But before I can ask her, the nurse replies with a question: “Don’t you know where you are, dear?”
“No.”
“In a hospital, my dear.”
“Oh, that’s why.”
“What?”
“Why I didn’t recognize my room.”
“Don’t be frightened.”
How short life would be if certain unpleasant moments didn’t make it feel endless! In a room that’s not my own, for hours and hours I’ve believed is mine, trying to figure out where I am—and yet I am not dying!
Like an architect who finds the lost plans for a house, or the explorer who guides himself with a compass that may be broken, or better still like an animal that’s settling into a new lair and trying to remember the one before, I calm down and, relaxing more, investigate where the hospital is, whether the window of my room faces the river, and try to figure out how long I’ve been here.
Different noises fill my surroundings with their perverse stories. What’s that saw screeching early in the morning? Does it chop up human beings? Does it grind their bones to sand? Do they use such material to build houses? And that noise like boiling water coming up from the basement and the ground floor. Is it the sound of lips praying, or the boilers of hell where boiling liquids are prepared for sinners? In a hospital? The voices were like flies buzzing. Are they the same ones? And a roaring like that of wild beasts of the people in the hallways: What will become of it? Will it turn into monsters in distress, or a procession of men with costumes improvised from torn sheets and wet towels, journeying toward the desert, carrying inedible, stinking provisions. So many days of Carnival without a carnival!
These faces appear etched in the darkness. All of a sudden I see them. They can be distinguished from the furniture but seem to be of the same material. They are doctors’ faces. They have hands but no bodies or souls. Crowding together they draw near. It is they who suffer. They are the next victims. Those who suffer, suffer less than those who watch their suffering.
Suddenly they turn on a light, as if wanting to surprise me in the middle of some unspeakable sin. One of them, a cross between a god and a locomotive, has a light on his specialist forehead.
They sit me down, hit me, uncover me, shout at me, poke me, stick a thermometer in me, push their fingers into my abdomen until I cry out, tickle me with a blood-pressure gauge on my arm.
“Breathe,” they tell me. “Don’t breathe,” they say, until I turn purple.
How many patients must have died in the hospital because of examinations! I don’t even want to think about it. Such violent treatment could kill perfectly healthy people, but perhaps it would save them because it would keep them from falling asleep. After all, sleep foreshadows death.
Because of the many interruptions, time stretches out. The clock looks at me, its face round and ashen. It is eternal like the sun: its hours don’t shoot out like bolts of lightning. Eight visits a day by the doctors turn a day into a year. Should we be grateful that something so unpleasant allows us to measure time?
The serum falls drop by drop. An hourglass egg timer, a water clock in a lost garden in Italy, would be less obsessive. There is something feverish about the falling sand, the falling water. The needle stuck in the vein turns into our vein. I don’t look at it.
I don’t like the gray steel veins of the machines. I am like a machine, but human veins are a different color. Blue, blue. Ink, blood. Blue ink and red blood look alike.
There are floods in Buenos Aires. I know because I can feel it. I know from the newspapers (without reading them): I can hear them crackling in the next room.
It’s the birthday of some queen. It’s nighttime. I can hear the drums celebrating the event. People gather in a square with improvised altars and play the famous symphony for winds. How odd that I had never heard it before! Band music comes from the direction of the river, ever more excitedly intoning a sublime melody. I would prefer not to use the word “sublime” for a piece of music. But what other word could be used to describe that? On the highest notes, that enter all ears as if they were long needles, people are so disturbed that the tremulous sound vibrates, endlessly prolonged . . . How is it possible that I never before heard such a well-known melody? There must be many recordings of it with different symphony conductors, modified with different rhythms.
