At Close Quarters (12 page)

He started asking around in pharmaceutical laboratories and health companies, offering his services as sales representative or external collaborator, willing to take any replacement jobs, any hours. He applied for a position in a private ambulance company which no one wanted because it was unrewarding and tiring, and risky to drive at high speed. Nothing but rejections. In a
medium-sized
city, people knew of his suspension and no one wanted to put their image on the line. They preferred young, obedient people with clean track records.

But it wasn’t just unemployment that created tension in the house. Carolina, who’d been used to being alone during the day doing the household chores in her own time, couldn’t wholly adapt to the new situation. Now they were together twenty-four hours a day and they realised that they got in each other’s way, and small everyday conflicts arose easily: when she was vacuuming in the living room and made him lift his feet for too long; when one of them was watching a certain programme on TV and the other
had to resort to the small set in the kitchen to watch a different channel; or when they had to go to the toilet and the other was locked in there, and took forever bathing or depilating. He
suspected
that Carolina was discovering that a stay-at-home husband, who shuffled around in his bathrobe far too long before shaving and getting dressed, who invaded areas that she had previously had all to herself, was less interesting than a working husband.

They hadn’t had any serious problems before, had always got along fine. If on occasion they had hurt each other, it hadn’t been intentional. And, besides, what true lover has never tasted the blood of the person they love, and then, feeling remorse for what they’ve done, licked the tears they have caused only minutes earlier? Yet now it was different. They frequently had arguments, raised their voices for stupid reasons, carried out
exhausting
discussions for days on end until they couldn’t even remember why they had started. When the children came back from school, they often found them in different rooms, not talking to each other, no dinner made, the ashtrays full of cigarette butts, the air stuffy with smoke and tension. Brother and sister seemed to come together at such times, finding shelter in each other, claiming they were not hungry, and patiently, silently waiting for peace to be re-
established
. This situation not being propitious for romance, he and Carolina seldom made love. There was something incongruous about looking for sex at nightfall when they hadn’t touched, hadn’t kissed, hadn’t shown any affection for each other during the day.

It was during those bad times – they were thinking of a
separation
– that, one morning, a small unexpected event came to
alleviate
their financial difficulties. One of their neighbours, an old man who suffered from diabetes, asked him if, being a doctor, he gave injections. Nurses were on strike and the man didn’t know where to go. He accepted that small job, and then another, and another, and a little later he had a satisfied clientele, mostly elderly people from his neighbourhood, who appreciated his technical skill, his familiarity with needles, and his pleasant, discreet manner. On top of that, his medical knowledge allowed him to anticipate a few
diagnoses, and give advice that was later confirmed by specialists. His reputation grew among those he gave injections to, and he started taking their blood pressure. He visited them at home, some periodically, some whenever they needed it, so that they didn’t have to wait for medical visitors and could avoid queues at public hospitals. He didn’t make much money, but enough to live on, considering that he didn’t declare any earnings or pay income tax. The fear of being reported to the police for practising clandestinely made him very careful, but he never encountered any problems.

And yet, he couldn’t forget his professional degradation: he, a doctor with one of the best track records of his class, had been reduced overnight to burying the needle in flaccid, often unclean buttocks, or in arms that were either emaciated or rippling with obesity. These were supposed to be the best years of his life, and yet he saw with astonishment and despair that his dreams and projects had been cut short. What was left of him, that young, brilliant anaesthetist whose graceful hands everyone trusted, who was sought after by his colleagues when they had to undergo an operation? What was left of that specialist of whose patients it was said that they only experienced one small, fleeting discomfort: the first prick of the needle going into the vein or the muscle? Once, in those days that now seemed far gone, someone had called him Dr God. It was a joke at the basins, as everyone took off their gloves and washed under the taps, but it had a good ring to it and the nickname caught on. Someone else explained that Dr Lesmes Beltrán possessed a gift that had so far been the privilege of the gods: he could eliminate pain without taking away consciousness. Hadn’t paradise been like that before the fall? What greater dream of happiness might man achieve?

