Sphinx (14 page)

A***'s death was the final blow. I imagined her scanning her room, looking down from the twelfth floor at the somber streets below, and beyond, at the elevated lights of the city; I imagined her eyes, no longer able to identify anything there that belonged to them. Closing my eyes, I could feel rising in me the tearless despair that had engulfed her, her child vanished and dead, her life dark and diminished with abandonment.

It took what felt like an infinite amount of time to get through customs at the airport; it was four in the afternoon when the taxi dropped me off at the hotel where, ever since my first trip to New York, I had resided for a few days until inquiring with some acquaintances about a place to stay. I took a shower. The city was cold and gray, almost murky. In the taxi on my way to the hospital, I peered out the window and tried to rediscover some of the formidable excitement that had filled my first visits: that taste of the bizarre, of the unknown and the variegated. My rhapsody ended in the blues. The hospital was a dreary composite of buildings of all sizes. For the length of three or four blocks, thrown pell-mell, was a conglomerate of successive additions hastily connected by footbridges or inexplicably juxtaposed and stacked: brick wall faces, domes, glass and steel towers, concrete cubes. A ramp, as one might find in an underground
garage, brought visitors to the entrance. After a sort of decompression chamber formed by two successive doors, visitors passed from the frozen air of the exterior to a stifling and, to my nostrils, noxious atmosphere. Signs written in English and Spanish gave directions. In a stark hallway, I located an information desk and, introducing myself to the secretary, explained why I was there. She directed me to the intensive care unit.

The hospital was a labyrinth. I followed endless corridors, some cluttered with beds, and I crossed waiting rooms filled with miserable-looking people. I don't know what gave them such an appearance; not all of them seemed to be poor (I had only recently started learning to distinguish between misery and poverty). There were African Americans and Puerto Ricans seated, their elbows on their knees, staring at the ground between their feet; their winter clothes bothered them, they were hot and sweating, not daring to remove them. Their gaze would follow a nurse, a doctor, a guard, and then sink back into despondency.

I reached the unit that had been indicated to me and grabbed a nurse passing by in a hurry. She led me to the end of a transversal hallway: a bed had been wheeled against the wall, surrounded by a pole with an IV drip and a heart monitor. A canvas curtain, pulled around it imperfectly, was supposed to symbolically designate a space. The nurse warned me that the patient was weak but conscious. I approached. Her eyes were closed but she was not asleep. I saw on the heart monitor, displayed in a luminous trace, an excruciatingly irregular pulse; her belabored breathing was subject to brutal interruptions. I silently contemplated her face, now so thin, the white hair making a halo around this dark-skinned face, miraculously smooth and spared from wrinkles. Her left hand was resting on her chest; her right arm was immobilized by the IV, by the flow into her veins, drop by drop, of a colorless liquid.

When I put my hand on her forehead, she opened her eyes and stared
at me, making an effort to recall a vague memory. I said to her very slowly, in an English so unsteady it made my voice tremble, that it was me, that I was here with her, that I hadn't forgotten her, that I was going to take care of her and that she was no longer alone.

She pronounced my name and caressed my hand, smiling. On the verge of tears, I clumsily gave her a kiss; she spoke in a murmur, asking me why I had been crazy enough to come all this way, saying that I shouldn't worry myself about her. She had straightened herself up to speak to me but was already drooping again onto her pillow, exhausted. Caressing her cheek, I told her not to talk, for I could see it was tiring her out. I took her hand in mine and, glancing at the heart monitor, saw with terror what it had cost her to speak: her heart was beating in a panicked rhythm that was taking a long time to subside. She nodded off, still clutching my hand. I lingered there, immobile at her side, repeating to myself, absurdly, “Ô mon Dieu, mon Dieu…” She awoke with a start, searching for me with eyes eaten away by anguish. They fixed on me and I felt her hand tense in mine. I leaned in and stammered derisory words of comfort in her ear. She said to me softly, almost inaudibly: “I've been waiting for so long for a voice like yours that could [a word I didn't understand] me.” Her words, the tone of her voice, cut through me like a knife; I bit my lip.

I asked a nurse passing by about the possibility of procuring a quiet room for this woman, rather than a portion of the hallway exposed to incessant traffic. I committed myself to paying all the expenses that this regime might require. She went off to consult the head supervisor and returned soon after, accompanied by a nurse's aide who helped her to move the bed into a room twenty yards away. I took A***'s mother in my arms and placed her onto her new bed. She silently acquiesced. She was so still and light; it felt as if she had lost a lot of weight. I adjusted her nightshirt and put the sheet back over her body. She observed me
as I took care of her, not saying a word; I could see nothing in her eyes except that she was following my every move.

The nurse replaced the IV bag; I went to see the doctor. He was in the hallway drinking a coffee. In clogs and a type of pajama that served as the uniform for the hospital health personnel, he seemed to be just as miserable as all the people I had passed in the labyrinth of hallways and waiting rooms. He was small; the harsh light coming from the ceiling gave him an unhealthy complexion and accentuated the faults in his skin. A troubling baldness hideously disfigured his scalp, lumpy and shiny with sweat; he frequently wiped his hand across his forehead. He volunteered the details of his diagnosis: long-term cardiovascular problems, blood pressure subject to brutal variations—she could fall into a coma at any moment. I gave him the contact information for my hotel, asking him to notify me if anything should happen, no matter the hour of the day or night.

