Andres Neuman - Talking to Ourselves

Not today either.

It happened like this.

I had just had a shower. I was dressing to go to spend the night at the hospital, when the phone rang. It was Juanjo. He spoke quickly or I understood slowly. The monitor. The serum. The oxygen. The two nurses who had just come in. He couldn’t get his words out. He was having great difficulty breathing.

I hung up. I’ll never be able to forgive myself for the first thing that entered my head.

I thought about finishing drying my hair.

My hair. My head.

I ordered a cab. It didn’t come. I didn’t wait. I walked out of the house. I crossed in the wrong place. I thrust myself between a lady and a cab for hire. The lady ticked me off. I took umbrage. I muttered something about artificial respiration. I climbed into the car. It drove off. There was traffic everywhere. We were going slowly. Sometimes no faster than the pedestrians. I saw the numbers changing on the taximeter. Suddenly I got out. I got out of the car and I ran. My phone rang. I nearly passed out. I answered terrified. It wasn’t Juanjo. It was the cab company. They wanted to know where I was. The driver had been waiting for me for some time outside my house. I yelled at the woman from the cab company. I kept yelling at her as I ran. I poured abuse on her. People stared at me. The woman hung up. I kept running. I was dripping with sweat. My legs were stinging. My entire body was throbbing. A mix of burning and cold rose up my throat. I thought I was about to spit out a lump of something. Something that rattled. As I ran I thought about Mario. At last. Completely. Only about him. His mouth. His nose. His breath. His breathing. I tried to help him. I tried to breathe with him. I choked. We choked. I imagined my mouth on his mouth. My lungs and his. I imagined I was blowing. Blowing hard enough to raise him off the bed, to propel me to the hospital.

In the end I arrived in time.

We never arrive in time.

That is what happened on the day of the fifteenth before ten to eight. The night was worse.

Someone had to call the funeral home to buy the coffin. And the newspapers to dictate the death notice. Two simple, inconceivable tasks. So intimate, so remote. Buying the coffin and dictating the death notice. No one teaches you these things. How to get sick, care for, declare terminally ill, say goodbye, hold a wake, bury, cremate. I wonder what the hell they do teach us.

First it was the funeral parlour. Or, to be precise, the funeral parlours. Because there are many. A great many. All offering different deals. The hospital itself furnishes you with the contact numbers. As if this were part of the treatment. With the same efficiency with which they give enemas.

One parlour charges less for the coffin, but extra for the transport to the cemetery. Another gives you free transport to the cemetery, but charges more to hire the venue for the wake. Another gives you a discount on the venue, but doesn’t carry a cheaper range of coffins. Yet another seems more costly, but their price includes taxes. Then you realize the other prices that seemed more reasonable didn’t include tax. And you are back at square one. And the queues of widows and orphans come and go. If dying is just another procedure, I prefer the rituals of any exotic tribe.

As you dial number after number, enquire, write down, have misgivings, and hang up, you never cease to feel, not even for a second, like the stingiest creature on earth. Incapable of offering the person you love, the person you didn’t save, a decent repose. You suspect you are committing an atrocity, bargaining at a moment like this. That it would be nobler to bow to this extortion in silence and allow yourself to grieve. But, at the same time, as though you were being stabbed in the back, you resent the crass opportunism of this business, the bloodthirsty profiting from your loss. So you try again to find a figure that seems reasonable (how much is a reasonable death? what is a costly corpse?), a price, let’s say, that doesn’t oblige your corpse to claim riches he didn’t have. And you are back to square one with the phone calls, while the lines of widows and orphans keep coming and going.

In the end, in the middle of a call to one of the parlours, I felt bad about all my bartering, and signed up to the first deal they offered, I gave them my personal details, my credit card number, thanked them, hung up, and instantly regretted having accepted a price Mario never would have accepted.

Dictating the death notice was no easier. Dictating it: announcing the death of a loved one in the third person. Imagining someone is reading it as you are drafting it. Pretending you don’t know your husband has died, and that you are finding out from this announcement. He, in the third person, your beloved, in the second person, who will never exist in the first person again. Grammar doesn’t believe in reincarnation. Literature does.

I must dictate the death notice straight away, they told me, or I’d have to wait another day, they explained. If I didn’t have the text prepared, they lamented, there was no choice but to do it on the spot. The newspaper was closing, they informed me. There was enough time to insert a normal death notice, a religious one, they corrected themselves, one that prays for the soul of the, and so on, they recited. But there isn’t time, madam, they said hurriedly, to start reinventing the format.

As I improvised the text of the first death notice, I was tempted to give my name in place of Mario’s.

I had to dictate the final death notice to a trainee with a twang, because everyone in the office had gone home. And it was a question, he said, of middits . If we didn’t send it off straight away, the notice wouldn’t get enderred . When the trainee said get enderred , I heard interred . The notice wouldn’t get interred. Afterward, he offered to read it back to me, to bake sure the text was coddect . I listened to it delivered in his voice, in the twangy voice of someone who was probably the nicest of all those who had answered me that night, I listened to my death notice full of apparent misspellings and impossible blunders. Then I went into paroxysms of laughter, a succession of muscular contractions over which I had no control, as though I had become tangled up in an electric cable, and the trainee with the twang asked me if I was all right, and I said yes and became electrocuted with laughter, and one of my brothers-in-law handed me a glass of water and a sedative.

I went outside to get some fresh air. I noticed no difference between outside and inside. I called my parents’ house. First I spoke to Lito. I told him we would see each other very soon. That in a few days’ time, Mum was going to drive over and pick him up, and that on the way home we were going to stop and eat a double hamburger. I didn’t do a very good job of pretending. Then I asked him to let me speak to his grandma. When my mum took the receiver, I cried for a while. We didn’t speak. Even when she is silent, my mum knows what to say. I won’t make old bones knowing as much as she. Or I won’t make old bones. Afterward, I called my sister. Because of the time difference, I woke her up. She gave me her condolences in a voice thick with sleep, and talked to me about flights, stopovers, dates. Then I called a few women friends. They found the right words to comfort me. Two of them took taxis over. Suddenly it occurred to me that they were able to comfort me so effectively because they’d been practising what they would say to me for months. That made me feel worse. Then I thought about Ezequiel. I sent him a text message and turned off my phone.