by Andrés Barba
“I hate all this,” she says.
And she believes it, literally, believes her I hate all this. But she immediately speaks again.
“Leave her alone . . . and leave me alone, too, while you’re at it.”
She thanks Anita for everything she’s done and reaches out for her mother’s hand, claws for it. Claws is an especially apt word. Mamá’s five cold, motionless fingers, in hers. She makes an absurd declaration:“I’m here.”
Mamá’s nerves, Mamá’s eyes, those eyes like two adjoining mouths. She stays with her for two more hours, Anita by her side, and feels that everything is still changing—her awake and Mamá dozing, as though their two states were as different as two types of meat. The doctor says it’s a miracle she’s alive, that at her age, this type of attack tends to be fatal. He has a receding hairline, gray hair, and says this practically on his way out, with the professional indifference and lack of imagination typical of so many doctors. It suddenly occurs to her that stupidity might be inevitably inherent to the medical profession—a necessary stupidity, one required for survival—but the elasticity of the doctor’s bearing suddenly flusters her far more than the miracle of Mamá being alive. She forgives him dispassionately—This man has to leave the hospital and still manage to have an appetite, to sleep with his wife, to pay his mortgage, no doubt he earns an obscene salary—but the sum of those parts means nothing, doesn’t explain his attitude.
“I see in her records that your mother had arrhythmia in the past, and a cardiac episode last year.”
“You make me sick.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
She can’t understand this aggressive behavior of hers. She’s never been an aggressive person. There are things she has yet to learn about herself that she’s never even suspected. The doctor walks out without a word, and she feels a forlorn elation at having at least put a dent in his perfect white shell. She discovers and forgets Anita’s presence intermittently, but quickly realizes that she needs her to be there, beside her. She also feels something dark, something that seems indecent to her: the feeling that her presence belongs to her, that she’s paid for it. But the thought immediately makes her feel ashamed. And her perception of Mamá seems to have become mythologized, albeit unsteady and vacillating—her mind, her will, her almost harmless malevolence, her penchant for fans and fabrics, her defeated pride, her petty life, all those years spent on a sofa watching television, her suitors who weren’t really anybody’s type, her secrets, her desire not to die, her inability to accept the consequences of anything. She’s no different from any other woman, but the obviousness of that fact doesn’t blur her image further, instead defines it to the point of being painful. Later, when night falls, she tells Anita she can go. She walks her to the hospital’s main exit, and when they step out of the elevator and head for the door, the city’s darkness seems strange, and knowing that Anita is there with her produces an unnerving sense of calm, as though her body were radiating something like iridescence. She almost smiles, realizing she hardly even knows her. She reminds herself of this fact so that her feelings won’t again run away with her.
“I’ll call when we need you, just go home for now, and don’t worry—we’ll still pay you for these days.”
“I don’t care about the money,”Anita says, and then she does something unexpected—she shakes her hand. A small, rough, cold hand, like that of a young cub whose fur is about to grow in. She is flooded, then, with a terrifying sense of anguish.
“Well, we’ll pay you anyway, it’s OK.”
It’s as though Anita doesn’t want to leave.
“What am I going to do now?” she asks.
“Go home, talk to your boyfriend, tell him everything. Take a bath. Make love.”
Anita smiles at each suggestion, blushes at the last. She lets out a short giggle, as though poking her little snout out of a cave and feeling the warmth of the sun on the tip of her nose.
“OK,” she says.
At that moment, she wants to hug her. Then, after she goes back to Mamá, she phones Pablo.
“I need you here, I need you to come right away,” she says.
Raquel arrived the following day, preposterously tan, accompanied by an unhappy Donovan who had trouble hiding his irritation at having had his vacation cut short. She rushed straight to the hospital, as though rather than a daughter she were a paramedic upon whose speed the life of the patient depended. She took one look at Mamá and burst into tears. Donovan stood half a step back, and when he greeted Mamá, he did so as though his British stiff upper lip were no match for Mamá’s invincible armada. For her, having spent all night and almost all of the next day—until Raquel’s arrival—alone at the hospital with Mamá had been almost unbearably odd. She’d stared at her in the semidarkness for hours, unable to sleep, feeling as though she were entering a forest—it looked like a forest—full of shadows but with broad, light-filled expanses, or maybe like spying on a house, peering into the windows of a house where the people were incapable of sitting or standing in anything resembling a natural position. After a few hours, her attention had focused calmly on all of the things around Mamá: the cardiograph, the little IV drip, the metal bars on the bed frame to keep her propped up, the white chairs, and the small sofa by the nightstand (they’d told her it pulled out, but it turned out to be broken). She’d followed the trail of each of those objects the same way the characters in a children’s story follow the trail to the mansion of their quest. Mamá’s breathing was ragged and labored. Only a few times in the night had she dared to touch her. They’d had two or three very brief conversations about banal things: which flight Raquel was coming in on, whether Anita had left, what time breakfast would be served. At four in the morning, she asked her whether they’d cashed in her winning lottery ticket.
