The Mutations

by Jorge Comensal

  “Tell me, what happened?”

  “He stood up to go to the bathroom and couldn’t even manage three steps. He had a terrible cramp, and didn’t make it in time … I had to change his clothes, and then I woke up my son to help me lift him onto the bed. I’ve given him a tramadol, but it hasn’t helped.”

  “You gave him one capsule?”

  “That’s right. And he’d already had one this afternoon, apart from the ketorolac.”

  “Okay. Give him another tramadol right away, and ask the pharmacy to deliver some Celebrex, two hundred milligrams. When the Celebrex arrives, give him one of those and a Dormicum. That should get him to sleep.”

  “What was the name of the pills again?”

  “Ce-le-brex, with an x. Come by my office tomorrow morning after ten and tell my secretary you need a prescription for some transdermal patches. She’ll give you some instructions on how to use them.”

  “Thank you so much. I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  “Perfect. And tell your husband not to worry. Those patches work miracles.”

  They said goodbye.

  Aldama thought of how the patient’s nerves would be calmed once they’d been pumped full of opiates. They would no longer bombard his consciousness with constant updates on the ruinous state of the nation. Because, after all, pain was essentially knowledge. That was why flagellants whipped themselves: so great was their emptiness, so ignorant were they, that even the knowledge of that pain gave them pleasure. And that, too, was the very reason so many people were hooked on heroin: so great was the adversity in which they lived that their only form of knowledge was through pain, pain which they sought to numb with the needle. Your husband, he would have liked to tell Mrs. Martínez, knows all too well what’s happening to him, that’s precisely why he’s suffering, and why he cries out in pain. Have you ever seen Collective Suicide, the painting by Siqueiros at the Museum of Modern Art in New York? I recommend it highly; it captures what’s going on inside your husband at this very moment.

  He poured himself a glass of whiskey in silence. It was too late to still be thinking about the clinic or go back to listening to the impassioned Khachaturian. He needed to relax, and what better way to do so than with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cantata BWV 82, sung by Lorraine Hunt, the mezzo-soprano? She’d died of hereditary breast cancer in 2006. Her husband, the composer Peter Lieberson, of lymphoma in 2011.

  Aldama had a particular interest in music associated with cancer. He’d devoted a great deal of time to listening to the complete works of Brahms, who had probably died of cancer of the liver or pancreas. When he learned that the conductor Claudio Abbado had died of stomach cancer, he obtained all his CDs and set about searching for contrasts between the recordings before and after his illness. He had also ordered an unfamiliar album from London: Iannis Xenakis’s Metastasis, which turned out to be a pile of “stochastic” garbage.

  He removed the Khachaturian CD from the stereo and replaced it with the cantatas performed by Hunt. Though her voice was generally too operatic for Bach’s compositions, the singer convincingly embodied the psychic drama of Simeon, the biblical character invoked in the cantata. Perhaps cancer, which by the time she recorded that album had already done away with her mother and sister, had granted the mezzo-soprano a maturity perfectly suited to that work based on an unusually poignant episode from the Gospels. Joseph and Mary took the baby Jesus to present him at the temple, where the elderly Simeon recognized him as his Savior, and, holding him in his arms, sang, “It is enough”: Ich habe genug. It was a familiar mixture to Aldama: surfeit and plenitude.

  “Ich habe den Heiland, das Hoffen der Frommen, Auf meine begierigen Arme genommen.” I have held the Savior, the hope of the righteous, in the warm embrace of my arms.

  “Ich habe genug.”

  As Lorraine Hunt’s voice softened the harsh German syllables, Aldama hummed the beautiful melody.

  “Nun wünsch ich, noch heute mit Freuden Von hinnen zu scheiden.” Now I wish to depart from here with joy this very day.

  Simeon was old and weary. The child’s delicate freshness intensified the weight of his years. He sang as if saying, “Jesus, I leave the world in your hands. Now is my time to sleep.”

  “Ich habe genug.”

  Aldama savored the end of the aria with a swig of whiskey. Silence. The composition continued with a fervent recitative.

