Andres Neuman - Talking to Ourselves

“The Husband begins too many of his sentences with ‘What if,’” I begin each day rewinding my actions, wondering what would have happened if I had taken better care of him, what if I had realized sooner that he wasn’t well, what if I had convinced him to see the doctor sooner, what if I had accepted his initial reaction, what if I had agreed to his idea of rejecting treatment from the start, what if I had acknowledged that it wasn’t working, what if I had allowed him to say goodbye to us at home, what if we had told our son the truth, what if, what if. No one is saved from the “What if.” No “What if” saves anyone.

He called.

Today. He called.

Him.

He said (yesterday, Ezequiel) he hadn’t wanted to disturb me before. (Disturb me.) That, out of respect, he had chosen to keep silent. (Respect. His for me.) Are we going to see each other? he asked. (See each other. Him and me.) I don’t know, I replied. You don’t know or you don’t want to? he asked. I don’t know if I want to, I replied. And I hung up.

What offended me exactly? His untimely reappearance? But everything about Ezequiel is untimely. This was precisely what excited me about him.

Or did it offend me that he took so long? That he didn’t insist from day one? Did his respect bother me? Or his discretion? Or the possibility that he had forgotten me? That he was capable of repressing the urge to call me, to see me, to defile me?

Yet if he had begun calling me on day one, what would I have done? I would have hung up on him. And so?

And so, here I am. This is me.

What are you writing, darling? asks my mother, who is staying with us for a few days. Nothing, I reply, nothing. It’s good for you to express yourself, she says smiling. And she goes out, leaving me a cup of tea. I wonder whether my mother expresses herself.

Did I reach a point where I wanted Mario to die? I woke up with this question. I woke Lito up with this question in mind. My son opened his eyes and I had the feeling he could read it. I hugged him, kissed him, buried myself in him, swallowed my tears, I told him I had a cold.

As Lito walked in to school, I watched him turn his head toward the car.

What is the difference between taking pity on a sick man and deserting him?

I threw up between classes.

Ezequiel has not called.

“It is a commonly held idea,” I protest through a novel by Javier Marías, “that what has happened should be less painful to us than what is happening, or that things are easier to bear when they are over with,” and it is the opposite: while things are happening we have to deal with them, and the anaesthetic comes precisely from dealing with them. “This is equivalent to thinking that someone dead is less serious than someone dying,” someone dying at least asks you for help, justifies your pain. “There are those who say to me: keep the good memories and forget the end ,” what sort of advice is that? don’t we remember books, movies, love affairs partly because of their endings, largely because of their endings? what degree of forgetfulness does it require to remember a beginning without its end? “They are well-meaning people,” they are idiots, “who don’t realize that every memory has been tainted,” grief spreads through memory like an environmental disaster.

“The effects far outlast the patience of those who appear willing to listen,” they call me, ask how I am, and, when I tell them the truth, they are disappointed or try to contradict me, as though it were wrong of me to go on being upset when I have such loyal friends, such steadfast relatives. “Every misfortune has a social sell-by date, nobody is made for contemplating suffering,” or happiness for that matter: the only thing we tolerate in others is monotony, the tendency not to exist, “this spectacle is bearable for a time, while there is still some turmoil, and a certain possibility of prominence for those watching who feel indispensable, playing the role of saviour,” but why don’t you call us when you need help? they complain, what are friends for? what is family for? They are confusing SOS with OSS, what I call Obligatory Sentimental Service.

When someone you slept with dies, you begin to doubt their body and yours. The once touched body withdraws from the hypothesis of a re-encounter, it becomes unverifiable, may not have existed. Your own body loses substance. Your muscles fill with vapour, they don’t know what it was they were clutching. When someone with whom you have slept dies, you never sleep in the same way again. Your body doesn’t let itself go when it is in bed, your arms and legs open as though clinging to the rim of a well, trying not to fall in. It insists on waking up earlier, on making sure at least it possesses itself. When someone with whom you have slept dies, the caresses you gave their skin change direction, they go from relived presence to posthumous experience. There is a hint of salvation and a hint of violation about imagining that skin now. A posteriori necrophilia. The beauty that was once with us remains stuck to us. As does its fear. Its hurt.

I promise not to write until he calls.

This is what you get for being proud.

For being proud and a whore.

But, but.

He called. Again.

And not only that. He also begged me.

He told me he dreamt of seeing me again. Incessantly, he said. In a serene voice. I didn’t think this was enough. I refused. He asked what he had done wrong. I laughed. I asked him if his question was serious. He kept saying yes, in an increasingly anxious voice. I told him not to worry so much, because he had a legion of widows to console. He asked me if I was trying to humiliate him. I asked him if he was trying to humiliate himself.

Then he wept. Ezequiel wept.

I hadn’t felt such distinct pleasure for a long time.

Confronted with death, our emotions tense up, stretch, almost snap. They veer from paralysing pain to hyperactive euphoria. The other’s death throes are more or less fleeting. Not these conflicting emotions. As though the survivors’ inner arc had collapsed, leaving them capable of either extreme. Of the greatest empathy and the greatest cruelty. Animal loyalties and wartime treason.