Andres Neuman - Talking to Ourselves

Before seeing the doctor, I chatted with Lito and Mario. Lito told me they had slept in the truck. I thought we had agreed they were going to stay in hotels. I chose not to get angry because they seemed happy. Mario told me he hadn’t been feeling sick. He sounded relaxed. When he’s anxious or he’s lying to me, he pauses strangely in mid-sentence; he takes breaths in unnatural places. Lito was shouting excitedly. Hearing him like that comforted me. At the same time it saddened me. He said he saw a landscape just like the one in the Road Runner cartoons. They’re eating well. I’m not. I’m going to choose the exam texts. Then I’ll spend the afternoon reading. My nerves are calmed by reading. Not true. They aren’t calmed, they change direction.

After leaving the surgery, I went (fled) to a bookshop. I bought several novels by authors I like (I chose them quickly, almost without looking, as if I were buying painkillers) and a journal by Juan Gracia Armendáriz, which I leafed through by chance. I suspect his book will be not so much a painkiller as a vaccine: it will inoculate me with the unease I am striving to overcome.

“Illness, like writing, is forced upon us,” I underline in the journal, “that is why writers feel awkward when questioned about their condition.” In a sense the opposite is true of us teachers, we seem to wear our condition on our sleeve, we exist in a classroom. I imagine the same goes for doctors, only it must be far worse: in the eyes of others, without respite, they are always doctors. “And yet when questioned about their favourite techniques or their best-loved authors, writers will talk incessantly, in the same way the sick become particularly garrulous when we enquire after their ailments,” the difference being that writers can’t help talking about something that saves them, whereas the sick can’t help talking about the thing that is dragging them under.

I have just come from seeing Dr. Escalante. It wasn’t what I expected. Not in any sense.

But was I expecting anything?

I arrived at his office exactly on the hour. As I had supposed, I was obliged to wait quite a long time. I was the last to be called in. Dr. Escalante and I greeted one another coldly. He asked me to take a seat. He said, “Let me see,” or some such phrase. All perfectly normal. After that, I am not sure what happened, or how.

At first he behaved as always. He listened, nodded, and gave didactic answers, as though avoiding the most troublesome aspect of every reply. That exasperated me, because I hadn’t gone back there to revisit platitudes I already know by heart. Sometimes I have the impression doctors tell you things not to help you understand what is happening, but to delay your understanding. Just in case, with any luck, in the meantime the illness is cured. And, if it isn’t, at least they will have saved themselves the awkward business of revealing the worst. This cautiousness drives me nuts. I told Dr. Escalante so in no uncertain terms. I detected a look of irony and at the same time of mild satisfaction on his face. He smiled. He seemed to relax. As if he were saying: So you’re one of those. The kamikaze type. The type who believe they prefer to know.

At that moment the doctor struck me as a man who knows he is attractive, without being good-looking.

From then on Dr. Escalante’s tone changed; he unclasped his hands, moved closer to the edge of his desk. I was immediately on my guard, trying not to straighten my hair, cross my legs, not to blink or anything. And, for the first time, we had an honest conversation. He was brutal, direct, and at the same time respectful toward me. He spoke to me as an equal, without using patronizing euphemisms. He confirmed nearly all my fears. Although he insisted that the trip wasn’t the real problem. I was supposed to know everything he told me, and yet hearing it still shocked me. It made me think of Dr. Escalante as an honourable man. After all, they don’t pay him to be that sincere.

When it seemed the conversation was over, one of us, I don’t recall who, made some remark about marriage. Nothing memorable. A passing comment. Yet, almost without us realizing it, our conversation was rekindled. And not only did it regain its intensity, it turned more personal. I talked about my son, his uncles, aunts, and grandparents. Escalante spoke of his mother, who died from the same illness he is now attempting to combat. I mentioned the panic attacks that have kept me from sleeping since Mario is the way he is. The doctor confessed that when he first started practising, he suffered from terrible insomnia. And he also told me he was separated. He told me this, I don’t know, with unnerving empathy. I pressed myself against the back of my chair. He glanced at the time and frowned. I sprang to my feet and thrust my arm straight out, so as to shake his hand at a distance. He said: I can’t believe how late it is. And then, squeezing my hand: I have to go now. I’d gladly ask you along, Elena, but it’s a work lunch. I told him not to worry, that I should have left ages ago, that I had to do I don’t know what I don’t know where. And I hurried toward the door. Then he added: But we could have dinner, if you like.

“I realised what the feeling was that had been besetting me,” I underline, as I read a John Banville novel with some trepidation, “since I had stepped that morning into the glassy glare of the consulting rooms,” when there is an illness in the family, light angers or even repels us. “It was embarrassment. Embarrassment, yes, a panic-stricken sense of not knowing what to say, where to look, how to behave,” until not long ago I loved the mornings, I would get up eager to fill myself with light, and leave for work feeling I was accompanied. Now I prefer the night, which at least has a certain quality of parenthesis, somewhat like a sterile chamber: everything appears slightly deceptive in the dark, nothing seems willing to go on happening. “It was as if a secret had been imparted to us so dirty, so nasty, that we could hardly bear to remain in another’s company yet were unable to break free,” now Mario is far away but our secret is still here, in the house, “each knowing the foul thing that the other also knew and bound together by that very knowledge,” Mario has left, and that knowledge remains. “From that day forward all would be dissembling. There would be no other way to live with death.”

Today has been utterly disconcerting. Because I’m not exactly drunk; far from it, I never get drunk, but a little tipsy perhaps. Because it’s two in the morning. And because just now, outside the front door, I gave Ezequiel a long hug goodbye and we even brushed the corner of our mouths with our lips. The wine was wonderful, made entirely from grapes harvested at night, or so the sommelier told us, what all of them? Amazing, how can they possibly see the grapes? Truly wonderful, I wrote down the name of the vineyard so that I can order some online, it wasn’t too tart or too fruity, the sommelier was terribly friendly.

Maybe some coffee will clear my head.