Ten
Debrah and James came into the kitchen and the four of us hugged. I don’t like collective displays of emotion, but this time it did me good, I think. Plus they’re American and very different from us in many ways; they were our best friends, no question, and so we had to respect all that, even if it made me a little uncomfortable.
Debrah and James are still together. Besides ours, theirs is the longest-lasting marriage I know. They call to check in every two weeks, but since Sara’s funeral two years ago they haven’t been back to La Mesa: airports and airplanes are hard on the elderly. He’s seventy-five, and she’s seventy. The last time they called, they told me they were planning to go into a nursing home together, a notion I found appalling, of course, since to me that’s basically deciding to breathe in the smell of your own and other people’s urine day and night and day after day until you stop breathing altogether. But I didn’t say anything.
Debrah and Sara worked together at Bellevue Hospital, which was how they’d met. James was a leftist lawyer, which in the United States means his clients were poor and he earned almost as little as them. James had put us in touch with a lawyer friend of his in Portland who specialized in these matters and would help us if anything went wrong, since Jacobo wasn’t an Oregon resident and didn’t have the right to that kind of assistance, and the doctor, Pablo, and Jacobo himself would actually be breaking the law and could get in serious trouble. It was the lawyer who had advised me and Sara not to travel to Oregon, to let the two boys go on their own, since having so many people there might draw attention to us. Sara flat-out refused, of course, and even got angry and cried, but she finally accepted it.
I misspoke. James actually earned less than his clients, since when they didn’t have money, he gave it to them or lent it to them without expecting to ever get it back, and if Debrah didn’t put her foot down he’d end up giving them her money too. Once I went down to the courthouse in Lower Manhattan to watch him work, and got to see him defend a Latina drug addict who over the course of the hearing gradually slumped more and more until in the end she was snoozing on his shoulder. She had robbed a neighbor for drug money and would have sold her children for a baggie of heroin. As he talked, the judge gestured to James not to let her fall asleep, and he had to push her upright and lift her head and her eyelids so she could look at the judge and the jury, which she did for a moment, lids drooping, before slowly leaning over again, her eyes now closed, and coming to rest on James’s shoulder once more.
He is burly, tall, dark-complexioned, very intelligent, good as gold. Debrah is of Irish descent, from Ohio, with very blue eyes, petite and lively, as dynamic and swift as he is deliberate.
The drug addict and my friend touched me deeply. Deep, deepest respect, James. And now I don’t even remember how it all turned out, if they put her in jail or what. The image that stayed with me was of the burly lawyer, formerly a football player at the University of Mississippi, and the emaciated junkie, who must once have been as beautiful as Venus, slumping, only half-conscious, at his side.
The four of us returned to the living room, where Preet was talking enthusiastically to Arturo about professional basketball. When he saw us, he straightened up, went silent, and smiled. Once again we all sat to look at him.
“Sikhism is the world’s youngest religion,” he said after a while. And this time it was Venus who remarked, “That’s amazing.”
Ángela just came in to ask me if everything is all right and if she and her husband can leave. “I left your dinner in the microwave,” she said. “Don’t even think about going to bed without eating, Don David.”
She and her husband don’t live here; they live in a little farm on the way to a village called Cachipay, and every afternoon they go to the main plaza to catch one of those little vans that weave up the gorgeous, verdant curves of the paved but potholed road to the village. I’ve gone to visit them a number of times on Sundays, and I go not in the car with my driver but in one of those vans. I like the atmosphere: everybody talks to everybody else as if they were all out for a drive and not riding public transportation. The only problem is that I have to hunch over a lot and my legs don’t fit between the seats. I also like the farm: one and a half acres of coffee plants growing in the shade of pacay trees and a graceful species of acacia known as pisquín, and a wattle-and-daub house that is always neatly painted: white walls, red tin roof, and red window frames and doors. I drink coffee on the porch, gaze out at the trees, take a short nap in their bed, and return home. I don’t think I’ll take the van there very often in the future, as my declining eyesight makes me feel too unsteady to move around that way.
