an empty stomach.
I didn’t have a clear memory of what had happened—it was as though everything had taken place under a layer of glue. But she couldn’t have forgotten. Not her. I’d left her huddled up against the wall in the darkness, a heap of beaten limbs. Used and tossed aside, like a rubber. I thought, Maybe she’s behind that door the cops are standing in front of. Maybe they’ve brought her here to identify me. Now, when I’m just about to walk past that repulsive person with the olive skin, she’ll come out into the open. Short, faceless, with hair like a raffia basket on her head, she’ll stretch out her arm toward me: It’s him. Grab him. Her cockroach legs have carried her out of the distant suburbs, scurried through the better neighborhoods, and brought her to me. The cops are going to arrest me. They’ll do it unobtrusively, the way it’s done in a public place, so as not to create panic. A tight grip on my arm, and a calm voice saying, Please come with us.
But instead, Angela, nobody so much as grazed me. With my finger on the red button, I waited for the elevator doors to open. The others were still there; they hadn’t moved. I didn’t look at them, but I saw them, three dark shapes in the corner of one of my eyes. By the time the elevator arrived, I was no longer myself. With my shirt sticking to my back, I smiled at a lady and a little girl who were going up with me. “After you,” I said, like a stupid brute. I haven’t done anything, madam. Can’t you see that? I’m a nice man. Please go downstairs, walk up to those nasty-looking fellows, and tell them so. Meanwhile, we were flying up past the floors in a metal box.
While I made my usual rounds, visiting the beds of the patients I’d recently operated on, I exchanged glances with no one. Eyes down, squinting professionally through my bifocals at the medical charts, at the gold Mont Blanc pen I used to adjust sedative levels. Then I headed for the operating room, and on the way my shoulders trembled like wings. I made my customary entrance, kicking the door open, holding up my sterilized hands to a nurse, who slipped on my gloves. I’ve got my hands up like a criminal, I thought, and I managed a small smile. Then peace descended, the serenity of work. Iodine solution, cold scalpel, blood. My hands were as calm and precise as always—no, even more so. It’s just that they weren’t mine; they were the hands of a man I was looking at, an impeccably professional man whom I no longer admired. I looked at myself the way an entomologist looks at an insect. Yes, now I’m the one that’s the insect, I thought, not her; she’s just a poor woman, a victim of chance, whom I violated, whom I bit, whom I sucked dry. I saw the rubber hands down there, not mine, and yet thoroughly mine, gleaming white hooks at work in a world where I knew how to handle myself and where I was a doer of good deeds.
Electric scalpel. Cauterize the blood vessels. They’re still out there, waiting for me. I’ll be wearing my scrubs when they arrestme—what an absurd way to go to jail. Kocher forceps. Swabs. They’re leaving me a little time for remorse. That’s why they didn’t grab me before; they want me to go through this torture. Pure cruelty. Yes, she was in that room; she saw me pass and nodded her head. Then she collapsed in her chair like a broken reed. They brought her a glass of water and told her, Don’t worry, ma’am, the son of a bitch won’t get away from us. We’ll get him and his dirty little dick, too. I didn’t look into the room when I passed it. I didn’t have the nerve. Too bad.
I made an effort, but I couldn’t recall what that room was used for. The first door is the one you go through to get to the blood-sample room. But what’s behind the open door the policemenin the gray uniforms were standing next to?
In my mind, I rushed into that empty, unknown space, where I thought the woman I couldn’t remember anymore was hiding. And it seemed to me, Angela, that this memory loss was enough to erase what I had done.
Why didn’t I go back and caress her and persuade her that nothing had happened? When I want to, I know how to cajole a fragile heart. I could have begged her pardon; I could have offered her money. I could have killed her. Why didn’t I kill her? Because I’m not a murderer. Murderers kill. Surgeons rape. Vascular clamps. Aspirator. She’s filed charges against me. She picked up her patchwork purse and went down to the local police station.
I felt as though I could see her, sitting on a chair in one of those rooms that smell like rubber stamps and torturing her fingernails to keep her courage up. While she was pressing her pale legs together and describing the distinguished-looking man who had assaulted her, someone was typing at a desk behind her back. Who knows what she told them. . . .
