I picked up the beer bottle again and sucked it empty, right down to the noisy foam. He asked, “Would you like a coffee?”
“No thanks,” I said.
He left the table and came back with a single espresso cup in his hand. After he drank the coffee, he put the unopened packet of sugar into the inside pocket of his coat. His sunglasses were still on the table, and he fumbled with them pensively, folding in their earpieces. I leaned against the window, looking out, partly supported by a nonfunctional radiator. Its tubes were covered with a layer of solidified dust.
“Was she your lover?”
This question was totally unexpected, as unexpected as the wind that began to blow, whistling around the clay tiles of the parking shelter where the hearse was.
“Why do you ask?”
I still hadn’t turned to face him. The reflection of the beer bottle in the window spread a greenish glare over its grimy, anonymous surface.
“She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but you have one on.”
“Maybe she never wore it.”
“No, women like that keep their wedding rings on their fingers.”
“She could have lost it.”
“They buy another one. They may have to economize on their household expenses or take out a loan, but they buy another one.”
Perhaps it would have been better if he’d persevered in keeping quiet. His voice was less impeccable than his silence.
“Did you love her a lot?”
“What’s that to you?”
“Nothing. I was just making conversation.”
He picked up his sunglasses, sat up straight, and examined the dark lenses against the light. He said, “A year ago, I lost my wife.”
He put the glasses back on his face with a precise two-handed movement. The sturdy earpieces—very dark, but made from some kind of bone—slipped down behind his ears. He remained still, ascertaining that the glasses were correctly positioned, and then briskly moved his hands away. He was already on his feet.
“Shall we go?”
Afterward, as he drove, he seemed to become sadder—or maybe that was me. The road looked like a stream of thick gray mud, rippling away from the oncoming hearse. “I loved her very much,” I murmured. “Very much.”
Sometime later, on a bleached-earth side road off the provincial highway, in the middle of a field, we came to a stop. The huge black car was hard to park. There was a big mulberry tree nearby. Leaning against its trunk—which turned out to be warm, much warmer than my back—I hung my head and cried. The undertaker stood next to me. At first, he tried to assist me, bending over me and putting his arm around my shoulders. “Come, now . . .” he said. But then he drew himself erect again. I could hear his knees popping as he straightened his legs. The wind slid into the tall grass around us and made a whistling sound like music. By that time, I’d told him everything—about my wife, Elsa, about you, our newborn child, and about Italia. And I wept for her, I wept every time I tried to pronounce her name. I simply couldn’t do it; either I’d start sobbing in the middle of a syllable or I’d belch out fumes from the beer that was sitting on my stomach in a growing ferment.
From time to time, the undertaker flicked his eyes over parts of me. He was uncomfortable, but his discomfort was filled with affection and human sympathy. He looked at my grief-stricken mouth; he looked at my eyes, which were too red to be looked at. Then he drew back and turned to contemplate the windblown, musical grass, whose whistling continually rose and fell, fading away like eddies in a whirlpool. He lit a cigarette and smoked it in silence, then threw it onto the chalky lane. As he stamped the butt into the loose soil, he observed the torsion of his foot inside his black shoe. “You die the way you live,” he said. “My wife passed away like a leaf, without disturbing anyone.”
We climbed back into the hearse and spent the rest of the journey changing back into what we had been before, him with his tensed neck muscles and me with my forehead resting on the window. But inside us, in our dissimilar souls, we felt solidarity with each other. We were like two wolves that have chased a prey and lost it: They lie together in the dark woods, panting and weary, and they’re still hungry.
By the time we arrived at our destination, the ambient air was crushingly hot. The village was perched on the sides and stump of a hill with a flattened summit that made me think of the crater of an extinct volcano. The bright yellow ocher houses crowding the hillside looked as though they had been cut out of the sulfurous rock.
