It’s sad now to be writing the jokes that I was telling up until two years ago, when Sara was still alive. “Something vaguely resembling a joke,” she would have corrected me. And then the taxi carrying my eldest son was hit by a pickup driven by an intoxicated junkie at the corner of Sixth Street and First Avenue, less than four blocks from the apartment, and I, and Sara, and all of us, were plunged into the deepest hell.
Four
I didn’t stop painting. I never stopped painting, not until recently. I finished the paintings I’d started, and I even prepped more canvases and started new ones, but for a long time it was a reflexive act, like the way they say some people keep walking after their head’s been cut off.
So many years have passed since then that even the pain in my heart has gradually dried up, like the moisture in a piece of fruit, and only rarely now am I suddenly shaken by the memory of what happened, as if it happened yesterday, and swallow hard to contain a sob. But it does still happen, and I nearly double over with grief. But at other times I think of my son, and then I feel such warmth that in those moments it even seems to me that life is eternal, restful and eternal, and pain is an illusion.
Whenever I got deep like that, Sara would look at me with some amusement. Even now I can hear her voice teasing me: “Let me make sure I’ve got it all straight, David. So pain is eternal and life is an illusion? No, wait. Life is…?” That’s why I almost never go back over these lines with my magnifying glass, because it’s pointless to try to see where I’m on target, if I am at all, and where I’m being a moron. It’s best to just keep going. And I don’t have much time to go back over things anyway: I’m old now, and for some time I’ve been rapidly losing my eyesight.
Also, truth does not exist and the world is music.
Today I live by myself in a house in the outskirts of La Mesa, a city of thirty thousand in central Colombia. Sara died here two years ago. The back patio looks out over a deep, wide valley with vultures or buzzards or whatever you want to call them soaring overhead. Sometimes the vultures swoop low in the air, only a few meters from the cliff behind the house, above the abyss, and if my vision were good enough I’d be able to see how they move their flight feathers, changing direction or altitude, how they enjoy the World. (I see them very clearly and yet I can no longer see them. Where, then, is the World? Where does it perch?) Some people find it unsettling that beyond our garden, just beyond the orange and tangerine trees that Sara kept so well pruned and fertilized, there yawns such depth and vastness that it seems as if it might swallow everything up, like a terrifying symphony.
I am relatively healthy. More bothersome than my failing eyesight is the poor circulation in my legs, especially my left one, which causes sharp tingling in my fingers in the wee hours of the night (I don’t know why it prefers those hours). Apart from that, everything is in decent working order. I lost my teeth to gum disease ten years ago and got dentures. I bought the best one available, super pricey, the Porsche of dentures, Sara used to joke, adding reassuringly that they were a major improvement on the teeth I’d had before.
A woman of about forty-five, Ángela, comes every morning and stays all day, looking after the house and preparing food. Ángela likes to tell me that I’m not eating enough and that I’m skinny for my height, which I find amusing, as height-to-weight ratios should no longer be a concern once a man has hit seventy-eight. I’ve still got my memory, I’m lucid, and generally speaking people don’t treat me like an old man. What has happened, though, is I’ve become detached from the affairs of the world of the featherless biped, and I consider few or none of them truly important. Up until the situation with Jacobo, I was deeply invested in what people thought of my work, reading the reviews with an eagerness that now seems absurd, convinced I wasn’t gaining enough recognition in the art world. And it was true: for a long time, my work was not valued. And as it happened, my son’s long torment coincided with an immense, sticky swell of recognition that I did not want and that seemed to have chosen that precise moment to arrive for the sole purpose of exacerbating our affliction, like a drag queen or a monkey or a lunatic at a funeral.
Along with that recognition, though, came the money we so desperately needed.
Jacobo’s intense pain started three years after leaving the hospital. The doctors had warned us: the worst thing might be not that he would never walk again, but the physical discomfort he might begin to experience at any moment. The pain gradually became chronic and increased in intensity, to the point that there were days – not all of them, thankfully – on which we had to tiptoe into his room and speak in whispers so he didn’t moan and tremble at the noise.