  “Ach! möchte mich von meines Leibes Ketten Der Herr erretten!” Ah! If only the Lord would free me from the enslavement of my body.

  The cantata was also a crash course in preparation for death. Another pause. Another swig of whiskey. The composition arrived at its final aria.

  “Ich freue mich auf meinen Tod…” With gladness, I look forward to my death. Ah! If only it had already come. Then I should escape the despair that keeps me captive now on earth.

  Only a fanatical Lutheran could have written such a joyful celebration of death. What better way to indoctrinate a terminal patient than with such compelling music? Aldama wanted that cantata, in that same version, to accompany him at his final hour.

  When Simeon sang, holding Jesus in his arms, the child was unaware of the future awaiting him on the cross. Had he had any idea, he would have howled in fright. Aldama remembered from the catechism that Jesus had at least been aware of his fate the night before his capture, in the Garden of Gethsemane. Why hadn’t he hightailed it to Galilee, as so many rebels later did? The passion of Christ, with so many excruciating stages, was a kind of postgraduate degree in anatomy. In the end, Christ became such an expert that he managed to solve the riddle of death. So much pain, so much knowledge: thus was he able to rise on the third day from the tomb, well rested, and disappear. Why hadn’t he stayed behind, in body and soul, to fight for eternal life on earth? Perhaps in the throes of pain he had foreseen that it was a lost cause, that no one else would be willing to suffer—to learn—as much as it would take to cease to be a man and to become a god.

  “It is enough,” Jesus must have thought in Aramaic, before vanishing into the ether.

  “We regret to inform you that humans have metastasized into the Congo, Siberia, Borneo, and the Amazon.”

  Who would be the world’s oncologist? Aldama wondered before turning out the light and heading to bed.

  “Ich habe genug.”

  23

  After two weeks without seeing Ramón, Teresa received a message from him. “I’m still having trouble with my legs. Good evening. Do you think what we talked about would help with the inflammation? R.M., Esq.” She replied straightaway that it would, and that she’d be happy to deliver the “medicine” the next day. Teresa was accustomed to using euphemisms for marijuana, since almost none of her patients felt comfortable with that word so fraught with myths, stigma, and class prejudice. She favored the scientific name, Cannabis sativa, which she found feminine and suggestive. She associated “sativa” with satisfaction and sapientia—Latin for wisdom—which seemed to her like kindred states of mind.

  Ramón was in no state to be able to smoke a joint or get hold of a vaporizer, so she decided to make him some cannabutter cookies that he could soften with milk and eat discreetly, since he didn’t want to tell his family about the new treatment. To begin, she placed a stick of butter and two tablespoons of finely ground bud in a frying pan. Once the butter had melted, she stirred the ingredients together, simmering them slowly until the liquid had turned a bright pistachio-green. In a glass bowl, she beat two egg yolks, one egg white, one and a half cups of flour, and a spoonful of baking powder. Then she added half a cup of sugar, and another of cocoa powder, whose only purpose was to disguise the dough’s suspicious color. Finally, she added the sativa butter. When the dough was ready, she shaped it into fifteen cookies, arranged them on a baking sheet, and put them in the oven, preheated to 325 degrees. For fifteen minutes, the heat caressed them, made them rise, crisped them, and turned their edges a golden brown. They looked so good that she couldn’t resist having one herself. S
he sat down with a book of surrealist paintings to enjoy the cookie’s visual effects. After a while of leafing through the pages, she masturbated then and there. She climaxed with a frenzied tapestry beneath her eyelids: mangoes, lemons, and peaches everywhere.

  The next morning, she woke up slightly hungover. She had trouble getting through her morning sessions. After lunch, revived by an espresso, she set out in the direction of Ramón’s house.

  The domestic worker greeted her with suspicion, as if Teresa were a health inspector who’d come to pass judgment on the care she provided the patient. She showed her into the study. Ramón was watching TV with his teenage son and daughter, who could hardly summon the effort to greet her politely. They displayed an apathy typical of nihilist philosophers or provincial museum guards.

