Nervous system, p.18
Nervous System, page 18
Never taking their eyes from the tennis players, the uniformed men uncouple the heavy base of the light attached along the wall behind the bed. It raises a cloud of accrued years hairs wings mites, atoms of the patients who came before the Father and that no one has bothered to vacuum. Ella breathes them in and coughs them out, disgusted, and remorsefully ponders the fact that her Father’s wound is open, or closed but above all infectable, and that hospitals are high-risk zones for a sick man.
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A cleaning woman is moving her mop over other people’s filth while she unabashedly coughs up bronchitic phlegm. She sprays elemental particles over linoleum that’s been worn by decades of disinfectant. There’s a crowd of wheels and feet, of laces and plugs, of voices that hamper her work. The mop strings get tangled in the military boots, soaking them. It’s the devious, damp trap that she sets for the soldiers.
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And the same way they entered they take their leave, one by one, the nurse, the cleaning woman, the soldiers, until only one is left, the one with the childish face. That one stands before Ella and recites, waving some hardened hands, an incomprehensible report on the antiquated lighting system that runs through the ruinous building, the many inconveniences it’s caused them, the wiring, the alternating current, the nonexistent replacement parts, the paltry public hospital budget. They’ve had to change another blown bulb and a switch that didn’t work. He talks to her as if she were the hospital director or the head of maintenance or the head of this household where she now lives, as if she were her Father’s owner or his representative. But she’s nothing but an occasional daughter.
The bitter Father: that damned soldier only talked to you, like I’m just here for decoration.
The ascetic Father doesn’t have the strength for the newspaper or the concentration for a novel. There’s nothing to watch on TV and there’s no reason to waste electricity, he says, turning off the newly repaired light.
He’s not going to die, Ella decides, relieved to see him grumbling.
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What the Mother on the other end of the line wants is for Ella to describe the urine in the bag or the bottle it was emptied into. She asks this unaware that the daughter is incapable of discerning shades of color. The daughter hesitates. It’s not lemon butter banana, nor is it honey corn caramel pineapple mustard. Not orange or eternal flame. Watermelon juice? insists the Mother, adding that blood lends a lot of color. No, Ella replies, getting more entangled in the tonal varieties of yellow and red. A little more fiery.
Another glass of water? If I drink any more water, threatens the Father, I’m going to explode.
Ella would have tasted his urine to diagnose him. As a child, she compared the taste of her urine with that of her three siblings. The Twins pissed in diapers where she deposited her tongue, and the Firstborn didn’t flush, as if he aspired to participate in her tongue’s investigation, as if he wanted to find out how far her thirst for knowledge would go.
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It’s all over the news, the lung they’ve just transplanted into a little girl’s body. An adult lung that Ella imagines suffocating in a rib cage only seven or eight years old. A child about to explode. You haven’t learned anything, objects the Father. They only transplanted pieces of lung.
Ella changes the channel and what appears is the soundtrack of the streets filled with protesters. Thunderous noise, barely tolerable. She’s about to change the channel again but instead sits looking at the demonstrators howling against a pension system that has condemned them to an old age of abandonment, and she wonders if they’re sending her a subliminal message.
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Sitting on the hard green sofa, dodging a leak that drips into a container and spatters the wall. Ella is reading the end of a biography of the paralyzed physician who is about to die, or is perhaps already dead.
A slipper swings from his toes while the Father says: you should have read that novel I recommended. She looks up in surprise because she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. You’ll find it on the third shelf, in the sixth position left to right, the Father directs, dictating from memory the cartography of his office. And at that exact coordinate Ella finds, that night, an edition of dry and brittle pages sliced from centenary forests that went extinct ages ago. A classic wrapped in transparent plastic and covered in dust. When she opens it she sees his slightly slanted signature at the foot of a sepia page that was still white when he recorded the date, a calligraphic 05/1957. This is the book that spurred him to study medicine.
She wonders what he could have liked so much about that novel. The doctor is an arrogant toad with jumpy eyes, obsessed with the recent discovery of x-rays. He’s an infamous, ironic doctor, with no pity for his patients. Translucent tadpoles between two waters is the phrase that distracts her. The Father is asleep. Ella will forget to ask him.
The blemish left by the asymptomatic tuberculosis he had but doesn’t know when. Calcification was what that scar was called.
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The tuberculosis patients of that novel inhabit high, stony peaks. The healthy people in the lower lands, the nether regions that were one single country.
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It was the only country prepared for the melting poles and rising waters that were being announced. The country that had implemented a drainage system that would prevent the floods the rest of the planet would suffer. On a trip to that country below sea level, Ella had suffered an infection that came close to destroying her kidneys.
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You were always one of us, ventures the jumpy-eyed doctor when he discovers that the protagonist, visiting to take care of his cousin, is also infected.
We are probably always sick and don’t know it. And although as a child Ella had thought they were trying to scare her with all those stories of what a body can suffer, only later has she understood that those stories were nothing but a gloss. Because the strangest thing is to live. So much can go wrong, she thinks, looking away from her book to check the bag of urine and its changing color.
