Sphinx

by Anne Garréta

  She pronounced my name and caressed my hand, smiling. On the verge of tears, I clumsily gave her a kiss; she spoke in a murmur, asking me why I had been crazy enough to come all this way, saying that I shouldn’t worry myself about her. She had straightened herself up to speak to me but was already drooping again onto her pillow, exhausted. Caressing her cheek, I told her not to talk, for I could see it was tiring her out. I took her hand in mine and, glancing at the heart monitor, saw with terror what it had cost her to speak: her heart was beating in a panicked rhythm that was taking a long time to subside. She nodded off, still clutching my hand. I lingered there, immobile at her side, repeating to myself, absurdly, “Ô mon Dieu, mon Dieu…” She awoke with a start, searching for me with eyes eaten away by anguish. They fixed on me and I felt her hand tense in mine. I leaned in and stammered derisory words of comfort in her ear. She said to me softly, almost inaudibly: “I’ve been waiting for so long for a voice like yours that could [a word I didn’t understand] me.” Her words, the tone of her voice, cut through me like a knife; I bit my lip.

  I asked a nurse passing by about the possibility of procuring a quiet room for this woman, rather than a portion of the hallway exposed to incessant traffic. I committed myself to paying all the expenses that this regime might require. She went off to consult the head supervisor and returned soon after, accompanied by a nurse’s aide who helped her to move the bed into a room twenty yards away. I took A***’s mother in my arms and placed her onto her new bed. She silently acquiesced. She was so still and light; it felt as if she had lost a lot of weight. I adjusted her nightshirt and put the sheet back over her body. She observed me as I took care of her, not saying a word; I could see nothing in her eyes except that she was following my every move.

  The nurse replaced the IV bag; I went to see the doctor. He was in the hallway drinking a coffee. In clogs and a type of pajama that served as the uniform for the hospital health personnel, he seemed to be just as miserable as all the people I had passed in the labyrinth of hallways and waiting rooms. He was small; the harsh light coming from the ceiling gave him an unhealthy complexion and accentuated the faults in his skin. A troubling baldness hideously disfigured his scalp, lumpy and shiny with sweat; he frequently wiped his hand across his forehead. He volunteered the details of his diagnosis: long-term cardiovascular problems, blood pressure subject to brutal variations—she could fall into a coma at any moment. I gave him the contact information for my hotel, asking him to notify me if anything should happen, no matter the hour of the day or night.

  When I returned to the room, the nurse had finished her tasks; as she was leaving, I slipped a twenty-dollar bill into her hand that she attempted to refuse. Once she had left, I approached the aged woman, her black skin contrasting with her white sheets. She asked me why I was doing all this for her. I searched for the words to respond: “It’s a kind of debt toward A***…And you remind me of someone I would have wanted to be able to care for, as I now do for you…I have felt and I feel all that you’ve felt and feel. I’m almost a stranger to you but you’re not to me…” She reached her hand toward my face; I knelt down by the bed and she wrapped her left arm around my head while caressing my hair. I could hear her heart beating and, as if in response, the discreet noise of the machine at every spike, a syncopated beep-beep in the silence of the room. I saw this dark-skinned hand and its pale, tidy nails out of the corner of my eye. With regret surging in me like a stifled sob, I thought of death, coming soon to consume all this.

  Suddenly she said that I must be tired, that the trip must have worn me out. I swore to the contrary. She smiled and insisted that I return to my hotel to get some sleep, reassuring me that she was doing fine. It was night, what more could I do? My impotence took me by the heart. I promised to return the next morning at nine o’clock sharp, and kissed her on my way out. It was wrenching. In the hallway the nurse was approaching, carrying a tray of medications that she was about to distribute to the patients. I asked her to make sure to notify me at the slightest alarm. She asked me how I was connected to this woman, whom I was taking such good care of and with whom I seemed to share neither race, ancestry, nor even age. I didn’t know how to respond and briefly explained that this woman was the mother of a person who had been very dear to me, who had died nearly seven years ago. She studied me; I don’t know what was going through her mind. My features drooping with fatigue, my dark clothes, my foreign accent, this strange story, the color of my skin, death’s repeated blow—what did she make of it all?