My eldest son spent the first three years after the accident wanting to walk again and striving toward that goal. Then he lost hope, and after that, and as the pain became chronic and increasingly unbearable, he started wanting death to come for him. He’d rather it happen in his sleep, he told Sara once, but it would also be okay if it took him when he was awake.
Five
I couldn’t have stopped painting even if I’d wanted to, as our medical expenses, even with health insurance, were significant. We adapted the apartment so that Jacobo could move around, and many of the pulleys and other equipment were expensive, and the insurance didn’t cover everything. Then came the physical suffering, and the expenses went from significant to astronomical. When someone starts feeling such acute pain, the most important thing is to stop it, to alleviate it somehow, and even if you have only partial success or none at all, it’s quite costly.
The acupuncturists, for example, who never did any good, were expensive – the more Asian they were, the more they cost – and insurance didn’t cover them. I remember for about a year we paid an acupuncturist from Chinatown three hundred dollars for each weekly session. Fourteen thousand dollars to Dr. Shu (“Doctor Zapato,” Jacobo started calling him near the end), who had an office on Mott, until Jacobo himself said it wasn’t worth it and we should stop wasting money on the guy. By then the persistent agony had soured the poor boy’s spirit. Oh, and that’s not even counting the cost of Dr. Shoe’s so-called medicines, little black pills about the size of Colombian beans, very bitter, that had to be chewed very slowly so they’d be effective in combination with the needles they poked into Jacobo’s scalp and everywhere else, leaving him looking like a penitent or a porcupine.
In the beginning there was a lot of equipment: not only the devices intended to permit Jacobo some degree of physical independence in daily life, but also a sort of gym we installed in one of the bedrooms, where, despite the doctors’ gloomy prognosis, the boy did his exercises till he dropped with exhaustion, hoping he would manage to walk again through sheer will. It was a hope we all shared at first. After watching him struggle and suffer like a broken monkey for hours on those bars and rings, we thought he was showing signs of increased mobility, and he himself said he was starting to feel his toes again. But it was all in vain.
It’s a cruel cliché: the last thing you lose is hope.
Pablo used to work out with him and grew quite muscular. He was inspired not by vanity, of course, but so he wouldn’t hurt his brother while carrying him from the shower to his bedroom or when settling him into his wheelchair. A while later Pablo started getting tattoos, and so we ended up with a gigantic boy with a sculpted body, his massive arms and shoulders adorned with gorgeous scarabs and orchids, and with a way of being that was as gentle as water and stable as rock. Jacobo got muscular too, from all the exercise, though just in his shoulders and arms, while his legs looked withered and sad. Arturo, who didn’t exercise at all, except for a stint playing ping pong in high school, was always tall and lanky like me.
Our two eldest resembled Sara in personality and physical appearance more than they did me, though they had a bit of both of us. Neither of them experienced the recurring periods of melancholy I’ve endured since childhood, and the boys always knew to accept it without que
stion, just as Sara did, even though they couldn’t understand how a person could suddenly get so dark and silent for no reason. And the biggest paradox was that most of those blue periods, which were in large part imaginary, gradually disappeared after the disaster. That insistent suffering – his, mine, all of ours – ended up sweeping away the worst thickets of foggy cobwebs in my soul, the densest, most imaginary ones, and left me stripped of arbitrary sadnesses.
I looked at the ferry foam a while, walked into the exercise room, and thought about how we could give all that equipment to one of Jacobo’s many friends. The pulleys, I mean, as Pablo would definitely want to keep the weights and springs and other apparatuses so he could stay in shape.
I returned to the studio to look at the painting again.