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General Urology. She finds this manual on another shelf in the paternal office where she spends a few nighttime hours entertaining herself with urology. Fifth edition, 1966. The Father has noted the present of his reading in blue ink, 1967. The Father who signs his name is twenty-seven years old. He writes his name three times: on the first blank page; on the second page, under the title; and on the third, beside the table of contents.
It’s strange. Her Father forbids her to write in any of the books he lends her, but these pages are underlined in the compulsive manner of a student. The Mother assures her that the textbook is hers, but perhaps only the underlining is.
Underlined and annotated books: messages that the Mother left for Ella in the future and for her husband in the past that they shared.
If they both studied that textbook, the Mother must have studied it later.
Reading notes. Slanted handwriting on a loose sheet stuck between the pages. A correction, sentences crossed out and rewritten.
1) Abundant water
2) Avoid repro (What could this mean? Is it what she’s picturing?)
3) Ingestion of vitamins and minerals
4) Limit milk, eliminate cheese
5) Acid phosphate Na or 12 4–6 g. Neutral phosphate Na or 12 2.5 g
6) Pyridoxine. Folic acid. > 25 mg x 30
7) Avoid potatoes, sweets, sweet fruit, blackberries, spinach, jell-o, cabbage, tomato, celery, beet, cocoa, tea, coffee, rhubarb.
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With more blood cells in his system, the Father would have shown more interest in the discovery of that handwritten page. He makes no effort to remember it and shows no interest at all in reconstructing the situation that might call for such a treatment. Everything has changed so much, I’m learning to forget what I learned, because that knowledge doesn’t apply anymore, it’s worthless. Listening to a patient’s body, examining it, touching it; now the only certainty comes from machines, the eyes of machines. Medicine today isn’t the same thing I studied, he adds with a yawn.
But the daughter would rather avoid the machines and those eyes that see all, the minuscule and the distant and the deep, things inaccessible to the human eye.
Feigning distraction, the daughter focuses on the oxytetracycline printed on the bottom of the page. I think that’s a broad-spectrum antibiotic in the tetracycline family, right? She consults the web, the Father consults with himself, yes, yes, he says, and he thinks about it a little more. It’s used to treat diseases in bees.
Because workers drones but not queens suffered from parasites huddled in their bodies, and from bacterial and fungal varieties that spread to those heads of theirs crowned by two antennae that were their nostrils, their heads full of eyes: compound eyes on their temples, and on their foreheads, three simple eyes. There was a virus that attacked those heads or deformed their wings and legs in a mortal paralysis.
Bees, whose extinction would occasion the end of humanity.
They didn’t know stillness, not even inside the hive. Their wings beat the air to keep them aloft and carry them the hundreds of kilometers isotopes ages that they were capable of traveling. They tended and fed one another, they defended one another by stinging the community’s enemies, they died gutted in suicide attacks. The Father let her talk, but when she paused for breath he clarified that bees weren’t as communistic as they might seem. They could be cruel: a sick bee was expelled from the hive by its healthy companions, to protect the queen and the other workers.
Humans had also done this during times of worsening plagues.
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Ella is digging in her pockets for change when a woman approaches carrying a little boy whose cheeks are swollen by mumps. Cramps in the parotid gland. The boy is crying. The woman hands Ella a coin, and though Ella knows there is some risk in accepting it, she rushes to slide it into the slot and grab the second coffee from the machine. She races away from the woman, skips the elevator that’s always overflowing with people. She climbs the emergency-exit stairs, balancing the coffees on the landing, where she stops to catch her breath.
Nothing pleases her Father so much as seeing her arrive with that repugnant instant coffee that they drink together, every morning, in secret.
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Successive messages from the Mother. Did the physical therapist come? Did the Father do his exercises? Did he walk in the hallway? If not, the muscular atrophy will be brutal.
Bones can atrophy too, Ella thinks, and then she forgets that she thought it.
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His hair has grown in spite of the anemia. He pushes it forward with a comb he keeps in his pocket. He’s always worn shirts with pockets and thin little combs inside them, never T-shirts, never shorts, never sneakers: he’s always been a formal man, impeccable, and now he wears a robe that’s open on the sides with four loose strings that leave his ribs exposed, his gray torso. The cloth reaches only to the middle of his scrawny thighs. They walk slowly, the two of them, down the hallway. The Father is stooped over as he drags his IV stand with the bag, and he zigzags like he’s getting drunk on saline. His ribs poking out, his grizzled chest, the country below wrapped in white gauze, and the catheter and the liters of juice honey hungry ants. And the white socks that would save him from blood clots if they weren’t already worn-out. If they weren’t fallen down over his ankles. Ella decides not to look back when her Father bends down to pull them up.
The dreadful giggles of the nurses and young aides.
They’re used to the patients’ exhibitionism, writes El, remembering his recent colonoscopy. You’ve seen one butt, you’ve seen ’em all. Ella knows that not all asses are created equal. Or all penises. Her Father’s, wrapped in cloth.
