Breathing Through the Wound

by Victor del Arbol

  It was a modest apartment, but it had all the basics: a TV, a reasonably comfortable bed, a few characterless paintings on the wall, a double-armoire with full-length mirror, a mini-refrigerator with a single gas burner next to it, and a shower and leaky sink. The thing was, despite the fact that the place lacked none of the essentials, it still wasn’t comfortable. The problem was that there was a sadness in the air, one that all impersonal places seemed to exude, with the lack of detail they reveal about those who inhabit them. Eduardo could die right there and the following day all they’d have to do is change the sheets—and that would be enough to completely erase all trace of his presence.

  Most of his stuff was still packed up in the same cardboard boxes that Olga had helped him truck over from the storage unit where they’d spent the past fourteen years. In one corner lay a heap of no-longer-consulted books on painting and his prized record collection, alphabetically organized beside his record player. Those records were the only things he still felt somewhat attached to. Jazz, blues, and soul formed the soundtrack of his childhood, although it wasn’t until his father died and bequeathed him the collection that he truly learned to appreciate it. Childhood was no longer Eduardo’s home, and never again would be, but at the very least that music was still his music.

  He groped for a cigarette, lit it. The first puff burned his lungs. Then he reached out a little further and his fingers touched the rutted shape of a near-empty vodka bottle. There was a finger of booze left in it, and he downed it in one, feeling as though his head was about to explode. It stopped its spinning for a few seconds, and Eduardo closed his eyes and focused on the Peter White solo on the radio. It wasn’t peace, but something akin to it—although his father would have said that nothing compared to Dexter Gordon’s sax in “It’s You or No One.” But his father wasn’t there.

  The hangover made his stomach lurch and he felt the urge to vomit. His liver was killing him, though not fast enough. All he wanted to do was lie in bed and listen to old records, let that day fade away like all the others, without a trace. But that couldn’t be. He had to get up, drag himself to the toilet, struggle with his constipation, clean himself up, make some breakfast—at least eat the apple that was starting to shrivel in the wicker fruit basket—and maybe spend a little time straightening up the apartment, airing it out, emptying ashtrays, cleaning the garbage out of the sink. With a little luck, he might even find it in himself to work on one of his commissions for Olga.

  He took off his pajamas and carefully folded them before placing them into the hamper and turning on the shower. The plumbing groaned and grumbled, but after a few seconds there emerged a stream of relatively warm water, which wouldn’t last. The building was old and in dire need of repairs that no one seemed willing to take on—water was heated by a communal boiler, so you could easily find yourself out of luck mid-lather; if anyone in a neighboring apartment happened to turn on their shower at the same time, that was it.

  Eduardo stood leaning against the cracked wall tile beneath a sickly trickle of water as soap bubbles slid down his legs, making their way to the drain. He rubbed his right knee, swollen as a wineskin. A huge scar ran clear from one side to the other and, although over the years the skin had grown back around the wound, the flesh had been sucked down underneath it like an earthquake faultline.

  Touching the mound of dead flesh was like rubbing up against a time he no longer wanted to remember.

  He stayed in the shower until the plumbing groaned, in a sort of death rattle, and the water stopped flowing. When he slid back the screen that served to separate the bathroom from the bedroom, he saw that Graciela had slid a note under his door:

  I heard music so I assume you’re up. There’s fresh coffee if you feel like having insomnia together.

  Graciela was his landlady, although Eduardo suspected that wasn’t her real name. Inventing a name was an easy way to invent a life—but either way, it was none of his concern.

  He dressed slowly, pulling on a pair of polyester pants and a wrinkled shirt. The overall look, when he glanced in the mirror, made him frown. Not bothering to shave, he simply smoothed his hair with one hand before walking out the door. Eduardo wasn’t trying to impress anyone. Not anymore.

  Graciela’s apartment was at the end of the hall. For most tenants it constituted off-limits territory unless Graciela granted them permission to venture there—and there was never a reason to grant it. The landlady needed her own space, a place she could be herself—or be the part of herself she didn’t show in public.

