Luis Leante - See How Much I Love You

Everything caught his attention. A little while before reaching the barracks, as they went by the market, Montse’s image had vanished from his mind. By the time they got off the truck, he was sure that this was where his wounds would heal.

5. Parador Nacional: A large state run hotel common in many Spanish towns and cities.

6. Djellaba : A long, loosely fitting hooded outer robe with full sleeves. Worn by both men and women.

WHEN DOCTOR CAMBRA STARTED HER TWENTY-FOUR-hour shift on the 31st of December, she couldn’t have guessed that the new century would usher in a radical change in her life. Nor did she suspect that the events of that night would help her make decisions she didn’t think she was ready for.

She wasn’t actually supposed to be on duty that day, but she swapped her shift with a colleague because she would have found it very hard to spend New Year’s eve at home on her own for the first time in her life. In the last few months she’d taken extra shifts on numerous occasions. Still, this one was something special, given what the arrival of new century meant for so many people. The Casualty Ward of the Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau was prepared for a very busy night. Few staff were hoping to get more than two or three hours’ sleep. But, in fact, before midnight they admitted fewer, less serious cases than on a regular day. Although she didn’t have much to do, Doctor Cambra walked up and down trying to keep herself busy. She would go to the pharmacy, restock the cupboard with gauze, and make sure they had received as many bottles of saline solution as had been ordered. Every time she walked into the staff room where the TV was on, she would hang her head and sing to herself in a mumble to stave off her despair. She was afraid she might break down in front of her colleagues at any moment, like that time she had burst into tears in the middle of an examination, while the nurse looked on in distress, not sure whether he should tend to the doctor or to the elderly woman who couldn’t breathe because a rib was pressing on her lungs. Now, every time Doctor Cambra heard her name through the loudspeakers of the casualty ward, she went wherever she was needed without thinking about anything except her work. At times an intern with a badly receding hairline and an aquiline nose would remind her of Alberto, who was still her husband. But, unlike a few months before, she was able to smile. She could even picture him cooking dinner with that radiologist who was obsessed with the gym and the hairdresser’s; he who had never done the dishes and had never opened a kitchen drawer except to take out a corkscrew. The last time she’d seen him it looked as though he had dyed the grey hairs on his temples and sideburns. She also imagined him belly dancing for the radiologist, and chasing her around a coffee table, in one of the wild cat-and-mouse games that he hadn’t played with her for years. Her feelings for Alberto had changed from sadness to irony, and from irony to sarcasm. She would never have imagined that someone who had been such an important part of her life since her youth would become, in barely ten months, a sort of rag doll, an empty, fake being — a veritable bastard. She found it hard to remember what he looked like when they’d met, at the time when he drove around Barcelona in that white, impeccable, polished, perfect Mercedes of his, it was just like him. A doctor from a family of doctors, a young cardiologist with a brilliant career, he’d been seductive, intelligent, handsome. Now, Doctor Cambra could not rid her mind of the image of her husband of twenty years chasing the young radiologist. When she bumped into Doctor Carnero, the anaesthetist on duty, she was still wearing a sarcastic smile on her face. They looked at each other in complicity.

‘This is the first time I’ve seen anyone smile on a New Year’s Eve shift,’ said the anaesthetist as she walked by.

‘I guess there’s a first time for everything.’

A voice called Doctor Cambra through the loudspeakers. Before the message was over, she was at her station.

‘In number four there’s a young woman with fractured limbs. A motorcycle accident.’

Doctor Cambra’s blood boiled. Her face flushed and her heartbeat accelerated. She walked over to the room they’d indicated, to find a very pale young woman being tended to by a nurse and an assistant. The girl looked scared and helpless, and the doctor immediately felt her legs grow weak. She tried to regain her composure, and said, in an annoyed tone:

‘Who took her helmet off?’

‘They brought her in without one. She probably wasn’t wearing it.’

The doctor lifted the girl’s eyelids and shone a little torch in them. She couldn’t help taking her hand and squeezing it. The girl’s other hand looked dead and was scratched all over. The doctor pressed gently on her thorax, spleen, kidneys, and stomach, saying: ‘Does this hurt? And here?’ The girl moaned, but shook her head.

‘Let’s see. Tell me how it happened.’

The girl mumbled something, but she couldn’t string her sentences together.

‘Do you feel a bit sleepy?’ asked the doctor. ‘Don’t fall asleep now. Go on, tell me what you can remember.’

As the girl tried to make herself understood, the nurse took her blood pleasure.

‘We’re going to need a CAT scan.’

The assistant wrote it down. The girl went on talking, now more coherently.

‘Blood pressure’s eleven-eighteen.’

‘How old are you?’ asked the doctor.

‘Nineteen. I have to be home for dinner.’

Doctor Cambra held her breath and looked away. That may have been the same thing her daughter had said six months before, when a doctor at the casualty ward had asked her what she had just asked the unknown girl. Nineteen. Her daughter had turned nineteen in March. As they took the girl away for her scan, Doctor Cambra left the room. Her daughter’s death would not come between her and her work, but she could not forget it either. Just like this girl, she’d been nineteen, and was riding her moped with her helmet hanging from her arm, heading home for dinner with her mother. However, it had been her father who got the call. At the hospital, Alberto’s name was well-known. They didn’t even have to look up his number in the dead girl’s diary. It was on file, at reception, along with the frequently used numbers. Montse didn’t know what hurt her the most, how long they’d taken to let her know, or the fact that it had been her husband, in a deep voice filled with self-possession, who had told her that their daughter had died. Besides, he had shown up with the radiologist, as if he wanted his lover to witness his fortitude.

An hour later, when Montse bumped into doctor Carnero in the staff room, her sarcastic smile had been replaced by a vacant gaze. On seeing her, the anaesthetist knew her friend was about to slip back into that deep hole she was trying to climb out of.

‘Coffee?’

Doctor Cambra nodded. It felt good to be surrounded by people and talk about mundane things.

‘How’s your son?’

The anaesthetist squinted at her and tried to smile.

‘Oh, he’s fine. But how are you? A moment ago you were smiling to yourself and now I come here and find you…’

‘I’m fine. My head’s not always where it should be, that’s all.’

‘We all get that, Montse. It doesn’t really make you special, you know.’

‘Nothing does, Belén. I’m the least special person on the planet.’

Belén tried not to take her friend’s observation too seriously. She knew better than anyone that Montse didn’t need words or advice but time for her wounds to heal.

‘Listen, Montse,’ said the anaesthetist. ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’