He always had a lot of friends, Jacobo did, and that didn’t change after the accident. Quite the opposite: in addition to his old friendships, his young comrades in misfortune started coming to visit. They showed up every day, in all sizes, colors, and personalities, all of them in wheelchairs, most of them trying to endure as best they could the physical pain that plagued them constantly. Jacobo had met them in one of those support groups that Americans are so fond of and that Sara and I resisted so long until we realized they were actually useful.
I remember one young man of about eighteen, exceedingly polite, who was paralyzed from the waist down just like Jacobo, but in his case thanks to complications during a surgery. He always talked like a doctor.
“How are you, Mr. David? Pleased to meet you. I’m Michael O’Neal.”
I shook his hand and asked how things were going.
“Just so-so, Mr. David,” he told me. “I suffered from adhesive arachnoiditis, a silent complication that may present in six hyphen sixteen percent of patients who undergo this lumbar surgery or a follow-up procedure, who may then experience a second complication, paraplegia, as the most common symptom of arachnoiditis is persistent pain in the lower back. They operated on my spine to treat herniated discs that developed as a result of the adhesive arachnoiditis, diagnosed by means of magnetic resonance imaging, and which affected the cauda equina…”
“I’m so sorry, Michael,” I said.
“Same here, Mr. David…. Cauda equina. Then, despite a mechanical cleaning and surgical debridement, I presented with irreversible paraplegia with diffuse spinal affection due to serous fluid remaining in the wound bed. The intersomatic implant inserted during my first surgery was removed, and treatment concluded with the reinstrumentation of posterior stabilization, with a persistent neurological deficit. In other words, Mr. David, I was paralyzed, and ironically the pain is incredibly intense, intense and very persistent, and I feel it in my legs, which don’t actually have any feeling. If they stabbed me in the leg, I wouldn’t feel a thing, Mr. David, but this pain keeps me awake at night.” He finally trailed off and fell silent, staring out the window at the trees in the cemetery, overwhelmed by suffering.
After finishing high school and wandering around Latin America and Europe for a couple of years, doing a lot and not doing much of anything, I’d studied medicine at Antioquia University in Medellín and could make some sense of medical jargon. I dropped out not because the profession didn’t appeal to me – in fact, I was quite drawn to it – but because of my passion for painting. I transferred to art school against everyone’s advice, as I seemed to have no ability or talent for the arts. But those years in medical school were hardly a waste, despite what everyone said, not just because my knowledge of anatomy proved quite useful in my work but because in my view it is always – always and without exception – better to know than not to know.
“I’m very sorry, Michael,” I repeated, and Jacobo, who experienced the same sort of pain, looked at me with his large brown eyes, very intelligent and bright – and all the brighter in contrast with the thick black beard he was growing – and winked at me, a wink of amusement at the way Michael talked, but mostly a wink of empathy and compassion.
The windows of the apartment, which was on the fourth floor, overlooked a historic cemetery – I can’t remember if I said that already – with lush, leafy trees. When we moved in, the most recent grave was that of Ellen Louise Wallace, buried in 1975. Four years after we came back to Colombia, James would tell us that in 2006 they’d buried someone else, one Robert Chesebrough Kennedy, in one of the plots by the street. At the rear of the cemetery were two spectacular magnolias, the first trees to bloom in spring. The cemetery was enclosed by an intricate wrought-iron fence, and because the gate was always padlocked, no one ever went in and in winter the snow stayed pure and dazzling. Only the squirrels and birds left tracks in it. The rats, too, I guess, since back then the city was overrun with them. “AIDS has called in the bubonic plague as backup,” I’d joke to Sara about the rats. “Really, though,” I’d add, “a city without pigeons, squirrels, rats, beggars, or cockroaches couldn’t have much going for it.” “What a list!” she’d say.
Here in La Mesa, the sky just caved in. A massive hailstorm has started, and our house is old but has a tin roof in the rear, so it makes a tremendous racket. It’s rare to get hail in La Mesa. This is the first time it’s happened in sixteen years. It’s one of the most beautiful experiences there is. The destruction of the self, the dissolution of the individual. The air smells like water and dust and you are suddenly nobody.