“Yes, we collected the money, don’t you remember?”
“Of course I remember.”
“Then why are you asking me?”
It wasn’t an impatient or exasperated question. It was odd—even impatience had somehow disappeared. Numbness was an objective reality, like the cardiograph or the white nightstand, though it wasn’t actually numbness but something even stranger: patience. A courteous, resigned patience, like that of someone waiting for a person who’s always late.
“I asked to see if you’d tell me the truth.”
“Why would I lie?”
“So you could keep it for yourself.”
She felt a flash of anger and then the desire to be cruel. Patience turned into something anxious, as though she were feeling her way along strange tunnels that were sometimes hot and sometimes cold.
“I’m not going to keep it, don’t you worry, you can give it to whoever you like, give it to Raquel if you want, or go home and burn it in the gas heater, one bill at a time.”
“You don’t love me,” Mamá said.
Her reply was one that Mamá appeared not to hear, she didn’t even know whether or not it was true but it was one that she needed to say out loud.
“I don’t know if I love you or not.”
And immediately, she had the theatrical urge to bend over her and weep for hours, and to sob, That’s not true, I do love you, I do . . . Do you love me? She knew it was possible for that scene to unfold, but it seemed too convoluted.
For the rest of the night, she felt as though her reply were hanging in the air, like a jet contrail. All at once, she had a vague recollection: herself at age six, with Mamá, watching her at the mirror getting ready to go out, her on the bed, Mamá facing the armoire’s large mirror, brushing her hair vigorously, smacking the brush against her hair. She’d never before noticed how much the just-back-from-Argentina Raquel resembled the Mamá from when she was six. Donovan made the most of his days, sightseeing in Madrid. She and Raquel spent nearly all day together, with Mamá, in the hospital. Mamá’s recovery
started looking up, and the doctor she’d insulted that first day turned out to get along very well with Raquel, perhaps just to punish her. His rhetoric began to sound optimistic, within the bounds of pessimism. Now, at least his clichés were more positive.
“She’s not a young woman,” he said, “but who knows? One can never be entirely sure.”
From time to time, the two of them went down to the cafeteria, or took a walk in the little park beside the hospital. They talked almost solely about Mamá, about how well or how poorly she was doing. Raquel always spoke in optimistic terms and fantasized about where she’d take her that summer to continue her recovery. She found it impossible to think that Raquel actually believed what she said, and in her sadness and devastation, she attributed that lack of faith to her own selfishness. On one of their walks, Raquel also confessed that she had a lover.
“Lately things haven’t been going very well between me and Donovan.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Raquel replied, and added, smiling, “I’m actually happy.”
“Really?”
That, too, was strange—Raquel confiding in her. She thought about Anita. Whether Anita would have lovers or not. She felt mentally drained. She’d never thought about having one herself. She recalled that once, on a business trip, she’d kissed a man, even gone home with him, but when he started taking off his clothes, it all seemed so absurd that she could hardly keep from laughing out loud and left immediately. She could understand how people fell in love, but most of the time when people told her stories like that, she felt like she was surrounded by children who needed to be taken by the hand and told flatly, That doesn’t belong to you.
“Yes, I’m happy. He’s Spanish, but he lives in London. He’s married, too. It’s all so complicated, isn’t it?”
And yet Raquel seemed secretly thrilled that everything was so complicated. It was as though her lifestyle, her speech, possessed a degree of wisdom and resolve, and perhaps also frivolity, that she herself lacked. All she could think to say was, “I’m glad.”
In fact, she felt afraid. A strange, vague fear that didn’t subside even when she was with Pablo, like the fear experienced by someone who knows they’re about to be subjected to physical pain but hasn’t yet felt it. Pablo had always gotten along so poorly with Mamá that despite his kindness and the fact that he constantly asked how she was feeling, it seemed unnatural to talk about these things with him. Raquel only heard what she wanted to hear; her optimism and near-total ignorance of what Mamá’s life was actually like, and maybe even what Mamá herself was actually like, floored her. There was little trust between them, and she’d never been able to speak candidly to her. She was convinced that the moment she tried to tell her about anything that was worrying her, Raquel would respond by clucking her tongue and declaring, “Nonsense.”
