The Plimsoll Line (16 page)

He tests the edge of a frozen puddle with the tip of his boot. Seen from the kitchen window, it could be said he is reflecting on something, but in fact, all he’s doing is shaking; he hasn’t had breakfast, and his swollen fingers beat inside his gloves, the inside of his head is full of cold air, and it isn’t a pleasant sensation but rather an icy weariness that keeps him stuck to the puddle. He goes over his ingestion of food in the previous forty-eight hours. He imagines the chief nurse screwing up her nose, as if detecting a bad smell, when the scales confirm the excess weight of the university professor and renowned art critic who recently seems to have adopted the habit of coming to dialysis with a couple of extra pounds. He’ll have no choice but to admit that he drank too much water the night before; the pizza, Laura’s diary, the subsequent lack of tobacco—he had to calm his nerves somehow, so he drank until he was sated. But now, as he detaches himself from the puddle and walks back and forth along the pavement, he’s lugging around all that liquid, and he feels it accumulating in his fingers, and also his ankles, and eyelids. He checks his watch; it’s already after seven thirty. He raises his hand with impatience at the oncoming car, and the headlights illuminate the holes in the unpaved road in bursts. The taxi driver’s look is framed in the rearview mirror. “We’re a bit pressed for time today,” he says, and the man nods, a little befuddled by the blasting warmth coming from the car’s heating. On the radio, two men discuss the government’s foreign policy. The taxi driver shakes his head and clicks his tongue, leans toward the radio and insults one of the program participants. His features are framed in the rearview mirror—a pair of rural eyebrows, a frown, small eyes. The broad, red nape of his neck is half-hidden by the collar of his wool sweater. As usual, the car stops at Jeremías’s post. His figure can just be made out behind the steamed-up glass, seated next to a thermos. When he sees them, he passes the newspaper through the car window. The man says good morning and drops a coin into his chapped hand, but Jeremías simply grunts in reply, pulls his cap down over his head, and goes back to his little room in short jumps. The taxi driver traces a mocking smile in the rearview mirror. The car heads for the highway, and the gas station disappears behind them. Perhaps he should have asked Jeremías about the accident, he must know what happened. He saw him bend down next to one of the windows. He must know what became of the car’s occupants. Two? Three? How many people were traveling in the car? Perhaps in the last few hours there has been a multiple organ donation and somebody, like him, will receive a kidney, a liver, or a heart. “Jeremías gets crazier every day,” says the taxi driver, pointing to his temple.

The lights of dawn sparkle on the frosted ground. From the fallow fields emerges a mist that clouds the early morning with a suggestion of tundra. There are pairs of rooks pecking at the fields, and long puddles covered in a thin layer of ice. The sky grows light timidly, imprecisely, until the slightly polar clarity sketches the outlines of houses in the city, the white smoke of several chimneys, the first garbage trucks. There are people in the street now—they come out of their front doors, bent double against the cold; there are pedestrians waiting at bus stops and others being swallowed down by the entrance to the metro; a homeless person walled in by cardboard; and a man walking his brick-red dachshund in the park. They stop at a traffic light, and a girl walks past in front of them. He feels a sudden dizziness. He sits up to take a better look—the coat with the large collar, the medium-length hair, the beauty spot on her cheek, the student’s backpack. The vision of the girl introduces a misalignment into his perception—the gesture of a painter taking a step back and squinting to gaze at the canvas—and he is on the verge of saying “Laura.” The taxi driver turns down the radio.

“Pretty, huh?” he says, keeping his eyes on the girl, who has already reached the opposite sidewalk and is rounding the corner of a building covered in scaffolding.

“What was that?”

“The girl . . . you know what I mean,” he draws a pair of hips in the air,“a real beauty.”

“I thought it was somebody I knew.”

“All cats are gray in the dark, right?” says the taxi driver, winking in the rearview mirror.

The windows are misted up.

“It’s very hot in here,” says the man, as if talking to himself.

The taxi driver shrugs his shoulders, turns down the temperature, but turns up the radio. The presenter states that the world is immersed in fear, that’s the main driving force, fear, and nothing else, and one day we will know the true causes of international terrorism, which will be purely economic, as history clearly shows; but another voice declares that the crux of the matter resides in the impression of an immediate threat and in knowing who is creating the problem, who profits from the fear, because fear, he maintains, is not free, but just the opposite; a third voice, however, remarks that this is infamy, because fear feeds on itself, without interruption, without measure; a fourth voice attempts to refute this hypothesis, and the debate descends into an incomprehensible discussion syncopated by voices cutting each other off. The presenter appeals for calm and proceeds to encourage the listeners to phone in and express their opinions. “Because you, dear listener,” he says before going to commercial, “are what the news is really about.”

