Nervous system, p.15
Nervous System, page 15
Portrait of an amputated bone of which nothing was left to be said.
✷ ✷ ✷
Some people suffered disorders of the nervous system that inhibited the experience of pain. As if they were blind or deaf to touch, those people cut or burned themselves and stopped only when they saw the damage, or smelled it. Those people died young, declared the Father. Pain exists for a reason, after all.
To die young, murmured the Father, who was old by now and still alive. Young was what his first wife was when she died.
The strange thing was that the Firstborn had averted so many tools of death. Power switches and loose cords. Windows and their balconies. Too-clean glass. Rugs where feet went sliding. Ladders and stairs. Belts around the neck. Ropes. Pipes. Knives, spoons, toothpicks sunk into the throat. Toothbrushes buried in the jugular. Stray bullets. Loaded guns. Shrapnel. Fire. Unbreathable smoke. Odorless gas. Plastic bags on the head and pillows over the face. Cleaning products consumed too enthusiastically. Poison. Insecticide. Recluse spiders. Snakes full of venom. Rabid dogs. Walls shaken by the earth and fragile cornices that plummet without warning. Branches that fall without warning. Planes that crash, without warning. Trains derailed. Slippery ice. Wet streets, curved avenues, highways without shoulders, and enormous and minuscule cars. Trucks turned off, stopped in the fog. Bicycles careening in the wrong direction. Speed bumps. Zebra crossings. Yield signs. Stop signs no one respects. Traffic lights on red or yellow. Choppy ocean waves. Flooded or empty pools. Faulty genes. Germs of all kinds doing what they do. Sleeping pills. Overdoses. Allergies. Attacks of asthma, or sadness.
The Cousin was pleased as punch with all that iron screwed to her arm, unaware of how much titanium the Firstborn carried around.
✷ ✷ ✷
The Father scolded him for putting the Cousin’s life at risk. What was he thinking? The same thing you were thinking with my mother, replied the oldest son, taking refuge in his plaster armor.
Father and son cracked their knuckles in silence. What they could have said with words they told each other in osseous code.
Someday, in the future, they’d get to the marrow of the matter.
✷ ✷ ✷
The afternoon was already dissolving over the beach when the Firstborn climbed up some rough rocks, balanced one on top of another, to dive into the sea. Below him swelled the tall, clean waves, almost free of foam, but the tide was already starting to recede, those waves were withdrawing, and it seemed like the water itself had shrunk, that the ocean had gone dry and all that remained was the wasteland of rocky sand and mollusks stuck to the ocean floor, seaweed, fish flailing incisive salt-suffocated gills, and starfish alive and dead moving surreptitiously over that nothing on which the Firstborn, flipping into the air and stretching out on the wind, fossilized now from fear, was about to break his head.
The lifeguard saw him from a distance and then close up, body to body. He arrived kicking up sand with his heels but someone had already called the ambulance. They laid the Firstborn on the sand and asked his name, and he had a hard time remembering.
It was a summer of curfews, and the Father, who hadn’t heard from his Firstborn in some time and was many kilometers away, received an urgent call, and he said, yes, yes, he’s my oldest son, lowering his voice until it was inaudible, where is he, where did you take him, and without asking if his son was alive he grabbed the car keys and said, let’s go, let’s go, get your coat, and the Mother put on a wool cardigan covered in pills and missing a button and they sped off toward the coast. They drove without asking any questions, or maybe just one very brief question: TBI? Just three letters and a question mark because there was nothing more to say, TBI, but it wasn’t TBI but a closed-head TBI, closed and dark as the sky of that night now almost closed—soon they wouldn’t be allowed on the highways without running a big risk. The Father didn’t think about the hour or the restriction but about that closed head, swollen, bleeding inside, and he accelerated between hills and slopes and sharp curves, no moon light at the end of the tunnel, no cars going in the opposite direction, much less people. They saw nothing but the mutt that leaped into the road and looked at them with red eyes and froze in the high beams for the hard blow that killed it. Because the Father, instead of turning or braking, accelerated over its body, resolved not to look in the rearview mirror.