What part of me stayed with her? I’d like to know what trace I left on her uninviting body. I was crazy with liquor, with heat, with perverted lust. But she was sober. She looked at me; she suffered me. Whoever suffers remembers. Autostatic retractor. Maybe they gave her a gynecological exam; she lay on the narrow white bed and turned her face to one side and submitted to yet more humiliation. And there, with her legs spread wide apart, staring into space, she decided to ruin me forever. Kelly forceps. Maybe they got a sample of my seminal fluid. Kelly forceps again. No, she couldn’t possibly have found me. She doesn’t know a thing about me; she doesn’t know where I live or what I do. On the other hand, maybe she does. When I went into the bedroom to use the phone, I left my bag on the sofa and she went through it. You bitch, you ragamuffin bitch. They’ll never believe you. Swabs. I’ll defend myself. I’ll say it was her. I’ll say she used some excuse to lure me into her house and rob me, maybe even kill me. Wasn’t I afraid when I was following her inside that unfinished apartmentbuilding, with the darkness and the stench and the squatters?It was fear that put me in such an altered state. I attacked her to protect myself from the fear. Isolate the choledoch duct. She was behaving obscenely, I’ll say. She tricked me; she gave me drugged coffee. . . . Yes, maybe there was something strange in the coffee she gave me. It stinks like poison in that shack, Mr. Commissioner. You should go there and inspect the place. Cystic duct. Thread. Maybe there are some bodies buried in that dusty garden. The cars passing overhead on the viaduct rattle the windowpanes,and all the noise drowns out the screams of the poor victims. It’s a miracle I’m alive! Arrest that hag! Drainage tube. How could you, you wretch? What made you think you could ruin me? Who did you think would believe you? And then in my mind I slapped her hard across the face; her raffia-basket head jerked back and forth. Surely they’ll believe me. The policemen will apologize, and I’ll leave them one of my cards. It’s always useful to know a surgeon. Tampons. The man with the dark lips has a face like someone suffering from liver disease. I’ll be magnanimous. I’ll pick up the telephone; I’ll call a couple of colleagues and arrange for a complete checkup. I’ll skip the usual procedure and move him to the top of the waiting list, the way I do for only my closest friends. He’ll thank me; he’ll make a bow as he thanks me. He’ll send me a bottle of liqueur and a police calendar, which I’ll give to a nurse. Recheck hemostasis. You, on the other hand, are going to get shoved out of here in handcuffs, little slut. You’re illegal,like your neighbors. I’ll send a bulldozer to knock down your house. Count the sterile towels. My word against yours. Needle holder. And we’ll see who wins! Suture thread.
The operat
ion was over, and I looked up again. I could feel defiance coloring my eyes, and contempt. Standing next to my second assistant, a young intern in a white coat too big for him was staring at me as though in a trance. I hadn’t noticed that he was there—he must have approached the table just a moment before. His face had the look of one who has used too much willpower on himself. Maybe he was just trying to remain on his feet. Maybe he was afraid of blood. Imbecile.
I stripped off my gloves, left the operating room, and went into the locker room. I sat down on a bench. Looking outside, I could see the usual view of the adjoining wing of the hospital, the low windows along the interior stairways, the people going up and down. Only steps and legs were visible; faces were hidden by the wall. First, a pair of men’s pants passed, then a nurse’s white legs. I remember thinking that nothing can save us from ourselves, and that indulgence is a fruit that’s already decayed when it falls to the ground. I’d given free rein to all those indecent thoughts, and now I was as useless as a dead sniper.
The doors to the operating room were wide open, and the room itself was in disorder. A man in a dressing gown, carrying a roll of toilet paper in his hand, was walking down the corridor toward the bathroom. I said good-bye to the nurses and the assistant surgeons and got into the elevator. Inside of me, there was nothing but what I had struggled against. I got out on the ground floor. There wasn’t anybody standing next to that door anymore, and beyond it was an ordinary room, a waiting room for dialysis patients. Two women with yellow faces were sitting in there, waiting their turn. No, Angela, she hadn’t ever been in that room, or in any other room in the hospital. She’d stayed in a heap against the wall, under the poster with the monkey. She hadn’t even raised her head.
