Back at home, Eva sat down on her bed. The rooms to both sides of hers were quiet. She didn’t want to think, didn’t want to let tomorrow into her mind. She lay down and let sleep crush in.
When she woke up, it was morning. She tried to sit up but could only prop her torso on her elbows. She poked her thigh. Nothing. Her legs had frozen. She could not feel them: they were empty, uninhabited, unreachable. There would be no storeroom today, no red glass eye, no white-linen tables or cash in her hand. She would not rise. The heave of the world could stay where it was, hanging just above her bed, waiting for her to lift up and yoke into it. She would not rise. She was paralyzed, she could not move, it had already been decided. It was easy: she would let it be easy, she would just close down, take-me-deep-inside-you-deep-black-boot-closing-down, shutting out the noise of Buenos Aires, the chain of failures, the vacant room next door, the red glass eye; lying numb like this, she could just wait, she would simply wait to die.
Time swung, shape-shifted, crept and raced and crept again.
Sun slanting through the window grew rich and sank to night.
Night hung feverish and electric until dawn.
Dawn brought light that stretched slow limbs and slowly, slowly collapsed down into night.
Eva ebbed from her body. She was not a young woman in a rusty bed, but a soft, diffuse haze in the air. She rose in translucence, cold didn’t matter, and neither did fire—only this, the good forgetting, the extraordinary lightness of being-this-nothing-at-last. Higher now. Through the ceiling, into the sky, buoyed by air. Air permeated everywhere, air pale and swirling, air dark and still, shimmering open a fissure of light through which she could dive to meet whatever could be met there—God perhaps; she didn’t care—she dove.
“Eva.”
A shake, a rustle, there was a tree: perched in the tree, Pajarita, with dark braids and dark eyes. “Why are you here?”
Feel to her more than speaking: I’m dying, Mami. Almost there.
“Why?”
Too. Much.
“Mija.” Pajarita’s face soared forward, out of the branches. “Don’t be stupid. I won’t let you in.”
Can’t. Do it. Alone.
“Alone?” Her mother laughed. “You have the strangest ideas.”
A rustle, a shake, and the face of Pajarita shimmers away. A tree dissolves. A fissure closes in a line of light. Then air is falling; air is fallen through; nothing and everything fall toward each other and turn into something solid and throbbing again.
She opened her eyes. The quiet light of morning coated the walls. Sensation flooded back to her: sore neck and arms, parched throat, hunger, headache like a block of lead. She shook her head and fingertips to make sure she still could. Below her waist, she still felt nothing—but above her waist she hurt, she hungered, she was alive.
“Socorro.”She sounded like a frog. She willed her throat to open, tried again.
“Por favor … help …”
Finally, a tentative knock on the door.
“¡Che! You all right?”
“Please … come in.”
The door opened. The prostitute from next door stood in the threshold, pink towel and toothbrush in her hand. A wiry, compact woman, puffed skin beneath blue eyes. “I thought—what the hell happened to you?”
“Can’t move.”
“I’ll call the hospital.”
She left to find a telephone. Eva turned to face the wall. While she waited, she saw more than remembered herself stashing something between wall and mattress, that bundle of leaves and roots. She pulled it out and held it at the cusp of missing legs.
The room they took her to was white and bare and the hospital loomed beyond it, a sterile wilderness, unmapped, enormous. On the second day she woke to the sound of footsteps clapping down the hall. A group of marching feet approached her room.
“This one’s an unusual case,” a doctor said outside the door. “Partial paralysis, numbness, fever, dehydration, malnutrition, various aches, hysteria, delusions. No stable diagnosis yet. Let’s enter.”
They trooped in, a flock of white birds in their laboratory coats. Teacher at the front, student doctors flapping all around him. Eva felt their eyes on her chaotic hair, the unbathed sweat of her, the mess of half-written poems on the steel table suspended over her lap. She drew herself up against the pillows.
“Buenas tardes,” she said.
The students shuffled. Her body railed for water.
“As we examine her, take care to notice any subtle abnormalities,” the doctor said. He was a balding man with canine jowls. “Are there any questions?”
They shook their heads.
“Doctor?” Eva said.