The taxi driver turns off the radio while dodging a line of cars. A local bus gets in their way, so he brakes suddenly. He honks the horn by banging on the center of the steering wheel.

The image of the girl was not a mistake, but a grimace of imagination or memory. He smiles on thinking of the face the taxi driver would have made if he’d informed him that the girl who just passed in front of them was not the silhouette of a pretty, young woman, or his lover, but a joke, nothing more, a joke of his dead daughter’s. He hasn’t managed to establish a chronological link to imbue these events with meaning but has ended up qualifying them as a private joke. They used to disconcert him, but now they put him on a state of alert.

Having read Laura’s diary after the morning news failed to send him to sleep, he took a bottle of mineral water and went up to the second floor. He wasn’t searching for anything, he just kept walking and gazing at the frieze of the walls. Everything was still as it was supposed to be, with the slightly spectral quietude of a domestic museum—the teddy bears, the schoolbooks, the parka, the red spine of the photo album. He picked it up and sat on the edge of the bed. There were the postcards Óscar had sent her from all over the world—the Brooklyn Bridge, the Twin Towers, the spectral lights of Osaka, Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City, a suburb in South Africa, the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu, and Ankara, and St. Petersburg. He stopped at the image of a water buffalo. This postcard had been sent from Bangkok. He took it out of the album and read the text.
You see I don’t forget you. Even when I’m very far away. You’d like this country a lot. I bet you a ride on my bike this arrives in time for your birthday. Love you, Óscar
. He drained his bottle of mineral water and tried to sleep. He could feel the sparrows chirping on the roof.

Perhaps it’s only right that Ana should know about the diary, should read what he himself has read. It is her daughter. He weighs up the possibility of showing it to her censored; he would only need to hide a few parts, the most insidious references, in particular the salacious evidence of Laura and Óscar’s relations. That way, Ana would be accessing the diary of a teenager, because that’s what it is, no more, no less, a text, like any other, written to express her insecurities, disappointments, trouble communicating, questions to which there is never an answer—the diary of a young girl. He wonders what would hurt Ana the most. Perhaps all he would achieve is to cause her posthumous, gratuitous pain. After all, it wasn’t addressed to her, but to him; the diary is his discovery, his secret, his joke. He tells himself he should protect Ana from this revelation. He wonders what hurts him the most, and in fact it is his own disappearance, his absence, or worse still, the references to an image that is very similar to the shadow of an anonymous observer, a neutral, floating attention that judges everything with dispassionate curiosity. That was him, a deaf presence. And that’s the most revealing thing, even more, perhaps, than the image of a morbid passion—Laura and Óscar making love in a wheat field, secretly kissing on the porch—which is something he can accept without argument, because, when it comes down to it, and this was the painful joke, he didn’t know Laura. He knew nothing about her. Though he also knew now that his daughter had been happy.

The intermittent sound of a horn brings him back to the image of the cold sidewalks. He examines his heart, but only feels a vague sadness.

“We are definitely going to be late today,” declares the taxi driver.

The traffic lights change color. The car continues down the city’s main avenue, finally gets past the traffic, and enters a tunnel that leads to a large plaza near the clinic. He pays for the journey, leaves the car, and heads for the revolving door of the medical center. He is greeted by the piped music—
Raindrops keep falling on my head
—and anticipates the salty taste of saline in his mouth. He changes in the cubicle and comes out in a pair of beige-colored pajamas. The room smells of bandages and iodine. From the sofa, Ángel raises his eyebrows in greeting while the ward manager leans in toward the scales. She screws up her nose. “I can’t believe that someone like you should behave like a little child,” she says, while at the same time jotting down his weight in her notebook. “You’re more than four and a half pounds over today.” He stretches out his arm on the venipuncture table. Sara’s latex-gloved fingers explore his fistula indecisively, pressing down on the gaps that are still free, between his tendon and his muscle. She doesn’t tell jokes today, she is nervous. Or she seems to be, and this is not a good sign. It could be said he feels his veins shrinking under his skin. He holds his breath and counts to ten. He doesn’t close his eyes. He is just preparing himself for the worst, when the needle forces its way through skin as hard as lemon rind.

