Rodrigo Rey Rosa - Severina

“I wasn’t going to say it; I wouldn’t have dared. But you’re right; I don’t think there’s anything more they can do for him there.”

“We’re just throwing money away.”

I took her hand, relieved. But straight away I felt burdened with worry again. Now Ana would have to look after her grandfather, I thought. I remembered that ana means I in Arabic. I felt grateful for the sudden, natural deaths of my parents, years earlier. The motionless ghost of Señor Blanco floated before me in imagination.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

“What do you prefer to be called? Ana or Severina? Or. .?”

“He used to just call me Severina.”

“Severina, then.”

The doctors agreed that medical science could do nothing more for the comatose old man.

“The best thing would be for us to go back to the pensión, ” Severina said to me.

I disagreed. “Even if you didn’t have to pay for the room there, you’d be much more comfortable in my apartment.”

“Maybe.”

I explained that as well as the bedroom, which she was familiar with, there was a little servant’s room beyond the kitchen and the laundry that wasn’t being used.

The room was dark. One of the idiosyncrasies of the local architecture is to provide servants not with a room as such but with a kind of wardrobe just big enough to stand in beside a small bed, and a child-size bathroom with a cold-water shower. Still, it seemed to me that it would be sufficient for an old man in a coma.

When I showed Severina the room, it smelled of damp, of stored clothes and old shoes; it hadn’t been properly aired for months, maybe years. In one corner there was a broom, a pile of scourers, and a dustpan. I was ashamed.

“All this will go, Severina. I’ll have a word to Juana. We have to get rid of this mess.”

“Is it the cleaning lady’s room? Are you going to kick her out?”

“She only comes in once a week.”

“Where’s she from?”

“The altiplano, like almost all of them.”

“Is she Mayan?”

“Well, yes.”

“They scare me, you know, cleaning ladies.”

She didn’t agree with me that her grandfather, in his current state, wouldn’t realize what kind of room he was in. But there was no alternative. He’d be too exposed in the living room. He’d be in the way in my bedroom. And there was no space in the little room that I used as a study. I promised that as soon as he recovered consciousness, we’d put him in a more suitable place.

“Do you think he’ll wake up one day?” she asked me.

A silent ambulance transported us from the hospital to the apartment building. The paramedics took Señor Blanco up in the elevator and, after settling him in the little servant’s room, showed us what to do with the serum dispenser and explained some other care procedures.

“It’s awful,” said Severina when the paramedics had gone.

“This was what he feared the most: having to depend on others. We often talked about it. He once said—“

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

She looked at him for a while, and I decided to leave them alone. She was clearly in the grip of an inner conflict. A few minutes later she came into the living room.

“You’re going to think I’m very selfish,” she said. “I hope you won’t take this the wrong way.”

I guessed what she was going to say from the tortured expression on her face:

“Maybe the best thing to do would be to disconnect that business, don’t you think?”

I didn’t say yes or no. It would be a very slow death, I thought. Severina hugged me. Then (the way she had of doing things like this was all her own) she led me to my bedroom, and there, in what had become my own private plot of earthly paradise, we remained, clocking up two or three more hours on the (illusory) meter of my happiness.

The cleaning lady used to come on Tuesdays. It was April already, and with the arrival of the dry season’s all-withering winds, dust had settled in every nook and cranny of the apartment.

That Tuesday, before going out, Severina came to kiss me in bed. Her damp hair brushed my face. It smelled of almonds.

I got up shortly afterward with a number of premonitions, but they were so vague as to be almost nonexistent. I thought uneasily about Juana, the cleaning lady. I didn’t feel like explaining that I had guests. I bolted my breakfast and vacated the kitchen a few minutes before she arrived.

While she washed up in the kitchen and swept the bedroom and the bathroom, I was reading Schnitzler’s aphorisms. Finally she moved on to the laundry and the room where Señor Blanco lay.

Her brief, shrill cry made me shudder, even though I’d been anticipating something like that. Then I heard her steps coming from the laundry. She stopped in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen.

“Is he asleep?”

“He’s unconscious.”

“Out of it? Poor thing.”

“We have to look after him.”

“Can he hear?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Is it like being dead?”

“More or less.”

I went on reading and smoking on the divan in the living room. The rhythm of Juana’s activity slowed noticeably. Before she left, she asked timidly if the guests would be staying long. I said I didn’t know, and to judge from the look on her face, she wasn’t happy about that.

As I feared — although I hadn’t dared articulate my forebodings — it became clear after a few days that I would have to take care of the old man more or less on my own. Severina didn’t withhold her favors (or, for that matter, give me any reason to suppose that she wanted to live with me forever), but her absences from the apartment grew longer and longer.

She would come back with new books — often titles I’d never heard of — and there was almost always an extraordinary discovery among them, or so it seemed to me. We persisted in the pleasant habit of reading together, quietly, each in a corner with our different books, sometimes for whole afternoons or evenings, occasionally exchanging remarks or reflections, ranging from the vague to the penetrating, on the books or on life in general.

“Pay no heed to those dissimilar sisters, Admiration and Envy, daughters of Merit, the false friend of Success,” she read.

“Who’s that?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Someone wrote it in the margin.” She closed the book to show me the cover. It was On Neoclassicism by Mario Praz.

I made a sign to ward off the evil eye. “It’s funny,” said Severina. “It looked like a new book.”

She used to wake at dawn. The first thing she would do, after taking a shower and getting dressed, was check her grandfather’s serum. Then she’d eat a quick breakfast and go out. When the cleaning lady was coming, she’d stay out for lunch. She seemed to be genuinely afraid of people who cleaned the houses of others. One day I asked her if she could tell me why.

“They can know all about you, but you don’t know anything about them.”

I was thinking: that’s what our relationship is like. “You’re right.” Again, I felt she was reading my mind. “It’s what happens when a relationship is based on necessity,” she said.

“Yes, when it’s like that, there’s nothing you can do.”