When he pulled up to the hospital and turned off the engine and got out of the car and woke up the stiffened nerves in his back, he heard his wife say that the front bumper had fallen off when he hit the dog. That’s what it’s there for, replied the Father without turning around, hurrying toward the emergency room.
✷ ✷ ✷
Instead of closing up in a neat line, the Cousin’s wounds widened and scarred over. They gave her an elastic sleeve with metal plates to squash the scabs that were never going to disappear.
The keloid had been described by the ancients, but it was the moderns who gave it a cancerous name, close to cancroid, which called up something that the keloid was not. Because it wasn’t cancer or a tumor even though its thickness was due to the frenetic reproduction of cells. The Cousin had always been prone to those lesions: her fiber skin scab fear overflowed the limits of the original wound.
The Cousin didn’t believe that all wounds needed to scar over or that all scars were ugly, even if they were thick, rough, hard. She was going to make hers part of her allure. When others saw her bare arm and wanted to know what had happened, the Cousin declared, without getting upset, that her mother had stabbed her with a knife. Or that she’d been carried off by a kite that landed her in a picture window. Or that she’d been bitten by a rabid dog, and they’d had to shoot it to make it let go of her. Once, she said she’d been attacked by sharks in the same choppy sea where once she really had almost drowned.
✷ ✷ ✷
El told the Firstborn a story about his dentist. He knows my job is identifying bones, and he gave me this riddle: How do you tell if someone was alive or dead when they fell from a building? Then he ordered me not to close my mouth, and his thumb pressed the crown into my gum and he stuck his hand in my mouth all the way to the back of my throat. And, El went on, rather than think about the body falling alive or dead, I thought about that awful habit of asking questions when the patient can’t reply. The dentist gave a dramatic pause as if I didn’t know the answer, El said, while the Firstborn pressed his lips together and extended a finger to draw a question mark in the air. And El assured him that any forensic scientist could answer that question. If the wrists were broken in the fall it means the person was alive. We all put our hands out when we fall, by instinct. Only if we’re dead do we not try to catch ourselves.
The Firstborn smiled uncertainly. He never put out his hands—he tried to catch himself with his elbows. Years before, they’d put one back together for him with stainless steel plates nails barbed wire.
✷ ✷ ✷
In that fall with the Cousin, the Firstborn had dislocated his elbow and fractured his shoulder. And although it was forbidden, he went out to jog under the full weight of his plaster torso.
✷ ✷ ✷
Portrait of an elbow. Instrumental joint. Hinge of the arm. Loose-skinned bend. Of the whole skin suit, it’s the corner that is most wrinkled, most aged, most tattooed by falls. Its strangeness was that it bent backward while the rest of the body pointed forward.
✷ ✷ ✷
Men think because they have hands, claimed the ancient poets. More recently, other thinkers suggested that men, but not women, move because they need something. It was a version of a saying that the Father had once uttered: necessity creates the organ.
The Twins didn’t walk, didn’t stand up, didn’t show the slightest bit of enthusiasm for crawling; they spent their days lying on their backs staring attentively at their two pairs of feet, the cinematic proliferation of their toes. Concerned, the Mother asked the neurologist at her hospital to examine them. Their only problem is laziness, her colleague concluded, taking off his horn-rimmed glasses and combing a hand through his gray hair. Make them.
The one who took care of making them crawl, stand up, and start walking was the Firstborn. He bribed them with sweets.
✷ ✷ ✷
The Firstborn told El that he could empathize with the anguish caused by the disappearances because he felt his loss was similar. But you know what happened to your mom’s body, you know where she’s buried, you can visit her, replied El, realizing as he was talking that Ella had never mentioned where her mother was, and maybe neither of them knew. The Firstborn turned pale.