  I went back through the hospital hallways in reverse. It was nine o’clock; the waiting rooms had been emptied. I passed nurses wheeling beds that had transported wailing women dressed in poor rags, cloth, and newspapers, or the silent injured. In a service elevator some people were attempting to pin onto a stretcher a black man howling and foaming at the mouth. Between two doors I caught sight of a woman waiting, terrorized and with an absent gaze, cradling a child in her arms. I remember that she was wearing a woolen bonnet and that she wore laddered stockings that fell over misshapen slippers. I walked the length of these hallways mechanically; the lights bathed the surfaces in a dirty yellow tint. In the big, deserted hall where I ended up at last, I saw security guards in uniform chatting and patrolling in pairs, walkie-talkies in their hands and revolvers in their belts. A sorrow bore into my ribs that I attributed to fatigue and to the effect of all the stimulants, coffee, and cigarettes I had consumed to ward off sleep. The footsteps of those around me dizzily diminished in my head.

  The freezing night air hit me as I went up the ramp and gusts of wind whipped against my face; it had started to rain. On the avenue, cars were passing, inundating the building I had just left with light from their high beams. I was suddenly invaded with a dread of New York. Taxis passed me by, empty but not stopping. I started back toward my hotel on foot in the rain, twenty blocks of wet sidewalk reflecting the city and its lights in a blurred, murky image. I kept my head lowered, attempting to shield it from the brutal blasts of wind and the waves of rain. I saw New York only in a mirror of asphalt.

  I walked straight up 42nd Street without noticing that I was rolling snippets of incoherent English around in my head: expressions and interjections that seemed to originate in songs I had heard long ago, when I was still with A***. I was searching for the lyrics to a particular song that we had enjoyed singing sometimes while walking at night through the streets of strange cities. Gradually the words came back to me, though I kept stumbling over the refrain:

  Well hello then good old friend of mine.

  You’ve been reachin’ for yourself for such a long time

  No need to explain, I’m not here to blame,

  I just wanna be the one to keep you from the rain

  From the rain.

  It’s a long road when you’re all alone

  And someone like you will always choose the long way home

  There’s no right or wrong, I’m not here to blame

  I just wanna be the one (…)

  And it’s good to know my best friend has come home again

  ‘cause I think of us like an old cliché

  but it doesn’t matter ‘cause I love you anyway

  Come in from the rain.

  I tried to sing it to myself as I walked, but my voice cracked impossibly on the high notes. I took 42nd Street going west, walking with my head empty and my feet frozen. An old blues song came back to me, but I remained unable to sing; my soul probably wasn’t yet sufficiently black.

  Back in my room I ordered an herbal tea from room service. The television was emitting flashes of light, muffled echoes. From the window, high up, I was watching all that was down below: the intersections, the endless streets, the blanket of roofs punctured by skyscrapers and stained with lights blurred by the rain. I opened a window and the humid rumble of the city abruptly washed over my face. That odor of city rain, which, hot or cold, has always frozen my blood, surged forth like a spindrift of funereal nostalgia. I was s
natched from it by the sound of the bellboy ringing at the door. He entered and placed the tray on a low table. I signed the bill, gave him a dollar tip, closed the door behind him and went back to my spot on the bed to drink my herbal tea. The TV screen and the screen of the glazed bay windows reflected the same insane scintillation. The tea filled me with a sweet warmth as I stretched out on the bed. My limbs felt shattered from all the distance they had traveled: the Atlantic, a hospital, and twenty blocks. Without even the strength to undress, I fell asleep feeling as though I were being crushed.

  A sharp ringing woke me in the darkness of the dead of night. I groped for the telephone; the receptionist announced a name I didn’t recognize. It took me a few seconds to get a hold of myself, to accustom myself once more to the language, to realize where I was. I finally understood that I was being called from the hospital because the woman I was here to take care of had just suffered a serious drop in blood pressure—blood pressure, blood pressure, the phrase resonated in my brain as if on a loop, an interrupted feedback amplifying itself—had fallen into a coma, was going to die—die, dying. Yes, I had understood, I was on my way.

