S loved the idea, so over the course of her stay in New York, she helped me look for women who could benefit from these dances. These classes became a source of income for me, to finance the next trip, and something else. Dancing with them took me away from things. My mind melded with the mass of translucent silicone I was playing with, and everything around me, everything that meant anything, I could see it all reflected there, contained within, and only there. Nothing else mattered to me at that moment. But at night, despite the heat of Jim’s body, or maybe because of it, I mourned not being able to share my feeling of being pregnant. I had trouble sleeping. I felt ridiculous helping other women when I wasn’t able to express something so fundamental for fear of being misunderstood not by just anybody but by Jim himself, the person I loved more than anything else in life. On nights like those I remembered how many times in the past I had toyed with the idea of adoption, which I always ended up deciding against because I considered it a next best thing to becoming a mother. Maybe—I thought before feeling pregnant—if I had been physically incapable of conceiving, I would have adopted a child. But what obsessed me so much was being denied the possibility, to the point of not wanting to break the connection between maternity and the process of gestation. For that same reason, I spent years feeling stupid every time I stopped to think about how much effort, how much sadness, how much of my life was devoted to searching for someone else’s daughter. After I had mulled over these thoughts, lying in bed beside Jim, optimism would descend and carry me off to sleep, when I would touch my belly and say that all this was in the past, and that there was something worse than not being able to announce my pregnancy to Jim: and that was not having anything to announce at all, the absence of my baby, a baby that certainly for me was developing like something real.
Aware as I was that Jim and I had to respect our compulsory downtime in this search that at times governed our lives to an absurd degree, I contacted the hospital where years back I had met the first mastectomy patients, and the director, who remembered me fondly since she had been able to measure the positive effects of my dance sessions as part of post-op therapy, gave me the opportunity to visit the hospital and present the project again, together with S.
BUT THESE NEEDED MONTHS of respite weren’t going to last long. The same thing always ended up happening: when I finally caught my breath, this would trigger an internal mechanism and send me back to my efforts as part of the search-and-rescue team. During the first few days of reactivating our efforts, I would be able to see better, hear better, smell better, as if I really were a mother in whom nature had opened up channels of perception for better protecting her young. Searching again. Tracking, pursuing. I simply couldn’t last more than six months without setting out afresh on Yoro’s trail. Sometimes I behaved as though I were her real biological mother, whom not even Jim could tell me about, since according to him, the parents’ biological identity had always remained a secret. That feeling would come back from time to time, and I’d feel a prick of shame again; there I was, off chasing after a stranger’s child, when my pregnancy seemed so evident to me, as though I wasn’t satisfied with the daughter who was growing in my own womb. If I’d considered myself a maternity mendicant before I got pregnant, like someone obviously incomplete and formed only by crumbs of the crumbs, now I started to feel insatiable, a woman hungry for new children, her own, a sort of Saturn devouring her babies as she gave birth to them, hunting them down only to continue the search. That’s why I was very cautious about showing my feelings for Yoro even to Jim, the anxiety that overwhelmed me by the news of her ever more horrifying disappearance.
The next door to knock on was the lighthouse at the Ilha da Queimada Grande, an island off the coast of Brazil. Of all our trips, this one has been burned into my memory as a first descent into hell. The lighthouse was the only building on the entire island, and according to rumors there were five snakes per square meter, unique in the world, whose venom was so potent it could kill a person within an hour. The rumors also said that the wife and daughter of the last keeper had died after being bitten by these snakes and that he lived huddled up in their memory without leaving the tower, even though the lighthouse had been fully automated for safety reasons since the early twentieth century. Of course the dates meant that the man we were going to visit couldn’t be the same keeper, and yet the stories they told on the continent assured us that it was the same man. In any case there we were, on a Zodiac manned by two men from the Brazilian coast guard and a doctor who carried an antidote in case of an accident.
