pure biology
Still breathing in that salty scent stuck to his shirt. Holding onto him, I kiss his mouth and his cheeks that grow gaunter every day, the corners of his eyes. A strange happiness moves through me when I feel the edge of his eye twitching under his skin. His living eyes. Ignacio pushes me away and plants a kiss on my ear. My fingers climb up his face again but Ignacio says please, don’t do that. He puts his temple next to mine, and again the happiness overwhelms me, the happiness of having an instant of his body for myself, just before they make us separate. What will you two do while I’m in there? Silence. A silence that keeps me from guessing what gestures are made, what faces. What will you do with so much time? It won’t be so long, says Ignacio, distraught, knowing that he’ll have three whole hours alone with my mother. Four, in the worst case scenario, two hours per eye. I understand that he’s repeating this to calm himself. According to Lekz, says Ignacio, he’s never spent more than four hours fixing a pair of eyes. He said it could even take less, if he hurries a bit. Don’t worry, adds my mother (I see her through your eyes, Ignacio, comforted to have company, fixing her hairdo), don’t you worry, dear, we’ll find some way to entertain ourselves. And she said it as if saying: alone at last. My mother will have Ignacio to interrogate, she’ll have him especially to besiege with those medical stories he hates so much and that I grew up listening to. Stories of medical errors, stories I’m addicted to. Ignacio holds me tightly and starts to tremble a little, he squeezes me, wrings me out, suffocates me; don’t leave me alone with her is what he seems to be saying. His heart speeds up. Anxiety heightened to the nth degree. But I, his shield against my mother, his defender and his secret torturer, I can’t protect him now. Let me go, Ignacio, I have to leave. Don’t be a stranger, he says. Here’s hoping, I say, and I raise a white cloth in farewell while a nurse’s soft hand takes my arm. It’s the hand of a Filipino woman who speaks to me slowly. And, seduced by her malignant voice, I let myself be led to the place where they will sacrifice me. She helps me climb up on the operating table. You won’t feel a thing, she assures me as she stabs me painfully with the IV needle, followed by the anesthesia needle. I lose my head with so much needle in my vein. Are you ok? she asks, and my being, this Chilena covered in a ridiculous flowered robe, tells her, pronouncing the words with difficulty, no, not at all ok, this table is very cold. Before I finish my complaint she throws a blanket over me, and the heat relaxes me, puts me to sleep. My new Filipino girlfriend takes me by the wrist, searches for my pulse, and breathes a what’s your name, what are they operating on, which eye first; but I’ve forgotten it all, I don’t know who I am and I can’t explain why I’m there in her arms, I only hope that she knows the answers in spite of her questions, that the questions are just a strategy to distract me from my teeth, which are chattering now. And I realize, because I recognize his throat clearing, that Lekz is now behind my head, that those are his hands straightening my head, arranging my cap, washing my corneas with a creamy cotton. I also realize that next to him is another oculist I remember vaguely, because she works in the same office as Lekz, because she is, I remember now, his wife. She’s going to assist him in the job. All in the family, in here and out there, I think, without retaining the thought. And maybe it’s my nurse who tells me to reach one finger up toward the ceiling, a finger of a hand that now weighs a ton and soon dissolves. The finger is no longer there. My hand isn’t there and neither is my arm. I’m not me anymore. Lucina vanished, her being is suspended somewhere in the hospital. What is left of her now is pure biology: a heart that beats and beats, a lung that inflates, an anesthetized brain incapable of dreaming, while the hair goes on growing, slowly, beneath the cap.
hours