  The door was ajar. In the front room was an armchair with an open book on it and, a little further on, a side table with a half-empty glass of wine in which floated a couple of cigarette butts, one of them lipsticked. A pair of high heels stood guard at the bedroom door, a bunched-up dress on the floor beside them. Eduardo had heard Graciela with a stranger the night before. They’d sounded happy, the stranger had laughed a lot, his laugh like some odd kind of hiccup, and Graciela had kept shushing him, though she sounded gleeful. After a while they’d stopped. Perhaps it had been a long night that had ended—like all of the landlady’s dates—in tragedy.

  “Hello?” he called, raising his voice to be heard.

  But Graciela didn’t hear him. She was in the bathroom, standing before the mirror with a towel wrapped around her. Eduardo had guessed she was in her late forties, though he’d never asked her age and she’d never offered it. At any rate, she wasn’t beautiful and probably never had been, but now she seemed to have succumbed to the evidence. There must have once been a time when she got the urge to put on make-up, or go to the hairdresser’s once in a while, a time when someone gave her the pre-date jitters—choosing an outfit, shoes, jewelry, trying out different smiles, thinking up topics of conversation in case of a catastrophic mid-dinner silence. But that time, if ever it was, was history.

  Now Graciela gave off the air of undesired solitude; she’d reached the point of no return and it was too late to redirect her life and avoid a dead end. The lines on her forehead bore the scars of bad decisions, misunderstandings and lies, the disappointments and insecurities that had pushed away the men in her life one by one. She seemed resigned to her role as landlady, overseeing the old building, killing time behind the desk in the lobby, dreaming—even if her dreams inevitably ended with an ashtray full of butts and wrinkled napkins.

  Through the half-open bathroom door, Eduardo watched her remove the towel carefully, as though it were stuck to her skin and painful to peel off. Graciela ran a hand across the steamed-up mirror, gazing at a deep pink scar that looked neat and clean. There was no breast where the cut had been made. For a few moments, she gazed at herself—examining herself, really—as if she were having difficulty getting used to the breast’s absence. She stroked the wound as though trying to remember what it felt like, how it felt to possess that missing organ. Then she buried her face in her hands and wept, elbows on the porcelain sink.

  Eduardo’s first instinct was to go into the bathroom, but Graciela’s sobbing stopped him. What could he possibly say? What right had he to interrupt this moment of intimacy? He knew almost nothing about her aside from the fact that they had something in common: different forms of loneliness.

  He retraced his steps and was about to silently take his leave, but before walking out of the apartment, he sensed eyes on the back of his head, and he stopped. Sara, Graciela’s daughter, was eyeing him from the hallway. Eduardo raised a hand and the girl imitated him, returning his greeting, each tacitly accepting that none of this was happening.

  “Today’s not a good day,” Eduardo said.

  The girl shook her head.

  “No, it’s not.”

  * * *

  —

  Strolling the deserted streets of Madrid at that hour of indecision—when everything is on the verge of happening but nothing yet has—redeemed the city, concealing its misery, creating a false sens
e of benevolence. Eduardo walked slowly, feeling free to go wherever he liked without the shouting and chaos that he was not yet re-accustomed to, after fourteen years of absence. He recognized all the streets, but in a way he felt like a foreigner.

  What d’you say we go off in search of treasure? his father used to say, his voice hoarse from the endless cigarettes he smoked, and which had eventually taken him to the grave. Going “off in search of treasure” meant spending the Sunday rummaging through the stalls of El Rastro—Madrid’s flea market—among the torrents of people who streamed out of the metro, spilling down Calle de Roda and Calle de Fray Ceferino, toward Plaza de Cascorro and then down to Ribera de Curtidores. Once old tributaries leading to Río Manzanares, these were a noisy, delightful chaos, where people wandered between makeshift stalls and cozy taverns, back and forth from little secondhand treasures to chatos of wine and tapas.

