“Best not make the effort to talk,” the doctor said to him, affably. “Stay calm and come with me. If you had that bone in your actual throat I’d have to give you a few hard thumps on the back, or compress your thorax; I’d have to get behind you and hug and squeeze you, squeeze to fainting point. Fortunately, there’s no need. The procedure is different for a fish bone in the tongue, if you still have the fish bone in your tongue. It’ll be a simple, yet delicate matter: the fish bone can splinter and go into the jaw, and then take up residency beside the carotid artery on its way to the heart, no less. But we’re going to check it out.”
And they headed for the private consulting room, right there, on the ground floor, through a discreet oak door on one side of the living room. Primavera followed behind, bewildered: she had thought the matter would not go on for long, that they would all, formally, say goodbye to one another, and that her husband would go on being the man she knew. But to see him so composed and obliging, leading General Aipe along, intrigued her as much as it irritated her. Her Doctor Donkey was so naive — she calmed down at last — he really must believe the general was suffering from a stuck fish bone. Then, going along behind her husband’s tall figure, glancing at his affable profile, she suddenly wondered, very surprised at herself, why she was not in love with him, or why she did not accept, after all, that this was her husband and she loved him; there are so many ways to love with resignation, she told herself, why, simply, did she not love him or try to love him and stop, frankly, fucking about? Primavera Pinzón asked herself this, engrossed in her own moment of truth, and now — she suddenly cried out — what will happen? Why did I think of a fish bone? All this is through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault, amen, and for a second she believed, unable to credit it, that she was laughing, that she was roaring with laughter at herself and the two men by her side.
Had he made a mistake in returning home, the doctor wondered, meanwhile.
For years a sort of tacit agreement had been established between him and his wife regarding their private wishes to be “alone.” The doctor himself sometimes went out to the finca “alone,” for a weekend, and Primavera did not object. No doubt about it — the doctor thought — he had neglected to remember the agreement in time or, remembering it too keenly, he had found himself there, besieging Primavera. The fact was, they both knew what to expect from one other: the reckless female patients, for example, who from time to time, and so thriftily, became the doctor’s lovers, did not pass unnoticed by Primavera, who smiled patronizingly — stronger than he was. As for him, why did he resort to these affairs? Simple repayment — he told himself — generosity towards the generosity of certain women exhausted with their husbands, women who were starting to grow old, like him, who admired their doctor and found an occasional diversion in him. The doctor did not feel one iota of tenderness for these tormented patients who invented a whole range of illnesses in order to visit his practice; he just proved to himself that he was alive, and that he was more alive if he managed to make them happy, but — he recognized — while the hospitable embrace occurred, his memory took refuge in the flesh and eyes of Primavera Pinzón: he did not succeed in ridding himself of her.
And now — he wondered — what was he doing leading the general towards his consulting room? If it were only a matter of another of Primavera’s boys, he thought, he would let him go, unscathed, but it was this horrible General Aipe. And something at the doctor’s core inflamed and — conversely — pleased him: the irritation on Primavera’s face pleased him to the point of anguish.
“Eleven o’clock at night,” he said, consulting the clock on the consulting room wall, “Innocents’ Day isn’t over yet.”
He seemed genuinely eager to assist, bent over the little table of medical instruments, searching here, searching there; an unassailable force was at work in him which froze his wife and the general, a force that sprang above all from an inspiring serenity. For that reason, lying back on the leather couch, more of a divan than a couch, General Lorenzo Aipe listened drowsily to the medic’s calming voice. The general had his mouth open, lit by a small torch the doctor was holding in his hand. Then the general saw him pick up a tongue depressor and, almost immediately, a syringe; the needle went in, clean and painless. For a moment, the general’s hand seized the doctor’s.
“Steady, General,” Doctor Proceso said. “It’s preferable to anaesthetize the tongue to avoid any pain: we’ll find the fish bone, if there is one.”
“Is there a fish bone?” Primavera asked, fixing her darkened eyes on her husband.
“It’s the likeliest thing,” he said, without altering his expression. His voice was uninflected, neutral, professionaclass="underline" a medical practitioner carrying out his duty. “That’s what the colouration of the tongue here suggests. I’ll need to palpate it. Patience, General.”
General Lorenzo Aipe wished to speak; he gave a sort of prolonged sigh, and wanted to add something with his hands: signals of astonishment and dissent, incredulity at what he was going through, that well-aimed jab he had been the object of. He started to get up, but the doctor’s hand spread open on his chest and pushed him gently but firmly back onto the couch’s leather pillow.
“General,” he said, “don’t try to speak. At this moment, your tongue is a dead one — like Latin.”
The general and Primavera exchanged another look, full of misgiving, urgently apprehensive. But the doctor’s voice went impassively on and was of a candour that persuaded them.
“Let me do it, General, it won’t hurt, it’s a case of finding the end of the bone, taking hold of it and pulling it out, or breaking it off and destroying it,” and while saying this he already had in his hand, as if by magic, a slender scalpel, like a glinting streak, that he quickly used on who knows which of the seventeen striated muscles of the tongue, as he explained while he did it, “the tongue is a fleshy organ possessing seventeen striated muscles,” he said, concentrating, “that’s done it, general, I’ll apply this little bit of gauze for a few seconds to stop it bleeding, like so, good, the bone has been absorbed into your tongue, from there it’ll dissolve into the intestinal flora and cease to be a danger; it’ll become just like you and me and everyone else: pure shit.”
The horrified silence which followed his words was the decisive push that helped the general to finish getting up, Primavera to finish getting out of the consulting room, the two of them to finish crossing the living room as if fleeing from a lunatic.
The doctor followed them unhurriedly to the front door: he saw how they got into the Volkswagen and left — Primavera at the wheel, the general just a panic-stricken face, goggle-eyed, his hand at his lips.
Afterwards the doctor returned to the living room and sat in the easy chair—“bad job,” he said to himself, “bad job.”
He did not know when Primavera got back. He felt her pass by him, vaguely, like a draught, heard her go upstairs and slam the bedroom door with all her might.
She came back to him much later, by the light of the dawn tinting the windows. He sensed her pass him again, go to the kitchen, head slowly back up the stairs to the first landing: there, Primavera rested her elbows on the handrail.
“And you’re happy,” she said.
The doctor heard her, frozen in his easy chair, but understood absolutely nothing: he was thinking about that episode in Bolívar’s life that Belencito Jojoa had recounted to him one rainy afternoon.