When I returned to the room, the nurse had finished her tasks; as she was leaving, I slipped a twenty-dollar bill into her hand that she attempted to refuse. Once she had left, I approached the aged woman, her black skin contrasting with her white sheets. She asked me why I was doing all this for her. I searched for the words to respond: “It's a kind of debt toward A***…And you remind me of someone I would have wanted to be able to care for, as I now do for you…I have felt and I feel all that you've felt and feel. I'm almost a stranger to you but you're not to me…” She reached her hand toward my face; I knelt down by the bed and she wrapped her left arm around my head while caressing my hair. I could hear her heart beating and, as if in response, the discreet noise of the machine at every spike, a syncopated beep-beep in the silence of the room. I saw this dark-skinned hand and its pale, tidy nails out of the corner of my eye. With regret surging in me like a stifled sob, I thought
of death, coming soon to consume all this.

Suddenly she said that I must be tired, that the trip must have worn me out. I swore to the contrary. She smiled and insisted that I return to my hotel to get some sleep, reassuring me that she was doing fine. It was night, what more could I do? My impotence took me by the heart. I promised to return the next morning at nine o'clock sharp, and kissed her on my way out. It was wrenching. In the hallway the nurse was approaching, carrying a tray of medications that she was about to distribute to the patients. I asked her to make sure to notify me at the slightest alarm. She asked me how I was connected to this woman, whom I was taking such good care of and with whom I seemed to share neither race, ancestry, nor even age. I didn't know how to respond and briefly explained that this woman was the mother of a person who had been very dear to me, who had died nearly seven years ago. She studied me; I don't know what was going through her mind. My features drooping with fatigue, my dark clothes, my foreign accent, this strange story, the color of my skin, death's repeated blow—what did she make of it all?

I went back through the hospital hallways in reverse. It was nine o'clock; the waiting rooms had been emptied. I passed nurses wheeling beds that had transported wailing women dressed in poor rags, cloth, and newspapers, or the silent injured. In a service elevator some people were attempting to pin onto a stretcher a black man howling and foaming at the mouth. Between two doors I caught sight of a woman waiting, terrorized and with an absent gaze, cradling a child in her arms. I remember that she was wearing a woolen bonnet and that she wore laddered stockings that fell over misshapen slippers. I walked the length of these hallways mechanically; the lights bathed the surfaces in a dirty yellow tint. In the big, deserted hall where I ended up at last, I saw security guards in uniform chatting and patrolling in pairs, walkie-talkies in their hands
and revolvers in their belts. A sorrow bore into my ribs that I attributed to fatigue and to the effect of all the stimulants, coffee, and cigarettes I had consumed to ward off sleep. The footsteps of those around me dizzily diminished in my head.

The freezing night air hit me as I went up the ramp and gusts of wind whipped against my face; it had started to rain. On the avenue, cars were passing, inundating the building I had just left with light from their high beams. I was suddenly invaded with a dread of New York. Taxis passed me by, empty but not stopping. I started back toward my hotel on foot in the rain, twenty blocks of wet sidewalk reflecting the city and its lights in a blurred, murky image. I kept my head lowered, attempting to shield it from the brutal blasts of wind and the waves of rain. I saw New York only in a mirror of asphalt.

I walked straight up 42
^nd
Street without noticing that I was rolling snippets of incoherent English around in my head: expressions and interjections that seemed to originate in songs I had heard long ago, when I was still with A***. I was searching for the lyrics to a particular song that we had enjoyed singing sometimes while walking at night through the streets of strange cities. Gradually the words came back to me, though I kept stumbling over the refrain:

                         
Well hello then good old friend of mine.

                         
You've been reachin' for yourself for such a long time

                         
No need to explain, I'm not here to blame,

                         
I just wanna be the one to keep you from the rain

                         
From the rain.

                         
It's a long road when you're all alone

                         
And someone like you will always choose the long way home

                         
There's no right or wrong, I'm not here to blame

                         
I just wanna be the one (…)

                         
And it's good to know my best friend has come home again

                         
‘cause I think of us like an old cliché

                         
but it doesn't matter ‘cause I love you anyway

                         
Come in from the rain.

I tried to sing it to myself as I walked, but my voice cracked impossibly on the high notes. I took 42
^nd
Street going west, walking with my head empty and my feet frozen. An old blues song came back to me, but I remained unable to sing; my soul probably wasn't yet sufficiently black.

Back in my room I ordered an herbal tea from room service. The television was emitting flashes of light, muffled echoes. From the window, high up, I was watching all that was down below: the intersections, the endless streets, the blanket of roofs punctured by skyscrapers and stained with lights blurred by the rain. I opened a window and the humid rumble of the city abruptly washed over my face. That odor of city rain, which, hot or cold, has always frozen my blood, surged forth like a spindrift of funereal nostalgia. I was snatched from it by the sound of the bellboy ringing at the door. He entered and placed the tray on a low table. I signed the bill, gave him a dollar tip, closed the door behind him and went back to my spot on the bed to drink my herbal tea. The TV screen and the screen of the glazed bay windows reflected the same insane scintillation. The tea filled me with a sweet warmth as I stretched out on the bed. My limbs felt shattered from all the distance they had traveled: the Atlantic, a hospital, and twenty blocks. Without even the strength to undress, I fell asleep feeling as though I were being crushed.

A sharp ringing woke me in the darkness of the dead of night. I groped for the telephone; the receptionist announced a name I didn't recognize.
It took me a few seconds to get a hold of myself, to accustom myself once more to the language, to realize where I was. I finally understood that I was being called from the hospital because the woman I was here to take care of had just suffered a serious drop in blood pressure—
blood pressure, blood pressure,
the phrase resonated in my brain as if on a loop, an interrupted feedback amplifying itself—had fallen into a coma, was going to die
—die, dying.
Yes, I had understood, I was on my way.