6
Something unexpected had already happened that year, Angela; on Easter night, I lost my father. It was painless—I almost never saw him. After my mother died, our meetings had become more and more infrequent. I knew he lived in a residence hotel, but I didn’t even know his address. He’d agree to meet me from time to time in the bar, which was a converted houseboat floating on the river, near the tennis courts. Our appointments were always at dusk, when the light was the softest. He liked appetizers, glasses rimmed with sugar, little saucers of olives. He held his stomach in and sat so as to present his best profile. He enjoyed feeling like a young man. The only thing I remember from those rare meetings is the sound of tennis balls struck by rackets and bouncing off the dusty red surface of the court.
On the day of my father’s funeral, I stood listening to the priest give the homily. Elsa was next to me, wearing an embroidered black veil over her face and crying. I’m not sure why—perhaps just because it seemed to her like the right thing to do. A thickset man with white hair moved out from behind a column and walked past me. He was wearing a shabby velour tie with its label half off and dangling against his shirt. He stepped up to the microphone and read a little page he’d written himself. Flowery, useless words; my father would have liked them. This must have been one of his best friends. Clutching a snotty handkerchief in one hand, he read in a voice drenched with authentic grief. He had a peculiar manner, affable and repellent at the same time, and his whole face, from his hair to his collar, was yellow with nicotine. Afterward, he stood in front of the church, smoking a cigarette. He shook my hand and tried to embrace me, but I recoiled. Nobody in the family seemed to know him. He went away, hopping down the church steps, his sturdy body stretching the seams of his iridescent jacket. In that unknown man and the mixed impression he left, I thought I recognized my father’s only legacy.
One day, driving toward the sea, toward your mother, I thought about my father. In the months following his painless, sudden death, it had tormented me more than I would have expected it to. Sometimes I’d wake up at night and go to the kitchen and realize, between the refrigerator and the table, that I was an orphan. Not because I’d lost him, but because I’d lost any chance of having the father I wanted; whatever remote possibility there might have been had died with him. Maybe it had always been there, that possibility, and my pride would never let me see it. Remorse, somber and silent, had crystallized inside me. Now it was summer, and I was still lying awake at night, brooding over my strange sadness. I thought that maybe the arrival of cooler weather would get me back on track. As I drove to the beach, I thought Elsa and I might go to Norway for the August vacation. I wanted to walk along the precipices of huge rift valleys, sail into fjords, cross the Vest-fjord to the Lofoten Islands. And then I wanted to stay there and catch giant codfish in the cobalt blue ocean while the wind turned my skin red.
A middle-aged woman was driving the car ahead of me—I’d been behind her for some time. I could have turned on my blinker, sounded the horn, pulled out to the left, and zoomed past her, but instead I leaned on the steering wheel and bided my time. Her short hair was pinned up with a comb; there was something pensive about the back of her neck. She was a woman who was coping, stiffening her girlish back, but she’d lost her bearings. That’s enough; now I’m going to blow the horn and rattle her backbone. But then I thought about my mother. She got her driver’s license late in life, a gift from herself. She would climb into her little runabout—it smelled like furniture polish—and drive away to parts unknown. Her herringbone overcoat, carefully folded, was on the passenger’s seat. She drove the same way as the woman in front of me, clinging to the steering wheel for dear life, afraid that the car behind her would blow its horn. Angela, why does life come down to so little? Where’s mercy? Where’s the sound of my mother’s heart? Where’s the sound of all the hearts I’ve loved? Give me a basket, my child, give me that little basket you used to take to nursery school. A few bright lights have shone on my life, like fireflies in the dark, and I want to put them inside.
The woman in front of me slowed down, and I slowed down, too. I let myself be led along, as docile as a newborn in a baby carriage. The roadside fields were dirty. It was somewhere around here that my car had broken down a few weeks earlier.