“Tomorrow I’ll organize your papers,” said Ángela.
As I fill these pages, I number them and put them in a Fab laundry detergent box I keep beside my desk. Because I have to write so large, I go through a lot of paper, and when the sheets don’t fit in the box anymore, Ángela organizes them by page number and puts them in sheaves of one hundred on a large table I used to use for painting and engraving. The table looks beautiful piled with stacks of manuscript pages with blackberry-colored ink, the kind I like and which I prepare myself. There are thirty-odd piles now containing my memories of the years when Sara and I were young – the first five, I mean, which were such happy years and at times such conflictive ones, with that flood of hormones still rushing through our veins. And now the pages about Jacobo are starting to land there. I use special paper, thicker than normal, almost like etching paper, because I like to hear and feel the friction the paper makes against the fancy Montblanc fountain pen Sara gave me one Christmas.
But sometimes I wish I could paint again. Not those pathetic sketches I’d been drawing with my peripheral vision when I finally decided to quit and start writing instead, but big paintings, like the ones I used to do, paintings large enough to contain the whole world.
Eleven
We ordered sautéed chicken and noodle soup from a nearby restaurant. I hadn’t had breakfast, but I still only ate a little soup and half a piece of chicken, which I chewed as if it were rubber. At the table, people were talking about Preet’s visit, which had been difficult for everyone, and perhaps for that reason, and also because of our affection for him, we were having a little fun. Venus said that the orange turban looked better on him than the indigo one he almost always wore.
“Hello, I am Preet,” Arturo said, almost singing. “We Sikhs do not recognize the caste system.”
Yesterday afternoon they came here to the house to take my photo. I couldn’t tell whether the magazine was about art, architecture, or interior design; the young man and woman, both of them quite attractive, wandered around the house taking photos of anything that moved or didn’t. They captured me working at my table with my Montblanc and my magnifying glass. The magnifying glass is photogenic because it’s big and square and black and is mounted on the table with a jointed arm that attaches to the tabletop with a clamp. They also posed me beside the climbing ficus that was gradually taking over one of the interior corridors. I think at this point I look like a statue by Alberto Giacometti, the sculptor: I seem to get skinnier every day, as Ángela says, and my figure has gradually turned to spirit or vapor. That is, drawing ever further from the things of this world and venturing into death, which does not exist, and into the infinite world we actually inhabit. If I could still paint, I would do a large self-portrait in which I would look like a mere shadow on a climbing vine that was solid, eternal, as if it were made of metal or stone.
There’s another Giacometti: Diego, Alberto’s brother, who designed some beautiful pieces of furniture in bronze. I once had a cousin make me a copy of one of Giacometti’s tables, a slab of glass resting on a three-legged bronze tree with an owl perched on one of its branches. I had to travel to Medellín, where Ángel lived – he was a raging alcoholic but the best bronze worker around. It took him two long years, between occasional stints in the hospital fo
r alcohol poisoning that almost killed him, but it turned out perfectly and it’s in the living room next to a leather armchair we brought down from New York. When Ángel died three years later, I went to Medellín and was able to see him, emaciated, his beard neatly combed, wearing a tie, finally unburdened of the terrible suffering that alcoholics endure, in a sober coffin and surrounded by floral arrangements. I did a little altarpiece painting of his corpse, floating like Ophelia’s on a river of flowers, almost primitivist, and because the flowers were painted in such a hyperrealistic style, nobody recognized it as my work.
The two young people stayed until dinner, ate, and left around nine. At one time I would have found that whole business with the photos and the articles and the endless questions about my work incredibly irritating. Especially during the years of Jacobo’s suffering, it pissed me off to have to deal with that aspect of my work, which I found so unpleasant, and if it hadn’t been for Sara, I would have closed the door and disconnected the doorbell and the telephone and let the chips fall as they might. But back then promotion was still a major part of my sales, and my sales were a major part of our lifestyle with Jacobo. Later, when my work was getting more attention and commanding higher prices, I began to agree to only those interviews that interested me and allowed me to say some of the things I wanted to say. Today, in my old age, it just makes me happy and makes me feel less alone to have young people in my home looking at my work, asking me questions, and taking an interest in Sara’s garden and parts of my life.