His task was indeed complex, delicate, with small margins of error between efficiency and grave danger – a specialism in which the words pain, critical state, coma, and death resonated more frequently than in other areas of the hospital. Someone suffering from flu or having a wart removed was not given a general anaesthetic.

At times, seeing that he was not given credit for surgical
successes
but was the first to raise suspicions when it came to failure, he had regretted his choice of specialism, but it had always been a fleeting impression, and he’d soon felt proud of it again. Perhaps it was he, along with the intensive-care doctor, who best knew the secrets of the body, who had the most complete vision of what it was made of and how it worked in real time, precisely at the most serious times, when its suffering was at its most intense and its activity clearly observable: the energetic beating of the heart or the lustrous density of the liver, the hardness of the femur or the smooth texture of the thyroid, the elasticity of the vagina in
childbirth
or the prodigiously long labyrinth of the intestines tidily tucked away. His colleagues might well be experts in one organ or one function of the admirable body mechanism, but as an
anaesthetist
he worked with all. Besides, his colleagues might work on the flesh, but he also worked on the spirit. They cared about the wound, he cared about the pain. He alone had the power to soothe it and put patients to sleep, in various degrees and for different durations of time, depending on the rhythm with which he
administered
the drugs. From one minute to the next the ill were in his hands: living but dead, their blood coursing through their veins but their brains unaware of it. He was the god of sleep and shadows who took them to limbo and brought them back to reality, who looked at their nakedness or covered them with a sheet, who could make a child come into the world amid his mother’s conscious happiness or through a tunnel contracted by pain and blood. He pulled the strings, could control them like puppets. Other doctors might be able to rummage through their guts, or drain their lungs, or transplant their organs, but only he had the key to
consciousness
. Others could widen the roads for the blood and dig
alternative
tunnels in the heart, but only he could light or extinguish the flame in the cave of the soul. Others could sew up the skin without leaving any scars or screw bones together with titanium plates, but only he opened or closed the lungs to insufflate life into them. Even the patients acknowledged that enormous power of
his, as when they were informed of the risks of the operation, they were always less afraid of the scalpel or the frequent infections than of the negligible possibility of not coming round from the anaesthetic. Negligible? Well, yes, at least in his hands, even if that woman had floated away into nothingness. Because it wasn’t he who had failed during the operation, he’d been alert to everything that was happening on the surgical front. The capnographer had simply broken down, no longer giving the information he needed to act on. When he saw the other dials flicker, it was already too late, and a pulmonary embolism had sent her into cardiac arrest.

He now cast away those memories and fixed his attention on the pulsioxymeter and the capnographer, alert to any anomaly. Everything was fine. If the boy had taken any ketamine, the stomach-pumping had got rid of it.

‘Doctor Beltrán?’

‘Yes?’

‘How’s it going? Everything in order?’ Doctor Añil glanced at him before clamping the blood vessels.

‘Yes, everything under control.’

‘Fine, we’re going to extirpate then.’

Once they drained all the blood spilled by the broken spleen into the abdominal cavity, the surgeon sank her arms up to her elbows in the boy’s belly to cut and extract the inflamed, spongy organ, its pulp palpitating between the stomach and the kidneys. In a low voice she ordered a nurse to transfuse a new bag of blood and make sure his blood pressure remained stable. The most complicated part was over. It was then, as they prepared to close him up, that Lesmes, enveloped in the smells of blood and disinfectant under the bright lights, sitting in the place he’d feared he’d lost for ever, watching over a boy who would recover without serious after effects, once again felt good about his profession, calm, more satisfied that he had been in years.

‘I think we’re done,’ said the doctor soon afterwards.

Half an hour later they left the boy in the observation room, in the hands of the intensive care doctor. When he went back to the
washroom he saw that Dr Añil was still there, as though she had been waiting for him. He took off his stained gown and turned the tap on with his elbow.

