That same night Mom took me to the theater. One of the most important theater festivals was happening in the city, and Mom wanted to reward me. The work was called Electra Garrigó, and it was a contemporary version of the Greek Electra, brought to the stage so many times. Her mother, Clitemnestra Plá, resembled my mother in many respects. The love/hate relationship between them overlapped a lot with our relationship. I realized that the characters, just like the actors, were suffering a kind of collective hysteria, something I have continued to detest as a form of mediocrity and vulgarity.
Nothing was intense in the scene. Nothing was alive there. There was no pain. There was no ideology. The scream wasn’t real. The blow wasn’t real. It was racket, speculation, tradition. The Stanislavski Method applied coldly and calculatingly. An audience, equally uniform, was enjoying the show from the seats. Welcome to the carnival. I got up and left. I walked up the ramp of the theater aisle noticing the line of faces beside me. Mom got up and left. She walked up the ramp of the theater aisle without looking at the rest of the audience. Looking at a fixed point that was my head on the horizon. Outside the theater a man was selling candy, popcorn. Those who hadn’t gotten tickets had stayed there, talking. “You’re ungrateful,” she said, and she slapped me in the middle of the street. Inside the theater, people started to applaud.
Be happy
wherever
you go,
you told me one day.
That’s why
I don’t complain
when I go
anywhere
without you.
LEPIDOPTERA
I have maybe a few days or a few weeks of life left. Maybe a few hours. You’ve told me you’ll still be another month. There won’t be time to give you the code, or there will. I’ll be optimistic. I only remember there are six numbers. I spend the day trying to remember them, my memory isn’t what it used to be. You’ll have to go through the library, book by book, page by page. In one of them there’s a paper with the numbers written on it.
In the advanced stages an acceptable quality of life can still be obtained, in spite of the critical situation and the side effects that plague me.
The current advancements in radiation and chemotherapy are effective weapons in keeping the pain from wiping me out completely. I was exposed to a surgery. Salvage surgery, they call it. Everything very white and metallic. Several doctors. And nurses. And medical technicians. They were friendly and understanding. I was pleased.
I had to make the decision myself. They didn’t believe I was alone in the world. “But I’m not alone in the world,” I explained. You’re with me even though you’re not here. They evaluated the characteristics of the disease, and also the side effects that the metastatic localizations were producing. And all in the context of the host, that is, of the patient himself, of me. They felt bad telling me, but I encouraged them. “Let’s do this.”
Their considerations allowed me to analyze and arrange the most appropriate therapy, with the sole objective of offering me a better quality of life.
“I have a daughter,” I explained to them, “who has just given birth to a nine-pound boy.” You haven’t told me what you named him, or who he looks like most. Tell me about him.
The most frequent situations in which palliative therapy is needed for a patient have to do with the extent of the neoplastic process and its dissemination toward the different regions or organs that have been invaded. For example: the skeleton, the central nervous system, the liver, the lungs or other cavities, which lead to secondary effusions and bleeding. Which in my case amounts to my whole body. Understand?
They explained to me that the skeleton is one of the most common sites of distant metastasis, specifically produced by malignant neoplasias that originated in the breast, the lung, the prostate, the kidney, or the thyroid. I never thought my prostate would become what it is today. A rotten stone that smells like mud. It’s terrible, my dear.
Last night I wrote the exact description of what I was feeling in my notebook. Understand that I have become an old and sensitive man, one who cries when he sees your photograph and who sleeps in your bed with the I.V. in. Can you imagine?
The most important symptoms in the treatment I began are the pain and the neurological disorders resulting from compressions of the spine, which could present at any point along its length. I’ve already experienced them.
Today at noon, before I swallowed one of those instant soups that I hate so much and are so easy to prepare, your letter came with the photo of the baby. It was the perfect excuse to put off the onion and squash soup and run to the library where I could read it calmly. If only I had run, but it was more like I reached my destination—the library—by dragging myself vertically, my back or side up against the wall, my hands clutching at the columns and the furniture, my feet taking short steps, barely lifting off the floor.
The baby’s photo is now in the library, in a new picture frame made to look antique.
They told me I had to bear in mind the possibility of fracture from the weakening of the osseous matter brought on by erosion. That really scared me. So I took precautions, gave away a lot of furniture, arranged the rest of it along the walls; I tried to maintain good taste. Now the house is the way you always wanted it. Modern and minimalist.
These fractures that they warned me of are referred to as spontaneous, because they frequently occur from a simple movement, and they’re easily produced in the most deteriorated part of the bone. They are frequent, above all, in people like me, of advanced age, and of course they must be mended through orthopedic surgery. I’ve been forewarned, don’t worry, I move very slowly, like a snail. The kind you liked to collect. Land snails. Polymitas.