He should have realized it wasn’t going to be a good day at the clinic, especially when Ángel pointed in the direction of the chocolate-colored armchair somebody had placed under the window. A pigeon was delousing itself on the windowsill. It was a dirty, anxious bird, but it wasn’t the pigeon that had attracted his attention, and Ángel gestured again, this time with his jaw, at Tere’s armchair, which was still empty, slightly tilted back, like the chair at a dentist’s, next to the machine’s loose cables. He quizzed his companion with his eyes. Ángel hadn’t seen the girl in the waiting room, and certainly not at the venipuncture table, he was absolutely sure about that. A woman brought the breakfast trays as usual. They watched her movements, how she served the decaffeinated coffee, the rolls spread with butter and jam. She handed out the breakfasts without stopping at Tere’s place. This time, all Ángel did was screw up his nose. The man sipped his coffee greedily. After a while, the nurses filed out of their room. They formed a perplexed, silent group. The ward manager stepped forward and asked for their attention. She stared at the floor tiles, as if pondering the firmness of the ground under her feet. Perhaps she wasn’t sure how to talk to them and was remembering her medical training courses, though she must have confronted similar situations before. She seemed to opt for the most professional approach. She shuffled her clogs and looked up at them, but her eyes, absorbed by the tiles on the wall, seemed to fly over the top of them, attentive to some object moving behind them. Tere’s mother had phoned first thing. She had found her early that morning, on the floor, next to a broken glass, perhaps she had been thirsty, had filled a glass with water in the kitchen, and on the way back to her room, had collapsed. Her mother had tried in vain to resuscitate her and then called for help. The ambulance didn’t take long to arrive, but all the medical team could do was certify her death. Tere had died of cardiac arrest; her heart, while young, must have had some congenital condition. In the absence of conclusive proof, this was the likeliest hypothesis; this is what the nephrologists had told her. She
could
say that Tere hadn’t suffered, she probably hadn’t even had time to realize she was dying. She pointed toward the other nurses, they were all deeply affected, as was the medical team, which given the patient’s young age, had, from the start of her illness, followed her case with special interest. A funeral would be held in the clinic’s chapel sometime in the coming days. Her eyes stopped wandering all over the room and glazed over. They, she said, should not lose hope; when they least expected it, they could receive a call from the Transplant Coordination Center to inform them that they were the recipients of a kidney. Every month, dozens of such operations were carried out. The donation of an organ was a gift that could arrive at any moment, possibly long before they imagined, so they should be ready to receive it in the best possible of conditions. “We will all remember Tere with great affection,” she said, gazing at her team of nurses. She may have been waiting for one of them to corroborate her words. There was a silence that demanded to be broken. Ambrosio coughed loudly when the nurses left the room. The rhythmic sound of the machines evoked a group of beached dinghies. Encouraged, perhaps, by the tone the chief nurse’s words had taken on, the Jehovah’s witness suggested they pray together for the girl’s soul, but nobody seconded his proposal. Marcela’s face was contorted into an expression of mourning. Next to her,Ángel sighed. He hoped that, just as the ward manager had suggested, Tere hadn’t suffered. In the light coming from the window, her armchair resembled an old shoe; on the other side, the pigeon remained quiet, dozing on the sill.

His forearm throbbed, lacerated by needle marks. Sara had taken a while to find the fistula, and now the pain spread under the surgical tape like a jellyfish sting, but this sensation seemed to absolve him, and it extended up through the tube that kept him connected to the machine and through the vision of his blood warming the plastic, being sucked toward the membrane. He was still there, like the armchair, like the pigeon, he hadn’t gone, and this idea kept his spirits up, so he breakfasted with gusto. He couldn’t concentrate on reading the newspaper, so he amused himself by gazing at the light coming from the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. He imagined Tere, small, large-headed, in the slightly obscene light of the tubes, her tawny-owl face pressed against a green carpet in the darkness of a dining room, dressed in a pink nightdress, her legs positioned as if ready to jump. Her thighs were chubby and very white. She had lost her glasses in the fall, and out of the broken lenses poured water that soaked the linoleum. He saw her mother enter the dining room and kneel down next to her. She covered her thighs with the edge of her nightdress. She squeezed her face, pinched her cheeks. Stood up, moved away from the body, walked around the room a little, and raised her arms to the sky, like a silent film actress. Somewhere in the house, possibly in the hallway, a phone rang, but nobody picked up.