“Well then, let’s start.” The doctor pulled back Eva’s sheets. He placed his stethoscope against her chest, then prodded her neck, arms, palms, waist, commenting to the students as he went. He pressed her thigh. “Can you feel this, Señorita?”
“No.”
“Lift your right leg, please.”
She tried; the limb stayed limp against the mattress.
“Left leg.”
Nothing.
“Interesting.” He made notes in her chart. “Well. This will be of interest to Dr. Santos, who will examine the patient this afternoon.”
A student murmured. Pens stirred the air and scrawled against clipboards.
“Let’s go,” their teacher said, and the flock dispersed.
“Doctor,” Eva called.
The doctor turned. “Yes?”
“I need some water.”
“Ah. Bueno. A nurse will be here soon.” He smiled nervously, and was gone.
Eva lay back against a starched white pillow. She should be grateful for this place, this clean room, detestable though it was, a sanitized box with too many eyes peering in. She was at their mercy. They asked little about her life and she didn’t want to tell them. They didn’t need to know about the shatter, Andrés’ desertion, the snot on his chest, a mother in a fissure and a father in a boot. They might think she was crazy but she knew what she was—alive, still breathing, and that was a marvel. She’d walk again. Perhaps she would. And if she did, she’d stride to her own future, forward forward never back; she didn’t know where she was headed but she knew what she was tired of, roaches, betrayals, dwelling in the bottom of a shoe; she would stride away from all that, toward some new shore, courting miracles with gritted teeth. The world spread out around her in a naked landscape that overwhelmed her when she closed her eyes. She turned to poetry. Words shot from her like sparks. She couldn’t stop. Line after line they burned onto the pages that a kindly nurse had brought her. Pen touched paper and she saw flashes that barely seemed possible. They were all she had, these poems, and Mamá’s dried plants to slip into her mate when the nurses weren’t looking.
She picked up her pen and wrote: You, my fire, are all I have. Naked I still come to you.
Thirsty. Footsteps moved brusquely back and forth in the hall. Lick my every part, blue tongue. Hungry I will come to you.
She tore the page from the notebook, let it fall to the floor. New paper. I have searched the wildest woods / Wells of terror, mapless roads / For Desire’s secret name—
The light from the small window was deepening to gold. New paper again. Everywhere everywhere there is hope / If there is still poetry.
Outside her door, a woman laughed. She sounded like a witch. Poems like needles pricking you out of dreams, / Poems carry women through holes in the sky
A knock on the door. The nurse came in, pushing a wheelchair. “We’re going to see Dr. Santos,” she said, as if announcing tea with the pope.
First there was water to drink, then a sponge bath, and then the nurse trundled Eva into the wheelchair and down narrow halls. Each passage teemed with people: nurses, men in lab coats, a patient with bandaged torso and haunted eyes, a patient who wept and sang very softly to the intravenous device in her arm. They pushed through gray double doors. Another flock of studen
ts in white coats filled the room. In their midst stood a man in his thirties with a large nose, a potbelly, and an unmistakable air of authority.
“Dr. Santos? The patient has arrived.”
Dr. Santos looked up from his clipboard, meeting Eva’s eyes with cool detachment.
“Señorita Firielli.” His voice was gently calibrated. “How are you doing?”
“Not so great.”
He nodded, slowly, knowingly. “It is hard to be ill.”
“It is hard to be in this hospital.”
White coats rustled, like low alarms. Dr. Santos stared down at her. “Is that so?”
She had said too much. She flushed. “Yes.”
“May I ask why?”
“The doctors. They’re disrespectful.”
His face remained composed, but she thought she saw a twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Well, Señorita, my apologies. Let’s hope our reputation can be redeemed.” He looked down at his chart. “You came in with complaints of paralysis, fever, aches, and acute headaches—is that correct?”
She nodded.
“I will examine you now.”
He began to touch her, the students in a silent arc around them. He felt her collarbone, tapped her arms, gently pressed her back. His fingertips were warm and unobtrusive. They tiptoed down her spine as though it were a familiar staircase in the dark.
Dr. Santos nodded to himself and wrote notes in her chart. The students followed him into a side room, where they closed the door to confer. When they emerged, he held a small vial of pills. “Please leave me alone with the patient.”