Women wearing their heavy traditional costumes, with black wool leggings, shawls, and work shoes, were walking down the center of the unpaved road leading to the cemetery. Instead of making the slightest movement to get out of the way, they stared at us incredulously, like goats. We crept into the parking area next to the cemetery gates. Other people were there, less exotic people, dressed in contemporary clothing and standing around an ordinary jalopy, but they stared at us with the very same stupefaction as the others, equally shocked by the sudden appearance of an unknown funeral car carrying a coffin with no flowers. The undertaker reached around into the back for his jacket. He said, “I’m going to take care of a few bureaucratic matters.”
And he picked up his black leather case, which was stiff as a coffin.
I watched him walk past the two columns holding up the gates of the cemetery and unhesitatingly turn left. Do all cemeteries have similar topographies? However that may be, he moved about that silent place as though he knew it; in fact, the tremors in his legs increased, as when a horse recognizes its stall. His face disappeared behind the white wall formed by the gravestones, which fanned out in all directions. The jalopy drove away in a cloud of dust. I got out of the hearse, stood behind it, with my back to the cemetery, and pissed, leaving a dark stain on the earth.
The undertaker came back, accompanied by a somewhat shorter man wearing blue work clothes. After exchanging a few words, they separated, and the undertaker walked over to me. “They close at sunset. We have to find a priest.”
The coffin had already been let down, and the overturned earth rose in a mound beside it. The wind made the priest’s vestments billow and stirred his censer, wafting the incense fumes our way. The cripple, who was waiting to be paid, had not moved. The undertaker had recruited him, and now he continued to stand there, supporting his body weight on the longer of his two legs and making an excessively disconsolate face, as if that, too, were part of the service he’d been hired to provide. The cemetery custodian was still there, as well. Together, we had lowered the coffin into the grave, and it had been no easy task. The undertaker took off his jacket when we started and didn’t put it on again until the end. His sweaty forehead was covered with specks of dirt conveyed there by the swirling wind. But the muscular exertion had somehow helped my spirits. I felt calm, despite the hot wind fluttering around me. My hands had been the first to sprinkle earth on Italia’s coffin, and now the custodian was swinging his shovel in a steady rhythm, scooping and dumping. My pain was still there, but diminished, dulled by exhaustion.
The cripple’s face, framed by his shock of long blond hair, resumed its normal inexpressiveness. He looked like an onion lying in a field, unearthed and abandoned. The brotherly undertaker appeared to be at peace with himself; the sun was going down, and his work was done. As he breathed, the gold belt buckle under his belly vibrated a little. It had been a long day. He glanced up at the sky, his gaze sweeping across it with swift precision: Yes, the darkness would bring him compensation. Italia was under the earth, and some of that fresh lumpy earth had passed through my hands, had rained down on her from my spread fingers. Now she was buried, Angela; my ephemeral moment of love was over.
I saw a dark shadow like the shadow of a bird. A rustic-looking figure was standing a few feet away from me, half-hidden by the wall of aboveground vaults that divided the cemetery. It was an old man, but he was as small as a child. He stood there without moving, holding a hat in his hand. I didn’t think he’d been there a litt
le while ago, when I’d bent down for two handfuls of earth, but maybe I simply hadn’t noticed him. He seemed to have come out of nowhere. His eyes met mine without curiosity, as if he already knew who I was. I turned away from him, but all the same, the memory of that look remained implanted in the back of my neck. Then I remembered the yellowing photograph Italia had in her room, the one of the young man. Her father, her first tormentor. I turned around again, this time with the intention of doing something, of going over to speak to him. But he wasn’t there anymore. There was only the sound of the wind, which was swirling around on the other side of the wall of vaults, and there was the encroaching black background, where you couldn’t see a thing. Maybe it wasn’t him; maybe it was just some curious passerby. But I forgave him, Angela, and at the same time I forgave my own father, too.
No memorial marked Italia’s presence in that cemetery. The undertaker had come to terms with the custodian for setting up a simple unornamented stone, but that wouldn’t be ready for another ten days or so. The custodian passed me a pad of graph paper and a ballpoint pen and asked, “What do you want on the stone?”
