b) Every Friday, around eight, a family of bakers—the husband, his fat, blondly peroxided wife, their teenage daughter—offer coffee and broken almond cookies to the people sleeping in the waiting room. Apparently, they have been coming for ten years without missing a single Friday.
c) At night an eight-year-old boy appears in the stairwell. It’s easy to recognize him: he’s got a hole in his head. I haven’t seen him. “Naturally,” one of the nuns on the nursing staff mutters reproachfully. “That’s what unbelievers always say.” It’s rumored he was the victim of the famous trenazo of October 4, 1972: a train crash in which some three hundred people perished at Puente Moreno, to the south of Saltillo. And it’s also rumored he survived the journey, but when the porter, pushing him at high speed to surgery, managed to upturn the stretcher, he was killed. And that’s why his soul didn’t rest in peace: it couldn’t resign itself to having died in such an idiotic way.
d) The U.H.’s nocturnal pet is a stray dog the security guards call Chinto. He often dines on the contents of the garbage containers opposite the building. A woman whose husband has been in intensive care for over a month has given it a T-shirt with a picture of the state governor, Humberto Moreira, and the PRI logo. Chinto sometimes sneaks in through the door from the western courtyard and curls up in the short corridor between oncology and the flying saucer. If a doctor happens to see him, the security guards kick him (the dog) out. But if not, they leave him be, and even give him scraps of their food.
e) In the early morning, the U.H. is transformed into the Event Horizon: a ghost starship that has traveled through hell. The main entrance has been closed since ten at night. The security guards stay at their posts a few hours longer. Then their spirits begin to wane. Both the staff and some of the patients’ relations gather in the ER (the only area open 24/7) to gossip, watch TV, or take a nap if there are any empty stretchers. The lobby, by contrast, is deserted. The night shift doctors retire to their hut, have a surreptitious drink, play cards. The nurses of both genders sleep, tune in to a reggaeton station on the radio, self-medicate in private, or smooch and have oral sex out of sheer boredom. It’s just sport.
The early hours of the morning. Mamá was sleeping peacefully. I got the urge to go out for a smoke. Rain was falling in one of those downpours that make the pious say God is trying out his strategy for the next Flood in Saltillo. I went down to the first floor and hid in the turn of a concrete ramp between the nurses’ office and the basement, along which bodies are transported from the upper floors to the dissecting room. It’s the least busy area of the building, especially at night, and was at that moment in almost complete darkness. A thin strip of light filtered through from the nurses’ office, accompanied by the murmuring of voices reading out numbers, and the mechanical tapping of a desk calculator. A little farther off, the glow of the stairwell by the elevators.
A slight noise came from the end of the corridor. Something like the sporadic, secret flapping of swing doors. A metallic but soft drumming that made me imagine the tension in a giant spring at the bottom of a swimming pool. As I was winding back and forth along the final section of the ramp, I wondered if, other than the charades that make the hospital personnel go soft in the head, there was any way to communicate with the dead bodies lying a few yards from me, behind the two aluminum sheets shielding the most recondite corner of the hospital: the morgue and the autopsy room.
With that morbid thought in mind, I approached the end of the ramp, passed the landing (on the right) and the nurses’ office (on the left), and reached the door with its meager metallic gleam, taking the last section almost on tiptoe, as if hoping to surprise the faintest trace of breath in a corpse: baby’s sighs. The clanking—I guessed they were admitting a new body—became more clearly defined as I moved closer. There was a familiar harmony in the sound; almost the prospect of language. I thought: perhaps this is how the dead communicate with each other. Porters and watchmen and pathologists develop precise movements, perfect anatomical mechanisms for dismantling a stretcher or unfolding a sheet, or carefully passing an inanimate torso from the mattress to the slab. A rhythmic, efficient routine whose deceptive obscenity hides the most solemn of funerary rituals.