  I hung up. I was cold—from lack of sleep, from the wet clothes I still had on, from the idea of this cold city. In the darkness, in my drowsiness, I sensed death in the air. I turned on the light and undressed; my gestures were slow, clumsy; it felt as if I were never going to be able to change into dry clothes. In the elevator I lit a cigarette, which made my head spin. In the mirror I was frightened by how pale I was. I thought I saw death on my face, in my eyes. How did that occur to me? There exists no image of death. I surprised myself, I suppose, by thinking, by knowing, or by understanding—I don’t know which—that death lived inside of me, that death had come up to the surface in my sleep to take possession of my carnal covering, to put it on and to cover me in turn with its cast-off rag.

  The night porter called me a taxi. I went down the same road I had taken a few hours earlier in reverse. I wasn’t looking at the streets; I was trying to glimpse the reflection of my face in the glass that separated me from the driver, but it was too dirty and murky. My watch read ten o’clock, the time in Paris; I switched it to the time in New York. The sight of the hospital overwhelmed me. I lost myself in the hallways cluttered with beds. Cops were bringing in the hobos they had picked up in the street on stretchers; here and there were odors of sweat, vomit, urine, and disinfectant. The plastic double doors closed, swishing behind me. I hadn’t run but I was out of breath. I sat for a moment between two chatting security guards before recommencing my haphazard route. Was I dreaming? Deserted hallways followed cluttered corridors; it seemed as if I had crossed dozens of identical gazes, the empty stares of the New York night flotsam, and my own gaze was probably no different. A sign finally pointed me in the right direction. In a corridor identical to all the others, I spotted the night nurse in the middle of injecting a sedative into a woman who was babbling deliriously, pouring out an abstruse flood of Hispanic sounds. The young girl at her side was sobbing and wringing her hands, the tears hideously disfiguring her and revealing decayed incisors in her contorted mouth. When the nurse had finished, I approached her and she brought me to the room. The doctor was near the bed, speaking to the presiding nurse. They had placed an oxygen mask on the old woman’s face. She had suffered a drop in blood pressure; as if there were nothing else to be done except wait for an unlikely miracle, the doctor withdrew. There was suddenly no one else in the room except for me and this body, whose breathing and failing heart depended on the machines. She didn’t see me, probably didn’t hear me either. With terror I drew my hand near hers, which remained inert. I leaned over her, observing her face. I spoke to her.

  This dying woman was a painful reminder of her child. I pronounced the name of my beloved. An identical absence. And now, she was dying. Had she waited for me to come, for someone to come, before surrendering to her exhaustion with living? She had probably waited, with all her strength, for a voice to come and appease her long-lived solitude. What if she had died from despair, from the atrocious despair at having awaited a voice that never came? What if she had died in her bed, in this infernal hallway, always listening for the sound of a familiar footstep; amidst the noise, the deranged cries, the echoes of conversations, brushed by a thousand bodies, all foreign and indifferent. I kissed her forehead, wiped off the sweat, and thought about how on my dying day there probably wouldn’t be anyone to do the same for me. I straightened up and lingered in silence, taking note of all the noises surrounding us, the beeps of the machines connected to her, the imperturbable rhythm of belabored breathing, the gaps of electronic silence…I went out into the hallway and asked the night guard for a coffee. I came back into the room and sat on the chair I had moved next to the bed. I held this old momma’s dark-skinned hand in mine. I felt life beating savagely, shamefully within me; my heart resounded in its ribcage; my muscles, though spent by fatigue, played and moved in physical impatience. Life can be handed down, but not handed over, I thought to myself. The nurse entered and remained a moment in my company. I kept quiet while she talked to me about a number of things. She mentioned that her colleague had told her a bit about me. I told her my story, why I was there. I was speaking to her in a deep, hoarse voice without looking at her, caressing this hand I was clinging to lovingly. The nurse left soon after. I lingered in the penumbra, the only light coming from a lamp at the head of the bed. I was not at all aware of time’s passing; my sole link to the world was the hand I was holding. I was looking at this face, searching for something of A***’s in it.