Pressing too hard, making a few holes in the paper with the pen, I wrote her name, nothing but her name. Now there wasn’t anything left to do, so we all stared at the filled-in trench and waited for someone else to be the first to leave. The undertaker made the sign of the cross and moved away, followed slowly by the cripple. There was no gesture that I wanted to make, nor did I have any special thoughts, except for thinking that one day I’d remember this moment, I’d fill it up with something that wasn’t there. I’d find a way to take what appeared utterly futile at the time and make it, in retrospect, quite solemn. I bent over and scooped up a little earth. I thought I was going to put it in my pocket, or perhaps let it trickle through my fingers like ashes. Instead, I shoved it into my mouth. I ate dirt, Angela, maybe without even knowing it. I was looking for a way to say good-bye, and I couldn’t come up with anything more eloquent than a mouthful of earth. I spat it out, using the back of my hand to wipe away whatever was left on my lips, on my tongue.
The undertaker was on his way back from paying, with my checks, everyone who had to be paid. The cemetery was now closed, and I leaned on the wall near the locked gates, waiting for him and looking out over the land that lay below us. It was dotted here and there with the fixed lights of houses and traversed by the headlights of moving vehicles. Night had completely fallen. I recognized his footfall behind me.
He leaned against the wall at my side, reached into the inner pocket of his jacket, and took out the packet of sugar he’d collected in the highway restaurant. He opened the packet and poured its contents into his mouth. We were so close to each other that I could hear the sound of his teeth as they crunched the sugar grains, a grinding sound that gave me shivers. He moved his tongue across his palate, savoring the sweetness as it fused with his saliva. He looked below us where I was looking, over the precipice and down into the valley with the floating lights. “I don’t know,” he said.
“What?
“It doesn’t seem fair. Dying, I mean.”
He swallowed the last of his sugar and said, “But on the other hand, it does.”
I looked into the cemetery. She feels no more pain, I thought. And that was a good thought.
40
Ada’s standing in front of me, very close. I’m looking out over that precipice, as I did fifteen years ago. You’re down there in the darkness, one of those trembling lights. I don’t know why I’ve brought you all this way, Angela. But I know I’m still leaning against that wall, and you’re at my side; I’m clutching you like a hostage. Here she is, Italia. This is my daughter, the one who was born back then. And you, Angela, raise your head, let her see you, and tell this lady, this queen, hello. She looks like me, doesn’t she, Italia? She’s fifteen. Her behind’s a little big. She used to be skinny skinny, but for a year now, her behind’s been a little big. It’s her age. She’s a girl who eats between meals and doesn’t fasten her helmet. She’s not perfect, she’s not special, she’s one among many. She’s an ordinary girl in the world. But she’s my daughter, she’s Angela. She’s all I have. Look at me, Italia. Take a seat on this empty chair and look at me. Have you really come to take her from me? Stay there; I want to tell you something. I want to tell you how it was when I went back to the life I’d left behind. I had no more emotions; I felt no pain; I received no consolation. But Angela was stronger than me, and stronger than you. I want to tell you what it smells like to have an infant in the house: It’s a sweet smell that sticks to the walls, that gets inside the walls. I’d post myself beside her cradle and gaze down at her sweaty little head. She’d wake up laughing and suck her feet. And she’d stare at me with the fathomless eyes of the newly born; she’d stare at me the way you used to. She had a beneficial effect, like a stove. She was a gift, brand spanking new. She was life, and I didn’t have the courage to embrace it. An airplane is circling in the sky, preparing to land. A woman on that plane is weeping. She’s fiftythree, somewhat heavier than she used to be, with a little bag of flesh under her chin. That’s my wife. Her scent has grown old in my nostrils. She’s looking at a cloud; she’s looking at her daughter. Cut through that cloud, Italia, cut through it like a swan. Give me back Angela.
“Doctor . . .”
I get to my feet, as though for the first time in my life.
“We’re closing her up.”
“Vital signs?”
“Normal.”
My heart’s about to jump out of my throat. I grab one of Ada’s arms and cling to it, holding on to a last bit of silence, but soon I start sobbing into my hands, and I even wet my pants a little. And then, chaos; while my emotions swamp me, all the ambient sights and sounds come rushing back into my consciousness at once: voices, white coats, doors opening and closing. Alfredo’s coat is spattered with blood. It’s the first thing I see. When he takes off his gloves, his hands are white. Holding out those hands, he comes toward me.