That’s the way it had always been, and nothing, not even Mamá’s situation, was going to change that.
Phoning Anita had been less the result of a logical choice than of a lack of better alternatives. She was relieved, in part, that that was the case. She was also relieved, both of the times she saw her over the course of those several days, at the innocence of their conversation. They arranged to meet downtown and took a walk that ended up, both times, with them sitting in a café because it was too cold out. Walking beside her, she felt the presence of her compact, enigmatic body and made very simple statements that Anita replied to like the caregiver that she was, with brief replies dropped like bombshells.
“You know, Anita, my mother is doing very poorly.”
“She’s an old woman.”
She wasn’t sure why, but each of Anita’s replies made her smile. And Anita didn’t seem uneasy about the outlandishness of the situation, in fact seemed to take their conversations and walks as a natural extension of her job, but, as with Mamá, something in her had changed. She seemed more nervous, more cautious, as though attempting to convey something that couldn’t be translated from her own Colombian Spanish to her employer’s Castilian. From time to time, she told her somewhat more personal things, things about her childhood and adolescence in Medellín, about her mother, or about her city. She described how when she’d told her mother she was pregnant, she’d locked her in her room, taken a leather strap to her, and whipped her bottom raw. She stated this with no passion and no rancor—as though there were no reason make a big fuss about it—but also with an inexplicable weight to her words, the weight of her own indifference, perhaps. Hearing that kind of anecdote left her with a strange feeling, a feeling that there existed a world in which her honest instincts were useless, a world in which her heartfelt indignation was worthless. Then, at the end of their second meeting, she finally said it. She was wearing a cheap, black coat with a hood, and throughout their conversation had been playing with a pink cell phone that she’d no doubt bought with her first paycheck. She looked like a schoolgirl. She stood before her, pulled off her hood, and came out with it.
“I don’t want to see Señora die. Do you understand? I don’t want Señora to die in front of me.”
She said it so impetuously that for a moment it seemed her little face was filled with fury. Then she relaxed and took on a startling beauty she hadn’t possessed until that moment. As for herself, she thought she might faint; a sudden vertigo and queasiness overcame her. She didn’t know if it was due to what Anita had said or the fact that she’d hardly eaten in three days. She thought she sensed, for the first time in her life, the real possibility of Mamá’s death. Not the assumption of it, not the conviction that it would happen sooner or later, but the reality of death and all its coarse obscurity. She felt the cold turn to heat, like an abrasion.
“It’s not you, I really like you.”
And then she made the most unpredictable declaration imaginable.
“I’d like to be like you.”
“Like me?”
“Yes,” she replied, as though it were somehow shameful.
“Do you want to quit?” she asked, trying to compose herself.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“They’re about to release my mother from the hospital. Could you stay with her for one more week, until I can find someone else?”
Anita took a moment before replying that time.
“I’ll do it for you,” she said.
Raquel left the day after Mamá was released, with an angry Donovan who had abandoned all attempts to mask his feelings. Pablo took them to the airport. Mamá cried less when saying goodbye but was more helpless than usual, and she stared pointedly at Raquel as though attempting to send her a secret message—Don’t leave me alone with her. Her face looked wracked with sorrow. All at once, the boys became hyper—this was the first time they’d seen their grandmother in the hospital—and started horsing around by the bed, almost knocking over the IV drip. She jerked them up by their hands, yanked them almost airborne from the room, and gave each of them a smack in the hallway. Pablo saw and was enraged.
“What did you do that for?”
“So they’d keep still.”
“Will you just calm down,” he seethed, and took the boys with him to the airport.
Later, as she was collecting Mamá’s things from the hospital bathroom, she stared at herself in the mirror and thought that her face had a sort of provincial naïveté about it, thought that hitherto unfelt and profoundly simplistic desires could be seen surfacing on her skin—to love, not to die, to possess—alternating with their opposites, as vivid and simplistic as the former—the inability to love, the powerlessness to stop death, not to possess. She folded and packed everything more slowly and carefully than necessary, until Anita arrived to accompany them. Watching her walk in, she thought she looked more like a teenager than ever, kissing Mamá and then her, and helping her to the taxi. She once more had the same gestures, the same darkness she’d noticed the first day she saw her
at Mamá’s place, gestures suggesting that even her own life was an accident, but an accident worth celebrating, gestures that seemed to have acquired a surprising, robust superiority. She was nobody’s maid. It seemed almost impossible to believe that this was the same young girl who just a couple of days earlier had said she didn’t want her mother to die in front of her. She now touched Mamá with almost extraordinary candor, with something approaching distinction, and Mamá responded to that gentility like a queen mother about to make her grand entrance before the court.