  My rumination was interrupted by a sound. I turned my head but could not identify the source. Suddenly I understood that the noise was nothing but a sudden silence: the heart monitor had stopped beeping and a green, flat line passed continuously on the screen—the machine displayed a zero. I squeezed her hand in mine; I knew she was dead. Oxygen continued to flow, now useless. I called the nurse and the doctor. The doctor recorded the time of death, came back toward me and announced that it was all over. He asked me if I could take it upon myself to notify the family members, if there were any. And in the same tone, without transition, he asked me if I consented to an autopsy. Looking at the corpse, I was submerged in a kind of disgust at the abrupt resurgence of raw, cannibalistic reality. I responded without diverting my gaze that I judged autopsies to be barbaric and moreover of little scientific use, since they never yielded any new discoveries. I entreated him to excuse my refusal and thanked him for his care.

  The nurse went about disconnecting all the machines hooked up to this body they had failed to keep alive. She explained to me what came next: declaration of death, retrieval of the deceased’s personal effects from the hospital safe. I had to wait another two hours before the administrative services opened. I sat back down beside the cadaver. All my thoughts during those two hours of vigil were muddled and kept getting away from me; I felt nothing but an invasive inner turmoil, a mute silence without the succor of meditation. At eight o’clock I went down to the office to take care of the formalities. They gave me the clothes, the watch, and the bag that had belonged to the deceased. I inquired about a funeral home and they told me of one not far from the hospital. I went back into the room one last time. The waiting rooms were filling back up with patients. My body was cutting through the crowd, as if acting on its own; my soul seemed to be missing from it. The nurse on duty approached me to offer her condolences. I told her I would return the next day to settle the details of the burial.

  The weight of it all, the heaviness and difficulty of the preparations, fell onto my shoulders. It had stopped raining, the sky had cleared, I saw the sun and upon leaving the hospital I felt the New York air, impalpable, enveloping me. I crossed the avenue, running, without seeing anything. I kept running all the way down the street to the building where the deceased had lived. It was a building with twenty floors, very close to the hospital. Closing the door of the studio behind me, I found myself again in the r
oom that, since Paris, had been haunting me in a vision. It hadn’t changed a bit, still a concretized shell of solitude where she had lived for years, neglecting her soul. I sat in the armchair, under her portrait done after the war. A*** had lived there too, before fleeing to Europe; in the closet were A***’s old schoolbooks and records. In a drawer of the desk against the wall I found a number of photographs and some letters A*** had written long ago. What was I supposed to do with all of this now?

  I took care of all the practical details, notified the family, paid the priest and the undertaker. She was buried in a cemetery in north Harlem. Some of the family came to the funeral. I asked those whom I had met during my trips to New York with A***—the old mommas in tears, her sisters—to come by the apartment of the deceased to take anything they wanted to keep. Their sons regarded me strangely.

  I had already made a packet of photographs, letters, and objects that I wanted to keep, which I assumed would not have interested the family because they held only sentimental value. I decided to stay another two weeks in New York and moved out of my hotel. The rent of the deceased’s apartment, now empty, had been paid through the end of the month, so I started sleeping in a blanket on the floor.

  I set about reading the letters from A***. I spread some photographs on the floor, and all day I tried to reconstitute those two lives affected so differently by a shared sundering. When I was hungry, I ordered Cantonese fried rice and sweet and sour chicken from the neighborhood Chinese restaurant. Every day, around five in the afternoon, I would go sit at a table in the Village to write down the story I had mentally reconstituted. I hadn’t notified any of my New York acquaintances that I was in the city. At night I would go to a club without making the effort to meet or recognize anyone. People often did a double take when I passed, as if I had something written on my face, a declaration of my decomposition. One night, while I was waiting on the corner of 54th Street for a taxi, I saw a woman who also seemed to be waiting, staring at me. She moved away from me swiftly, down the avenue. I was avoiding all company and in turn, for some obscure reason, people seemed to flee from me.