“It took a bit longer than I thought it would. I had problems with the dura—it contracted. And there was excessive bleeding. I had a hard time making it stop.”
His surgeon’s cap is soaked. He’s got marks around his mouth from the surgical mask, and he’s got the face of a madman. He speaks very quickly and gets mixed up. He says, “Let’s hope there isn’t a diffuse axonal injury. Let’s hope the brain compression the impact caused wasn’t too severe.”
I breathe in assent. Then I ask him, “What’s your prognosis?”
“I told Ada to try weaning her off the respirator. We’ll be able to tell better then, but it’ll take a little while.”
Your bandaged head glides past me on the way to intensive care. The nurse pushes the gurney slowly and cautiously. Now you’re inside these glass walls, and I’m looking at your closed eyes and watching the sheet over your chest move as you breathe. Your breathing’s what I’m watching for. Ada’s taken you off the respirator and removed the anesthetic pump; she’s trying to bring you a little closer to the surface so we can see what’s happening. She moves around you, around your tubes, with special concentration. She’s pale and drawn, and her lips are dry. “Take a break,” I murmur. She obeys me reluctantly.
Now it’s you and me again, Angela. We’re alone. I stroke your arms, your forehead, all your exposed skin. Your head is resting on one of those croissant-shaped pillows. You’ve got to stay like that. Your neck muscles have to remain extended to avoid any compression of the venous circle. And your head has to lie higher than your heart. Your ears are brown from iodine solution. You’ve got some asphalt in your cheeks, but don’t worry—those cinders work their way out by themselves. If there are any left, I’ll remove them with the laser. As for your head, I’ll buy you a hat. I’ll buy you a hundred hats. Your friends will come and visit you—they’ll think you look funny in that bandage. And they’ll envy you because you’ll get to skip school. They’ll bring CDs and scatter them over your bed. They’ll bri
ng you a cigarette, too. I know who’ll bring it for you: the short fellow, the little punk with the dreadlocks, the one who comes up to your shoulder. Is that the lucky boyfriend? I like him. I like his hair. I like everything you like. Look, I’ll rent some skates, some Rollerblades. Black, with lots of wheels, like yours. I want to skate the streets with you on Ecological Sundays. I want to fall down; I want to make you laugh. There’s a strange sobbing sound in your chest, so I’m going to hook you back up to the respirator. Don’t move. But you do move. You squeeze my hand.
“Can you hear me? If you can hear me, sweetheart, open your eyes. It’s me. . . . It’s Daddy.”
And you open them, open them with no effort, as though opening them were the simplest thing in the world. You uncover your black-and-white eyes and look at me.
Ada comes running up behind me. “What’s going on?” she says. She probably doesn’t realize it, but she’s yelling.
I don’t take my eyes off you, and I feel myself smiling wetly. “She’s responsive,” I say. “She squeezed my finger.”
“It might just have been a grasping reflex. . . .”
“No. She opened her eyes, too.”
Alfredo has washed up and changed his clothes and combed his hair. He looks like an athlete who’s just won a competition. He’s wearing plastic bags over his street shoes. He says, “Intracranial pressure, acute anemia, cardiac arrest . . . I didn’t think she was going to make it.”
“I know.”
“I could only hope.”
“You hoped well.”
He bends over you, stimulates you, checks your reactions. You open your eyes again, and this time I seem to recognize your funny, indolent gaze. Alfredo checks the medications on your schedule. It would be better, he says, for you to be sedated again and then left alone for the first twenty-four hours. After that, he leaves the hospital in his typically brusque way, without saying good-bye to anyone. He goes back to his life as a separated husband, to his house, which a Philippine servant tidies up when he’s not there. His colleagues in the intensive-care unit don’t look up as he leaves; they’re bent over the schedule sheets, discussing shifts. Ada alone follows him with her eyes, smiling at him. He wasn’t on duty, and yet he came back to perform this operation. Maybe he did it because she was the one who asked him to.
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