by AIRA, CESAR
There were about forty children in the ward with me, with all sorts of conditions, from broken bones to leukemia. I never counted them, or made any friends; I didn’t even speak to any of them.
It took them forever to discharge me, so all the beds were vacated and reoccupied during my stay, ten times or more in some cases. There were all sorts, from kids who seemed to be in excellent health and made a phenomenal racket, to others who were listless, lying still or asleep … I was in the second category. I was so weak I couldn’t move, and permanently drowsy. A kind of lethargy would set in mid-afternoon and last for hours. I didn’t even swivel my eyes. Sometimes it went on for whole days or weeks; I could feel myself falling back into that state without having come out of it, at least not consciously … And it was a very long way to fall …
Every day, just at the worst time, or the beginning of the worst time, the doctor came to visit me. He must have been interested in my case; survivors of the cyanide poisoning were rare. I once heard him pronounce the word “miracle.” If there had been a miracle, it was entirely involuntary. I was not cooperating with science. An urge, a whim or a manic obsession that not even I could explain impelled me to sabotage the doctor’s work, to trick him. I pretended to be stupid … I must have thought the opportunity was too good to waste. I could be as stupid as I liked, with impunity. But it wasn’t simply a matter of passive resistance. Doing nothing at all was too haphazard, because sometimes nothing can be the right response, and I was determined not to let chance determine my fate. So even though I could have left his questions unanswered, I took the trouble to answer them. I lied. I said the opposite of the truth, or the opposite of what seemed truest to me. But again it wasn’t simply a matter of saying the opposite … He soon learned how to formulate his questions so that the answer was a simple yes or no. If I had always lied, he would have started translating every answer into its opposite. I considered it my duty to lie every time; so in order to protect myself, I had to proceed in a roundabout way, which isn’t all that easy when you have to reply yes or no, without hedging. On top of this, I had resolved never to mix any truth with my lies. I was afraid that if I lost track, chance would be able to intervene. I don’t know how I did it, but I managed somehow. Here are some of my tricks (I don’t know why I’m explaining all this, unless I’m hoping to inspire other patients by my example): I pretended not to have heard a question, and when he asked another, I replied to the first one, with a lie, of course; I replied, always fallaciously, to one element of the question, for example an adjective or a verb tense, not to the question as a whole; he would ask me “Is this where it was hurting?” and I would answer “No,” while suggesting with an ingenious movement of my eyebrows that the place in question was not where it was hurting before, but where it was hurting now. He picked up all these signals—nothing was lost on him—and despondently rephrased his question: “Is this where it’s hurting?” But by then I had already moved on to a new system, a new tactic … I should say in my defense that I was making it all up as I went along. Although I had veritable eons of time in which to think, I never used that time to plan my lies.
“And how are we today, young Master César? Don’t we look well? Ready to play ball again? Let’s see how we’re going …”
His cheerfulness was contagious. He was a short young man with a little moustache. He seemed to come from far away.
From the outside world. I looked at him with a special face I had invented, which meant, What? What? What are you talking about? Why are you asking all these hard questions? Can’t you see the state I’m in? Why are you talking to me in Chinese instead of Spanish? He lowered his eyes, but took it as well as he could. He sat on the edge of the bed and began to examine me. He poked me with his finger here and there, in the liver, the pancreas, the gall bladder …
“Does it hurt here?”
“Yes.”
“Does it hurt here?”
“No.”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“…”
Then, perplexed, he started all over again. He was looking for places where it had to be hurting, where an absence of pain was impossible. But he couldn’t find them; I was the sole keeper and mistress of the impossible. I possessed the keys to pain …
“Does it hurt a little bit here?”
I made it clear that his questions had tired me out. I burst into tears and he tried to comfort me.
He used his stethoscope. I believed that I could accelerate my heartbeat at will, and maybe I could. At once he began to manipulate me with extreme care. For some reason he wanted to put the stethoscope on my back, so he had to sit me up, which turned out to be as difficult as standing a broom handle on end. When he finally succeeded, I began rolling my head around wildly and retching. Fiction and reality were fused at this point; my simulation was becoming real, tinting all my lies with truth. For me, retching was something sacred, something not to be trifled with. The memory of Dad in the ice-cream store made retching more real than reality itself; it was the thing that made everything else real, and nothing could withstand it. For me, ever since, it has been the essence of the sacred, the source from which my calling sprang.
When the doctor moved on, I was a complete wreck. I could hear him at the beds nearby, talking and laughing; I could hear the voices of the little patients answering his questions … All this came to me through a thick fog. I could feel myself plummeting into the abyss … My willfulness wasn’t deliberate. It was just plain willfulness, of the most primitive kind; it had taken control of me, as evolution takes control of a species. I had succumbed to it during my sickness or perhaps just before its onset; I wasn’t like that normally. On the contrary, if I had one salient character trait, it was willingness to cooperate. That man, the doctor, was a kind of hypnotist who had put a spell on me. The worst thing was that, even under his spell, I was perfectly consciousness of being willful.