  Those crowds had been so exciting when he was a kid. He’d listen wide-eyed as his father told him the story of the soldier Eloy Gonzalo, left as a baby on the doorstep of an orphanage and later to become one of the national heroes of Cuba; or told him how cattle had been slaughtered in the old abattoirs, their blood running down the steep streets and staining them red. Eduardo was fascinated and could easily envision the stalls set up by the traveling barbers, auctioneers and secondhand dealers, the tanneries, the municipal slaughterhouse—things that no longer existed but that somehow still formed part of an atmosphere that was palpable there at the market. “It’s our very own medieval medina,” his father used to say proudly, holding his son’s hand tightly to keep the human river from sweeping him away.

  But everything had changed: the things, the scenery. His perspective.

  He walked into a bar close to El Retiro park. It was still early and the tables were empty. At the bar stood a couple of customers who looked like they’d had a long and not particularly prosperous night. A bored waiter watched the television, hanging from the ceiling in one corner, absently. Eduardo ordered a whiskey, straight up. It was just past eight in the morning, but the waiter seemed nonplussed—no doubt seasoned to these battles.

  “A lot to forget, huh?”

  Eduardo smoothed his hair nervously. Prickly gray-speckled stubble was growing in around his loose jowls and small mouth. A pale-skinned man, he smiled too much when he was uncomfortable, which essentially meant any time he was forced to carry on a minimally drawn-out or unwanted conversation. His eyes—darting, evasive, sleepless—were like those of a rat trying to make itself invisible. Occasionally some tiny little thing attracted his attention and his eyes glimmered with a dim light that, for an instant, hinted at the man he had once been. But soon the black cloud that hung over everything engulfed him once more.

  “No matter what’s upsetting you, friend, your liver doesn’t deserve this kind of punishment.”

  Eduardo made a face intended to banish the intruder. He downed his drink and made his way slowly up Cuesta de Moyano until he reached the fountain of The Fallen Angel, and took a break at the octagonal granite pedestal supporting the sculpture.

  “His pride had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host of rebel Angels…round he throws his baleful eyes, that witnessed huge affliction and dismay, mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate,” he recited quietly, recalling an old Fine Arts professor who’d encouraged his students to study the bronze body that was being strangled by an evil snake—especially its facial expression, filled with dramatic intensity; it was an exact reflection of the verses of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

  Everything about it was still: the space, the time, the sculpture itself.

  Eduardo knew that feeling: the exasperating and perpetual stillness, the certainty that nothing is mutable. He could order his legs to walk one meter to the right—or two, or three—and come up against a wall; he could do the exact opposite and yet still butt up against the same wall, he was sure he wasn’t getting anywhere, that he was just like that petrified sculpture. The lack of trivial everyday thoughts and the obsession with one repetitive, grotesque, all-consuming thought was what his therapist called insanity.

  But he wasn’t insane. He was just dead.

  He strolled slowly toward the Crystal Palace in El Retiro park. Somehow, his steps always seemed to lead him there. He liked to sit for hours by the huge pond, gazing at the bald cypresses; he was fascinated by those tall, slender trees able to take root in the muddy earth.

  He thought about the last time he’d been there with Elena and Tania.

  Elena had looked beautiful, wearing tight jeans rolled up to mid-calf and a spaghetti-strap top with black and white splatters that looked almost random.

  “What made you fall in love with me?” Eduardo whispered, embracing the memory. He had asked Elena that question often, and she had always responded with a happy, sincere laugh, and kissed him on the lips without answering. She never gave him a reason; what she did do was make him the happiest man in the world.

  He picked up a small rock and hurled it out across the pond’s placid surface, trying to make it skip. The smooth stone skipped twice and then sank, leaving an expanding ripple that soon disappeared as well. Eduardo smiled, recalling the stone-skipping contests he used to have there with Tania. She always won—her pebbles made it from one side of the huge pond all the way to the other. His daughter was a girl ill-at-ease with the changes taking place in her body, on the verge of becoming something that both scared and perplexed her. Tania was fourteen years old, and her wide eyes already showed signs of rebellion, which came out in simple ways—truculence, back-talking, being contradictory—that he didn’t know how to handle. Had she been given the chance, she’d have eclipsed her mother both in beauty and wilfulness.