At about three in the afternoon, Sara and I fell asleep for a few minutes, and when we woke up we made love lying on our sides, clutching each other so fiercely that we reached complete communion in pleasure and especially in affliction. I don’t know how many times we must have made love in all those years together, Sara and I – thousands, I think, in thousands of ways and thousands of moods, both in happy times and in moments as awful as the one we were currently living through, and every time it was different, every time it was as if it were the very first. We fell asleep again for a little while, our arms still around each other and me still inside her. When we woke up maybe half an hour later, I heard the piercing song of some blue jays in the cemetery and, in the distance, down the street, a hoarse, ugly shout, like a death rattle: “Hey you, motherfucker!”
I once asked Jacobo about his sex life with Venus, and he told me that the first time he’d managed to ejaculate, the pain in his legs and cephalgia had been so intense that he’d nearly passed out. In time that physical pain began to decrease, he said, and eventually vanished entirely. Jacobo’s injury was classified as T-10 complete, which means that he was paralyzed from the tenth thoracic vertebra down. I already knew a great deal about spinal cord injuries because of my years as a medical student, though I also did a lot of research online and in the libraries. I also got information from Michael O’Neal, Jacobo’s young friend who enjoyed talking like a doctor.
“Not all patients with spinal injuries experience neuropathic pain, also known as, quote-unquote, phantom pain,” Michael would say. “Indeed, the self-reported average for the prevalence of chronic pain in patients with spinal injuries is approximately 65 percent, of whom about a third report having severe pain, which, as in Jacobo’s case and my own, is sometimes agonizing. And that’s what you have to keep in mind, Mr. David: there’s not much about these pains that’s phantom-like. They’re quite real, and sometimes the torment is unbearable, as if they were sawing at your waist or sticking your legs in a bonfire. Unbearable. Am I right, Jacobo?”
“Right you are, Professor O’Neal,” Jacobo replied, and Michael smiled, flattered.
That day he showed up at around four, spoke very little, and stayed only a few minutes. It may be that Jacobo had told him about his intentions and Michael was expecting us to give him an update, as he asked whether Jacobo was home, but without conviction, and he didn’t really listen when we told him some details about his supposed trip to Miami with Pablo.
Twelve
At four thirty they called again and said that the doctor wasn’t going to come at eleven either, but at six in the morning the next day. They gave me the news, without details, and hung up quickly, as Jacobo was in a lot of pain and Pablo was going to give him a massage. They didn’t talk to Sara.
“Tell Mom not to worry, he’s a conscientious guy and will definitely be here at six,” Pablo told me.
This time Sara didn’t say anything, but only squeezed my hand hard and sat staring at a spot on the hardwood floor for a long while.
“What if he changes his mind?” she asked.
“The doctor?”
“Jacobo.”
I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to think, didn’t know what to feel. None of us wanted death – not him, not her, not me, not anybody – and life clings to this world with something akin to delirium. The cockroach to its crevice, the plant to its chink between bricks or even to bare rock.
“With all this awful waiting…”
I went to the window. Down below, on one of the graves, was the statue of the Virgin Mary in a pose of profound peace. If only I were a believer, I thought, so I could go to a church right this moment, confess, no idea what for, pray…I’d love to have some tutelary gods, I thought, and sacrifice a rabbit to them, dedicate thick-smoked incense, leave them fruits, offer them flowers. But there was no Virgin for me, no tutelary gods. For me there were only those clouds, those pigeons that had just flown by, those trees, that jumbled void, that place whose borders cannot be identified, that blooming rose bush, that inexpressible abundance lulled by time and eternally harmonious, both when it was happy and when it was horrible.