Mom didn’t miss a single one of the doctor’s visits … She hovered at a discreet distance and came forward to help as soon as I became unmanageable … She was extremely anxious to extract information from him. He used the word “shock” … He can’t have been a real intellectual, because he showed great interest in what Mom said to him. They went away and whispered; I had no idea what about … I didn’t know that we had been in the papers. He said “shock” again, and repeated it over and over …
But the doctor and Mom were hardly more than a brief distraction in the course of the day, which stretched before me, majestically impassive, rolling out from morning to night. It didn’t seem long, but it filled me with a kind of respect. Each instant was different and new and unrepeatable. That was the very nature of time, ceaselessly realizing itself, in every life … My malicious little strategies seemed so petty, I was overcome with shame …
Ana Módena de Collon-Michet, the nurse, was the day incarnate. There was only one nurse in the ward throughout the day shift; just one nurse for forty little patients … It might seem insufficient and no doubt it was. Resources were rather stretched at the Rosario Central Hospital. But no one complained. All the patients were hoping to get out of there alive, one way or another, all fondly imagining that they would not be back. Even the children were fooling themselves, quite unwittingly.
But the days came to rest in the big white ward and wherever I turned my gaze, there was the nurse. Ana Módena was a living hieroglyph. She never left the hospital; she had no illusions. She was a ghost.
The mothers were always complaining about her; they fought with her, but they must have known it was hopeless. The mothers came and went, while she remained. Short-lived alliances were forged against her, and Mom was involved on a number of occasions; she didn’t have the strength of character to say no, even when she realized it would have been in her best interests. The complaints concerned Ana Módena’s abruptness, her impatience, her rudeness, her almost insane ignorance. Having frequented the hospital environment for an avera
ge of a week, the mothers formed an idea of the ideal nurse for the children’s ward. They imagined what she would be like, what each of them would have been like in her place: a good fairy, all gentleness and understanding … It wasn’t hard; without realizing, they were imagining how the ideal nurse would have been gentle and understanding with them, and each of us is the ultimate expert on the gentleness and understanding we deserve. It wasn’t their fault; they were poor, ignorant women, housewives struggling to cope. In nine cases out of ten, they were responsible for the illnesses of their children … They had a right to dream … They thought they knew what the perfect nurse would be like, and they did … Their mistake was to go one step further and presume that all those qualities could be combined in a single woman … The fact that Ana Módena, the Perón of the Pediatric Ward, was exactly the opposite of their ideal image, cast them into a stupor which they could only shake off, or so they felt, by drawing up a list of demands or devising a strategy with the aim of having her dismissed … All those dreams turned her into a ghost. As a rule I didn’t understand what was going on, but this was something I understood, because I was a dreamer … and because Ana Módena was a ghost in other ways too. She was always in a rush, extremely busy, as any nurse would have been in that situation, looking after a forty-bed ward on her own. But she was never available for anyone. She was invariably busy with the others, and it was the same for all of them too. As I lay there, I got used to seeing her out of the corner of my eye, whizzing past from dawn to dusk … never stopping … It wasn’t only the children in their beds that she had to attend to, but also those being sent off to the operating theatre, or for X-rays … and she did it all so badly, whispered the mothers, that everything kept going wrong because of her … They said she kept losing patients … They keep dying … as if her touch was lethal … They’re always dying in her ward, said the legend that enveloped me like a bandage made of whispering phylacteries … The children stopped living when they fell into the category of things she was simply too busy to deal with … But this wretched reputation didn’t prevent the mothers from making up to her, flattering her, leaving her tips, bringing her little cakes and being unbelievably, shockingly servile … After all, the greatest treasures they possessed, their children, were in her hands.
She was a fat, hefty woman. When she bore down on me, it was like an elephant splashing in a puddle … I was the water. There was something sublime about her clumsiness … She suffered from a peculiar affliction: for her, left was right and vice versa. Down was up, forward was back … The meager volume of my body came apart in her hands … legs, arms, head … each extremity was subjected to a different gravitational force … I was breaking up into falls and imbalances … With her, there was no point pretending … she projected me into another dimension … yet various parts of my body, suddenly scattered far and wide, took it on themselves to pretend … though what, I don’t know … Her hands, with their lethal touch, were molding an absolute truth.
They kept me alive with serum. Ana Módena replaced the bottles, invariably at the wrong time, and put the needles in my arm … She stuck them in anywhere. My nose began to run. Everything that went in my arm came out of my nose, in a continuous drip. It was an extremely rare case. To her, it seemed normal … In any case it wasn’t a priority. Early in the morning, before the first mother arrived, Ana Módena brought the dwarf, and made her recite her psalms in front of each bed, including the empty ones. The dwarf was an autistic visionary. Ana Módena steered her by the shoulders, as if she were holding the handlebars of a tricycle. The dwarf didn’t seem to see anything; she was a piece of furniture … She was one of those dwarves with an oversize head … Ana Módena would put her in front of a bed occupied by a listless or sleeping child … a deep silence reigned in the ward … Then, responding to a tap between the shoulder blades, the dwarf would mutter a Hail Mary, gesticulating oddly with her little arms …
“Mother Corita will save you, not the doctors!” thundered Ana Módena.