Lung cancer, they said, and kidney cancer, and malignant melanoma produce their metastasis in the central nervous system, nearly always. This manifestation can be due to a metastasis in the osseous cranial vault, which then invades the nervous tissue, or the encephalic mass directly. The symptoms that appear most frequently in this localization are cephalea, mental disorders, and problems with motor skills, such as ataxia and aphasia. When I heard that, I laughed. They sound like the names of twin girls who go to the park hand in hand. One wants to play on the swings and the other prefers the merry-go-round. In the end, they decide to get on the teeter-totter, and then they go down the slide. Their mother loses sight of them and calls to them to make sure they’re still together. “Ataxia and Aphasia! Where are you?”
Before prescribing a treatment, the doctors carry out the necessary exams to confirm the presence of a cerebral metastasis, and then decide on the most appropriate measure for improving the clinical profile.
At first I didn’t understand, but I gradually came to understand. You, too, will understand.
It was important, as well, after the metastasis was diagnosed, to determine whether it was single or multiple. Modern diagnostic methods, such as cerebral scintigraphy, computerized axial tomography, and nuclear magnetic resonance, allowed the diagnosis to be confirmed with enough accuracy.
Today, very early, I opened a book of poems by José Kozer, the last he produced: Expanding Particles. Kozer, whom I met once in a New York cafe, made me feel miserable. Not because of the poem I read—one verdict acts on another verdict, cancels the obsession of its words—but because I confused those lines to the point that I saw them double and couldn’t distinguish the verdict. What would José Kozer say if he saw me, unable to follow his obsession with my eyes. The conversation we had in that cafe is one of my most treasured memories.
* * *
Your birth, dear daughter, is also one of my most treasured memories. You were born at seven months. You wanted out as soon as possible.
I met so many people in that cafe. One of them was your mother. She didn’t even look at me. She came and went behind the counter, like the doctors in the hospital hallway. Though she moved effectively and no customer ever came to feel badly served, her movements were docile, slippery
. I loved the way she set down the mug, perpendicular to me in front of my chest. I came back the next day and ordered something different, so she wouldn’t notice. I wanted to see her anonymously, without her knowing she was being seen. Her manner was the same. Docile and slippery.
If it had been a single metastasis, the treatment could have been radiation or the exeresis of the single mass. Chemo-therapy, because it is difficult for cytotoxic drugs to pass through the blood-brain barrier, is of little use. What is in fact necessary, I would say obligatory, is to act on the edema through corticosteroids, and to use diuretics to decrease the amount of interstitial liquid, which in turn causes edema.
I’m practically a professional in the matter. We could open our own clinic, if it weren’t for the time.
You’ve told me he was born healthy, the little one. That he opened his eyes right away and stared at you. Marvelous. When you were born you didn’t open your eyes until morning. You looked like a bean, a pink and hairy bean.
Your mother, of course, knew José Kozer, and she adored him, like I did. I watched her devour his sentences, learn fragments of his poems, stare at him fixedly in the cafe. Thanks to José Kozer I felt jealousy, that stingy and attractive feeling, impossible like few others to hide. Before she died, your mother gave me a letter for José Kozer that I never mailed him. Like the code, it must be between the pages of some book. If you find it, send it to him yourself. Fulfill her wish. She’ll be at peace. We’ll both be at peace. The memory will even wrap José Kozer in peace, the happiness of a memory he has surely forgotten.
He’d come in, sit down, order a green tea, take out a sheet of paper and a pen. He didn’t write anything until half an hour later, once he’d seen and heard a few incoherent phrases coming and going around him.
One day I waited for him to come in, sit down, order his tea, take out his paper and pen, all in order. Then I went over, sat down across from José Kozer, ordered a cappuccino, sipped it slowly, and told him: “I’m going to burn your books, so she can’t read them.” The man said to me: “Don’t burn them, sell them.”
Compression of the spinal cord is one of the most high-pressure emergencies in oncology. I saw the doctors come and go down those hallways, crazed over a spine. There can be progressive and irreversible damage if they’re slow to diagnose and, as a result, slow to administer appropriate treatment. Although to be honest, my dear, it’s all irreversible at this point. The distance between you and me, for example, is the same as a compression.
And so, the treatment of that type of lesion will consist of surgical decompression through the resection of the tumor, though partial, followed by radiation of the damaged area. The secondary complications that arise are unconnected to the direct influence of the neoplasia. What happens is that, needing repose and bed rest for a prolonged period of time with limited movement, bedsores and ulcers are inevitably produced. So, adequate hygiene is necessary, and treatment with stimulants for endothelial activation. The wounds improve and even scar over.
However, my dear, the pain continues. The anxiety, the fear, and the desperation are accompanied by an unbearable pain that leads to depression. The desire to see you again keeps me standing. The doctors, sometimes, see me smile, and they’re surprised by the shine in my eyes. That’s you in my eyes. And it’s him in my eyes. If I saw him and didn’t have the muscular strength to hold him in my arms, I’d know all this effort wasn’t worth it.
Right now, as I type the word now, the pain takes over my abdominal area and is devastating; I vomit onto my feet, the nurse will clean it up. I’ll drag myself to bed, lie down a while. I’ll try again to remember the code, and if not, you’ll find it stuck between two random pages of a magnificent book.