The deaf children in the square, as if they recognize the melody, swing back and forth frantically. They don’t kneel before the improvised altars, they are much too nervous for that. The children are the lucky ones. The music lasts the whole night. It’s like a curse. How dramatic it is, how long, how endless! At dawn, solitary men on the terraced pink roofs whistle it, confused by the intonation, since they don’t know it well. I don’t know at what solemn, diaphanous moment the last vibration of the music disappears: music at dawn that keeps the day from ever arriving, just as ejaculation is endlessly postponed by yogis. A few hours later, colors, then astonishing visions burst before my dazzled eyes. Suddenly a yellow hue fills my sight, one never seen before. Like a neon sign it traces its figure on light purple water (the purple seeming to indicate water). Inside the yellow zone (representing the earth), groups of motionless, gray, fearful people are clearly etched, as if carved in stone; they stand beneath countless parasols, like the Buddha’s parasols, and are saving themselves from something. From what? It occurs to me that this is a map of the world, scattered with monuments.
In the next room someone is reading the news of the floods in the papers. I once knew a dog that slept on newspaper. The crackling of the paper, when it moved around or breathed hard, made me think it was reading the news.
A spot of dampness appears on the wall where the head of my bed rests. I uselessly look for it in the mirror that faces me. It disturbs me. I know that it is green, purple, blue, like a bruise, and that it’s getting larger. Could it be a symbol of my sickness? The spot of dampness hurts me as if it were inside my body. They call a man to look at it. I wonder if he is a plumber. He carries a little brown bag. The man pokes, bangs on the wall, pays no attention to me. He sighs.
I am thinking of Blake’s illustrations to the Book of Job and The Gates of Paradise.
“There’s nothing that can be done,” he exclaims, leaving the room smelling of putty. “Every year it’s the same. It comes from the house next door,” he adds, coming back into the room.
The nurse gives me something to drink. The water doesn’t taste like water.
“Enjoy your meal,” the plumber says to me.
They call a sister of charity. The sister of charity comes in: she slides along in her dark skirt and her happy, doll-like face as if rolling on little wheels. She is of the opinion that pipes are mysterious. The house will have to be torn down to find the origin of the dampness. She leaves the room with her keys and rosaries.
They used to take presents to the dead. I wonder if I am dead. They bring me a fragrant bouquet of passion flowers, two green nightgowns, candy that is much too sweet, hearts made of chocolate, a bouquet of roses that makes me sick, a pot of cyclamen that I give to the Virgin, a box of cookies, soup that makes me sick.
There are cars in the street, a phone in the room. What time of year is it? Nowadays dead people have everything taken away: their rings and teeth, because they are gold; their eyes, because the cornea is used in other eyes; their skin or hair, because they’re used for grafts and wigs. They haven’t taken anything from me: I am not dead.
What’s going on outside? I have to find out. Trees keep growing, preparing for new seasons. The awful monument with a bronze woman standing on a pink marble pedestal that I can see through the window will no doubt always have those yellow stripes belonging not to the marble but to the urine of passing dogs or nocturnal men with diuretic desires.
“Do you want me to adjust your pillow?”
When I entered this mansion, winter fortunately had already pulled the leaves from the trees and autumn, my favorite season for its golden fruit, had fled.
“Do you want a glass of water?” they ask me.
I can feel, nearby, the smooth, glossy, soft rottenness of the public parks, where men go for fresh air or to masturbate. When the window is open that dirty wind comes in, giving the illusion of cleanliness because it’s cold now in winter. There are people who sit down and who are sitting on the benches: women who knit while looking after their own children or those of others; beggar women with bundles of clothing or containers of old bread smelling like oranges; men who press against human beings or plants alike with the same passion to tell secrets; well-cared-for or lost dogs; hysterical cats that copulate, filling the night with electric cries.
“Some fruit juice?” a sugary voice asks.
“How did I get here?” I ask.
“In an ambulance,” they tell me.
“And how did they bring me?”
“In the stretcher, on the elevator.”
I arrived at night, like a mouse in a basement, without dreaming, stiff, without feeling, still. When I was a girl I played statues, always with the fear of turning into a statue; I played in a dark room (an aphrodisiacal game), afraid of disappearing. You had to close your eyes.