I reached the threshold. Before peeking through, I turned and looked toward the light welling from the nurses’ office behind me to confirm that I wasn’t being spied on. There was no one there. I bent over slightly and put my ear to the aluminum rectangle. It was ice cold. It took me a few seconds to understand the message. Then, little by little, beneath the regular tapping, I began to distinguish human moans. The voice, that demon possessing us—says Slavoj Žižek—between the body … Someone on the other side of the door was fornicating, surrounded by corpses, but with enviable precision, perfect rhythm, pushing some part of his body against the edges of something unfixed and metallic: a set of shelves or maybe a stretcher.
I hesitated: Could it be a necrophiliac screwing the posthumous remains of a slim girl …? I listened a little longer and decided that no: the moaning was in two distinct pitches. One deep, the other higher.
With repulsion, I noted my sense of alarm transforming into excitement. Two nights previously, at home, during one of my rest periods, I’d caught a Kate Winslet movie on cable, the one where she falls in love with a neighbor, a married man. For some reason, they both arrive at her house, drenched by a rain shower. Kate asks him for his shirt and goes down to the basement. He’s alone for a few minutes. He takes a look around and when he finds a photo of himself in shorts, bare chested, beside a swimming pool, he realizes the woman finds him desirable. The image is inside a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a bookmark for a poem with a verse underlined in red: “My love is as a fever.” The man goes down to the basement. He creeps up on Kate. Stands behind her. Massages her shoulders. Puts his arms around her. She turns and kisses him. He gently pushes her to the back of the room. He lifts her onto the washing machine, looks into her eyes. She undresses, rolling up her slip and pulling her dress over her head. Then she winds her legs around the man, while his back covers the whole frame, except for a glimpse of the beautiful, pronounced concavity between her rib cage and the slight suggestion of her hip. They fuck without human voice: the only sound is the slowish metallic rattling of the washing machine against the wall.
That was the image assaulting my brain for the minute or so I spent spying on the lovers with an ear flattened against the aluminum door of the morgue of the Saltillo University Hospital. I then straightened up—ashamed of myself—and walked toward the stairwell and the elevators. My palms were sweating. I had no idea where to go. The thought of spending the night in that state, watching over my sick mother, disgusted me.
I sat on the bottom step, lit another Marlboro, and decided I had to see her. It made no difference whether she was good-looking or plain, fat or thin or old. I had to wait there until they came out, and erase the image of Kate Winslet having an orgasm in a morgue from my mind.
Five, maybe ten minutes went by. The aluminum door opened. Two shadows emerged. The man was tall and wearing what seemed to be, in the darkness, a gown. The woman was slim, athletic, with nice breasts, and, since the external light illuminated the blue of her trousers, I knew she was one of the student residents. The man spotted me and walked over. She stayed in the darkest part of the corridor. I was able to make out his face from the light coming down the stairwell. He was a handsome, mature doctor. Almost certainly the specialist in charge of the area in which the wholesome girl with whom he had recently been cavorting was an intern.
“What are you doing here?”
The question took me by surprise.
“I came down for a smoke,” I replied honestly.
The man looked at me for a second. Then he went back to the girl, whispered something, and the two of them walked down the corridor away from me. I was able to catch only a glimpse of her head in the dim glow from the nurses’ office. I couldn’t describe her face.
I was about to ma
ke my departure when I heard someone coming down the stairs behind me. The heavy, uneven steps reached me. Then a hand rested on my shoulder. I stood up and turned around. Overhead, as a backdrop, the lightning flashes of a storm entered through the window on the landing.
“Let me have one?” said the newcomer, pointing to the pack of Marlboros in my shirt pocket.
I briefly studied him, perhaps imitating the inquiring look the doctor had previously directed at me. He was wearing an impeccable pair of Atletica sweatpants, black-and-orange New Balance sneakers, and a black T-shirt with the brand name Girbaud printed in plastic. He had a slight paunch, and shoulder-length, straggling, wavy hair: he was going bald.
“You can’t smoke here,” he said with a smile. “And it’s forbidden to spy on dead people’s sex lives, right?”
I was startled. I thought I’d bumped into one of the ghosts that terrified the nun. The guy took advantage of my confusion to extract the Marlboros from my shirt pocket with a neat, practiced snatch of the thumb and index finger of his right hand. He took a silver Zippo from his pants, lit a cigarette, pulled deeply on it, and blew out the smoke.