The students left. The doctor brought a stool to her wheelchair and sat down. “Eva.” His nose was like a beak. A great white bird now close and crooning. “I want nothing more than to help you.” He showed her the vial of small pink pills. “These pills reflect the best advances of modern medicine. They are potent interventions for conditions exactly like your own. If you take them regularly, you will get well. And you do want to get well, don’t you?”
His eyes were so probing, his coat so starched and white. She nodded.
“I want you to begin your treatment.” He gestured for her hand and placed three pills in her palm. They weighed almost nothing. “Take them. Your recovery will begin.”
Eva rolled the pills in her hand. She was not crazy, she was not lost, she would find her way. She held the doctor’s eyes as she put the pills in her mouth. Cure me, she thought, and swallowed them. A sign had come. Her recovery was beginning. She would be well.
At the core of his mind, Dr. Roberto Santos had filed his upcoming marriage in a drawer labeled Right Things to Do. A perfectly reasonable place to keep a marriage. It was sure to bring some happiness, not only to Cristina Caracanes, who had imported miles of Venetian lace he was not allowed to see, but to his mother and father as well. It would elevate the family name, rather than mar it. Marring the family name was a Santos tradition his parents had spent their lives trying to undo. His mother, Estela, had always been obsessed with “breaking the spell”—and said it just that way, as if their lives were locked in dragon-guarded castles, as if she’d been Sleeping Beauty when Reynaldo Santos found her, fanning herself next to unfinished railroad tracks in the Pampas. She was the daughter of the man who owned the New World Railroad Company; he was a construction engineer, employed by New World to oversee the laying of track. He was struck immediately by the way thin hairs escaped her bun to whip the wind. He was an educated, but not landed, man. His family came from some of the bluest blood of old Spain, traceable back to the second cousin of King Ferdinand of Aragon, but all of this had been tainted by Reynaldo’s father, known as Llanto, the last living member of the Mazorca. Llanto had joined up in 1848, when dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas expanded his circle of assassins to keep up with the need for terror. The Mazorca had so many missions then that they recruited new members from among their own sons. Llanto was sixteen when he joined. He quickly learned the art of slitting the throats of a dozen kneeling people in one long blow. He learned ways to force the violinist to keep playing while the blood flowed. He perfected the art of skewering heads on spears so they’d gawk for a week in the Plaza de Mayo. By his twentieth birthday, Llanto had killed over two hundred men and women and eighty-seven children. Then the dictator was deposed and Llanto withdrew in shame to a shack in the plains outside Rosario. At the age of sixty he returned to Buenos Aires in search of a respectable wife. He found Talita, a twenty-two-year-old widow, and sired his first legitimate child, Reynaldo, the construction engineer. Reynaldo grew up tainted by family legacy, determined to change it with the arc of his own life, as if a family name could be scrubbed clean of blood and shame, and the actions of its progeny were the scrub brush. So he’d married the purest girl whom he could find, who fanned herself in silence next to tracks no train had wheeled on. In her fresh-limbed love, she didn’t feel the weight of the Santos stain until the honeymoon in Rio de Janeiro had passed.
Roberto Santos had always known the stain. He was raised to continue his father’s mission. “Mira, Roberto,” his father would say, “there are only three events in life that matter. You know what they are?”
“Yes,” Roberto would answer, waiting for the next part.
“Birth. Marriage. Death. That’s it. And think—what do you have control over? Only marriage. You’d better choose well.”
For years, Roberto had not chosen at all. It seemed too looming a decision, a train whose turn would pull the cars of a hundred years behind it. All that steely history hitched to his back. Instead, he’d poured himself into his studies, throughout school and beyond it, rising from great student to great doctor to a premier researcher in medicine. The Santos name became a source of national pride among scientists, intellectuals, and more recently among the Peronista elite. It was not enough. His parents wanted a marriage; he was their only son.