“This time,” I am thinking, “I play statues in the dark, but seriously.”
The araucaria, sooty and huge, and the unreal rubber tree are nourished on excrement, semen, and glass. Nobody waters them, except God when it rains. All things, even trees, have a will to live, above all and in spite of everything. But if the form of one individual passes on to another, if nothing is lost, why struggle so hard to preserve a given form that, in the final account, might be the most inferior or the least interesting!
“What’s your name?” I ask the nurse.
“Linda Fontenla.”
Linda Fontenla likes to talk; she also likes the seriousness of the sick. What is a healthy person? Someone boring and useless. For Linda Fontenla life is an endless series of enemas, thermometers, transfusions, and poultices skillfully distributed and applied. If she gets married, she’ll marry a sick man, for such a person would be attractive to her, a cluster of hemorrhoids, an enlarged liver, a perforated intestine, an infected bladder, or a heart full of extra systoles.
“Believe it or not, an old man I was taking care of wanted to go to bed with me. Some people have no shame. He offered me everything, even marriage. I told him to go peddle his wares elsewhere. That’s why I don’t like taking care of men. They’re all the same. You can’t even apply talcum powder to them; you can take my word for it. They want to enjoy themselves, that’s all they want.”
“Am I dying, Linda?”
“Dear, what nonsense you talk. Do you want me to bring you the little hand mirror so you can see how well you look? Here you are. Look at yourself. Yesterday you were in bad shape. I was very much afraid.”
“But yesterday you told me that I was very well.”
“You have to be told that so you’ll perk up a little.”
I look at myself in the hand mirror, but at the same time look at the nurse’s hand. Nurses have painted nails, many more than other people.
“I have a face like a sheep,” I hear my voice saying, as if it were someone else’s.
“Like a sheep? Your face looks like a sheep face to you? You are so funny!”
“The sheep face that sick people have.”
“It’s the first time I’ve ever heard that.”
“You must know it, though.”
“Don’t talk so much. It’s bad for your heart.”
I look at the palm of my hand.
“They told me you can read palms,” Linda continues. “Would you read mine someday?”
“If I don’t die.”
“Always the same thing! Always death. You should think happy thoughts. Do you want me to tell you a story? When I arrived this morning, a group of women was crying and praying in the entrance hall. I thought to myself, Rats, my patient died. It was the man next door, you see? Who would have guessed? Their faces were three yards long from crying. They could have frightened anyone.”
“But couldn’t they have been crying for me?”
“There wasn’t anybody from your family, or any of your friends. Calm down. Are you going to be suspicious now?”
“I don’t care in the slightest.”
“I know. It was just a joke.”
“Turn off the light.”
I’m absorbed in my visions. Once again I look at the shadows of the room interwoven with brilliant colors. At first it’s a paradise for my eyes. I venture forward with fear, as happens when one is in love. May nobody speak to me or interrupt me. I am present at the most important moment of my life. On the white wall of the room the history of the world unfolds. I have to decipher the signs, at times very complicated ones. The planisphere has formed, with yellow earth, purple water, and groups of people with profiles like bison, sheltered beneath countless parasols. What images await me now? They change as if by magic. I see a head gazing out of a window. The window is composed of four large stones. The head is beautiful, one could say almost angelic, until the stones at the top and the bottom begin to close. The mouth laughs, baring its teeth, like the masks in a Greek tragedy.