“Frigging doctors, dude. They’re all the same. And the worst thing is the doors and the walls. They’re so thin.” He took another drag. “The day I came here, they gave me number 34. And in the next room there was a foreign couple. Incredible: so slovenly and loud. Every morning they used to go to it, making noises that were ill suited to the fresh morning: as if they were soiling it in some sultry way. It was a battle with smothered giggles and gasps, and I couldn’t ignore the indelicate nature of it, much as I tried, out of kindheartedness, to find a harmless explanation for it. First it sounded as if they were playing at chasing each other around the furniture, but then it was obvious the game had turned bestial. And I thought, ‘They must be ill, or at least one of them must be, since they’re here. A bit of self-control wouldn’t be out of place.’ Don’t you agree?”
His stiff, outdated speech seemed familiar: déjà vu. I tried to work out why, and soon figured it out. What the stranger had just said was taken, more or less, from one of the early scenes in The Magic Mountain: when Hans Castorp has his first unfortunate encounter with the Russian couple.
I looked him straight in the eye.
He held my gaze. Then he winked and added:
“Precisely.”
After that, he went off in the direction of the morgue, walking in a familiar, comical way: waddling like a duck until he exited through the door leading to the parking lot. The bulk of his body disappeared into the rain. At that moment I was certain I’d just had a short conversation in the basement of the Saltillo University Hospital with Bobo Lafragua, the hero of the unfinished novel I’d attempted to write a couple of years before.
I wondered just when the hallucinations had started. If there really were doctors fornicating among the corpses, or porn mags half hidden under waste bins in the restrooms. And I also wondered, for that matter, if Mexico had at any time declared war on the Axis powers. Or if, on the contrary, all this was nothing more than fever: “Mamá’s probably infected me with her nosocomial bug and I’m burning up too.” It was either that or the stress causing a psychotic break. I opted for the former: a psychotic break was a luxury I couldn’t afford.
I ascended the stairs to male medical, and went into room 101. Everything was silent but for the torrent of rain falling on the window and the hum of the new infusion pump. Mamá was sleeping relatively peacefully. I looked at the clock: 5 a.m. I sat in the armchair and tried to convince myself I’d never left it: I’d only just that minute awoken. I went to the bathroom, banged my head against the wall a couple of times, looked at myself through my eyelashes, and touched my cheeks. Over and over again, I repeated “It’s just fever.” Convinced my mother had infected me, I gradually calmed down. But, just in case, I decided not to mention my visions to anyone.
GHOSTS IN LA HABANA
1
My mother is not my mother. My mother was music.
2
I remember being lifted up and set on a chair, and Marisela Acosta handing me a comb. I held it in front of my mouth as if it were a microphone and sang: “Fly, fly, little dove, fly, fly between the bullets.” The corrido was by Genaro Vázquez, a teacher and guerrilla who died (we now know he was killed) on February 2, 1972. I must have been very small when I sang that song. The guests applauded wildly.
But that, of course, is not my earliest memory.
3
Mamá had, as far as I know, just one platonic love. A guerrilla whom we knew only by his nickname (I guess it was, in fact, a code name): the Karate Teacher. Now that she’s old, my story annoys her, and she says it isn’t true, that she remembers the kid, but that I’ve made up all the rest. This would have been not long after my third birthday, so I may not be the most reliable source. But I didn’t invent anything: I’m sure she cried when she heard of his death. That night, she didn’t have the strength to go to work.
We saw him only once: we were with my godmother, Jesu, one Thursday in a pozole restaurant near the Mercado Central when we came across him with Jesu’s younger brother, Kito. The Karate Teacher was very wiry, very serious, and very hairy. He talked nonstop in a low voice, with a lot of different words, a lot of saliva, and great intensity. I hated him from the start. Mamá, on the other hand, listened the whole afternoon with a dumb expression on her face. I threw myself onto the floor, scattered sand on the plate of avocados, and deliberately bit into a peppery radish so my face would go red and I’d cry. After each new stunt she would simply slap me on the bottom. When it was time to say good-bye, the Karate Teacher and Marisela clasped hands and looked into each other’s eyes. This is, of course, my earliest memory: the anguish caused by a stranger stealing my only love.
