Anne Garreta: Sphinx

When I returned to the room, the nurse had finished her tasks; as she was leaving, I slipped a twenty-dollar bill into her hand that she attempted to refuse. Once she had left, I approached the aged woman, her black skin contrasting with her white sheets. She asked me why I was doing all this for her. I searched for the words to respond: “It’s a kind of debt toward A***…And you remind me of someone I would have wanted to be able to care for, as I now do for you…I have felt and I feel all that you’ve felt and feel. I’m almost a stranger to you but you’re not to me…” She reached her hand toward my face; I knelt down by the bed and she wrapped her left arm around my head while caressing my hair. I could hear her heart beating and, as if in response, the discreet noise of the machine at every spike, a syncopated beep-beep in the silence of the room. I saw this dark-skinned hand and its pale, tidy nails out of the corner of my eye. With regret surging in me like a stifled sob, I thought of death, coming soon to consume all this.

Suddenly she said that I must be tired, that the trip must have worn me out. I swore to the contrary. She smiled and insisted that I return to my hotel to get some sleep, reassuring me that she was doing fine. It was night, what more could I do? My impotence took me by the heart. I promised to return the next morning at nine o’clock sharp, and kissed her on my way out. It was wrenching. In the hallway the nurse was approaching, carrying a tray of medications that she was about to distribute to the patients. I asked her to make sure to notify me at the slightest alarm. She asked me how I was connected to this woman, whom I was taking such good care of and with whom I seemed to share neither race, ancestry, nor even age. I didn’t know how to respond and briefly explained that this woman was the mother of a person who had been very dear to me, who had died nearly seven years ago. She studied me; I don’t know what was going through her mind. My features drooping with fatigue, my dark clothes, my foreign accent, this strange story, the color of my skin, death’s repeated blow — what did she make of it all?

I went back through the hospital hallways in reverse. It was nine o’clock; the waiting rooms had been emptied. I passed nurses wheeling beds that had transported wailing women dressed in poor rags, cloth, and newspapers, or the silent injured. In a service elevator some people were attempting to pin onto a stretcher a black man howling and foaming at the mouth. Between two doors I caught sight of a woman waiting, terrorized and with an absent gaze, cradling a child in her arms. I remember that she was wearing a woolen bonnet and that she wore laddered stockings that fell over misshapen slippers. I walked the length of these hallways mechanically; the lights bathed the surfaces in a dirty yellow tint. In the big, deserted hall where I ended up at last, I saw security guards in uniform chatting and patrolling in pairs, walkie-talkies in their hands and revolvers in their belts. A sorrow bore into my ribs that I attributed to fatigue and to the effect of all the stimulants, coffee, and cigarettes I had consumed to ward off sleep. The footsteps of those around me dizzily diminished in my head.

The freezing night air hit me as I went up the ramp and gusts of wind whipped against my face; it had started to rain. On the avenue, cars were passing, inundating the building I had just left with light from their high beams. I was suddenly invaded with a dread of New York. Taxis passed me by, empty but not stopping. I started back toward my hotel on foot in the rain, twenty blocks of wet sidewalk reflecting the city and its lights in a blurred, murky image. I kept my head lowered, attempting to shield it from the brutal blasts of wind and the waves of rain. I saw New York only in a mirror of asphalt.

I walked straight up 42 ndStreet without noticing that I was rolling snippets of incoherent English around in my head: expressions and interjections that seemed to originate in songs I had heard long ago, when I was still with A***. I was searching for the lyrics to a particular song that we had enjoyed singing sometimes while walking at night through the streets of strange cities. Gradually the words came back to me, though I kept stumbling over the refrain:

Well hello then good old friend of mine.

You’ve been reachin’ for yourself for such a long time

No need to explain, I’m not here to blame,

I just wanna be the one to keep you from the rain

From the rain.

It’s a long road when you’re all alone

And someone like you will always choose the long way home

There’s no right or wrong, I’m not here to blame

I just wanna be the one (…)

And it’s good to know my best friend has come home again

‘cause I think of us like an old cliché

but it doesn’t matter ‘cause I love you anyway

Come in from the rain.

I tried to sing it to myself as I walked, but my voice cracked impossibly on the high notes. I took 42 ndStreet going west, walking with my head empty and my feet frozen. An old blues song came back to me, but I remained unable to sing; my soul probably wasn’t yet sufficiently black.

Back in my room I ordered an herbal tea from room service. The television was emitting flashes of light, muffled echoes. From the window, high up, I was watching all that was down below: the intersections, the endless streets, the blanket of roofs punctured by skyscrapers and stained with lights blurred by the rain. I opened a window and the humid rumble of the city abruptly washed over my face. That odor of city rain, which, hot or cold, has always frozen my blood, surged forth like a spindrift of funereal nostalgia. I was snatched from it by the sound of the bellboy ringing at the door. He entered and placed the tray on a low table. I signed the bill, gave him a dollar tip, closed the door behind him and went back to my spot on the bed to drink my herbal tea. The TV screen and the screen of the glazed bay windows reflected the same insane scintillation. The tea filled me with a sweet warmth as I stretched out on the bed. My limbs felt shattered from all the distance they had traveled: the Atlantic, a hospital, and twenty blocks. Without even the strength to undress, I fell asleep feeling as though I were being crushed.

A sharp ringing woke me in the darkness of the dead of night. I groped for the telephone; the receptionist announced a name I didn’t recognize. It took me a few seconds to get a hold of myself, to accustom myself once more to the language, to realize where I was. I finally understood that I was being called from the hospital because the woman I was here to take care of had just suffered a serious drop in blood pressure— blood pressure, blood pressure, the phrase resonated in my brain as if on a loop, an interrupted feedback amplifying itself — had fallen into a coma, was going to die —die, dying. Yes, I had understood, I was on my way.

I hung up. I was cold — from lack of sleep, from the wet clothes I still had on, from the idea of this cold city. In the darkness, in my drowsiness, I sensed death in the air. I turned on the light and undressed; my gestures were slow, clumsy; it felt as if I were never going to be able to change into dry clothes. In the elevator I lit a cigarette, which made my head spin. In the mirror I was frightened by how pale I was. I thought I saw death on my face, in my eyes. How did that occur to me? There exists no image of death. I surprised myself, I suppose, by thinking, by knowing, or by understanding — I don’t know which — that death lived inside of me, that death had come up to the surface in my sleep to take possession of my carnal covering, to put it on and to cover me in turn with its cast-off rag.