My tumor is like me, a mollusk. It carries its house on its back. I am its house. It has slid determinedly inside me, through me, with me. Its triumph is nigh. We both know it.
Alternating contractions and elongations of its organism, slow and devastating, it got the upper hand and made room.
The snail grows and so does its shell.
Every one of its logarithmic spirals penetrates a little further, ever deeper.
I must have housed at least two of them, so they could couple and reproduce. Female/male one, and female/male another, they reproduced. Their eggs, scattered everywhere, populated the place.
The snail is large and bitter.
The snail’s life, between five and seven years, overtook my life.
Like in books, the hero and anti-hero were intertwined. Nothing closer to that love-hate relationship that paramours enjoy.
When the snail dies, its house dies too.
José Kozer’s poems about what he considers a house are delicious treats.
I’m sorry for talking to you so much about poetry.
The library is large and the books are your greatest inheritance, shake them and care for them, and above all, open them. If they seem very thick, tedious, impenetrable, pause on a word that you find at random. Investigate its meaning for yourself. Each book is much more than words on paper. I, for example, love typographies, illustrations, the titles of poems, or of chapters. There tends to be a whole life science in the brief sentences, another kind of love, which also hurts.
It’s all yours.
It belongs to you only.
Feelings
and hemorrhoids:
when they start
to emerge externally,
the most advisable thing
is bed rest.
SINAI
BLIND
At dawn I reached Mount Sinai, where I knew sacrifice to be common and everyday. I looked over my shoulder at the path I had followed to get there and I found it hostile, rocky. I knelt down and began to talk with God, to tell him what had happened to me so far and to tell him that I still remained fearful of him, because God was the greatest I had ever known. Salvation. A raft in the ocean.
The conversation began to lengthen and turn into requests I made of God without the slightest respect or shame. God help me with this and God help me with that. God I need this and I need that. God protect these and God protect those, who are my family and friends, and even protect my enemies who deep down are good people. God take my brother out of my life. Take him far away from me, that man who is no longer the man I’ve known since I was born. Take him as far away as your magnificence is able. I don’t want to carry that weight. I don’t want to meet him in my own house. I don’t want his legal address to be my own house. Before you oh God who knows me and knows that I am your servant and that I have struggled so to be good, a servant of God. Oh great highest Lord, grant me that, and I will not ask you for anything else.
Then you looked down on me from on high, my God, and you took my sight. I never saw anything again. Not my brother or my husband or my mother. I’ve never again seen the food I eat, or the clothes I wear, or the fingernails the manicurist paints for me at her beauty parlor. I’ve never again seen the floral arrangements in the Church, oh God. I’ve never turned my eyes upward again. Alleluia.
DEAF
At dawn I reached Mount Sinai, where I knew God’s majesty was everywhere, that its strength and faith was dispersed all around and constituted the place. I turned my head around in an empty gesture of sensing the path I had followed to get there, and I found it hostile, dark.
The bit about darkness was just feminine intuition. I knelt down on a rock and closed my eyelids because that’s how a servant of God speaks with her Father, Jesus’s Father and mine, oh God, how I love you. I thanked him for letting me arrive safe and sound, I gave thanks for the food that had already run out, and for the food that he would surely provide me with in the coming hours. I gave thanks for my life and for the things in life that he offered me and that he offers daily to all his children, no distinction or preferences. I told him everything that had happened to me so far. The tribulations a sinner woman like me goes through every day, walking down a road stalked by scroungers, beggars, and people—that i
s, strangers.
More and more I needed to get to the point, so I spoke to God of the matter that had brought me there.
It’s my brother my God, I can’t stand it anymore, his voice pounding in my ears morning, noon, and night. It’s my brother my God again in the city, again in my house, again in my life. Take him from my life my God I don’t deserve this. You know Father that I bow before you in fear but the truth is I just can’t bear him. Have mercy on this servant of yours and take him far away where I cannot hear him.
And then oh God you made your presence great and large toward me, and you struck me deaf. I never again heard my brother’s voice or anyone else’s. My mother’s voice and that of my husband are movements of the mouth I do not recognize. I’ve never again heard music or the horrendous noises of the carnivals. No sound for me oh master of all creatures.
MUTE
I reached Mount Sinai. Dawn was breaking. My eyelids were heavy as a couple of buckets of water. Everything felt heavy and it still feels heavy today oh Father how I praise you. Alleluia Father I no longer know from whence I came. I’ve forgotten where I came from, what my nationality is, where I live. The dead roots I’ve seen and left behind, the shrubs, the thorns, and the mushrooms, mean only time. Time is yours my God, and I know I am the most blessed woman right now, for I shall now prostrate myself before you Lord.
I do not hear you, do not see you, but I can still speak in my tongue, and you do see me, and you do hear me, the way you see and hear your servants, who in your name have been born and who your name serve.
My Favorite Girlfriend was a French Bulldog Page 6