See How Much I Love You (3 page)

‘Everyone stand up,’ bellowed the legionnaire. And all ninety-three novices stood up at once, before he’d even finished the sentence. But Santiago San Román’s mind was already outside the C-130. He almost floated down the ramp, carrying his bag and unbuttoning the top of his shirt like the legionnaires that waited below with their chests stuck out, chins cocked and eyes staring straight ahead. He placed himself in the first row, was the first to fall in line and so was the first to feel the warm December air – the warmest of Decembers, so different from the one in his native Barcelona. His whole body tingled as he took everything in out of the corner of his eye. Among the various flags and insignia, the uniforms of the Territorial Police attracted his attention: those pale army jackets which brought out the Saharawi’s dark skins. Opposite him was the office
building. An enormous balcony crossed it from one end to the other, almost as high up as the roof, and the men on the balcony were dressed in black and blue turbans and long
djellabas
6
, as if to enliven the monotonous reddish tinge of the landscape. The purring of the Land Rover, the noisy propellers of the Hercules, the instructions coming through the loudspeakers all seemed like a play staged for the new arrivals, rehearsed for years for the benefit of the young soldiers who came from the Iberian peninsula. He felt as though it had all been there for centuries, awaiting the moment that Santiago San Román got off the plane to see it. The desert and the Saharawis’ faces struck him as the oldest things on the planet. Everything fitted together: the landscape, the light, the faces of the native people. However, he came back to reality when he saw Guillermo’s pale face, his faithful friend Guillermo, whom he had only known for forty days, but from whom he had become inseparable. Guillermo was very pale and found it hard to remain standing. Santiago realised that his friend had had a rough flight. He hissed to attract his attention, but Guillermo barely raised his eyes and kept his gaze fixed to the floor. Santiago San Román felt somewhat responsible, because had it not been for him, his friend would now be posted somewhere quiet in Zaragoza, sitting out the months until he was discharged and collected his pay. But he, Santiago, had interfered, as had that legionnaire, a second lieutenant who had appeared in Zaragoza and spoken to them about the Legion, showing them his tattoos, a few photographs and a Super-8 film in which the legionnaires marched with a martial step, their chests puffed out; at that moment Santiago had decided that Zaragoza was not far enough from Barcelona. He did a mental calculation of the distance between the Saharan province and his neighbourhood and concluded that he could
not possibly get any further away. That evening he rang Montse’s house once again, to let her know that he was leaving to go to the end of the world. But once again he was told that she was away. They were lying, and he knew it all too well. He slammed the phone down as hard as he could. He tried to tear Montse’s image into a thousand little pieces. Unable to sleep, he tossed and turned in his bed all night, right next to Guillermo. After reveille was sounded and he had a moment, he went straight to the recruitment office and said the second lieutenant: ‘Sir, I want to become a legionnaire.’ And the lieutenant, without asking him to repeat it, warmed up his ballpoint pen with his breath and wrote down Santiago San Román’s name. Then he asked: ‘Can you sign, lad?’

‘Yes, sir.’ The legionnaire turned the page and pointed to where it said ‘signature and printed name’, and Santiago San Román put his name down, for he wanted to go to the end of the world, get a tattoo like the second lieutenant’s, which read ‘A mother’s love’, and forget Montse, never to return.

But now, seeing Guillermo’s gaunt and anxious face, he wasn’t sure that he’d done the right thing dragging his friend along with him, the first true friend he’d had in a long time. Still, it had been Guillermo, not him, who had insisted on volunteering to the Legion on seeing Santiago’s recently signed piece of paper. Santiago was touched just thinking about it. No one had ever done anything like that for him.

The music coming through the loudspeakers of the aerodrome caught his attention. The first few bars of that
paso doble
turned his stomach and also disconcerted him. Like the wines from Jerez and from Rioja, went the song. The energy of the music was in sharp contrast to the soldiers’ exhausted bodies. Are the colours of the Spanish flag. On command they started loading their bags onto the two trucks at the end of the runway. When I’m on foreign land and see your colours… Santiago San Román could not think straight. And think of your exploits… It was as
though Montse’s face were right in front of him. See how much I love you.

‘What did you say?’ she had asked, her eyes fixed on his own.

