The Dinner Guest

by Gabriela Ybarra

  The first morning that I went to see my mother I followed the procedure: I put on the green paper clothes and I scrubbed my hands. When I came into the room I found her in bed tapping on a hardboiled egg with the edge of a spoon. When she had swallowed the yolk, she asked me to please help her shower.

  Up until now she had always done it herself. Despite her weakness and my attempts to prevent her, in Cádiz she had found the strength to go into the bathroom and wash. While the water was running, I would sit by the door until the dripping stopped. Then I would creep slowly away from her room, sit in the living room and pretend that I had been watching TV or reading a magazine.

  That morning in the hospital her request for help took me by surprise. It didn’t occur to me to call anybody. I put my arm around her and helped her to sit up. She tired easily. We stopped for a few minutes so that she could catch her breath. When her breathing steadied, I lifted her legs and moved them carefully until they were dangling off the bed. Then we rested a while longer. We proceeded like this, little by little, until she managed to stand and walk slowly to the bathroom. When she reached the shower she stopped, raised her arms and waited for me to undress her. I undid her gown and threw it into a bin, then I pulled her paper panties down by the elastic.

  The last time I had seen my mother naked I was very small. One day my parents were careless and I opened the door to the bathroom and found them with no clothes on under the water. All I could make out at first was a vague outline, but in a struggle for the shower head the curtain fell open and I saw them clinging frenziedly to each other with a ton of suds on their heads.

  When I turned on the shower at the hospital, my mother was standing on the tiles, facing the water, with her back to me. I was afraid that she would turn around. The radiation had affected the whole lower part of her body, and I thought her sex would be red, black or burned.

  To my surprise, it wasn’t. It looked young and smooth, seemingly intact. The look of it matched the rest of her adolescent shape. I asked her to sit on the little chair on the shower tray. She sat. I asked her to hold the shower head while I looked for the soap. She held it. But her attention slid to the tiles and when I returned with the gel I found water pooling on the floor.

  I washed my mother’s face, neck and chest. My green paper gown got wet and the mask stuck to my tongue. I finished washing her body and her hair and I looked around for a towel but there weren’t any in the bathroom. I asked my mother to hold the shower head again and this time I was careful to aim the spray at her body. I went out into the corridor in my wet gown. I approached a nurse. When I spoke behind the mask I breathed in my own breath.

  The nurse raised her voice when she saw me in the paper gown in the hallway. She made me take it off. She scolded me for risking the health of others with the possible viruses in the room. Then she showed me the cupboard where the towels were kept. At the door to the room I put on a new cap, mask and gown.

  The pool had spread. My mother was still sitting on the chair with her eyes on the tiles, her gaze lost. The spray twisted at her feet on the shower floor. When I came in she greeted me happily. I asked whether she was cold. She said no. I turned off the water, put a towel around her shoulders and hugged her. When she felt the contact of my skin she stiffened, looked around and said, ‘This is a mess, isn’t it?’ ‘A little,’ I said. I helped her up. She stood there again in the shower with her arms raised, but I convinced her to go back into the room, pushing aside the IV bags for her. I finished drying her. I got a clean pair of panties and I knelt down on the floor. First I lifted one foot and pulled the underwear over her left ankle, then I lifted the other foot and repeated the motion. Once both legs were in, I pulled the panties up until the elastic was around her waist. Then, one by one, I got her arms into the sleeves of the nightgown, an open gown that closed at the back with three white ties. I tied them and helped her to lie down on the bed.

  There was a hair dryer in the drawer of the bedside table. I turned it on and pointed it at her face. She closed her eyes. When I was done I brushed her hair, put moisturiser on her and did her make-up. When the nurse came into the room she saw her and said: ‘She looks like a diva.’

