Rodrigo Rey Rosa - Severina

Without replying, I accompanied her to the ambulance, and after helping her into the back, where one of the paramedics was putting an oxygen mask over Señor Blanco’s face and the other was giving him an injection in the arm, I leaped in too. The driver pulled away abruptly.

“He was sitting on the edge of the bed, and I saw him fall back. He fainted,” said Ana. “A stroke, I guess.”

“Yes, a stroke, a brain hemorrhage,” said one of the paramedics.

For a moment the sound of the siren — which was all I could hear — reminded me of the original sirens, who had the bodies of birds, not fish, and whose song led men to their ruin. The incoherent images that tumbled through my mind left me thinking that the idea of love that comes down to us from the Romantics, who associated it with death and sometimes with the devil, was too gloomy to be credible, much less desirable, these days. Modern love, twenty-first-century love, had to be different, I thought straightforwardly, maybe just to reassure myself.

The old man was breathing with obvious difficulty. I took Ana’s hand and squeezed it. Without turning to look at me, without taking her eyes off her grandfather’s lifeless form, she returned the pressure. Then she gently removed her hand.

I sensed that the old man was going to die. I imagined the possibility of a gratifying transference: Ana would turn her attention to me.

“He’s dying, this time he’s dying,” she said.

The senior paramedic’s gaze was oscillating between his watch and the old man’s chest. He said: “He’s not in danger; he’s breathing normally.”

“He’s not going to wake up,” Ana said to him.

The paramedic didn’t reply.

The ambulance accelerated, and thanks to inertia—“beautiful inertia”—Ana pressed against my shoulder. I turned to hold her.

We stayed like that, neither of us saying a word, until we reached the hospital. The ambulance pulled up at the emergency entrance, and the siren stopped.

“I’m terrified of hospitals,” said Ana, who seemed diminished, the very image of desolation. “Will you stay with me?”

I helped her out of the ambulance under the hospital’s neon sign, while the paramedics transferred Señor Blanco from the stretcher to a trolley. A cold breeze had sprung up. Ana was shivering. She put her arm around my waist, and I put mine around her shoulders, and clasped together like that we walked into the hospital.

“You go with him. I’ll take care of the rest.” Suddenly I felt like a father, although my feelings for her were far from paternal.

She followed the trolley into the intensive care unit and disappeared behind the swinging doors.

I went to the admissions desk. I filled in the forms and provided the guarantees required for Señor Blanco to be admitted. With a mixture of hope and fear, I imagined the tangle of consequences to come, all traceable to the physical act of writing my name and contact details on that piece of paper and signing it.

I sat in the waiting room for just over an hour. An image came to me from something I had read — I can’t remember what: a Hindu monk who spent nine years absorbed in meditation, with his face to the wall, in order to discover Nothingness, Nirvana, the extinction of individual existence. I felt stupid: I had just signed papers that committed me to covering the hospital fees of a man I barely knew, the grandfather of a woman I barely knew either, and who — from the little I did know of her — was not exactly what you would call trustworthy. And then, just like that, with a shrug of my shoulders, a deep breath, a change in the contents of my visual field (from the toes of my shoes to a polar bear swimming with her cubs among chunks of ice in blue water on a muted television screen in the waiting room), suddenly I felt deeply in love and ready to stand by the vows that I still hadn’t sworn. For the first time in my life I was determined to give love every chance to run its course. I had signed those papers as one might sign a marriage register. And for a moment I felt freed, released from mere appearances and from an ingrained but strange vanity — the obscure vanity of the single man. I told myself that I had taken the first step toward liberation through love.

At eleven-thirty I began to nod off. A siren woke me. In a flurry of controlled agitation, a group of nurses and paramedics surrounded by men armed with machine guns and assault rifles burst into the hospital wheeling a young man on a trolley. The sheet covering his body was soaked with blood. They went into the intensive care unit; two men stayed to guard the door.

At last Ana appeared.

“They say he’s stable,” she said. “But he has to spend the night here.”

“He’s stable,” I repeated to myself. I was starting to get seriously worried about the hospital bill.

Ana smiled; she had read my mind.

“Keeping him here could work out to be really expensive, couldn’t it?”

“Tonight’s already paid for, anyway.”

“Really? Thank you,” she said. “I think we can go now.” She swiveled her eyes like a comic actress.

Christmas and New Year’s went by, and still Señor Blanco hadn’t regained consciousness.

During that time, we read or reread the following books, among others:

La tentation d’exister

Contre la musique

La carne, la morte e il diavolo

Daphnis et Chloe

Une ténébreuse affaire

The Honorable Picnic

Plain Pleasures

Black Spring

Among the Cynics

Flirtation

The Book of Heaven and Hell

“You’re not going to believe me,” said Ana Severina one night — her spirits seemed to be lifting again—“but I was in Borges’s library, in 1999, in Buenos Aires.”

We were sprawled among books in the living room of my apartment, where we spent most of our time. I propped myself up on an elbow and gave her my full attention.

“His widow wouldn’t let anyone in, but she was in Geneva at the time. One way or another I managed to charm the person in charge,” Ana explained, rather ambiguously, but I didn’t press her for details — I didn’t want to spoil the moment—“and I was allowed in, under strict surveillance, of course. Video cameras and everything, like in your bookstore, huh,” she joked. “I went back day after day for three straight weeks. The happiest and strangest weeks of my life!”

This made me feel absurdly jealous.

“It was incredible, chaotic, full of treasures,” Ana said with a laugh.

She told me about the notes Borges had made in the margins or on the flyleaves of his books: sentences that underpinned or opened or closed some of his most famous essays and stories.

“You might find this hard to believe, but I didn’t take anything,” said Ana. “I didn’t dare!”

For weeks, we talked about that library and others, while Señor Blanco remained in the hospital, in a coma.

Ana Severina had kept the room at the Pensión Carlos, but we ate together once or twice a day, and she often spent the night with me. I ended up giving her a key to my apartment.

I thought of Ahmed occasionally, but during those days of happiness I didn’t call him and he didn’t call me.

One afternoon, I think it was in March, Ana Severina and I had the following conversation. We were in an old Chinese restaurant.

“There’s no point keeping him in the hospital, is there?” she began.