‘See how much I love you,’ he had replied. And she had touched her lips to his in a way that he’d never felt before. And he had repeated, ‘See how much I love you.’ But now this devil of a sergeant was shouting at them by the truck, flailing his arms like a crazy windmill, spitting insults at the new legionnaires to hurry them up. Santiago San Román’s pride was hurt. He climbed up the truck and jumped in, then grabbed his bag and went to sit at the back, on top of the spare wheel. He pushed Montse’s image out of his mind by taking a look around. The Saharawis’ faces were the colour of the earth they trod on. For a second he thought they were one and the same thing. It looked as though the older ones, idling away the hours in the shade outside the military building, had been there all their lives. They shaded their eyes with their hands and looked at the new soldiers with a mixture of compassion and indifference. The truck pulled out, and the music died away behind it. The passage of the vehicles whipped up a mountain of dust. At the side of the road, the few surviving bushes were completely white. It was a short journey: soon the first houses of El Aaiún came into view. Santiago San Román saw a woman wearing a brightly coloured
melfa
and caught his breath. She walked with her head held up, in a straight line, holding a cloak in her hand, as if she were on a catwalk in Paris. She didn’t even turn when the truck passed by. Her image receded into the distance as they pressed on along the city streets. Santiago San Román didn’t know where to look.

Everything caught his attention. A little while before reaching the barracks, as they went by the market, Montse’s image had vanished from his mind. By the time they got off the truck, he was sure that this was where his wounds would heal.

W
HEN
D
OCTOR
C
AMBRA STARTED HER TWENTY-FOUR
-hour shift on the 31st of December, she couldn’t have guessed that the new century would usher in a radical change in her life. Nor did she suspect that the events of that night would help her make decisions she didn’t think she was ready for.

She wasn’t actually supposed to be on duty that day, but she swapped her shift with a colleague because she would have found it very hard to spend New Year’s eve at home on her own for the first time in her life. In the last few months she’d taken extra shifts on numerous occasions. Still, this one was something special, given what the arrival of new century meant for so many people. The Casualty Ward of the Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau was prepared for a very busy night. Few staff were hoping to get more than two or three hours’ sleep. But, in fact, before midnight they admitted fewer, less serious cases than on a regular day. Although she didn’t have much to do, Doctor Cambra walked up and down trying to keep herself busy. She would go to the pharmacy, restock the cupboard with gauze, and make sure they had received as many bottles of saline solution as had been ordered. Every time she walked into the staff room where the TV was on, she would hang her head and sing to herself in a mumble to stave off her despair. She was afraid she might break down in front of her colleagues at any moment, like that time she had burst into tears in the middle of an examination, while the nurse looked on
in distress, not sure whether he should tend to the doctor or to the elderly woman who couldn’t breathe because a rib was pressing on her lungs. Now, every time Doctor Cambra heard her name through the loudspeakers of the casualty ward, she went wherever she was needed without thinking about anything except her work. At times an intern with a badly receding hairline and an aquiline nose would remind her of Alberto, who was still her husband. But, unlike a few months before, she was able to smile. She could even picture him cooking dinner with that radiologist who was obsessed with the gym and the hairdresser’s; he who had never done the dishes and had never opened a kitchen drawer except to take out a corkscrew. The last time she’d seen him it looked as though he had dyed the grey hairs on his temples and sideburns. She also imagined him belly dancing for the radiologist, and chasing her around a coffee table, in one of the wild cat-and-mouse games that he hadn’t played with her for years. Her feelings for Alberto had changed from sadness to irony, and from irony to sarcasm. She would never have imagined that someone who had been such an important part of her life since her youth would become, in barely ten months, a sort of rag doll, an empty, fake being – a veritable bastard. She found it hard to remember what he looked like when they’d met, at the time when he drove around Barcelona in that white, impeccable, polished, perfect Mercedes of his, it was just like him. A doctor from a family of doctors, a young cardiologist with a brilliant career, he’d been seductive, intelligent, handsome. Now, Doctor Cambra could not rid her mind of the image of her husband of twenty years chasing the young radiologist. When she bumped into Doctor Carnero, the anaesthetist on duty, she was still wearing a sarcastic smile on her face. They looked at each other in complicity.

‘This is the first time I’ve seen anyone smile on a New Year’s Eve shift,’ said the anaesthetist as she walked by.

‘I guess there’s a first time for everything.’

A voice called Doctor Cambra through the loudspeakers. Before the message was over, she was at her station.

‘In number four there’s a young woman with fractured limbs. A motorcycle accident.’

Doctor Cambra’s blood boiled. Her face flushed and her heartbeat accelerated. She walked over to the room they’d indicated, to find a very pale young woman being tended to by a nurse and an assistant. The girl looked scared and helpless, and the doctor immediately felt her legs grow weak. She tried to regain her composure, and said, in an annoyed tone:

‘Who took her helmet off?’

‘They brought her in without one. She probably wasn’t wearing it.’