The colors fade. An expression of pain appears on the face: the stones are grinding the frightened, frightening face. I wish to see some other vision. I make one up. How? I have a supernatural power, but a limited one. I don’t always succeed in seeing beautiful or reassuring things. Don’t I like seeing Blake’s drawings? These visions seem to come from The Book of Los or The Gates of Paradise. An endless series of black horses with gleaming harnesses cover the wall. I don’t know what carriages the horses are hitched to, nor what distant century they belong to. They dazzle me so much that I can’t focus on what surrounds them. Muffled bells mark their slow march. An indescribable joy accompanies them. How sad it would be if these horses never returned! Now they vanish like clouds in the western sky. They were so precise, so clear! Where did they go? These visions must be like certain skies that are never repeated. Now, walking along at the same pace as the horses, as if their limbs were moving in water, four harlequins are spinning around in circles. There are many other harlequins; the room is full of them, but these four catch my attention. I wish they’d never leave! Horses sometimes make me afraid; they are black; at times they are gloomy, funereal. These figures, on the other hand, could never be anything but harlequins, light, happy, immaterial. Looking at them is like making love endlessly, like discovering perfection, like being in heaven. But as I look at them I foresee their disappearance, and that nothing will be able to replace them.
The inside of a room appears, filled with happy characters who form part of some unknown world; then, outside, an enormously tall staircase made of climbing legs appears against the blue sky. And when I’m convinced they will not return, the harlequins appear, moving their bodies so slowly, as can only happen in water. An irrepressible joy seizes me. They come back because I desire so strongly that they do so. Has my supernatural power been perfected? But now they vanish and mystical figures replace them: first the Apostles and then Jesus Christ. Jesus, with a crown of thorns on Saint Veronica’s veil, but then the beautiful face of Jesus turns into the face of a monkey and I look aside, to the right. I see a chest of drawers right before my eyes: a shiny mahogany chest I’ll never open. The chest changes when I stop looking at it. Now it’s an ordinary varnished cedar chest with white spots on it. I don’t want to look to my left. Before me I can see a garden covered with huge vines growing up to the sky, and among these vines there are marble statues, also growing skyward. Later I see a mountain of stone gleaming, noticing that the stones are people who are being crushed together, killing one another, people of stone who kill one another with stones. The mountain grows as the dead pile up; the stone men multiply.
A white lion shines, filling the whole wall.
When someone comes into the room and turns on the light, the visions disappear, but the ceiling is covered with t
he most beautiful roses or with stripes all the colors of the rainbow.
A long-legged dancer is carrying the square glass light fixture in his hands (like a shield); he removes it from the center of the ceiling, but then returns and puts it back in the middle again. I stop looking at the ceiling to admire the roses, prominent against the endless foliage. I’ve never seen roses stand out against the sky with such intensity. I see them draw closer as if viewed through several magnifying lenses. Then they get smaller, becoming almost imperceptible once again, and more beautiful. The light in the next room goes out. The angel appears. A Chinese garden gradually appears, slowly, as if by a transfer process. I look at this image from every possible angle, as if I were collecting postcards for an album. I am afraid it will disappear. If I could write a date, a name underneath it, I would do so. It disappears. Nothing will console me now that it has vanished. It was a fathomless garden with a pagoda inside. Bamboo was waving back and forth, no doubt in the wind, and there were lakes with shade and rivers with motionless canoes. Everything perfectly still!
I see a golden ship, a million heads looking over the gunwale; it’s not moving forward, or if it moves it moves with me on a blue sea. It’s a Greek ship. Carrying men’s heads as if they were fruit, fruit without bodies, fruit with faces, all the same size, all of them bald.
Now the people have suddenly grown old, the joy turned to pain, the goodness to cruelty, the beauty to ugliness. Why? Nothing lasts. Why? Am I suffering? Is each face a symbol of what I am feeling without knowing it?
There is an angel I am expecting. He is not here; he was not present in my visions. I hear his step, I feel his hand; he gives me something to drink, something to eat. I’m saving images for him, little figures like those that children glue in their notebooks. I hope he likes them! A painting, a book, wouldn’t please me nearly as much! Beauty has no end or edges. I wait for it. But where is my bed, where I can wait in comfort? I’m not lying down; I’m unable to lie down. A bed is not always a bed. There is the birthing bed, the bed of love, the deathbed, the riverbed. But not a real bed . . .
Thus Were Their Faces Page 22