And now he was so close, having chosen Cristina Caracanes, with her perfectly waved hair, her tight society smile, her high teas and charity balls for orphans with shaved heads and tin begging bowls. Her lineage was impeccable, as were the pleats in her dresses. It had been his father’s suggestion, and, Roberto thought, a good one. It even appeared—from his visits to her parlor, where they sipped English tea in the afternoon light—that she liked him. Or liked, at least, the columns in the society pages that lauded their engagement. She was the youngest of three sisters and, at twenty-four, restless to marry. She looked like a horse and laughed like a sparrow. She was proper and right and crisp and boring, the opposite of this uruguaya who had invaded his world on a wheelchair, casting out poems like minute explosives.
Fate, he thought, had a ghastly sense of humor, the sort unwelcome at any genteel party, to send this strange patient to his ward. To bring the perfect subject for his studies in the form of this woman, sharp and shiny as cut glass, just as tempting and as hazardous to touch.
He was reckless with her in a way he had not been for years, and he should stop, should not administer to her three times a day and give her pills from his own hand. It was more than he had ever done for a patient. It was her skin. No, her mouth. No. The way she moved, making the drabbest hospital gown seem like satin (the nerve, the gall). Perhaps it was her fragility. Or her tongue. He counted the minutes until he could touch her wet warm tongue.
“Your pills, Señorita.” He waited for her to look up from her scribbling.
She smiled and opened her mouth.
Dr. Roberto Santos’ fingers itched and burned as they placed three little pills on the soft dampness and paused, then withdrew reluctantly while she pulled her tongue back into that mouth and tilted her head to drink water, exposing her bare neck.
“Gracias,” she murmured. “You’re very kind.”
She wrote ferociously, and sometimes he watched her from the doorway. Propped on pillows, notebook on tray, brow pressed in tense inspiration. What a fascinating specimen. He discerned no particular pattern to these bouts. Eva was like a feral cat: sl
eek, restless, changeable—and intelligent too, more so than Cristina, with her banal gossip. He could never imagine Cristina surrounded by poems of her own writing. But he also couldn’t imagine her in a wheelchair, surrounded by the sickest, poorest people in the city.
It was unsettling to consider where Eva had come from. He tended not to think too much about his patients’ world outside the hospital, the dross and tangle of their daily lives. Even now, with this woman, he preferred to keep her in the present tense, to think of her like a fish—spit up from the maw of the sea—and this hospital a dry shore where she glimmered and flapped in need of help without him having to taste the salt of drowning. Worlds like theirs were not meant to mix. Not ever. Which is why argentinos of his class—and, even more so, of Cristina’s class—had been horrified last week when Perón married Eva Duarte. It was one thing to let such a woman become a mistress. But a wife, and, should he win the election, a first lady?
“What,” Cristina had moaned, clinking a porcelain teacup into its saucer, “is happening to our country?”
Roberto Santos had nodded as Cristina griped on. I wonder. Has Eva ever been a mistress?
That, he thought—pacing the hospital hallway, poring over charts, resting his right hand on a grieving woman’s back—must be the answer. What he felt must be pure carnal response. If he could make her his mistress, if he only had the luck and balls, he could free himself from this fever. He tried thinking of Eva at Flor de Oro, tried choosing girls who looked somewhat like her, pretended it was her splayed beneath him in the upstairs rooms, but it was no use. He still woke up in the morning with the thought of her in that dreary bed, half paralyzed (God help him) yet so bright, urging him to eat her in one long, slow bite. No: he was fooling himself; he wanted more than he could get with any Flor de Oro substitute. He wanted to know Eva. Know—what?—not her past, perhaps, but the shape of her sleeping breaths, the precise curl at the edges of her thoughts. Something inexplicable, internal, made her the strange woman that she was. Her words were flecks of it. He wanted to see more. He wanted, desperately, to see each poem that filled those little scraps of paper. He had the nurses collect them while Eva was asleep, then slip them back before she woke. For his research, he said. (Reckless again: nurses had a way of seeing through things, and what if they suspected? what if they talked? Buenos Aires might be big, but not too big for gossip, especially something like this, a society engagement, a pretty young patient, a doctor scrubbing clean a family name.) He diligently copied the papers’ contents into her chart. They enthralled him. He couldn’t stop. Each page was dated at the top right corner, in thin little numbers, even if they held only one word, like
The Invisible Mountain Page 16