Andres Neuman - Talking to Ourselves

My brothers-in-law were waiting for me at the entrance to the crematorium. They were arguing when I got there. The undertakers had just arrived, but there was a problem: they had brought us a casket with a Catholic cross. An enormous crucifix stretching the whole length of the lid. I assured them I had ordered a plain one. In fact I wasn’t so sure. I had the feeling I was dreaming every conversation. Juanjo thought the casket with the crucifix was perfect, just what their parents would have wanted. His younger brother disagreed. The middle brother thought I should be the one to decide. What should we do, then, Madam? the employee from the funeral parlour asked. I replied without thinking, as though someone were dictating to me: Let God’s will be done. Juanjo took it as sarcasm and walked off. I heard him murmur: And on top of everything else, she blasphemes.

I prefer not to think about the wake. Silence. Family. Crematorium.

I look up wake in the dictionary. The third entry is absurd: “Spend the night watching over the deceased.” As if, instead of watching over our guests, we were attending to the dead.

Absurd and precise.

I hadn’t read a single line since that day. What for. I always thought books, all books, spoke of my life. What would be the point of reading about something I no longer care about.

But yesterday, in a drawer in his bedside table, I found a novel Mario had left half-finished. And I felt duty bound to read it from there to the end. It was a novel by Hemingway, an author I loathe. I started exactly where he had left off. It was strange working out the other half.

Today I went back on the pills.

I cried stones.

Since Lito is back, it may seem like a contradiction, but Mario’s absence is more noticeable. The time I spent here alone was a kind of simulation. Its unusualness postponed the return to routine. What pains me most are my conversations with my son, when we talk about death in the kitchen.

He asks me how such a big truck could get crushed. I tell him sometimes big things break more.

He asks me why Pedro looks the same as before, if he had such a big accident. I tell him his uncle did a really good job fixing him up in the workshop.

He asks me if he can go on another trip in Pedro. I tell him maybe when he is older.

He asks if he can go and play ball in the park. I tell him he can. But my son doesn’t leave the kitchen. He remains there, seated, staring at me.

I have thrown away his clothes. Except for his shirts, I’m not sure why. I stuffed all his belongings in bin bags, almost without looking at them, and I put them out with the rubbish. I went upstairs. I made dinner. After putting Lito to bed, I ran down into the street. The rubbish bins were already empty.

A colleague had recommended The Foolish Children by Ana María Matute. I was slightly put off by the title. Now I understand why she kept insisting I read it. Death and childhood are rarely dealt with at the same time. We adults, not to mention mothers, prefer childhood to be innocent, pleasant, tender. In brief, the opposite of real life. I wonder whether, by shielding them from pain, we aren’t compounding their future suffering.

“He was a peculiar child,” I underline as I reflect on what Lito’s teachers tell me, “who never lost his belt, or ruined his shoes, or had scabs on his knees, or got his fingers dirty,” they tell me he doesn’t go to the playground during break time, he doesn’t seem interested in playing with the others, and is always drawing in a notebook or staring out of the window, “he was another child, with no dreams of horses and no fear of the dark,” and that sometimes he goes quiet, sits very still, and frowns, as though he were about to come to some conclusion he never reaches.

But I don’t care about my qualms, I want to look after him anyway, protect him from everything, embrace him in the playground, talk to him as if he were a baby, lie to him, spoil him, erase for him every trace of death, tell him: Not you, son, never.

Last night I dreamt I came home (except the house was bigger and it had a garden with orange trees), I opened the door and Mario greeted me wearing a costume. There was a party, and all the guests were dressed as skeletons. Someone handed me a costume. I put it on. Then Mario told me his death had been a joke, and the two of us burst into fits of laughter, violent, convulsive laughter, and with our guffaws the skeletons slowly began to fall apart.

Each morning, when I open my eyes, I see the hospital. Everything is there, like a sticky sheet. The monitor. The drips. The oxygen mask. The shadows under Mario’s eyes. His defeated smile. Good morning, sentinel, he would say to me.

Who was in greater need of that treatment: him or me? Was I experimenting with my hope through another person’s body? How could I have let them take him? What were we doing in the hospital: attending to him or detaining him? Were the doctors taking care of him or their procedures, their conscience? Did I keep him there in order to put off my loneliness?

Again and again I go back to the image of his diminished body, his sagging muscles, his half-open mouth. I reproach myself for not remembering him at his best. I keep telling myself it is unfair to insist on this final portrait of him. But the wonderful, strong Mario doesn’t need my help. And it is as though the other, weak Mario were still asking me to care for him in retrospect. Sometimes I think that, by continually going back to him, this suffering Mario will finally be able to rest, will feel accepted.

When a book tells me something I was trying to say, I feel the right to appropriate its words, as if they had once belonged to me and I were taking them back.

“She has already started to wear sunglasses indoors, like a celebrity widow,” I was startled to read in a short story by Lorrie Moore, sometimes I do the same, using my photophobia as an excuse, so that Lito won’t see my eyes. “From where will her own strength come? From some philosophy? From some frigid little philosophy?” Actually, I don’t get my strength from reading, but I do understand my weakness.

“She is neither stalwart nor realistic,” if I were stalwart I would surrender to loss forever, that would serve me right; as for realism, illness ends up turning it into daily ravings, so lucidity and hallucination become all mixed up, “and has trouble with basic concepts, such as the one that says events move in one direction only and do not jump up, turn around, and take themselves back,” events in life never move forward, they rewind ceaselessly, they repeat themselves, wiping out previous versions, the way we used to do with cassette tapes, the way Mario did with these recordings I am incapable of listening to without self-medicating, and which I have no idea when I should give to Lito.