The doctor lifted the girl’s eyelids and shone a little torch in them. She couldn’t help taking her hand and squeezing it. The girl’s other hand looked dead and was scratched all over. The doctor pressed gently on her thorax, spleen, kidneys, and stomach, saying: ‘Does this hurt? And here?’ The girl moaned, but shook her head.

‘Let’s see. Tell me how it happened.’

The girl mumbled something, but she couldn’t string her sentences together.

‘Do you feel a bit sleepy?’ asked the doctor. ‘Don’t fall asleep now. Go on, tell me what you can remember.’

As the girl tried to make herself understood, the nurse took her blood pleasure.

‘We’re going to need a CAT scan.’

The assistant wrote it down. The girl went on talking, now more coherently.

‘Blood pressure’s eleven-eighteen.’

‘How old are you?’ asked the doctor.

‘Nineteen. I have to be home for dinner.’

Doctor Cambra held her breath and looked away. That may have been the same thing her daughter had said six months
before, when a doctor at the casualty ward had asked her what she had just asked the unknown girl. Nineteen. Her daughter had turned nineteen in March. As they took the girl away for her scan, Doctor Cambra left the room. Her daughter’s death would not come between her and her work, but she could not forget it either. Just like this girl, she’d been nineteen, and was riding her moped with her helmet hanging from her arm, heading home for dinner with her mother. However, it had been her father who got the call. At the hospital, Alberto’s name was well-known. They didn’t even have to look up his number in the dead girl’s diary. It was on file, at reception, along with the frequently used numbers. Montse didn’t know what hurt her the most, how long they’d taken to let her know, or the fact that it had been her husband, in a deep voice filled with self-possession, who had told her that their daughter had died. Besides, he had shown up with the radiologist, as if he wanted his lover to witness his fortitude.

An hour later, when Montse bumped into doctor Carnero in the staff room, her sarcastic smile had been replaced by a vacant gaze. On seeing her, the anaesthetist knew her friend was about to slip back into that deep hole she was trying to climb out of.

‘Coffee?’

Doctor Cambra nodded. It felt good to be surrounded by people and talk about mundane things.

‘How’s your son?’

The anaesthetist squinted at her and tried to smile.

‘Oh, he’s fine. But how are you? A moment ago you were smiling to yourself and now I come here and find you…’

‘I’m fine. My head’s not always where it should be, that’s all.’

‘We all get that, Montse. It doesn’t really make you special, you know.’

‘Nothing does, Belén. I’m the least special person on the planet.’

Belén tried not to take her friend’s observation too seriously. She knew better than anyone that Montse didn’t need words or
advice but time for her wounds to heal.

‘Listen, Montse,’ said the anaesthetist. ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’

‘Nothing much, I guess: I’ll watch the ski jumping and the waltz competition on TV, and get fat with no regrets.’

‘I was thinking you could come round for dinner. Matías has brought some of that cod you like so much from his hometown.’

‘Cod on New Year’s Day? What about turkey and rice? The tradition that made our cuisine so great?’

‘You couldn’t be more old-fashioned!’

The door opened and an intern walked in, wearing gloves and surgical mask at a crooked angle.

‘Montse, we need you.’

Doctor Cambra stood up and left her coffee on the table without having even sipped from it.

‘All right,’ she said before leaving, ‘tomorrow at yours. If you like I’ll tape the ski jumps.’

‘No thanks. I’ll watch them live. My son loves them.’

Between eleven and twelve-thirty, the Casualty Ward was particularly quiet. A few staff members went over to the cafeteria for a bite to eat; others preferred to share home dishes in the staff room. It was the worst period of the night for Doctor Cambra.

The girl’s parents appeared a little before the clock struck twelve, harrowed by their daughter’s accident. Doctor Montserrat Cambra took special care of them. Against hospital regulations, she even allowed them to go in and see their daughter for a few minutes.

‘She’s been very lucky,’ she told the parents, who wept in front of the badly injured girl. ‘Don’t be scared by the intubation and all the bandages. It’s only saline solution and pain killers. Her head is absolutely fine. She’s broken a collarbone and a tibia. The worst thing, though, are the injuries to her hand, but with surgery and proper physical therapy there’ll be no serious consequences.’

The mother burst into tears as soon as she finished the report.

‘But she’s fine, trust me. In a month she’ll be nearly back to normal.’

Doctor Cambra was doing her best to lift the parents’ spirits, but she herself was sinking deeper into the terrifying hole. As soon as she could, she excused herself and walked away. Back in the staff room, the doctors and nurses on duty were toasting the new year in with plastic cups and making confetti out of old spreadsheets. The new century had crept in. A doctor from traumatology kissed her and wished her a happy new year. He was nervous and particularly clumsy, and nearly spilled coffee all over her.