“Everything’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be okay,” I told Sara.
“You think so?”
James and Debrah had gone to water the plants and change clothes at their apartment, which was uptown, at 125th and Broadway, and they’d be coming back to spend the night with us. Venus had gone out, beautiful in her white uniform, to see a patient on the Upper East Side. Arturo was working some nights as a sound technician in a well-known rock club in the Bowery called CBGB. He’d decided it was better to go in and clear his head a bit, so he was showering and getting ready. It was five in the afternoon.
Sara called her siblings. She had three sisters and two brothers. The men had all gone almost completely bald in their mid-thirties, while the women’s hair seemed to grow more and more abundant, curly, shiny, and healthy. They were like the same woman painted by four different, though kindred, artists. Their complexions ranged from dark cinnamon – Sara – to a light wheat color – the eldest sister, who let her black hair fall in ringlets against her shoulders. I always liked my brothers- and sisters-in-law – the way they enjoyed life, their sense of humor, and especially their immense capacity for affection. May your shell, like the snail’s, be strong enough to make tenderness possible, a poet once said, and that went for all of them. And, of course, I also liked the sisters for their beauty, and on many occasions I had to be careful not to look at them with desire or caress them, perhaps by accident, as if they were Sara. Two of them are still alive, both of them widows, both of them in Cali, and they are as pretty as ever. I call them from time to time and feel nostalgia, because it’s as if I were hearing Sara’s voice. The youngest brother is also still alive.
It was hard to talk to her siblings, who had no idea what was going on. Sara called them one by one, and every conversation went exactly the same. She’d try to make the usual jokes, but with effort, and I could tell the moment when, on the other end of the line, they’d ask her if everything was okay, tell her that she seemed strange. Sara would answer, her voice almost cracking, that everything was fine, that there were the inevitable problems of life, of course. Jacobo? Still in terrible pain, you know, she’d answer, but fine, everything’s going to be okay, she’d tell them. Not to worry, she’d call them later and tell them about it, sh
e’d add. And then she’d say: goodbye, goodbye, I have to rush off to work. Yes. I’ll call you tomorrow. Yes. Yes. Yes. Bye, I’ll call you, I’ll call you, goodbye.
Thirteen
Everybody left. Sara went to lie down and I started looking at the water in the painting of the ferry. Fifteen minutes later, she got up, put on some yellow rubber gloves, grabbed a can of Ajax, and went to scrub the tub and tiles in the bathroom. (Debrah has always been amused by the way we pronounce it ah-hahx in Spanish, totally unrecognizable to an English speaker, and she often asked us to say it for her. She said it sounded like an ax falling.) I heard Sara energetically scrubbing the tiles, and then I heard her filling the tub. I heard her take off her clothing and I heard her slip into the water. My ear was always acutely attuned to all of Sara’s movements. In other circumstances I would have gone into the bathroom to talk to her, to look at her. This time I knew that she wanted to be alone.
“What are you staring at?” she’d always ask in the bathroom when I got distracted and gazed at her too long: her breasts still high and firm at her age (which only happens with dark-skinned women, they say); her stomach flat with only two stretch marks on either side, which I even found beautiful; her lovely pubis, perfect, a nearly imperceptible shadow of fine hairs rising from it to her navel, where it created a climax of symmetry that took my breath away. I’d start from my trance and respond like one of the noble cat-callers of Cali:
“I’m not staring, I’m starry-eyed.”
“You goof!”
Luckily it was summer and the days were long. In summer at a certain point you have the illusion that the days last forever. I didn’t want night to come, because then I’d have to acknowledge that time was passing; that life was passing over us, crushing us with its wheels and gears. But only light, ever elusive, is eternal. And the light on the water beside the churning propeller of the boat, however much I studied it and reworked it, I was unable to find a way to capture it completely – that light that contains shadows, that contains death, and is also contained within them.
Difficult Light Page 4