Andres Neuman - Talking to Ourselves

Last night I took with me to the hospital an essay Virginia Woolf wrote about her own illness. I was curious to know whether this text would guide me or drag me down further. Yet I sensed I was going to find something there. Something in the language Mario now speaks. I fell asleep almost at the end. When I woke up I wasn’t sure I had actually read it. Until I saw what I’d underlined. With nothing to lean on and my unsteady hand, they looked like crossings-out.

“We cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters,” that is the ambivalence of the sick, which explains why I sometimes feel angry with him. He has been shot down, yes, he has been shot in the back. But because of this he has left us. As though he had abandoned us to join a war no one else knows about.

“To hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear,” or Alonso Quijano, De Pablos, Funes, “has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her,” or Garcilaso, Bécquer, Neruda, “but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry,” hence this desperate need of words?

“What ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness,” and these great trunks topple for both the sick and their carers, both endure a second operation that amputates something akin to their roots. “When we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature,” or perhaps it isn’t so strange: Who wants to make a fire from the wood of their own tree?

Since Mario has been sleeping at the hospital, I have to be on standby during the night. My nerves are electrified from not taking tranquillizers. One day my head will shut down all of a sudden, like when a fuse blows. Delayed sleep is degenerating into a habit. Into a sort of insomniac workout. My normal state is this mixture of lack of rest and inability to rest. And so I write.

Sometimes I find myself watching the other patients and their relatives, and I have trouble telling them apart. Not because they look alike (health is so painfully obvious that it makes you ashamed in front of the sick), but because, deep down, we are all doing the same thing: trying to salvage what we have left.

By caring for our sick person, we are protecting their present. A present in the name of a past. What am I protecting of myself? This is where the future comes in (or hurls itself out of the window). For Mario it is inconceivable. He can’t even speculate about it. The future: not its prediction but the simple possibility of it. In other words, its true liberty. That is what the illness kills off before killing off the sick.

This unknown time, this section of me, is what I am perhaps trying to salvage. So that everything that has been done wrong, not done, half done, won’t crush me tomorrow. For us carers, the future widens like an all-engulfing crater. In the centre there is already someone missing. Illness as a meteorite.

What is to be done? Action seems terribly obvious: to care for, to watch over, to keep warm, to feed. But what about my imagination, which has also become ill? Is it wrong of me to plan ahead, to rehearse again and again what is to come? Am I preparing myself for the loss of Mario? Or am I snatching away what little I have left of him?

I mentioned this to Ezequiel once, a while ago, when he was only Dr. Escalante. We were in his office. Mario had gone to the toilet. I took the opportunity to ask him about the appropriateness of planning ahead. I remember Ezequiel saying to me: If you don’t live in the present today, tomorrow you won’t know how to live in the future. I found his Zen-like tone rather irritating. I asked him to be more specific. But Mario came back from the toilet. And Ezequiel smiled and didn’t say anything anymore.

I keep coming across books that are appropriate for hospitals. I don’t mean books that distract me (it’s impossible to be distracted in a hospital), but rather that help me understand why the hell we are there. Where I am not convinced we should be. Where I brought him to leave him in other people’s hands. Now, when I read, I search for him. The books speak to me more than he and I speak to one another. I read about the sick and the dead and widows and orphans. The sum of all the stories could fit into this list.

“Then he took out a syringe,” I underlined last night in a short story by Flannery O’Connor, “and prepared to find the vein, humming a hymn as he pressed the needle in.” When they inject Mario I find it impossible to watch; they usually talk to him about something else while they are doing it, and I have the impression that what they say reaches his vein too. “He lay with a rigid outraged stare while the privacy of his blood was invaded by this idiot,” Mario says that what he most hates about being in a hospital is that as he gets worse, everyone feels obliged to put on a hopeful face for him. “He gazed down into the crater of death,” the crater! “and fell back dizzy on his pillow,” every so often, Mario cranes his neck, lifts his head, and lets it drop again.

Every night, between paragraphs, I watch Mario sleep and I wonder what he is dreaming about. Does one dream differently in a hospital bed? Because, to be sure, one reads very differently.

Cold, always cold, he feels cold in summer; even though they cover him, he shivers. It is as if his skin no longer warmed him.

Heat can be an extreme sensation, but it doesn’t accuse anyone. If one person is suffering from it, the other doesn’t feel at fault. When Mario grows cold, on the other hand, I feel I am letting him down. That I should keep him warm but don’t know how. I ask the nurses if they couldn’t perhaps turn the heating on, and they look at me pityingly.

I find it hard to leave. In the hospital I sustain my mission. My mission sustains me. Life outside is becoming more difficult. I don’t know whether there is a name for this abduction. Fleming’s Syndrome? When I don’t look after anyone, no one looks after me.

Every afternoon, when I open the front door and hang my bag on the coat stand, I realize how big this house is going to be. I walk through its emptiness. It seems to have been furnished by strangers. Not only is my husband missing, and my son, whom I call obsessively. I, too, am missing here. Although the objects appear intact, time has spread itself over them. Like a museum of our own lives. I am the only visitor and also an intruder.

There is no one here. No one in me. The person who cries, eats, has a nap, goes to the bathroom, is someone else. I hesitate to see my friends because they always ask the same questions. I don’t evade them either, because I am afraid they will stop asking. When I go to bed, as I close my eyes, I have fantasies about not waking up. As soon as I open them, the ceiling caves in on me.