From our launch, Queimada Grande looked like paradise. Everything was green, and the lighthouse rose like the lone indicator of human presence. But the moment I touched that ground I felt as though my strength had been sapped—all my hopes, my desire to live, and even my libido, which I feel whenever I look at Jim and visualize a fantasy . . . gone. My body was drained of energy, not only to meet the new battery of frustrations in the lighthouse but even to take the least step forward. I felt distanced from myself, seeing everything from the outside as I walked, dragging my feet, apathetic. The first thing I noticed was the underbrush. If the first man in line didn’t cut a trail through the brambles and branches with a machete, it would have been impossible to move forward. We wore boots that reached our knees to avoid snakebites. But my attention was fixed on the trees. There were hundreds of snakeskins dangling from the branches. That’s how I felt, like the sloughed-off skin of a snake, skin whose soul had crawled nice and far away, just like my genitals; hadn’t I spent half my life asking myself where my penis ended up after the explosion? Though it was a part of me I had never wanted, the idea of losing that piece of myself, without knowing what had happened to it, whether it had been buried or whether it had disintegrated, continued to cause me anxiety. I think since I’d hated my penis and considered—when I had it—self-mutilation, there was a kind of guilt attached to its loss that might be similar to having abandoned a dog. I often recall the figure of Antigone, that beautiful young Greek woman who risked and lost her life trying to bury her brother, whose punishment had been exactly that: that he not be buried, but rot at the mercy of the wind and the vermin, the dogs, the vultures. The problem is that whatever we don’t bury or burn or even find is able to haunt us for the rest of our lives. The people who disappear never die; their presence haunts us. I would have preferred to find my penis, to be able to mourn over it, caress it one last time, bury it to know that it is truly dead; but this way, my penis continues to haunt me to this very day. I feel pity for that little lump of my flesh. So this island seemed painfully familiar to me, the empty skins reminding me so much of an image that has plagued me in my dreams since those hospital days: my penis searching for me through the ruins of Hiroshima like a blind lizard, like a legless dog. That repetitive nightmare, over and over: lizard, blind, ruins, dog. In Hiroshima.
THE SLOUGHED SKINS were so noticeable on the island that surely they diverted the attention of the live snakes stalking us from their hiding places. That’s right, I thought. In the boat they told us that the snakes hid in the trees because it’s there they found their principal source of food: the birds. That’s why there were skeletons of birds scattered all over the place—among the bushes, on the ground, in the trees.
When we reached the lighthouse, one of the men knocked at the door and shouted the name of the superfluous lighthouse keeper: “Flavio, open up! We brought some food, and there are some people who would like to see you.”
I wasn’t expecting anything. Not even that he would open the door, let alone that the man would be able to give us any information on Yoro. But the door opened slowly, heavily, with the loud screeching of salt-rusted iron scratching the floor. There stood another person before us, as sluggish as I was, who silently let us in. The five of us looked at him, checked around us. We were at the entrance of the lighthouse’s very narrow landing. Looking up, all we saw was a long spiral staircase leading up to some space from which little pieces of plaste
r would tumble every now and then. Each one of the lighthouse’s cracks or crevices was sealed with duct tape or cemented over to keep—I imagine—reptiles and rats from sneaking in. And there was garbage everywhere. Tons of garbage, mostly tins of food tossed around the floor. By contrast, Flavio seemed spruced up and tidy, tall, with an athletic build, but mute. My tongue was tied too, so it was Jim who asked about Yoro, moving a step forward into the refuge.
Flavio said nothing. He just walked by us. He fought with the rust-covered green door and disappeared outside. The coast guard officer who had commandeered the launch tried to hold him back as the rest of us stared out at him from inside the lighthouse, but he stopped when he saw Flavio throw himself down and roll around in the underbrush like a flea-bitten animal. He was barefoot, shirtless, and in a land where snakes are as abundant as ants; it was only a matter of minutes before he encountered one. We heard a howl of pain and the officer ran outside to fetch him, lifted him in his arms, and brought him back into the lighthouse. They closed the door behind them. We all turned to the doctor, but the doctor admitted then that he was really a dentist and had no idea what was in the medical kit; someone had given it to him like a prop for playing the role of doctor. We opened the kit, but nobody knew what we were looking at. There were bandages, plenty of gauze bandages, and a bottle that by its smell turned out to be nothing more than alcohol. Nothing that could be an antidote.