The dwarf passed like a comet … Everything happened automatically … It was a blanket cure: empty and occupied beds received the same blessing … Thus religion was smuggled into the world of sickness. Except that it was an open secret, and, of all that brute’s misdeeds, this was the one the mothers brought up first if they had any pretensions to scientific decorum … but as soon as a doctor seemed unsure, or a child fell ill again or began to vomit, it was: Bring the dwarf, I beg you … Bring her to save my little angel … The hypocrites! Severely, Ana Módena would reply: It is the Virgin who saves, not the dwarf … And the mothers: For mercy’s sake, bring the little dwarf …
Mother Corita was the hospital’s real cement; Ana Módena was just its representative. The dwarf stopped the hospital exploding into a thousand pieces … and my body with it … my head flying off to the north, my legs to the south, an arm here, a finger there … Believing in the dwarf was what made it all hang together … the life fluid flowed through her, through the tube, from my arm up to my nose … But I had to believe. I had to believe deep down, while pretending not to.
Then it occurred to me that … with my body coming apart … I might reach a point at which I could no longer believe in the dwarf. Me, of all people! The perfect hypnotic subject! I believed in everything! And I needed my belief to remain intact!
But what if the dwarf was a fake? What if I couldn’t believe in her? After all, was I so different? Wasn’t I unbelievable myself, objectively? So what was to stop her being like me? Or, worse still, what was to stop me being a sort of dwarf, an emanation of Mother Corita …?
I needed a confirmation. I tried to extract one from Ana Módena … I tried to get to the bottom of things. And so it was that one morning, when she came into range, I blurted, “I dreamt about a dwarf.”
“What?”
“I dreamt about a dwarf.”
“What? What dwarf?”
I had thrown her.
“I dreamt about a dwarf who had a thorn stuck in her heart.”
“What dwarf?”
“A dwarf … a doowarf … a doo waruff …”
There could be no doubt about the identity of the dwarf … The aim of my ruse was to make her think I had something “difficult” to express. I had to approach it indirectly, resorting to allegory or fiction pure and simple. And she was drawn in, obliged to engage with my clever ploys … which escaped her … And then I began to lie by telling the truth (and vice versa) though how, I don’t know … it escaped me too … My strategies died, like the children in the ward … and came back to life with a vengeance … In a desperate bid to communicate concepts refractory to the understanding of a little girl completely stupefied by her wretched physical state, Ana Módena began to use gestures … Gestures took over … She was an impulsive, unmethodical woman and fell into the trap of trusting intuition, which flies blind and reaches the target before understanding can set to work … Hastiness and clumsiness made all her movements blunder into one another … As for me, the dismemberment made me gesticulate like her mirror image … but it was dizzying, the meanings of her grimaces and looks and intonations were piling up absurdly … the accumulation seemed to be approaching a limit, a threshold … coming closer and closer …
And at that point something snapped. I don’t think it was something in me so much as something between the two of us. But no: it was in me, inside me. From that moment on I have suffered from a peculiar perceptive dysfunction: I can’t understand mime; I’m deaf (or blind, I’m not sure how to put it) to the language of gestures. I have on occasion, in subsequent years, attended mime shows … and while the four-year old children around me understood perfectly what was being represented, and screamed with laughter, all I could see were pointless movements, an abstract gesticulation … It’s funny, now that I think of it, that no mime artist, not even the best, not even Marcel Marceau himself (who is the hardest of all to understand for me), has ever tried to mime a dwarf … Why should that be? In the language of ges
tures, the dwarf must be the unsayable.
5
BECAUSE OF MY ILLNESS, I started school three months late, in June. I still can’t understand why they accepted me at that stage in the year and put me in with the children who had started on time. Especially since it was first grade, the absolute beginning of my school life (there was no such thing as kindergarten back then), such a crucial and delicate stage. It’s even harder to understand why Mom insisted on getting me in, why she went to the trouble of making them take me; it can’t have been easy. She must have begged, implored them, got down on her knees. I can imagine it; that was her idea of motherhood. She probably thought she wouldn’t know what to do with me at home for another whole year. But what with the work of taking me to school, going to fetch me afterwards, washing and ironing the smocks, buying the pencils, pens, rulers and so on, finding an old reader to borrow, in the end it must have seemed hardly worth it, just for the relief of having me off her hands for a few hours a day at siesta time. She probably thought she was doing it for my good. It didn’t occur to her that missing three months, the first three months, in first grade, would be too much even for a girl like me. But it wouldn’t be fair to blame her. I don’t. It was only three months, after all. And poor Mom had so many things on her mind at the time. All the same, the teacher and the principal should have known better. But perhaps they were too close to the problems of learning, just as Mom was too far away from them.
The first weeks were a stream of pure images. Human beings tend to make sense of experience by imbuing it with continuity: what is happening now can be explained by what happened before. So it’s not surprising that I persisted in the perceptual habits I had recently acquired with Ana Módena and went on seeing gestures, mimicry, stories without sound, in which I had no part. No one had explained the purpose of school to me, and I wasn’t about to work it out for myself. Initially, however, the problem didn’t seem serious. I regarded it all, rather stubbornly, as a spectacle, an acrobatic show …