The Dying Animal (14 page)

And then the grief, then the weight of sadness for all that her family had lost, for her father and her grandparents dying in exile, for herself about to die in exile (and an exile she'd never before felt so cruelly), for all of the Castillos' Cuba that Castro had ruined, for everything she feared she was about to leave—all of it was so great that in my arms, for a full five minutes, Consuela went out of her mind. I saw, externalized, the terror that her body was feeling. "What is it? Consuela, what can I do for you? Tell me and I'll do it. What is it that's torturing you so?"

And here's what she told me when she was able to speak. Here, to my surprise, is what she told me tortured her most. "I always answered my parents in English. Oh, God. How I wish I had answered him more in Spanish." "Who?" "My father. He loved when I called him Papi. But after I was little, I never would. I called him Dad. I
had
to. I wanted to be an American. I did not want all their
sadness."
"Dearest Consuela, it doesn't matter now what you called him. He knew you loved him. He knew how much..." But there was no consoling her. I'd not heard her speak like this before, nor had I seen her behave as she did next, either. In every calm and reasonable person there is a hidden second person scared witless about death, but for someone thirty-two the time between Now and Then is ordinarily so vast, so boundless, that it's no more than maybe a couple of times a year, and then only for a moment or two and late at night, that one comes anywhere near encountering that second person and in the state of madness that is the second person's everyday life.

What she did then was to take off her hat. To throw off her hat. All this time, you see, she'd been wearing that fezlike hat, even when she was otherwise naked and I was taking the pictures of her breasts for her. But now she tore it off. With New Year's Eve abandon, tore off her funny New Year's Eve hat. First Castro's farce of a sexy stage show and now Consuela's mortality completely unveiled.

It was appalling to see her without the hat. A woman so young and beautiful with sort of feathery hair, very short, thin, colorless, meaningless hair—you'd rather have her bald after having been to the barber and been shaved than to see this idiotic fluff on her head. The transition from thinking of someone in the way you've always thought of that person—as just as alive as you are—to whatever signifies to you, as her fuzzy hairlessness did to me, that the person is close to death, is dying, I experienced at that moment not only as a shock but as a betrayal. A betrayal of Consuela for my having so rapidly absorbed the shock and made this accounting. The traumatic moment was upon us when the change occurs, when you discover that the other person's expectations can no longer resemble yours and that no matter how appropriately you may be acting and you may continue to act, he or she will leave before you do—if you're lucky, well before.

Itself. There it was. All the horror of it in that head. Consuela's head. I kissed it and kissed it. What else was there for me to do? The poison of the chemotherapy. All it had done to her body. All it had done to her mind. She's thirty-two, and she thinks she's now exiled from everything, experiencing each experience for the very last time. Only what if she isn't? What—

There! The phone! That could be—! At what time? It's two
A.M.
Excuse me!

It was. That was her. She called. Finally called. I have to leave. She is in a panic. She is having surgery in two weeks. She had her last chemotherapy. She asked me to tell her about the beauty of her body. That's why I was away so long. That's what she wanted to hear. That's what she's been talking about for nearly an hour. Her body. Do you think that after surgery a man will ever love my body again? This is what she asks again and again. You see, they've now decided to remove the entire breast. They were planning to go underneath the breast and to take a part of it. But now they think it's too serious for that. So they have to remove it. Ten weeks ago they told her they would remove only part of it, and now they tell her they are going to remove the whole thing. Mind you, this is a breast. It's not a small thing. This morning they told her what is going to happen; now it's night, and she's all alone and the whole prospect of everything ... I have to go. She wants me there. She wants me to sleep in the bed with her there. She has not eaten all day. She has to eat. She has to be fed. You? Stay if you wish. If you want to stay, if you want to leave ... Look, there's no time, I must run!

"Don't."

What?

"Don't go."

But I must. Someone has to be with her.

"She'll find someone."

She's in terror. I'm going.

"Think about it. Think. Because if you go, you're finished."

In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for
Patrimony
(1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for
Operation Shylock
(1993), the National Book Award for
Sabbath's Theater
(1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for
American Pastoral
(1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for
I Married a Communist
(1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for
The Counterlife
(1986) and the National Book Award for his first book,
Goodbye, Columbus
(1959). In 2000 he published
The Human Stain,
concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America.