It’s so loud, you can’t even write.
Six
Ever since they’d left we’d been in constant contact with the boys by cell phone. They’d made their first stop on the way to Chicago at a Holiday Inn in Clearfield, Pennsylvania, which they reached after five hours of driving. Jacobo couldn’t bear the excruciating pain caused by the van motion any longer. It was for exactly that reason that we’d assumed in the beginning that they’d travel by plane, but he wanted to see a bit of the world beforehand, and not arrive at death so…abruptly. So they decided to travel to Chicago first, to see the countryside and then the Great Lakes, and take a plane to Portland from there.
Making the whole journey by car as they’d originally intended, forty-nine hours, with Jacobo in such pain, would have been impossible. They did New York to Chicago in two days, avoiding the freeways and taking secondary roads instead, where they could see the real countryside and not go from rest stop to rest stop, from the Seven-Eleven in one town to the Seven-Eleven in the next. The United States is an ugly place if you don’t know how to travel it. When you go by freeway, if you’re a passenger and fall asleep at the gas station in one town and wake up at the gas station in another three hundred miles away, it’s as if you hadn’t gone anywhere. It’s exactly the same when you go from Holiday Inn to Holiday Inn, which the boys had to do, not wanting to risk an uncomfortable stay at an unknown hole-in-the-wall. It’s like being trapped forever in the most tedious dimension of time that God ever created. Of course, like Sara, they’ve always enjoyed everything to the fullest, even backwaters.
“Hey, David, here in Clearfield they’ve got this place that holds the record for the world’s biggest hamburgers,” Jacobo informed me over the phone. Sometimes my sons call me David, and sometimes Dad, in English. “They’ve got newspaper and magazine articles about it framed on the wall. The burgers look like motorcycle tires topped with tomato and mayonnaise. We teamed up with two other guys to eat one, and we couldn’t finish it.”
They had a great time on those back roads. They blasted Led Zeppelin and AC/DC as they passed dairy farms or corn fields glowing in summer splendor. Venus had showed Pablo how to give massages, which were the only thing, in all the years of Jacobo’s experience with cures and treatments, that had brought any real relief from the pain. When it became unbearable, they’d look for a place to park, Pablo would carry him to the back of the van where they had a cot set up, massage him for forty minutes or an hour, and let him sleep a while, and then they’d continue on their way.
Venus was a physical therapist, and that’s
how they’d met. She was from Santo Domingo, but she’d lived in New York since she was a little girl. She’d come every two weeks at first, and when we saw that Jacobo’s pain lessened significantly for eight hours straight – which in turn allowed him to sleep well and get a little rest – she started coming every Friday. The therapy was inordinately expensive, eight hundred dollars for each two-hour session, of which insurance covered three hundred and fifty, but it was unquestionably worth it. Of course, as the years passed it became less effective, until eventually it was no longer a matter of seeking relief with the massages but instead of making the pain go from unbearable to less unbearable. And the relief faded more and more quickly.
“With that price, that name, and that figure,” Jacobo would tease her back when they were not yet lovers, “your clients must ask you for other kinds of massages too.”
If any other guy had said that to her, I thought, Venus, who did have a very beautiful body, might have been offended. But women never got mad at Jacobo.
She’d start the massages on his feet. I did a lot of charcoal sketches of the two of them, trying to capture the intimacy between people facing the horror of pain together. They must still be there in my notebooks, somewhere in the jumble of my studio. That was before they started closing the bedroom door, of course, when the romance hadn’t yet begun and I could go in there to watch her work. Venus would start with the arches of his feet, as I said, then his ankles and calves, and stimulate the muscles until they twitched reflexively and relaxed. Jacobo couldn’t have known what she was doing, as they’d inserted a titanium rod in his spine, locking the upper and lower parts together. He only realized that Venus had reached the area above the rod when she bent him forward a little and Jacobo could start to feel the area where he had some sensitivity.
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