  *

  The morning hours of 23 August were peaceful. After the shower, my mother and I spent a while talking about the summer, though sometimes she would fall silent abruptly, look at me and say: ‘As if I could possibly have AIDS.’ It was around twelve that things started to get complicated. Shortly after noon, a big Latino doctor whom we’d met for the first time that morning came into the room. In his hand he had a little blue plastic glass with a red carnation in it. He sat on the edge of the bed, took paper and a pen from the pocket of his gown and drew a liver with a hole in it and fireworks coming out. Then he explained what silent metastasis meant and he told us that the cancer had spread to the liver, the kidneys, the lungs and the bones. When he had finished talking, he looked at us a few times to see whether we’d understood what he was saying. I nodded. My mother didn’t. The doctor gave my mother the little blue glass with the carnation in it and told us that next week he was moving hospitals to Mount Sinai. The two of us smiled when he told us this, wishing him luck and waving goodbye, and when he left, we sat there for a while staring at the carnation and the glass, trying to find some explanation.

  Around one, a friend came to visit me. When she saw my mother and I staring at the glass, she joined us in contemplation, but after a while she said that she was hungry. Her revolt shook me from my daze and we went to get a sandwich. While we were on our way to the deli the earthquake hit. A tremor of magnitude 5.9 on the Richter scale was rocking the east coast of the United States. Outside we didn’t feel it, so I talked on, oblivious of tectonic plates, and my friend smoked, indifferent to the movements of the earth. In Washington the Pentagon was being evacuated, the airports had just been closed, and the foundations of Manhattan’s skyscrapers shuddered, knocking over the coffee cups of office workers. Still, the only tremor that I felt that afternoon was in my head. After we had eaten we went back to the room. My mother told us that the bedside table had moved and that during one of the shocks the plastic cup and the carnation had flown over the bed. ‘Thank God I don’t have to look at them anymore.’

  After my friend left, my mother called my father to give him the news. She was sitting on the bed with her legs drawn up. In one hand she held the phone and with the other she pleated the bedspread.

  ‘Hello, Enrique,’ said my mother, ‘the doctor was just here.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘He says the tumour has broken out and spread to the rest of my body.’

  There was another silence.

  ‘And he says he’s not surprised that my back hurts because I have three broken vertebrae.’

  My mother glanced over towards the recliner where I was sitting and asked me to get her a piece of paper and a pencil. She wrote down a number. Then she said: ‘Yes, come quickly, please, I love you so much,’ and when she hung up she left the phone on the bed and was silent.

  *

  Her first reaction was to fall apart. But then she reflected and let it be known that she was glad no one had hidden what was happening from her. She found acceptance in the time it took her to eat the yoghurt on her meal tray. Which makes me suspect that maybe her unconscious already knew that she was going to die. I was calm too. My reaction to the news was nothing like what I’d imagined: no wild religious fervour, no agony. All I felt like was sitting next to her and talking.

  I don’t think I broke the news gently to my sisters. ‘This is it, get to Madrid as fast as you can and I’ll find flights for you.’ They cried a lot. They were on the beach, their hair wet, surrounded by people. One of them had the outbreak of religiosity that I had feared and she started to talk to me about miracles. My other sister didn’t know what to say and was silent for minutes at the other end of the line. The next day everyone arrived: my father on one flight and my sisters on another. My father couldn�
�t handle any paperwork and he was incapable of talking to the insurance company or the bank. Sometimes he wept. Other times he said strange things like ‘I saw the bloodstained rosary’. My mother was the only one who was able to soothe him.

  *

  Today is 23 October, 2012

  After getting out of the elevator on the fifteenth floor, I wasn’t able to go straight to my mother’s old room. Instead, I headed to the patients’ lounge by the elevators. Now I’m sitting here, writing. In the room, two nurses carry fresh carnations back and forth and an Indian-American couple hold hands. The woman bows her head and the man squeezes her fingers hard.

  The nurses with their arms full of flowers have gone into a glassed-in space with an array of tools and cups. On the table there are thirty blue cups in rows. The women in white gowns with their sleeves rolled up take the carnations one by one, clip their stems and set them in the cups.

  On the wall across from me is an activity calendar drawn with a broad-tipped marker. It looks like it was made by someone with an unsteady hand, because there are hitches and jags in the lines. I wonder whether the person who drew it is dead already. This is the place patients come to avoid thinking: they paint pottery, arrange flowers and talk about the past. I imagine a woman with grey hair making the calendar, tracing her marker along the edge of a ruler and then forgetting that she has it in her hand.