When he opened his eyes, he was overwhelmed by an impression of distance. The ceiling seemed very high, a mute, insolent color. He saw a nurse passing through the air, which appeared to be made of the same matter as fever, but she did so in a way he’d never seen before, moving effortlessly, like an astronaut, while that phone kept ringing in the hallway. Ángel slept with his eyelids half open and his face stuck to the pillow. A glob of saliva was gathering in the corner of his mouth. He felt the absurd certainty that something serious was about to happen; he didn’t want anything bad to happen to Ángel, he wanted to say something, to warn him, while the phone kept ringing somewhere in the room, and not even the nurse, walking past him again on her way to the corridor, seemed to notice. So he made an effort to lift himself up on his elbows. “Ángel, wake up!” he shouted, but he had the impression his words vanished like air from a spray bottle. He was aware that he really could go, like Tere, and that it was going to happen very quickly. The impression of light dizziness turned, little by little, into slow-motion vertigo and a slope it was extremely easy to slide down, weightlessly, while his words disintegrated into particles of vapor. The impression of alarm subsided, and the rings of the phone sounded ever more distant. He felt himself letting go. He could no longer hear the sound of the phone.
How easy it is to die
, he thought, and it was agreeable to feel himself being overwhelmed by this comfortable insensitivity. It was simple, too. There were no literary pleonasms, no philosophical nauseas, no rhetoric of anguish. It was as commonplace as turning off the mechanisms on a machine one by one, releasing the cables without nostalgia or Tenebrae services. It was pleasant, reassuring. And, above all, peaceful.

An intense cramp brought him back to consciousness, a knife penetrating his leg on the back of his knee and climbing up the inside of his thigh to the root of his buttock. The process repeated on the other leg with the precision of a scalpel. He howled in pain, rigid, between the footrest and headrest, and the light from the fluorescent tube fell suddenly onto his eyelids, but he couldn’t focus on anything except for the figure of Sara moving back and forth across his field of vision among the little lights jumping from the center of his forehead and then over the oxygen mask somebody clamped against his chin. He could see Sara moving between disks of light, violet flowers, islets of blood plasma. He felt elastic bands around his ears and the air tickling his nostrils. It was a pleasant lightness that entered his lungs and cleaned his field of vision. He noticed the figure of another nurse. Saw her inject some liquid into the saline tube. Still half asleep, Ángel watched what was going on. His cheek was furrowed by the wrinkle on his pillow. This detail calmed him down, as did the glob of saliva that had clotted in the corner of his mouth. Sara kept on watching him from the foot of his armchair, her hands on her hips. He couldn’t be sure whether it was a look of relief or reproach, but little by little his leg muscles relaxed, and he felt himself going down, or up, effortlessly changing place from some previous location, until he was again sitting comfortably in the imitation-leather armchair. He grabbed the chair and took a deep breath, though it sounded more like a snort. The ward manager took off the oxygen mask. She smiled, then pursed her lips.
You see now
? she seemed to be saying with that expression, and he nodded in exhaustion, gripping the armrests, and kept nodding with relief after all the nurses had moved off down the hallway.

He had to get used to being there again, to fall back in time with the
glup-glup
of the machines. The sound struck him as reassuring, domestic, like the hum of a fridge. He needed to click his tongue again, detect the salty taste of saline, move his toes, blink. Such trivial actions confirmed he had returned to a halfway point between pain and imperturbability. Nobody could live breathing pain, not for long, while imperturbability, on the other hand, invited you to settle into it, leave everything behind so as to be rocked in a place without time or space, always one step away from salvation and beatitude, but also from corruption and tedium.