  Ramón signaled to his children to leave him alone with Teresa. He had written some lines in his notebook and passed them to her to read: Thank you so much for coming. As my wife explained on the phone, there’s nothing more to be done. I asked you for some of that stuff because last time it really helped, especially with walking—I’m having a hard time with that. The medications they’ve given me ease the pain itself, but don’t take away the discomfort, if that makes any sense. Anyway, I wanted to thank you in person for all your help. It’s been a pleasure getting to know you.

  Teresa answered that he wasn’t going to get rid of her so easily. Ramón was flattered and smiled at the joke.

  “Let’s see how you like these cookies. They’ll last you about two weeks, then I’ll bring you some more. How does that sound?”

  The look in Ramón’s eyes asked her to be realistic. Teresa claimed that the cookies might have surprising results, then changed the subject.

  “Will you introduce me to your parrot?”

  Ramón rose from his seat with difficulty, and they went out into the garden. Teresa couldn’t help but laugh at Benito’s vulgar catcalls. She recalled aloud that her grandmother had had a parrot just like this one. It was her grandmother, she added, who’d taught Teresa to bake. At this stage in their relationship, she no longer needed to present an inscrutable façade to her patient. Thanatology wasn’t a psychoanalytic process but a kind of grief counseling, a professional comfort service that could withstand a certain degree of familiarity.

  They went back into the study. There, she asked Ramón to write about how he was coping emotionally with the pain. Ramón signaled that he didn’t know what she meant. She asked if he sought comfort from his family or confided in them, if he ever allowed himself to be pampered.

  All this is hard enough for them as it is. I’m resigned to my fate. This is no way to live. It’ll be a relief for them when I’m gone.

  “No, Ramón,” she said gravely, “they’re going to miss you. It’ll be a huge loss for them. And you know what’s going to help them move on? Feeling like they had some moments of connection with you and that you really knew each other. I know you might feel like a burden to them and that it would be best if … well. But there’s something really important you still need to do for them. Say goodbye slowly, teach them how to say goodbye. Nobody tells you this, but it’s something that can be learned. My grandmother taught us how. She sent for the priest and made sure he was offered his favorite sweets. She gave us all a gift and told us all something special. It was a master class in farewells. You’ve told me how strongly you feel about leaving your family an inheritance. Well, just like we teach children manners, this is something you need to teach them. You can’t abandon your children just like that, otherwise how will they know what to do when their own time comes?… Think about it. And let me know how you like the cookies, okay?”

  Their conversation was a game of chess on an infinite board. There were as many pawns as words, as many bishops as questions, as many knights as promises, as many rooks as insults. There was a king of great importance whose only available move was to hide from the final checkmate. It was a vast monosyllable, and each of its escapes was a no. There was a powerful, vulnerable queen risking her life with every move. No checkmate was more beautiful than hers. Yes.

  24

  The patches and cookies quieted the urge to escape from the pain. Pumped full of painkillers and bewildered by Teresa’s words, Ramón postponed the advance preparations for his death. Gradually, he lost control of his legs. He suffered from coughing fits that sounded like a bag of popcorn exploding in a microwave oven.

  When he saw Carmela come into the house pushing an empty wheelchair, Ramón caught sight of his own mournful, transparent ghost. An outrageous apparition. I’m not going to sit down in that fucking thing, he thought, and indeed he didn’t, since the person to seat him in it was Elodia’s son. In exchange for a meager fee, Antonio had agreed to come by each morning to carry Señor Martínez from his bed to the bathroom, and from the bathroom to the ground floor, where he left him settled into the wheelchair. In the afternoon, he came back and repeated the same routine in reverse. Compared with the sacks of cement Antonio had lugged around on construction sites from a young age, Ramón was a light, ergonomic package. The ease with which the young man carried him back and forth aggravated Ramón’s sense of his own nonexistence.

