Anne Garreta - Sphinx

The night porter called me a taxi. I went down the same road I had taken a few hours earlier in reverse. I wasn’t looking at the streets; I was trying to glimpse the reflection of my face in the glass that separated me from the driver, but it was too dirty and murky. My watch read ten o’clock, the time in Paris; I switched it to the time in New York. The sight of the hospital overwhelmed me. I lost myself in the hallways cluttered with beds. Cops were bringing in the hobos they had picked up in the street on stretchers; here and there were odors of sweat, vomit, urine, and disinfectant. The plastic double doors closed, swishing behind me. I hadn’t run but I was out of breath. I sat for a moment between two chatting security guards before recommencing my haphazard route. Was I dreaming? Deserted hallways followed cluttered corridors; it seemed as if I had crossed dozens of identical gazes, the empty stares of the New York night flotsam, and my own gaze was probably no different. A sign finally pointed me in the right direction. In a corridor identical to all the others, I spotted the night nurse in the middle of injecting a sedative into a woman who was babbling deliriously, pouring out an abstruse flood of Hispanic sounds. The young girl at her side was sobbing and wringing her hands, the tears hideously disfiguring her and revealing decayed incisors in her contorted mouth. When the nurse had finished, I approached her and she brought me to the room. The doctor was near the bed, speaking to the presiding nurse. They had placed an oxygen mask on the old woman’s face. She had suffered a drop in blood pressure; as if there were nothing else to be done except wait for an unlikely miracle, the doctor withdrew. There was suddenly no one else in the room except for me and this body, whose breathing and failing heart depended on the machines. She didn’t see me, probably didn’t hear me either. With terror I drew my hand near hers, which remained inert. I leaned over her, observing her face. I spoke to her.

This dying woman was a painful reminder of her child. I pronounced the name of my beloved. An identical absence. And now, she was dying. Had she waited for me to come, for someone to come, before surrendering to her exhaustion with living? She had probably waited, with all her strength, for a voice to come and appease her long-lived solitude. What if she had died from despair, from the atrocious despair at having awaited a voice that never came? What if she had died in her bed, in this infernal hallway, always listening for the sound of a familiar footstep; amidst the noise, the deranged cries, the echoes of conversations, brushed by a thousand bodies, all foreign and indifferent. I kissed her forehead, wiped off the sweat, and thought about how on my dying day there probably wouldn’t be anyone to do the same for me. I straightened up and lingered in silence, taking note of all the noises surrounding us, the beeps of the machines connected to her, the imperturbable rhythm of belabored breathing, the gaps of electronic silence…I went out into the hallway and asked the night guard for a coffee. I came back into the room and sat on the chair I had moved next to the bed. I held this old momma’s dark-skinned hand in mine. I felt life beating savagely, shamefully within me; my heart resounded in its ribcage; my muscles, though spent by fatigue, played and moved in physical impatience. Life can be handed down, but not handed over, I thought to myself. The nurse entered and remained a moment in my company. I kept quiet while she talked to me about a number of things. She mentioned that her colleague had told her a bit about me. I told her my story, why I was there. I was speaking to her in a deep, hoarse voice without looking at her, caressing this hand I was clinging to lovingly. The nurse left soon after. I lingered in the penumbra, the only light coming from a lamp at the head of the bed. I was not at all aware of time’s passing; my sole link to the world was the hand I was holding. I was looking at this face, searching for something of A***’s in it.

My rumination was interrupted by a sound. I turned my head but could not identify the source. Suddenly I understood that the noise was nothing but a sudden silence: the heart monitor had stopped beeping and a green, flat line passed continuously on the screen — the machine displayed a zero. I squeezed her hand in mine; I knew she was dead. Oxygen continued to flow, now useless. I called the nurse and the doctor. The doctor recorded the time of death, came back toward me and announced that it was all over. He asked me if I could take it upon myself to notify the family members, if there were any. And in the same tone, without transition, he asked me if I consented to an autopsy. Looking at the corpse, I was submerged in a kind of disgust at the abrupt resurgence of raw, cannibalistic reality. I responded without diverting my gaze that I judged autopsies to be barbaric and moreover of little scientific use, since they never yielded any new discoveries. I entreated him to excuse my refusal and thanked him for his care.

The nurse went about disconnecting all the machines hooked up to this body they had failed to keep alive. She explained to me what came next: declaration of death, retrieval of the deceased’s personal effects from the hospital safe. I had to wait another two hours before the administrative services opened. I sat back down beside the cadaver. All my thoughts during those two hours of vigil were muddled and kept getting away from me; I felt nothing but an invasive inner turmoil, a mute silence without the succor of meditation. At eight o’clock I went down to the office to take care of the formalities. They gave me the clothes, the watch, and the bag that had belonged to the deceased. I inquired about a funeral home and they told me of one not far from the hospital. I went back into the room one last time. The waiting rooms were filling back up with patients. My body was cutting through the crowd, as if acting on its own; my soul seemed to be missing from it. The nurse on duty approached me to offer her condolences. I told her I would return the next day to settle the details of the burial.

The weight of it all, the heaviness and difficulty of the preparations, fell onto my shoulders. It had stopped raining, the sky had cleared, I saw the sun and upon leaving the hospital I felt the New York air, impalpable, enveloping me. I crossed the avenue, running, without seeing anything. I kept running all the way down the street to the building where the deceased had lived. It was a building with twenty floors, very close to the hospital. Closing the door of the studio behind me, I found myself again in the room that, since Paris, had been haunting me in a vision. It hadn’t changed a bit, still a concretized shell of solitude where she had lived for years, neglecting her soul. I sat in the armchair, under her portrait done after the war. A*** had lived there too, before fleeing to Europe; in the closet were A***’s old schoolbooks and records. In a drawer of the desk against the wall I found a number of photographs and some letters A*** had written long ago. What was I supposed to do with all of this now?

I took care of all the practical details, notified the family, paid the priest and the undertaker. She was buried in a cemetery in north Harlem. Some of the family came to the funeral. I asked those whom I had met during my trips to New York with A***—the old mommas in tears, her sisters — to come by the apartment of the deceased to take anything they wanted to keep. Their sons regarded me strangely.

I had already made a packet of photographs, letters, and objects that I wanted to keep, which I assumed would not have interested the family because they held only sentimental value. I decided to stay another two weeks in New York and moved out of my hotel. The rent of the deceased’s apartment, now empty, had been paid through the end of the month, so I started sleeping in a blanket on the floor.