‘How’s everything?’ asked the doctor.

‘Fine, fine,’ he replied. ‘His vitals are up. He’ll come round in an hour or so.’

‘How are you feeling?’ she clarified.

Lesmes was a bit puzzled by her question; he was not the kind of person who aroused sympathy in others. It was the first time a colleague had taken a personal interest in him since he’d come back to work.

‘Fine, fine,’ he repeated.

‘I couldn’t help observing you during the operation, and, well, I got the impression you’re still a little nervous.’

‘No, no. I’m calm. Don’t worry,’ he replied, struggling to keep his voice steady. Yet his hands shook slightly under the tap. When he raised his eyes he saw she was looking at them.

‘We work as a team,’ she said, ‘even if I’m responsible to the directors for all that happens here. It’s not my role to punish people if anything goes wrong, but rather to see how we can avoid it.’

‘It’s an important difference.’

‘It is. I mean, there’s nothing to be afraid of. All that business … it’s in the past,’ she said, adding: ‘Don’t get me wrong. If I bring it up, it’s actually because I don’t think it matters now.’

‘It was an accident. A tragic accident. Nobody’s fault.’

‘I know, I’ve read the report. From now on, the only thing that matters is for you to do your job well. And since, tense and all, you’ve done it perfectly well in the last few weeks, there’s no reason to think you won’t under normal circumstances.’

‘I’m glad you think that,’ he said. He didn’t need to continue drying his hands with the towel. They were no longer shaking.

Dr Añil offered her hand, and he shook it briefly and cordially, before she left in a hurry as bosses do.

‘I’m going to speak to the family,’ she said from the door. ‘They’ll be glad to know he’s come out of it.’

He went back to the observation room. The boy was breathing calmly and all his vitals were adequate. He was returning to
consciousness
. The nurse was writing down the facts in a chart.

‘Everything all right?’

‘Yes, shall we take him to his room, doctor?’

He hesitated for a moment, but caution won.

‘Give it fifteen minutes. Better for the family to see him a bit more recovered. I’ll check on him later.’

He left the area through the back door to avoid bumping into anyone. He wanted to be in his small office and slowly, comfortably smoke a cigarette on his own, without anyone turning their head or looking at him reprovingly while making a fuss about the smoke.

‘Do you think they’ll let us in?’ asked Alkalino.

Walking on, Cupido studied their appearance.

‘We don’t look like we’re ill, but we’ll try our best.’

They walked into the spacious waiting room of the hospital. Fifteen or twenty people sat on hard plastic chairs near which were a couple of vending machines. At the back, under a sign that read Information, two receptionists took care of admissions, handing out entry passes that were then checked by an orderly sitting at a desk at the entrance to a wide corridor. To one side stood a security guard, his arms crossed.

‘Come on,’ said Cupido. ‘Be quiet for a change and follow me.’

They walked to the corridor and were stopped by the orderly.

‘May I see your passes, please?’

Cupido took out his wallet and showed his donor card.

‘We’re here to give blood,’ he said.

The man studied the card, which had a dozen stamps certifying his donations, and returned it.

‘What about him?’ he asked pointing to Alkalino, who was a little behind Cupido.

‘I’ve managed to convince him to do it.’

The orderly looked him up and down, as if doubting that the
blood of a guy like that – Alkalino was unshaven, his clothes crumpled – would be healthy enough for transfusions.

‘But he’s a bit scared of the needle, and I fear that if we make it difficult for him he’ll run away at the smallest opportunity.’

‘Fine. You can go in.’

‘Do I look so bad?’ asked Alkalino as soon as they took a few steps down the corridor.

‘No, why?’

‘Did you see the way he looked at me? As if he was looking at someone who’s very ill, and was only letting me in because when they analyse my blood they might discover some new virus.’

‘You may not be in very good health,’ joked Cupido, ‘but one cannot say you’re not doing well for that.’