  A different type of tree—hardy horse chestnuts, rooted deep in the soil—lined the shore to the right of the great pond. Looking up, Eduardo saw a woman sitting under the latticework of leaves and branches, smoking absently beneath the dripping leaves, gazing at the surface of the pond. Her head was turned to one side and she looked as though she’d just emerged from deep reflection. Faint disappointment or sadness puckered her lips, like they were the tip of the iceberg of her thoughts. Her face was thin, drawn, as though she’d had a prolonged illness and was still convalescing. A brown raincoat lay draped across her thighs—matching her skirt, sweater and high heels—and she had thick, intensely black hair that tumbled messily over her shoulders in girlish disarray.

  For a long while Eduardo watched her. He knew an exceptional face when he saw one. From his bag he pulled a sketchpad and charcoal pencil, and with quick strokes roughed out her profile, before her true expression had a chance to disappear. Unaware of being observed, the mysterious woman offered him a tiny cove of sincerity, an insight into who she was that she never would have shown, even posing nude on the divan in his bedroom. When people feel examined, even if their intentions are true, the seed of a lie is born.

  As soon as she realized she was being watched, that woman’s naive expression—her sincere modesty—would vanish, and he’d never be able to get it back. And with it would go the image of Elena that Eduardo had just evoked. Elena was dead. And yet the more he contemplated that woman’s silhouette, the more perplexed he felt, the more flustered by her presence. Because, in a way, that woman was a precise reflection of his wife, her exact image distorted, like the other side of an invisible looking glass. As if her skin had been ripped off and placed on another body, allowing her to keep living.

  The mirage lasted a few more precious moments, until the woman tucked a few strands of hair back with a relaxed gesture—but on looking up, her eyes met Eduardo’s. For a split second she was still herself, as if her pupils were still fixed on the pond without having seen him, brimming with warmth and tenderness. But that look evaporated almost immediately, giving way to a chaotic jumble of allegations. Brusquely, she picked up her raincoat and made off into the trees.

  Eduardo went to
where the woman had been sitting, looked out where she had been looking, breathed in the air in case she’d left the trace of a fragrance. Nothing.

  When he got back to his apartment, he pulled out a canvas and set it up on his easel. It had been a long time since he’d felt that sense of urgency—that need to capture something before it disappeared, aware of the fact that with each passing second it would slowly evaporate like smoke.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, he returned to the Crystal Palace in the hope of seeing her again. He waited for hours before finally accepting that she wasn’t coming, and then he left, scoffing at himself, at the loneliness that had driven him to seek the warmth of someone he’d invented.

  Eduardo walked to the closest metro stop, intending to forget all about it. The station had Schubert piped in the background. He could see the glimmering tracks of the rail leading into a long curve in the dark tunnel. The only people on the platform were Eduardo and a young man with Asian features sitting on the other end of his bench. The man wore a small backpack over one shoulder and held one of those brightly colored plastic cats they sell in Chinese discount stores—“lucky cats,” they call them. The young man was dressed in black from head to toe; a trench coat accentuated the pallor of his oval, almost childlike face. His fingernails were painted black and he was wearing a thin stripe of black eyeliner on his lower lids. His hair matched, too; it was as dark as his clothes, and tousled just so, in a purposefully messy style. The most striking thing, however, was that the kid would not stop staring at him.

  Eduardo stared back, regretting the fact that he’d actually selected this bench himself, given that he had the entire platform to choose from, and suddenly he felt as if the young man were addressing him in some private reproach: those scars on your wrists look old. So—what happened? Has the urge to commit suicide subsided? From what I hear it takes an iron will to actually go through with it.