Grim, skinny as a rail, he got on his bike and sped off, taking a detour on his route downtown to head toward the cemetery. It had taken him years to get there, and now he took hurried steps between centenary pantheons and mausoleums and niches dotted with desiccated flowers, mums, until in a bend of the path he found the grave that held his mother. Her full name carved into the stone disconcerted him, the two dates indicating the insufficient years she’d survived to live, the age she’d never reached. He calculated the years his mother had been rotting alone under the stone, the centuries worms winter winds rising up with the mother, her cells mixed in with the filth of the city. And all those white chrysanthemums whose scent blended into the cemetery’s intoxicating floral smell—where had they come from? There were so many, and they looked so fresh. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. In the distance, a caretaker with rolled-up pants and canvas sandals was watering clumps of carnations. Irises, lilies, weeds embedded in the granite stones. The Firstborn approached without a greeting, without looking the old man in the face; he cracked his knuckles one by one while he got up the nerve to ask, in a deathly voice, whether the man might know who had left those flowers in the crystal vases, the ones at the third grave from the right. The caretaker counted the headstones and nodded. Oh, yeah, sure I do, that old gal, as if the Firstborn knew who this gal who came to see his mother was. And, struggling to open his hands cracked by the sun, the caretaker described a short, thin woman whose sweetish perfume hung in the air every time she went by. She must be the deceased’s sister, said the old man, still holding on to the hose, and he added that she came every month, that she got down off her high heels and knelt beside the grave to place her chrysanthemums or her thornless roses, some enormous bouquets, always white. And she made the sign of the cross and prayed awhile. He raised a pair of seasoned eyes marked by deep crow’s-feet, and, lowering his voice, confided that a while back the old gal had skipped a few visits. The poor woman was really sick, he said, pointing to his head; she wears a wig now. Real good people she is, he murmured, thoughtful or sleepy, his rigid finger still against his forehead. She always leaves me a tip for taking care of her departed.
The old gal, the Firstborn repeats confusedly. He’s on his bike with his hands stiff on the handlebars, his bones covered in muscles tendons gloves sorrow. The old gal. The high heels. The tips. The wig. The Firstborn comes to a red light but instead of stopping he pedals faster between the cars and he curses himself, because he understands that in all these years the only person to visit his mother has been the Mother.
✷ ✷ ✷
For days he had the rarefied smell of flowers planted in his nose, the buzz of bees in his ears, and in his eyes, the caretaker’s cracked hands. Those hands that couldn’t open. He should have told him that in some places of the world, bee venom is rubbed on stiff joints and beeswax on worn skin, but instead he was struck dumb.
✷ ✷ ✷
Bees have lots of eyes, said the little Twins when the Firstborn went to pick them up at school. They have two big eyes and six little ones, babbled the Boy Twin, and his sister put three fingers on her temples, eyes, three of them here, and they circled him, buzzing around him, telling him he was a flower and doubling up with laughter.
✷ ✷ ✷
His face was that of his genetic mother but only the closest relatives knew that, plus the Father and the Lady, and none of them ever mentioned it. And the Mother who came after had made her portraits disappear, all the pictures where the first wife posed alone or with the husband she would leave a widow. There was no image left of the mother holding her son by the hand or in her arms, smiling. Not one. The Firstborn couldn’t bring himself to ask her what she’d done with those photos.
Her voice hoarser than ever, the Lady swore to the Firstborn that the Mother had placed other photos on top of them, in the same frames. Polaroids of the fat Twins on her lap, the teenage sister with an illegible diploma in her hands, the Firstborn with his eyes glued to the paving stones. But his mamita was still there, watching them grow up, peering through the holes of other eyes. The Lady wrinkled in an exaggerated smile, and the Firstborn asked if she thought he was stupid. He’d already taken the frames apart, and his mother wasn’t there. The Lady pressed her lips together and nodded and went to her room, to her drawers, to a shoebox, from which she retrieved the only photo she’d managed to save.
He lingered over the profile of his dead mother. The high topknot of her era. The earring that hung from her ear. He ran his finger over the hooked nose that made him more masculine while it made his mother more real.
