I opened the blinds. On the other side of the street was an abandoned lot. I felt a shiver, like something was about to happen, and went to see if Gerda needed anything from me.
It looked like she had touched up the dye job on her hair with a shade closer to purple. I noticed that she’d aged like Kurt had recently. How much time had passed? I asked myself this question as I watched shadows on the wall, making me drowsy.
Once more I put my hand on the sheet that covered her. Gerda opened her eyes again. I saw that they were very red, watery. She gazed at the ceiling for a few minutes — it took her a while to notice my presence.
Suddenly she suffered a shudder of pain, and then she saw me. I half smiled, not exactly because I felt obliged to force an air of consolation in front of a sick person, but because I barely knew Gerda, just as I barely knew anything in my life after the Glória neighborhood back in Porto Alegre, and aside from that, Gerda made me feel an embarrassment beyond what I was used to feeling around Kurt, and her presence seemed to demand a more ceremonious expression, because she was so quiet, distant, mysterious.
But that night Gerda was different: when she saw me a wide smile broke across her face, and I could see just how white her teeth were, and then she started talking, far more than I would have expected from her.
She asked me what time it was and how long she’d been there. I told her the time, and then confessed that I didn’t really know how long she’d been in the hospital — I’d think about it — I just knew that Kurt had given me the task of keeping her company that night.
Ah, Kurt, Gerda said to me, Kurt… She looked at me, without losing her smile, and at that moment I realized that the Gerda lying there wasn’t the one I knew, a decidedly different woman occupied Gerda’s body now, another woman who allowed herself to flourish in front of me for the first time, or maybe not, maybe Gerda was deliriously ill, but I didn’t want to call anyone, not the floor physician, not the nurses — I let her take my hand and sigh, Kurt, ah Kurt, she was speaking with such an enthusiastic tone, perhaps beyond what was appropriate — I knew nothing or next to nothing about the state of Gerda’s health beyond the cancer Amália told me about and the immense scar I saw cutting across her thorax — but at that moment Gerda seemed to come to the surface of whatever ailment was afflicting her, and told me that it was in Hamburg after the war that the two of them met, that they’d both been born and raised in Brazil by German parents, and in Hamburg they danced away the night, they would dance and the most foolish words would come to their lips — Gerda was sweating, her voice breathless, she was sweating a lot and holding my hand between hers, staring at me and repeating pained, choppy sentences with Kurt’s name.
She remembered how as soon as they met they came back to Brazil — Gerda’s father owned the land where they still lived today, they’d built a house there, married, but children never came, and what she had inside herself began to hurt, like a land that was cultivated in her mind but would remain always and forever unknown.
No, I said, not an always and forever unknown country, I answered, as a way to prevent Gerda from succumbing to a memory that seemed to be making things worse, since, at the moment she said the words always and forever unknown country, I perceived — right when in the middle of it she had given a long pause and gasped — it was just then that everything started to seem very serious, even though she was able to keep going and continued to hold my hand all by herself, she was even pulling my hand, yes, such that I was being pulled, dragged out of myself, lying on top of her body as I was doing now and devouring her, and when she said my God, a spasm, in a flash her body slackened, wilted, paralyzed, but not mine, mine was still going, and then came to the climax with a heaving gasp, to the point of evanescing over that woman who was no longer reacting, a stone.
It took me a while to untangle myself from Gerda’s inert arms. I didn’t feel the need to close her eyes, went into the bathroom.
As I urinated, trying to focus on and destroy a small fleck of filth that seemed to be crusted onto the white porcelain of the toilet, a nurse came into the room and announced that she was going to give Gerda an injection, and that with this dose she’d be in sufficient condition to get on a plane to Germany in a few days.
I went to the door of the bathroom, still zipping my fly. The nurse gave a few hysterical little laughs with the stuff for the injection in her hand, and started to tell me that Gerda was recovering all her functions nicely: she was going to the bathroom religiously at bedtime, after her dinner had settled, and no longer felt pain during her bowel movements.
She won’t be having any more bowel movements, I told her. Huh? the nurse probed. Look, I said, pointing to Gerda’s body.
I lifted Gerda’s hand, raised my index finger to her wrist, and her pulse beat twice, three times. I released her hand somewhat brusquely, stepped away. The nurse explained that this response from a dead body could last for a few hours. I asked her to close Gerda’s eyes, I’d already had enough of that still-warm death.
The nurse went out, I went to the window. The sun was trying to come out. In the vacant lot out front were five ragamuffin drifters, all of them standing with expectant posture, staring insistently at me. What did they want from me? I wondered, and lowered the blinds.
I picked up the phone and dialed the number of the hotel. She died, I said to Kurt. He said he’d come over later.
Nearby, a flock of birds started to sing. I lay down on the sofa, closed my eyes.
I opened my eyes, guessing the steps in the hallway were Kurt’s. This at least I recognized, Kurt’s gait. Before he opened the door I got up and went over to Gerda’s body. Kurt came close. He said he’d already brought our bags, he’d left them with the hospital doorman.
Only then did I notice that Gerda was ready, dressed in a gray skirt suit and white blouse, her half-open mouth lipsticked a pale pink, cotton in her nostrils.
I thought: how long will the funeral last? Through the slits in the blinds, I could see it was a clear day.
I looked at Kurt, but there was nothing to read on his face but fatigue. I turned my eyes back to the bright slits in the blinds and couldn’t stop thinking about the trip to Germany, certain to be canceled now.
We’ll take the body to Porto Alegre this morning, Kurt said.
And a horrible alarm clock began to go off inside the closet. As Kurt opened the closet the alarm shut off.
A shot in the yard out front. That was the first line of a poem I wrote in its entirety on the spot. I kept the poem in my head all the way to the airport. When we got there, I sat down at a lunch counter and copied it onto a paper napkin. It was the last poem I wrote. After that I never wrote another poem again.
But for the time being I was still standing there, composing the poem, the words coming in streams, in front of me was Gerda’s body, and just beyond was Kurt, standing to face me. He was staring at me. A shot in the yard out front / A hardened fingernail scraping the tepid earth — that’s how the poem continued, and to remember it I’d kept repeating it in my head line by line while I waited until it was time to escape that foul-smelling hospital room.
Gerda’s casket was put in a special car, half-chromed — Kurt and I were in front of the hospital waiting for a taxi to take us to the airport. We wouldn’t see the casket again until Porto Alegre.
When Kurt bent down to get into the taxi, I had an urge to help him but I stopped, as though preferring to closely watch what I was seeing: this man had really aged beyond his years, he was getting into the taxi with such difficulty that it left my mouth agape, thinking about how unprepared I was to track the passage of time.