  I’ve been thinking about it, he told Benito. There’s no other surefire method. I’ve got to put a bullet in me. One of my clients shot himself, once. He was drowning in debt, his wife was screwing her tennis coach, and his daughter had died in a car crash. He locked himself in his office and blew his brains out. I’ll write Carmela a note: Take me to my office, I want to sit at my desk. I’m not going to kill myself here. They’d only wind up hating the house and having to move. I’ll say I need to pick up some papers and take my briefcase to hide the gun in. I’ll ask them to leave me alone in my office and sit at my desk, facing my framed photos and my law school diploma. I want Leonardo to be there when they find me. And I want them to hear the shot, so it won’t be too traumatic. That’s important. If they picture it before they see me, it won’t be such a shock. And I’ll put something over my head, a pillowcase or a sweater, so they won’t see how I ended up. The tricky thing is getting to the key to open the drawer with the gun. We hid it in the closet, up on a shelf, and now I can’t stand on a stool to reach it. According to the fucking law, assisting a suicide is punishable by two to five years of jail time. And that’s just if it’s indirect. If there’s willful cooperation, if someone injects you with something or gives you the bullet, the sentence is harsher. But why the fuck should the state care, if you give your consent in writing for someone to help you?

  Once again, Elodia was conscripted. One morning, Ramón asked to be left in the bedroom because he didn’t feel like going downstairs. Once his wife and children had left, he rang the bell.

  “What can I do for you?” Elodia asked, panting from the exertion of running upstairs.

  Ramón had written out his instructions ahead of time.

  Please take me to the dressing room. Climb onto that little stool and pass me the key on top of the closet. Over to the right, on the edge. Don’t mention this to Mrs. Martínez, you saw how she freaked out about the watch.

  “Don’t tell me you’re planning to sell something else in secret.”

  Ramón glowered at her. She obeyed. She climbed onto the stool and began feeling around for the key with her hand. He heard a light clink, the muted tap of metal on wood. There it is, thought Ramón, but Elodia kept groping around on the shelf.

  “It’s not there,” Elodia said. She was congenitally inept at lying.

  I just heard it, Ramón growled in his thoughts. Elodia turned around and was met with the sight of a lunatic gesturing frenetically for her to keep looking.

  “Look at my hand, it’s covered in dust,” she said, playing dumb. “I’ll come back and clean in a while. I’m sure it’ll show up then.”

  Ramón insisted. You’re not coming down from there until you hand me that key. I just heard it, you goddamned liar. Get it down. I know it’s up there. I just heard it right now.


  “What do you want it for?” Elodia asked.

  Don’t you get fresh with me, dammit. What do you care? Keep looking. Turn around and look.

  “Calm down, we’ll find it any minute,” said Elodia as she began to search with exaggerated diligence. “Nothing but dust. Couldn’t Señora Martínez have moved it?”

  Ramón shook his head and pointed to his ear to let her know that he’d heard the key.

  “Do you want me to call her cell phone?”

  No, you fucking idiot, she can’t find out about this. I heard it right there. Don’t bother trying to fool me.

  “You know what? Those beans are going to get burned. Let me go downstairs and turn down the stove.”

  No fucking way. You’re not leaving here until you give it to me, you two-faced bitch. Carmela must’ve told you something. Keep looking. We’ll see who blinks first.

  “It must have fallen. I’m telling you it’s not up there.”

  Liar. Do I have to spell it out for you? I’m getting my notebook. You will not betray me. Ramón lifted the brake on his chair and began to wheel himself backward. Elodia hurried down from the stool.

  “Where do you want me to take you?”

  I need my notebook.

  She pushed him over to the chest where he’d left his notebook and pens.

  “I’m just going to run down and turn off the beans,” said Elodia while Ramón was writing. “Be right back.”

  Ramón grabbed her by the wrist. Don’t you dare go anywhere.

  “Please don’t be angry.”

  Don’t lie to me. What did my wife tell you?

  “About what?” said Elodia, so nervous from lying that she was sweating profusely.

  The key is up there. I heard it just now.

  “It must’ve been something else. I moved one of Señora Martínez’s purses.”

  Swear to God you didn’t find it.

  “It’s a sin to take the Lord’s name in vain. I’ll keep looking right away but let me go turn off the beans. Pretty please. They’re going to get burned.”