I can’t be sure how long afterward it was that Kito was arrested during a failed bank heist in Acapulco. Mamá, my godmother, and I visited him in jail, just around the corner from the house: at that time, we were living at No. 4, Callejón Benito Juárez, in the Aguas Blancas neighborhood, very near the Zona de Tolerancia. The three of them cried, and talked dirty through the bars. Then, in reply to a question from my mother, Kito said:
“Those ass-licking bastards in Ticuí applied the law of flight to the Karate Teacher.”
I remember the phrase. I didn’t learn what it meant until much later. What I do know is that night, Mamá locked herself in our room and got drunk listening to boleros. She says she didn’t. Says I’m remembering it all wrong because I was just a kid. But who forgets the first time he sets foot in a jail?
4
Scared out of my skin, I thought about that, and other trivialities, the night my plane was descending into La Habana. I thought about them as a distraction, so as not to break into a cold sweat: in the pocket of my denim jacket was a piece of opium paste the size of a garlic clove. I was terrified that Fidel’s children would throw me in the can for drug trafficking.
Someone—I can’t even remember who—had given me that chunk of rock for my birthday. We took a couple of tokes off a small ceramic pipe, and then I stashed the rock in my desk. And completely forgot about it. Until, months later, while I was packing for the trip to Cuba (it was a business trip: I’d been contracted as part of a team planning a series of concerts and exhibitions of the work of Mexican artists) and looking for something else, there it was. It occurred to me it would be fun to sit by the sea and share the rock with some of my colleagues. I broke it in two, ground one half, dissolved the resulting powder in water (producing a sort of alcohol-free laudanum), and poured the solution into a small bottle of nasal spray with a built-in applicator so as to be able to sniff it directly from the container. I dropped the other half in the bottom of an open pack of Popular cigarettes and, putting both of these in the pocket of my jacket, set off for the airport.
I spent the whole flight sniffing liquid opium from the Afrin Lub bottle: between the naiads and the clouds, and people looking at me in compas
sion, what a lousy cold that poor guy has.
Shortly before we landed, the fear hit me: Cuban jails have an abysmal reputation, and it’s well known that as Castro communism gets doddery, it’s also becoming more conservative and puritanical … What had happened to the libertarian (and no doubt also stoned) guerrilla shadows my mother taught me to sing of, standing on a chair, with a comb as a microphone in my hand …? Those jerks are right this minute dragging me away, hijacking me, good-bye blond Caribbean girls good-bye heaps of roast pork and suckling pig good-bye walks along the Malecón with your head like a bundle of lit matches from so much beauty good-bye guaracha good-bye … But at the same time I consoled myself: the positive side is that I’m so far off my ass I’ll hardly notice one more kick in the butt … But tomorrow … I closed my eyes and pictured myself cleaning the excrement from a latrine embedded in the wall of some sort of cave, with my long, long curling locks and beard (me, with hardly a hair on my head), like the Count of Monte Cristo … Then, in the next scene, no: I managed to outwit the dogs and the grunts and I shot through customs like Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys, with that same peep-peep-off-the-hook-telephone music in the background while I was, in my narcoguerrilla mode, moving deeper into the tropical jungle: comrades, take a bit of this analgesic, down with the evil government, freedom, freedom, The Revolution Is the Opiate of the People … And in this way, I entertained myself so wholesomely with the djinns of my nervous system that I didn’t even notice when the plane touched down.
5
By contrast, Mamá’s earliest memory (because she told me about it: she tells me almost everything) is tender and repugnant. She must have been, like me, around three years old. She was looking through the gold threads in the speaker of a big Dutch Philips radio with two wooden dials. Someone—she doesn’t know who; I suspect it was my grandfather Marcelino—had told her the music coming from the large, coffee-colored box was played by tiny little people who lived inside it. For all she stared and stared, Lupita couldn’t make anyone out. Yet, suddenly, perhaps … But …
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