Lina Meruane - Seeing Red

refrigerated chamber

I’m all patched, with a bandage over each eye fixed with adhesive tape. My fingers have just woken up, and they feel about the edges in search of a corner they can peel away. A severe hand intercedes, and there at the unstuck edge a prohibition falls. Ignacio? Let go of me, Ignacio, my face is burning. But Ignacio doesn’t let go and I repeat, take this mask off or I’ll take it off myself. Without raising my voice, without even hearing myself, I ask again if those skinny but strong fingers are his, that rough cheek, the mouth that kisses me almost without touching me. I ask him, with no compassion. Do you still love me, now that I’m your mummy? If you love me enough, stick your finger under these patches and make sure I still have eyes. Maybe I’m having this conversation with myself, maybe I still haven’t woken up and I’m still immobilized in a nightmare. But in that sinister place I hear myself whisper again, with increasing awareness, with growing fear, what happened in there? Do I still have eyes under here? I hear myself clearly, begging Ignacio to let me be sure they’re still in their sockets, that it hadn’t been a mistake to blindly sign those documents. I wonder how long I’ve been absent from my life and the lives of others. It’s late, says a muffled voice that could be his but could also be my mother’s. And then I fall into another pause, from which I recover to ask again about the doctor. He’ll be here tomorrow, they answer with unexpected clarity and in unison, my Ignacio and my mother. Tomorrow morning, she says. Stop touching your face, he says. But my skin is stinging and so is the uncertainty and my entire body feels like running away. Let’s go, I say resolutely, but no one moves. Not yet, replies my mother, and in a fluty voice she announces the nurse’s entrance, who in turn confirms that I’ll have to stay. Stay the whole night. With someone. I’d rather be alone with myself, I want to say, but the nurse perforates my mouth with a thermometer; she listens to my heart above the sheet, she strangles my wrist in search of a pulse. Which of them is going to stay with you? the nurse asks again, but I, with my mouth occupied, can’t answer. Ignacio raises a hand. My mother raises another. The contest between them begins. I keep my lips tight around 36 degrees while the nurse certifies it in her file, not watching the scene in which they, after having confided family secrets, now compete like strangers to spend the night in a reclining chair. My mother throws out the word newcomer, Ignacio parries with the word baloney and says anyway, let’s see what Lina says. Tie, I respond. You should both go. But instead, out comes a coin that contorts in the air, showing its head and then its tail and then clanging on the floor. Ignacio leaves and heads straight for his insomnia, and my mother announces that no matter how tired she is she won’t be able to sleep a wink. She promises to watch over me while I sleep, but as soon as she leans her head against the reclining backrest, she’s asleep. I hear her heavy, her slow breathing. A hellish night begins, which is anything but hot: the room is a chamber refrigerated by the metallic buzz of hundreds of ventilators. The blanket must have slid to the floor, and I shiver under a steady stream of air. I can’t get out of bed. I’m attached to the saline bottle that’s hydrating the blood in my veins. They haven’t left me a bell to ring in emergencies. That’s what my mother is here for. Mom, mom, mom, repeats my echo in the hospital abyss. Momomomom, I say again, raising my voice, directing a resentful but contained damned old lady her way. But my curse doesn’t shake her, my rousing call doesn’t move her, my fists scorching the side table, my kicks in the bed. Not even her own damned snores wake her up. Not even a far-off, intermittent hiccup that also disturbs my night. I scrawl a message with the toes of my now-frozen feet: If I die of hypothermia or pneumonia, may someone accuse my mother. In abject desperation I decide to seek consolation by unsticking a corner of the patch and letting the night slip in under it, along with my finger that reaches in search of my eyelid and finds it. There is a dozing, convalescing eye. One eye next to the other, with small bumps that hide knots under the eyelids. And it’s already dawn when someone comes in and I beg them to take my mother away and cover me up while they’re at it. I lose my senses under the blankets, and then we reunite. Awake and still bewildered, the three of us again: my mother complaining about how she didn’t sleep, Ignacio drawing out his vigil. There we are, a sleepy trio, sitting on the bed like castaways, waiting for the doctor.

bubble theory

If my fingers had been slowly pulling at the edges, his finished pulling it off: in one yank, off with the first patch, and another yank for the second, tearing out my eyebrow hairs. We were sitting face to face for the zillionth time, the doctor and I. Open your right eye, was the first thing he said to me. And the second: Do you see anything? I sat for an instant thinking about his question, thinking that I didn’t know how to answer what he was asking me. I was a tremor, right down to my pupils. Now, repeated Lekz, more slowly and articulately, as if he were translating: Do you see anything? If I was taking a long time to answer it wasn’t because I didn’t understand the question, but because I’d been trapped in the very center of the verb. See something. See what? I don’t see anything, doctor, I murmured. I was dazed or blinded by a vision of eternal life in the precise instant of death. I only see light, doctor. A white light so bright it stuns me. That’s all. No shadow, no shading, not a single object. Uh-huh, murmured Lekz between his teeth, and then he muttered a curt good that for an instant struck me as the opposite of what he was saying. Good was a word Lekz sometimes slid out like a crutch, and other times it seemed to weigh heavy on his tongue, like a rock that sinks in silence, leaving only ripples. The word had an expansive effect in the room. Because there were other people there besides us: my mother who sighed and my Ignacio, whose clothes hissed as he shifted in his seat. Lekz continued his examination: he lit an electric moon inside my eye, illuminating my most perverse desires. And what do you see now? he asked, still pointing his flashlight at me. Only immaculate light, doctor, no more. That is, even less than before. But unshakeable, undaunted Lekz said, and now? In the left eye? The doubled light was exhausting me. I wanted to close my eyelids, both at the same time, and return to the refuge of darkness. That light illuminated emptiness, solitude, my absolute helplessness. I’m still blind, doctor, but now everything is white. I sensed my mother standing up from her chair when she heard me, Ignacio uncrossing a leg. How Lekz ran his hand through his mane of hair in search of his future baldness, all to tell me that this was good, dragging out the vowels; how the best thing, for now, was for me to see just that. Lekz had emptied my eyes and filled them up again with helium. That was what I was seeing, then: two balls of gas in which the light converged. I inflated your eyes and now they’re pressurized. I had no other choice, said Lekz somewhat solemnly and abruptly, and then I sewed up all the holes by hand. You’ll be feeling like your eyes are going to explode, like the stitches are about to burst. But this, he rasped, his lung thinking back to the infinite cigarettes he’d consumed in his previous life; this, the pain in your eyes, is just the beginning. You’re going to have to keep your head leaning forward so the gas rises, puts pressure on the retina, and the retina scars over. For how long? I asked, not paying much attention, not thinking about the effort it would be for my neck, the tension, the acute kinks I would have. Between four and five weeks, maybe six, said a hesitant and particularly cautious Lekz. The time it will take the gas to dissolve. But five or six weeks will fly by. Fly by, I repeated, rushing ahead without calculating that the brain weighs a kilo and a half, and you had to add the skull on top of that. A dead weight at ninety degrees that I would have to start carrying immediately. You have to keep your head down, ordered Lekz without an ounce of compassion. Lower it now and don’t raise it again until the bubbles disappear completely.