Two little red puncture wounds just below Flavio’s knee dripped blood. Even the most ill-informed person would know that if he had been bitten near the ankle, the poison would take longer to reach his heart. But now there was less distance for it to travel, which gave the venom an advantage. If it took an hour for one of the bites to finish off a man, then this one would take half a leg less. Jim made a tourniquet to slow the venom’s pace and we used a sheet as a stretcher to transport Flavio to the boat. The leg swelled up immediately. It was the first time since Hiroshima that I’d seen an organ three times its normal size. Everything reminded me of the horror of that day. The serpent skins like my sex, my empty penis. The swollen lump of what only minutes before had been healthy and strong. The distortion of what had once been something else entirely. Flavio kept silent. He stared up at the sky, motionless, as if he were sedated. I too felt numb, like a walking automaton, unconcerned that the way back was as dangerous as the way there had been, the same number of poisonous snakes and a dentist without an antidote.
The day was sweltering, and not even the breeze of the speeding boat could relieve the heat. We were all sweating. We radioed for a boat to come out and meet us with the serum. Jim loosened the tourniquet every ten minutes so that the blood could irrigate the leg enough so that necrosis didn’t set in, but he did it against the opinion of one of the officers, who said the only alternative was to cut the leg off right then and there, though I have no idea how he figured we could do that without a doctor and proper instruments. The venom, being a strong anticoagulant, made blood seep like water from the two red puncture wounds, but the consensus was to allow it to bleed out because some of the poison would be removed that way. Flavio’s calmness was good because it kept his pulse steady, which slowed the toxin’s race to his heart. He couldn’t be allowed to sleep, so the crew kept talking to him, though he seemed completely unperturbed. Neither the fear nor the pain had upset him. He seemed no different after the bite than he did before, except that he had started to tremble in spite of the heat. He was dripping with sweat, his hair was soaked, but he trembled like he was lying on a sheet of ice. When the medical boat arrived they administered the serum, an anti-inflammatory drug, analgesics, and an antibiotic. On the way to the hospital, Flavio’s sweat turned rancid and sour-smelling.
We spent a week there, visiting the hospital every day, hoping Flavio might tell us something once he recovered, might offer some clue as to where Yoro had come from or gone—at the very least a story, an anecdote, a memory, another photo. Anything would make the journey, the effort, the hope, worth it. Gestures of brotherhood, acts of compassion or understanding, they had the soothing effect of smoothing out the difficulties we’d face in preparing for the next step of the way. So we bore witness to the process of recovery. The leg turned a deep, intense shade of green. It took his body three days to neutralize the venom. Black and blue marks appeared over his arms and legs from the difficulties of coagulation, but the most impressive of all was the huge lump that formed around the wound itself. And for me that was it, I didn’t need another thing to finally make my mind up, to throw in the towel—me, someone who cringed whenever I saw a bulge, a cyst, a tumor, even a mere sty. The trip was a fiasco. Too many things had yanked me back to memories of Hiroshima, and how I too had lived in anticipation of bulges, in my case seeping with radiation. When the doctor lanced Flavio’s flesh, a huge mound of pus oozed out. But the lumps on my body, the ones I waited for with trepidation, couldn’t be extracted. They were like manifestations of a venomous tubercle that brought in its life, death.
Flavio spoke not a single word over all the days we spent there waiting, and the only time he got out of bed by himself was to go to the bathroom, sliding silently from under the sheets to crawl along the ground. As I had supposed from the beginning, there was nothing to be done in that place. Flavio had turned forever into a snake himself.
