Anne Garreta: Sphinx

Returning to Paris after a week in Amsterdam, I found a letter from one of A***’s cousins, whom I had met during my first trip to New York. His letter, mailed a week earlier, was to inform me that A***’s mother was sick. Standing in the middle of my study, considering the letter I held between my fingers, I recalled that old woman whom I knew hardly at all. The thought of her distant solitude, lost in that cruel, cold city, choked me with remorse. I couldn’t recollect her face, or anything else of her. Nothing. Except the surroundings: those streets, the avenues with the wind chasing around old newspapers; a nighttime vision of dilapidated facades in the deranged neon lights and lonely pedestrians swept along by the breeze. This city was a film noir before my eyes, mute in the silence of my apartment. I remained immobile for a long time, confronted with this unmoving vision.

In the morning, without having packed a suitcase, I took the first plane for New York. While my gaze was floating above the voluptuous mass of cumuli we had torn through while gaining altitude, I was haunted by the thought of this woman. I was thinking of her reclusive life surrounded by memories of the life that had abandoned her again and again. What I knew of her, what A*** had mentioned in passing in our conversations — seven years ago already — was coming back to me in fragments, little by little recomposing the details of her existence. There was a portrait of her as a young woman in a pink stole, painted after the war; I recalled her scandalous marriage with a bourgeois white man, the child (A***), the desertion and subsequent divorce that resulted in the child’s fugues and eventual flight to Europe, only to return all too rarely. She kept the photographs of this devastated past in the drawer of a green, wooden writing desk. Did she ever look at them? I think she forced herself to forget, not to look, living between her bed, her somber work, and her kitchen where she made do with reheating the meals she no longer had the willpower to prepare for herself. When I knew her, already I perceived that she was exhausted with living, that she was carrying an intense lassitude inside of her, almost with arrogance.

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.