  I stop looking around and I get up to visit Room 1539.

  I’ve come home.

  Through the glass in the door I recognise the Indian woman from the lounge. She’s sitting in the recliner by the bed, her defeated body slumped forwards and her forehead resting on her arms. Of the patient I can’t see much. Just a dark, wrinkled foot. I don’t dare come any closer to the door to see more; I could do it with the excuse of using the hand sanitiser on the wall, but I keep walking along the hallway. At the door to the next room I see a bed with a body in it covered by a sheet. It looks like a man. There is no family with him. He’s there, going nowhere, waiting for someone to collect him.

  I keep walking on into the bathroom because I don’t know where to go. I step inside and spend a while standing there without using the toilet. I’m filled with anxiety and I turn on the tap to wet my wrists.

  Then I come out of the bathroom and walk the hallway some more. This time I do see the face of the patient lying in the room. On the trip from the hospital back to my apartment I think about how many people must have died in the same bed over the past year. I consider the processes, the protocols, the eight weeks of radiation and the eight weeks of chemo. I calculate percentages: 56 per cent of patients with the same type of cancer survive, 43 per cent of surgeries have a successful outcome. ‘You’ll live to see your grandchildren,’ said Doctor Marsden at our first appointment.

  XII

  New Yorkers talk more about death than anyone else in the Western world because on 11 September, 2001, they all thought they might die. The crater at Ground Zero has been there for more than ten years, and there are still ads in the subway offering assistance to people with post-traumatic stress or respiratory problems. The doctors here don’t lie. If they think you’re going to die, they say: ‘You’re dying.’ After that, a psychologist comes into the room and the patient recounts the most intimate details of her life very quickly, because there isn’t much time.

  A few hours after we learned that my mother’s disease had spread throughout her body, a Venezuelan woman with a very round face knocked at the door of her room. ‘Hello, I’m the hospital psychologist,’ she said to me. ‘Would you mind leaving me alone for a while with the patient?’ ‘Sure, that’s fine,’ I replied and I left the room. After I had closed the door I stood there for a while watching through the glass. My mother was sitting Indian-style. The psychologist had her back to me. I sat on a little bench in the hallway and waited for them to finish talking.

  Half an hour later the psychologist came to the door and invited me in. ‘You’re Gabriela, right?’ she asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘My name is Susana,’ she said, adjusting her glasses and looking from my mother to me. ‘Your mother told me that during her illness you walked a lot.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, and I imagined my mother from behind, among the cherry trees on Stuyvesant Street. ‘All we had left to see was Brighton Beach,’ said my mother.

  *

  25 October, 2012

  I’m sitting on a wooden bench across from the beach. The sky is overcast but there’s a hole above the pier through which light streams down to the water. The sand is clean, a pale, faded yellow. This is a city beach where seagulls live alongside pigeons.

  Behind me, between my left shoulder and my right shoulder, is Café Moscow. On its terrace, seven Russians in tracksuits are playing chess, singing Bolshevik songs, eating paninis, soup and hot dogs, and drinking soda. On the bar radio ‘The Internationale’ is playing, and every once in a while the Russians sing along to the verses they know.

  It’s 10.43 a.m. in the New York neighbourhood of Brighton Beach, a place situated on a spit of land that seems to want to detach itself from the south of Brooklyn. I got here by train. First I took the L and then I changed to the Q at Union Square, where I waited a while for the train, uncomfortable, my buttocks resting on a cold bench with protruding nail heads. A Caribbean woman in a bright turban sat down next to me. She looked as if she had just got off the plane from Trinidad. The woman took a deck of white index cards ruled in red from her pocket, chose one at random, and wrote in capital letters: CULTURE SHOCK. Then my train came and I got on. For the first five minutes of the trip I wondered what the woman would write on the rest of her cards.

  I’ve come to Brighton Beach to see what it’s like. After walking some of its streets, I can say that it’s a terrible neighbourhood. It’s ugly and full of the lame and the infirm. Old people pushing Zimmer frames and fat men in wheelchairs move along the boardwalk. As I write these words I’m glad my mother never came here.