THAT LAST TRIP RUINED ME. I’d grown accustomed to delicate health, but never had I felt the fear of death so near. Not even in the months leading up to Little Boy had I known that panic of sudden death. The fear of dying used to come in the form of a panic attack from time to time, but feeling it could happen in a split second, just like that, was a new sensation. During the days following the explosion and for years afterward, many of the hibakushas went to bed at night never to wake up again, even though they had survived and apparently been able to enter the ranks of those who can envision a ripe old age. I always knew I belonged to the same at-risk group, but the panic that gripped my mind from time to time never actually found purchase in my spirit; it continued along its path while I attended the specific remedies of the little or medium-sized illnesses that I patched up with Band-Aids. But the episode with Flavio triggered a deep-seated fear inside of me, a wick just waiting for the flame. Who could’ve imagined that a stranger, a man-serpent who’d never hurt me beyond the infliction of his silence, would spark the fear of sudden death, like a virus, like dying without being able to say goodbye, not even to myself. But there was a certain logic to it after all, seeing how an invisible evil occupied that man, how the venom expressed itself by deforming his body, reminding me that in a day, an hour, a minute my sick body could transubstantiate. Though my soul yearned to live, though it yearned to love and loved so much, it was no more than a wounded bird subject not to other people’s care, but to the whim of some superior being who insisted on testing its existence through nonexistence.
Though conscious of the fact that others were in a situation similar to mine, I nevertheless felt as though I were unique to my species. That feeling I had first experienced in the Natural History Museum in London only got worse when I realized there was nothing else like me there, not among the specimens bottled in formaldehyde, not among the people who were accompanying me. It isn’t that I thought of myself as some special case among victims; I felt as though I truly was the only member of a different race, like the strange creature pecking its way out of an egg from a different planet who is condemned to live among humans without any knowledge of its own species, its life expectancy, precisely what I most craved to know. I was an alien raised without a father or a mother, with nobody whose DNA was remotely similar, a person with more questions than answers, principal of which was that key piece of information about time: When was I supposed to die? How long do people of my race live? Eighty years? One hundred, two hundred? I was a stranger among a strange race, and at times I thought I hadn’t the slightest indication of what might become of my own flesh.
I entered a period of neurosis unlike any I’d ever experience
d before, which manifested mostly in the guise of thanatophobia (I’d come to know this word well), or fear of death. By day I took tip-top care of myself as always, without developing any special kind of hypochondria or self-protecting habits, but at night the fear would become night terrors, fear of death in my sleep. At first I would wake up in a sweat and shake Jim until his voice, like a mother’s gentle pinch, let me know I wasn’t alone, I wasn’t dead. I recalled what Jim told me about his time on the Death Ship, Oryoku Maru, how madness showed itself in the prisoners’ obsession with touching the bodies of others in the darkness, desperately, as a means for grabbing on to life, on to any life, if not their own, at least whichever one they could feel. The lack of sleep kept me drowsy by day, and when the afternoon arrived with the threat of another night of non-absence, I would load myself up with coffee to keep sleep at bay and stay awake as long as I could. Then I began altering my schedule. I started to sleep by day and stay awake at night. Since everyone else slept at night, nobody would come to my aid if my life began slipping discreetly through the cracks while I was asleep. Of course I felt terribly lonely, but I could believe in things like my pulse, my breath. They were a small part of New York’s beating heart, the throb of its inhabitants, and if that pulse, that breath should fail me, some other person, some other piece of the huge puzzle would come to my rescue; as long as that person, of course, wasn’t lethargic, hands tied by that simulacrum of death that is sleep. But all my remedies morphed according to the logic of my illness, and after weeks trying to avoid the night, I figured my best bet was going back to sleeping with Jim, since if there was anyone on the face of this earth who loved me, it was him, and if anyone was capable of feeling, even in sleep, that I was slipping away, it would also be him. So before I resigned myself to slumber, we would hug each other, though it always took me hours to finally nod off. At first I would remain motionless so as not to bother him; but then I’d toss and turn, so afraid of losing life.
The Story of H Page 13