The green door was bolted shut. I knocked several times, but no response. Up above on the overpass, the cars went whizzing by. I wondered how many times I had passed overhead on my way to the beach, completely unaware of the life down below. Beyond the piers of the viaduct, there were other dwellings: rusty sheds, trailers. The lugubrious carcass of a burned automobile showed through a patch of grass. Maybe it had fallen from the viaduct and nobody had ever bothered to haul it away. Nearby, there was an area of bare clay, dried and cracked by the sun. A snake with gleaming black skin slithered over it before disappearing back into the grass. She wasn’t home. As I walked away, the shadow of her house spread over that depressing landscape and buried me.
I went the long way back to my car and put the key in the ignition, but I didn’t turn it. Instead, I manipulated the radio dial in search of some music, and then I laid my head against the back of the seat. I was in the shade; outside, there was that great buzzing heat and, as usual, little else. Every now and then, an isolated scream rolled down from some unidentifiable hole in the wall. I turned off the radio. I stretched my legs out past the pedals, half-closed my eyes, and saw her through the slit between my eyelids, like a wide-screen movie. She was walking among the cement columns on the basement floor of the big unfinished apartment building. I’d been right to wait for her there. She’d gone that way, as she had before, because it offered some shelter from the sun. She seemed to walk faster when she stepped into the light, and then slowed down and almost disappeared when she reached the long black shadows of the columns. I’d been afraid I wouldn’t recognize her, but I recognized her as soon as I saw her. Far off, tiny, half hidden in the darkness. With her scarecrow head and her thin bandy legs. I spotted that disoriented way of walking she had—maybe there was something wrong with one of her hips. She was headed for me without knowing it, walking a little sideways, like a suspicious stray dog. She was carrying a large shopping bag in each hand—her arms were stretched and taut. These w
eights, however, failed to stabilize her as she advanced; in fact, they pulled her off balance. Now she’s going to fall, I thought; now she’s going to fall. And I grabbed the door handle, ready to get out and go to her. But she didn’t fall, and then another shadow hid her. I let go of the handle and stayed where I was. Her broad forehead came back into the light, and with it the sensation that it wasn’t her I was spying on; it was myself.
While she continued to come my way, moving through that checkerboard of darkness and light, I went over in my mind—frame by frame, like a film—the obscene moments I’d spent with her. I slid down in my seat, inert and sweating in sexual apnea. Because all of a sudden I remembered: her lifeless body, extinguished like her cold fireplace; her bowed white neck; that sad, enigmatic gaze. No, I hadn’t done it all by myself. She’d wanted it as much as I had. More than I had. And the wall, and the chair that fell over behind us, and her wrists, pinned to that glossy poster above her head—they all passed before my eyes. The memory was in the pit of my stomach. Even the smell of the two of us together came back to me: the smell of delirious passion, overpowering the smell of ashes. Ours had been a desperate embrace, and the desperation was all hers, riding on those skeletal legs that now were walking toward me. I was not used to making love like that, but she was. She dragged me down with her. And here she was, walking with her shopping bags. What was in them? What did you buy? What do you eat? Drop those bags, leave them in the dust, and come with me, little dog. With the light behind her, she was thin, very thin. She looked like one of those little invertebrates with anemic exoskeletons that come out of the ground in the spring. In the same way, she seemed to be surfacing after a struggle. She was going home undismayed on an ordinary day in her wretched life. What was she like? Why did she wear so much makeup? The patchwork purse hung on its long shoulder strap and beat against her legs. I had to leave. She stopped inside a cone-shaped shadow. She put one bag on the ground and touched her overheated neck and fumbled with her peroxide hair. I stayed so I could capture that gesture, remembering the scent of her sticky neck. I hadn’t had anything to drink. My stomach felt fine, my head was clear . . . and in that sober, normal, clearheaded state, I desired her. I couldn’t trust myself anymore; already, while I watched her, I was violating her. It was all a lie. I hadn’t waited for her so I could apologize; I’d lurked around like a hawk, ready to swoop down on her and do her in again. She was close to the car now—she was going to pass by without noticing me. I thought I’d look at her in the rearview mirror until she was out of sight, and then I’d go away and never come back again. I lowered my head, looking at my hands. They were resting on my thighs, as if to remind me that I was a respectable man.
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