  XIII

  On 27 and 28 August, Hurricane Irene touched down on the east coast of the United States. On the 26th our building was evacuated, and on the night of the 27th the eye of the storm passed over the city of New York.

  The morning of the 26th I ate breakfast while playing with an interactive map on the front page of the New York Times website. When I rolled the mouse over the streets on my block, a blinking red marker indicated that our building was in an evacuation zone. I soon got an email from Peter Ujkej, the superintendent. The message was titled ‘Evacuation Alert’, its tone at once polite and alarmist. In it, the super asked residents to vacate their apartments. A list of tasks was attached: bring in terrace furniture, shut off power, protect fragile objects from wind gusts, make sure windows are closed tight and don’t leave pets at home alone. I got my father and sisters out of bed, and, among the four of us, we put things in order. In the lobby, Peter was stacking sandbags around the doorjambs.

  The street was full of people carrying pillows, rucksacks and dogs. We got on the subway at the Bedford Avenue stop and crossed under the East River. Forty minutes later we emerged from the subway exit nearest the hospital. On the stairs we saw a poster that read: ‘Public transportation will be suspended from 4 p.m. today (08/26/2011) until further notice.’

  In Room 1539 my mother was watching a documentary on the life of Jackie Onassis. Now she only liked soft, cold food and she was eating gelatin from a bowl. She was so focused on the life of the First Lady that when we came in she shushed us: ‘They’re going to talk about the White House years now.’ Then there was a break for a hurricane update and the screen filled with weather maps. I thought that the eye of the storm looked a lot like my mother’s colon.

  From the window of the room we watched the sky grow dark and the wind rise. My parents, my sisters and I talked, looking out every so often to gauge the intensity of the storm. My mother clutched her liver as she told us how she had met our father. We spent the hurricane talking, she in a chair with her feet up and the rest of us gathered around her. My fat
her wrote down everything she said in a notebook. Sometimes he asked her questions. I did some writing, too, on the back of a receipt that was in my bag. And then I lost it. Maybe I threw it away by mistake. It had been a long time since we were all together: my sisters and I lived in three different countries. It was strange, I thought, that my parents had never told us these stories about their courtship.

  *

  Two days after the hurricane there was no trace of the storm: no fallen trees or traffic snarls. Public transportation gradually started up and planes were taking off and landing at the airports again. My parents left for Madrid on the first flight out of JFK. My sisters and I had to come in stages. Two days later for them, and three for me, via Charlotte.

  My mother had needed to prepare herself for the trip. Gather strength. She wanted to see her friends and the rest of the family, and die in Madrid. The day before the flight, my father, my sister and I went out with her into the hallway by her room so she could make a few rounds with the walker. We went back and forth three times. Then, after she was put into bed, she was given a little tube with a white ball to blow into. The nurse prepared a transfusion. She hung two bags of blood from a stand and connected them to my mother’s arm. As the liquid was distributed around her body, her wrinkles filled and her lips regained their colour. She grew younger. Her face was the same as it had been when we lived in Neguri. She wore a fuchsia dress, I was six, and the sun fell on us from the side.

  My mother constantly googled what was happening to her. Types of cancer, ‘Madrid ambulance’. She gave us advice: ‘Live lightly’, ‘I want Handel at my funeral’.

  The suitcases were packed a day early. Doctor Spring came to say goodbye. ‘You were doing such a good job,’ she said. ‘Well,’ my mother said, ‘how was Italy?’ Doctor Spring wiped a tear away with two fingers and said, ‘Sardinia is just as pretty as I remembered it.’ ‘Italy is lovely,’ replied my mother. The nurse came into the room pushing a wheelchair. My mother was ready to go. We had dressed her in a long blue skirt and a sun hat. We helped her into the chair and went down to the lobby. The ambulance was parked at the front door of the hospital. Two men put her on a stretcher in the ambulance and I sat next to her. My father and my sisters followed behind, in a taxi. My mother looked out the window and I watched her.