He wondered where he was now. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t be able to escape from the room, nor could he accept the possibility of spending the rest of his life in this position, adapting himself to the rhythm of the dialyzer, anticipating the symptoms of a fainting fit without return. He stayed alert, but the rest of the morning passed without incident. The light of the fluorescent tubes heightened the impression of a prolonged sleep, as if the very air in the room had acquired a liquid, salty consistency. From the street could be heard the sound of car horns, which seemed strangely in time with the beeps and warning lights on the machines the nurses had already started disconnecting with all the hullabaloo of a gambling den. He’d have given anything to be the first to be disconnected from the tubes. In fact, anybody would have wanted to be first, but he’d come to dialysis twenty minutes late, so now he had no choice but to watch the other patients already peeling themselves off their armchairs and walking weightlessly and noiselessly toward the scales. He felt Ángel’s hand stroke his shoulder. “Take care,” he said, dragging his feet. He attempted to relax. Time seemed to dilate, heavy and somnolent, in the room. The machine continued pumping his blood through the pistons. If nobody stopped the process, the machine would carry on purifying his blood until it turned it into a very fine sheet. He considered the absurd and terrifying possibility of the nurses going off and leaving him there, all forgotten. How long would he be able to last? He would have to shout to make himself heard. But that could never happen, at least not while the pigeon in the window, dirty and complacent, continued delousing itself. There was something insulting in the insipid gluttony with which it searched for parasites among its feathers. And yet there was also something reassuring, like the signals emitted by a marker buoy at sea. The cleaning staff spread disinfectant over the floor, and the smell was not all that unpleasant, rather it struck him as reminiscent of chlorinated water. Finally, he felt himself being detached from the tubes. Sara performed the operation at great speed, as if wanting to make up for the needle pokes. She led him by the arm to the nurses’ station. They took his blood pressure. He should eat as soon as he got home, they said. A very young doctor entered the room. He looked like an intern, or a resident. The head of the nephrology department had already been informed about his mishap. He leaned toward him as if searching for a sign deep within his eyes. Asked him how he felt. He didn’t know what to say, except that he felt very weak, and when he said this, he had the impression his voice was a very thin wire. “The truth is I just want to go home. That’s all,” he added. The doctor wrote something on a piece of paper. Sara took his blood pressure again and measured his pulse. Then they let him go. He got dressed and went back through the corridors, the elevator, the revolving door of the clinic, but couldn’t recognize the tune of the piped music, which seemed to emanate from the walls of the building, or the fresh air beating against the corner of the taxi stand. He got in the car without the driver even realizing it. He closed the door, and the driver jumped in his seat. He turned toward him, between the seats, looking very pale, as if he’d just seen an apparition. He recovered from his fright by tuning into the radio. The man was convinced he had become transparent.

During the day, his skin has stuck to his cheekbones, acquiring an eroded pallor. The door to the remote possibility of a visit having been closed, the mirror shows him the image of a man with ruffled hair and an urgent look. It’s an image that repels him, fleeting, glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. He reaches the shadow of the entryway and drops his parka, gloves, and keys. He has the impression he has gotten back from a long journey. He has closed the door, and everything has been left on the other side; the faces, words, and fears no longer belong to him, he has left them outside, like a scattering of objects tossed into a ditch. The weariness of his figure in the mirror is proof that he is safe, as if the fact of having returned home excused him from weighing up other uncertainties. Polanski mews at his feet, he feels the cat’s claws digging into his ankle. Limping, he walks toward the kitchen. He rids himself of the animal by moving it aside with the inside of his boot, as if pushing a ball, and the cat retreats toward the kitchen, narrowing its green, resentful eyes at the abruptly slender figure of the man now leaning against the doorjamb, as if drunk. He can still feel the points of light jumping off his forehead, like a school of silvery fry leaping onto the table and moving through the space of the kitchen, above the cat, though the animal seems not to realize and focuses its gaze, fixed and horizontal like the surface of a pond, on the man. He has the impression he is an evaporated body, transfixed by air, the body of a traveler who despite having reached the arrival gate at an airport, is unable to adjust to the new surroundings. He should buy a blood pressure monitor, he has to jot this down on a sticky note, write
Buy blood pressure monitor
, and stick the message to the door of the fridge. He forces himself to eat—a portion of mold-encrusted Bimbo bread and a few slices of cheese. He rescues a cup of cold coffee from the thermos and adds three spoonfuls of sugar. It smells of cold ashes. He wonders when he made this coffee. A sip is more than enough; it is, quite simply, awful. He curses himself for not having any Coke in the pantry, so he forces himself to drink the coffee. He accompanies the purgative with a handful of sweet peanuts bought from Jeremías. He tells himself he should revive the habit of bread and eat real bread, crusty, freshly made; there are towns in the valley where you can find loaves straight out of
Don Quixote
. He imagines freshly baked bread, crunchy, real. He no longer perceives the lights that were jumping off his forehead like sparks from a grindstone; they have disappeared into the air of the kitchen, and everything acquires more precise limits around him. He again feels the force of gravity, the weight of his shoulders, of his legs, the weight of his teeth, as well. Polanski mews loudly now. The reproach doesn’t pass unnoticed; he forgot to give the cat its ration of Whiskas before leaving the house. On opening the fridge, he is assailed by the rancid smell of leftover food. From behind a few soggy mandarins, he extracts the can of pet food. He scrapes it clean, depositing the lumps into the plastic bowl. He pats the cat’s head in a conciliatory fashion.