✷ ✷ ✷
The Firstborn had gone to bed early because he’d be up at dawn for the marathon, and he’d left his wallet beside the camping bed, within reach of Ella, who was still awake. Her hand crept like a tarantula over the rug and reached it, opened it slowly, slid her fingers into the folds full of cards until she found her mother in that single faded photograph on the threshold of two eras. Beside her stood the rejuvenated Father, who was looking sideways at his distant cousin, caressing the shoulder of that mother still a bride who was discovering the camera right at that instant, as though caught by surprise.
The Firstborn suddenly snored, his breathing stopped for a second, and Ella stared at him, startled. She saw her mother in her brother, obliquely, but right away she vanished.
If Ella had inherited that arched nose the Firstborn had gotten, she never would have operated, not a millimeter of bone cartilage uvula mother, she would have jealously defended that nose from the Mother, who went through life prescribing that a person slice off anything that might be considered extra. Fat and wrinkles. The hump of the nose her brother treasured and that Ella would have liked for herself.
✷ ✷ ✷
In a future scene, the nurse who extracts blood for a routine test palpates Ella’s forearm and tells her, you’ve got good veins. I’m sure you get that from your mother. Because sons inherit their father’s afflictions and daughters get their mother’s genes. That’s what she says, and Ella turns her eyes toward the room’s paltry window thinking that she would have liked to suffer share inherit ruin her mother’s affliction.
Her biological mother had deprived her even of her genes.
Nor did she look like the Father, as some people told her in an attempt to console her.
Every time Ella described an ailment, the volunteer Mother exclaimed, like me at your age. All Ella’s aches were those of the other Mother. Those infections, the Mother had had them. The extremities that would fall asleep on Ella in the future had fallen asleep on the Mother in the past. Ella’s suffering was nothing but a repetition.
A hundred times the question: Whose carbon copy was Ella?
✷ ✷ ✷
Even the Mother had archived the suspicion about the eldest’s anomaly, while the Firstborn secretly studied his skeleton and understood that only exercise could make it sturdier, lift weights, pull pulleys, increase the number of push-ups, squats, sit-ups, but now not even his muscles could protect him. He injured himself training and he could no longer run or jog, only limp; his pain was deep, untouchable. He crossed the finish line of his last race dragging a fractured heel and a pinch of shame.
Ella took him to the hospital in a taxi to see a doctor after an eternity of refusals to be seen. The radiologist sent him to the rheumatologist, who sent him to the traumatologist, who confirmed he had spent his whole life suffering from osteoporosis.
Suffering, repeated the Firstborn, going back over all the steps he’d taken, knowing that the pain had never been in his bones.
✷ ✷ ✷
All the fractures of all those years fell into place, but instead of asking him about his bones, Ella wanted to give a radiant spin to her brother’s gloomy situation, telling him how the earthquake that year had fractured earth’s axis, changing the terrestrial incline by eight centimeters and shortening the day. Her brother said nothing, and Ella filled the silence on the line with her enthusiasm. We’re spinning faster. The days are now 1.26 microseconds shorter. If we need to in the future, we could force new fractures to incline the orbit even more and avoid collision with some planet or asteroid in free flight.
Her brother cut her off midsentence. Ella filled her lungs with air. Her Father, she was sure, would be interested.
✷ ✷ ✷
Porous bones? That’s what he has? I can’t believe you don’t know what osteoporosis is, her Father reproaches her. Lies galactic invention. Lies that bore into the bone.
Really? The Mother opens her clairvoyant eyes. But that’s a woman’s disease! And it’s a terrible sight, the gums that appear in her mouth when she separates her lips to add that the Firstborn’s mother had broken her hip once or maybe twice. She was my mother, too, Ella corrects her as she listens to the list of breaks the biological mother suffered in life. Now the Mother is saying that it must be, of course, it’s a genetic failure inherited from that mother aunt now-distant cousin of the Father. You were spared, she intones, but Ella wonders who would want to be spared from their inheritance. Genetics are not always destiny, she thinks.
gravity
✷ future time ✷
In her pocket, her fingers again found something hard and sharp, like a tack but curved. It was a clipping of her Father’s grooved fingernail, from his hands that were a world. He used to leave such remnants of himself for Ella to find later. If her old Father were to die suddenly, she knew she’d go on finding him in her pockets.