‘You haven’t called me all week,’ he said, trying not to sound reproachful.

‘I didn’t get a chance, Pere, honestly. I had a million things to do here.’

‘Well, if that’s the only reason…’

‘Of course it is. You’re a great guy, honestly.’

The doctor walked off, wary of prying eyes. Belén approached her friend from behind and whispered in her ear:

‘You haven’t called me all week, Montse.’

She blushed so much she thought everyone would see.

‘You’re a great guy, honestly,’ continued the anaesthetist, imitating Montse’s affected tone.

‘Will you shut up! Don’t you realise he’s listening?’

‘Who, Pere? He’s deaf in one ear, as I’m sure you know. I myself anaesthetised him for the operation.’

‘You’re a witch.’

‘And you’re a bit jumpy today. Didn’t you know Pere is the hospital’s most eligible bachelor?’

‘And did you know that the most eligible bachelor falls short where it matters?’

Belén covered her mouth in a exaggerated gesture of surprise.

‘Really!’

‘You heard me.’

‘Well, nobody’s perfect, darling.’

The rest of the shift went as everyone expected: people coming and going up and down corridors, opening and closing doors, pushing gurneys in and out of rooms. It would have ended like any other shift Doctor Cambra had worked in her long career, had it not been for a series of coincidences that took place in the first hours of the new century.

At three-fifteen in the morning, an ambulance from the Casualty Ward of the Hospital de Barcelona picked up a twenty-five-year-old Arabic pregnant woman, who had been run over at the airport. First coincidence: the ambulance, which was speeding at over ninety kilometres an hour along Gran Via de Les Cort Catalanes, encountered a traffic jam when it reached Carrer de Badal; three cars had crashed and were on fire. That was the shortest way to the Hospital de Barcelona, but it was now impossible to pass through the fire engines and police cars gathering in the area, and so the driver carried on along the main road looking for the nearest hospital. Second coincidence: when the driver radioed the Hospital Clinic i Provincial, who told him they were expecting four people with severe burns, and advised him to proceed to his initial destination. Third coincidence: when the ambulance was about to take a turn at Plaça de les Glóries Catalanes in order to go back up Diagonal towards the Hospital, the driver made a mistake while turning a sharp corner and ended up on the wrong road. Fourth coincidence: as the driver was trying to orientate himself, he chanced on the main façade of the Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau, and before he knew where he was, he saw the red lights of the Casualty Ward. The moment the stretcher crossed the threshold, the woman lost all her vitals, and presently a nurse realised she was dead. Fifth coincidence: just when doctor Cambra was seeing an old man who’d been admitted with an asthma attack, an orderly and an intern left the gurney with the
body of the pregnant woman next to her. A certain something made Doctor Cambra take notice of that woman: perhaps the beauty of her features, the colourful piece of cloth wrapped around her, or her advanced pregnancy. Though no one asked her to, Doctor Cambra took her pulse at the throat; then she lifted her eyelids and found the pupils dilated and non-reactive, which confirmed that the woman was dead. Her features were placid, as if she’d died with a smile on her face. At reception, meanwhile, there was a bit of a commotion, and a discussion started between the administrative and ambulance staff. Doctor Cambra, without really meaning to, learned all the details. The victim’s husband, who had not been allowed on the ambulance, had taken a taxi to the Hospital de Barcelona, where he was no doubt asking about his wife at that very moment. Also, all the woman’s papers, passport and documents were in Arabic, so no one knew who to contact about the death. Doctor Cambra stepped in and tried to make some sense of it all.

‘Call the other casualty department, explain what’s happened, and tell them to send the husband over as soon as he gets there.’

They looked at each other, with all the tiredness one feels at half three in the morning.

‘And don’t mention she’s dead.’

Doctor Cambra looked again at the woman’s disquietingly peaceful face. In other circumstances, it would have looked contented. As two assistants put what the woman carried in her pockets and purse on a little table, Montse picked up a form and examined her injuries, trying to figure out how the accident had happened. In the form she entered the estimated age of the victim: twenty-five. It made her shiver. For a moment she saw herself at that age, walking arm in arm with Alberto, or dancing with him at Caldaqués, pregnant and envied by the resentful girls from Barcelona also on holiday at the seaside. Then, another coincidence, she leaned on the small table to write more comfortably, and the woman’s personal effects fell
off. This wouldn’t have mattered much in itself if, on bending down to pick them up, Montserat Cambra hadn’t seen three or four photographs, one of which strongly attracted her attention.