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In the bed, the Father and the scanty public hospital robe. The Mother exclaims, impatient, could you cover yourself up a little?
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A Father in a shower and a daughter there with him. And a dark and wrinkled hide that hangs between them, amid the curly tangle of his legs. Ella doesn’t have wild hair or that paternal hide, but, when she grows up. Because everyone says that Ella is just like her Father.
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You’ve got to let the doctors come in, says the Father as he finishes his coffee. In that hospital as in all hospitals there roams a troop of octogenarian doctors who know him, who were his colleagues, and there also snake through the hallways, more resolved, more anxious, talking on their cell phones, neophyte doctors who were his students. Their heads peek in the door to say, hi, how are we doing, doctor? and they give a bow and go on with their walk toward other patients, relieved it’s not them in that bed. That afternoon there are three newly graduated doctors who stop by the room. In spite of the anemia and confusion, the Father recites every one of their last names, while they, who were about to identify themselves, keep their names on the tips of their tongues. The Father shows off, reeling off the year semester eternity when they were his students, the mistakes they made on the final exam, their grades.
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At her Friend’s house when the Friend was still in her last year of medical school, the Father’s students would often commiserate with Ella. Their apparent pity was nothing but the prologue to a session of venting. Her Father started his classes speaking in a loud lecturer’s voice, but he gradually lowered it until he was impossible to hear, even for the students sitting in the first row. Some of them had learned to read his lips as his voice evaporated. And the daughter couldn’t help but smile, because she knew that paternal strategy. Ella herself used it in the classroom: when she noticed her students were distracted, she dropped a few decibels. Her students found themselves obliged to migrate to the front row and pay full attention. Or else submit to the whisper that would let them sleep. Ella was demanding on tests, just like the Father whom the aspiring doctors complained of. It wasn’t just that her Father was severe on the written test and ruthless in his grading; he tended to humiliate his students on oral exams for any lack of precision. For a forgotten detail. For excess information and lack of understanding. For not conceiving of the organism as a complex system of signs. For not listening carefully to the list of symptoms. Her Father reminded them that they, every one of them, were responsible for lives and would pay for them if they made a mistake. Error, however, was written into the brain. To err is human, difficult as it was to admit. Only the 404 error belonged to the machine.
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The image of the sliced brain as Ella cuts a cauliflower in half and pulls apart its stalks to boil mash spilt milk with cream and salt. Its thick nerve system, its nearly gray white.
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One day she would hear him say that he’d had to learn to let everyone make their own mistakes. By then the Father was retired.
Another day he said that people live better when they don’t remember their suffering. I’m learning to rid my head of the past, he said. His forgetful daughter agreed.
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The stern doctor who was her Father never mentioned his own mistakes or the deaths accumulated in the folds of his brain. His own mother had perished in an operating room, and he wasn’t able to stop it. Are you allergic to any medications? the anesthesiologist had asked her. No, replied the old lady, full of forgetting. Her memorious son, newly graduated from medical school, would have corrected her, would have explained that she had already suffered two reactions to dipyrone. One slight. Another moderate. The third dose would be the last. Suicide by distraction.
And there was another negligent death he wished he had prevented and that he never managed to forget, because his memory wouldn’t allow it. And the Firstborn’s wrath. And his daughter’s unbearable forgiveness.
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She observes him sitting at a table, without stethoscope hair gel full-color mustache, not moving his lips. Ella brings up her biological mother, asks for the first time if she was the one who provoked her mother’s death, or if the aspirin produced the fatal hemorrhage, or if it was the combination of daughter and drug. The Father shakes his head without raising it, as if that was where he carried the weight of his guilt. They accelerated your mother’s labor, he murmured, but they overdid it with the hormones.
They’d induced a chemical death with her consent.
The Twins weren’t induced, added the Father in a mournful murmur, and neither was your brother, they were all birthed slowly.
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Ella was certain that it was better to have been her Father’s daughter than his student, much as she would have been his best pupil. Ella. Not the Twins, and definitely not the Firstborn, who never hid his contempt for the medical profession.
I always thought you would go into medicine, said the Father, resigned but obstinate: he invariably returned to this question that had been resolved ages ago and that Ella could no longer answer. But the Father’s usual monologue took a detour: in the end, though, you did become a doctor, the only one in the family. You’re the doctor, replied the annoyed daughter. No, the Father contradicted her. Medical doctors had only bachelor’s degrees, to call them doctors was an etymological aberration.
She was etymologically a doctor, but behind his yellow-toothed smile stretched the shadow of a request. When would she let him read that dissertation he had financed? And he gazed at her as though probing her, and Ella held that hard, eighty-year-old gaze, those extinguished eyes, and maybe she quickly blinked a couple of times. It’s just a dissertation, it’s full of mistakes, she replied, trying to compose the crack in her voice, I’d rather you read it when it’s edited and ready for publication.
