Andres Neuman - Talking to Ourselves

I need some aggression. I need somebody to remind me I exist in myself. I need Ezequiel like a line. Like a gram, a kilo, a whole body. I am not talking about love. Love can’t enter when there’s no one home. Or if it does, it finds nothing. I am talking about urgent assistance. Emergency resuscitation. I want to be humiliated to the point where I no longer care. I want to be a virgin, not to have felt anything.

I switch on the radio. I don’t listen to the voices. I turn on the television. I don’t watch the pictures. I go from YouTube to my bank, from Facebook to books, from politics to porn. The wheel on the mouse is reminiscent of the clitoris. The fingertip controls forgetting. I browse the headlines, I contemplate the catastrophe of the world through a glass, I slide over its surface. I try to absorb the absence of pain because I am not the one suffering in other places, in other news. Does this offer me any relief? Yes. No. Yes.

In the inertia of my searches to discover what it is I am searching for, almost without realizing I tap in: help.

The first result is “psychological help.” Online therapy.

The second result is the Wikipedia entry that defines and classifies the word help .

The third result is help in configuring broadband settings.

The fourth result directs me to the Twitter help centre: “Getting started,” “Troubles,” and “Report violations.” It sounds like the sequence of an attack.

The fifth result helps with editing content. Assuming the user has any.

The sixth result is from the search engine itself: help with searching.

I am not surfing. But sinking.

“In the past,” I underline in a novel by Kenzaburo Ōe, “a siren had always been a moving object: it appeared in the distance, sped by, moved away”, disappearing completely, while I gave, at most, a fleeting consideration to the imagined sufferer and then forgot about it, as you forget a sound you no longer hear. “But now, I wore a siren stuck to my body like an illness”, the illness rotating on itself, my back transporting it. “This siren was never going to recede”. Every time I hear an ambulance, I am afraid it is coming for us.

In a while, I’ll return to the hospital. I only had time to go home, take a shower, and change my clothes. I didn’t have a nap this afternoon.

He always accepts. But he never takes the initiative of calling me. His only initiatives with me (and he seems to reserve them, to savagely preserve them) take place in bed. I asked him whether this is part of the protocol, or what. Ezequiel simply replied: This is in your hands.

Each time I go to bed with him, I feel disloyal not only because of Mario. Also because of Lito. I have the feeling I am neglecting him, abandoning him, when Ezequiel penetrates me. As though, when he does it, he reminds me I am a mother. Then I feel the urge to tell him to penetrate me harder, deeper, in order to give me back my son. I have monstrous orgasms. They hurt bad. He thinks this is good. He finds it healthy.

The more I see Ezequiel, the guiltier I feel. And the guiltier I feel, the more I tell myself that I deserve some satisfaction too. That from time immemorial heads of families have enjoyed their mistresses, while their foolish wives were dutifully faithful. And the more I push myself to escape with Ezequiel. Although I realize that in the end I am not escaping anything.

Every day, at some point, the room doors close in the hospital. All of them. At once. Then a metal gurney goes down the corridor. A gurney draped in sheets.

I look out and see these gurneys go by with a mixture of horror and relief. I watch the nursing assistants pushing them, I hear the wheels turning. Every day they take someone. Every day they bring a replacement. This stream of bodies isolates our room, where we are still safe. This stream also tells me that, at some point, someone will stick their head out of another ward and see me walking behind a gurney. And they will have the same pointless reprieve I have now.

Knowing what will happen, how and where, every gesture contains an element of deception. I bring him newspapers, films, sweets. We call Lito, we chat with Mario’s brothers, we speak of happy memories. I smile at him, I caress him, I make jokes. I feel as if I were part of a conspiracy. As if we all were forcing a dying man to pretend he isn’t dying.

I have the impression that families, and doctors, too, perhaps, soothe the sick in order to protect themselves from their agony. As a buffer against the excessive, unbearable disorder which the ugliness of another’s death creates in the midst of one’s own life.

“Writing about illness,” I underlined last night in an essay by Roberto Bolaño, “especially if one is seriously ill oneself, can be an ordeal. But it is also a liberating act,” I hope this applies to us carers too, “exercising the tyranny of illness,” this is something we never talk about, and it is true: the oppressed need to oppress, the threatened want to threaten, the sick yearn to disrupt the health of others, “it is a diabolical temptation,” we carers also have temptations, especially of the diabolical variety.

“What did Mallarmé mean when he said the flesh was sad and that he had read all the books? That he was sated with reading and sated with fucking? That, beyond a certain moment, every book and every act of carnal knowledge is a repetition?” I very much doubt it, that moment could only be marriage, “I believe Mallarmé is speaking of illness, of the battle it unleashes against health, two totalitarian states or powers,” illness not only takes control of everything, it also rereads everything, makes things speak to us of it. “The image that Mallarmé constructs speaks of illness as a resignation to living. And to turn around this defeat he unsuccessfully opposes reading and sex.” What else could we oppose?

The two of us lie on our backs in his bed, shoulder to shoulder, covered in sweat, catching our breath, floating in that fleeting moment of oblivion. I tried to go from my body to the idea. I think better after I have felt my entire body.

I asked him whether, beyond genetics, he believed psychological factors were at work in illnesses such as Mario’s. According to some theories, Ezequiel replied, we become ill in order to find out whether we are loved.

I dressed and slammed the door.

I called my mother in tears. She told me I was right to get it off my chest. Immediately, as if through telepathy, my sister called me. She asked me how Mario was and told me about some flights she had just found.

When I contemplate him, skinny and white as any sheet, I sometimes think: This isn’t Mario. It can’t be him. My Mario was different, not like this at all.

Yet at other times I wonder: What if this is the real Mario? And rather than having lost his essence, what remains is the essential part of him? Like a distillation? What if we are misinterpreting our loved ones’ bodies?