This was seen by other eyes. How, from that first minute, Lekz fastened my eyelid back to keep it open. How he peered into my distended pupil. How he opened three holes in a triangle, one above, one to either side. How into each hole he inserted a different apparatus: a wire topped with a very strong magnifying lens, a multi-functional pincher that cut veins and cauterized wounds, and a light cable to illuminate the retina. Three metal filaments acting together, to prune and burn and patch for many more hours than the promised three or four. And this was seen by eyes not so far from me. How, while I was absent from myself, Ignacio and my mother fled the waiting room. How they went out to take a walk around the city, and, sick of wasting time, they went into the dive on the corner, shared a pizza and a warm coca cola, and smoked hurriedly from the same pack. The operation must be almost over, they said to each other in encouragement, walking hurriedly back. They sat in a hospital hallway and, obliged to carry on a conversation, they took out and polished their worst memories, one by one. How my mother had survived three mistaken diagnoses in a row: a sharp vertigo that was thought to be multiple sclerosis, a terminal brain tumor, an attack of intestinal colic interpreted as cancer. All errors that could have been fatal if they’d been true, she said — the victorious survivor, my mother — but they were only spots on x-rays. How Ignacio turned pale, because hearing about an illness made him experience every one of its symptoms. How anything could happen, my mother consoled him, but he shouldn’t worry, now he was part of a family of doctors, now he was protected from diagnostic errors. People used to think, my mother went on, changing the subject a little — though not much, only shifting the conversation so she could tell another story that Ignacio would rather have been spared — people used to think that Alzheimer’s was a form of dementia. That’s what my mother had! interrupted Ignacio, connecting again to the conversation. Dementia? No, Alzheimer’s. And my mother took advantage of that revelation to gather information about his family’s DNA, bombarding him with genealogical questions, drawing conclusions. So no one knows who your grandfather was? said my mother, taking mental notes, telling him that she had also barely met her father. What a coincidence, Ignacio told me she told him. Coincidence that my mother and his mother had only seen their fathers once. My mother to say goodbye to him when he was in the mortal throes of cirrhosis; his mother simply by accident. The two mothers had also coincided in their refusal to call the stranger before them father. Mine told her father, she told Ignacio: You are nothing to me. His told her father, and then Ignacio told my mother: I don’t know you, I only have a mother, and she’s more than enough for me. They confided so many stories, but with all the time they had, even family began to run out. Then they only stared at the time: my mother at the dead hallway clock, my Ignacio at his uncomfortable wristwatch. They took turns going out to the street to take drags from the last cigarettes, exhaling the smoke against the sticky windows. And whoever stayed inside just watched the parade of patients leaving the operating theatre escorted by Filipinos. But fewer and fewer patients were coming out, and the doctors must have been scurrying out through other doors. Janitors multiplied, armed with brooms and mops. And there they stayed, my mother, my Ignacio, watching the second and the third and the fourth hour pass, no longer knowing how many had gone by. They sat and stood, paced around the room, annoyed, downcast, drinking infinite coffees from the machine. No one came out to give them explanations, because there would be nothing to say until the operation ended, and the operation ceaselessly stayed its course. Lekz didn’t make time to send reports to the outside. He couldn’t have done it even if he’d had the time. He didn’t do it because he couldn’t see anything with his eye up against mine, so full of blood. He didn’t dare lift his gaze. He wouldn’t have ventured to blink, neglect the exact movements of those gadgets that lit, magnified, cut, and burned veins, possessed of a ruthless voracity. He had to control the energy in his hands, fear those feet of his, stiffened from so much pushing the pedals on the floor. Because hands, pedals, and feet, said Lekz, on finally leaving the operating room and finding Ignacio and my mother, who ran toward him as soon as they saw him; pedals and pincers, he said, pale from hunger, green from exhaustion, those instruments, he said, are not extensions of my fingers. They have life of their own and are ready, at the slightest slip, to yank a person’s sight out at its roots. Ignacio looked at my mother, who didn’t blink as she looked at Lekz, who was clearing his throat to add that once he was finally able to extract the viscous gelatin of blood that was my swamped vitreous humor, once he could finally examine how my right eye had turned out, he’d shuddered. But he told himself, he told them, right away, that he had to take advantage of the adrenaline, and he threw himself headlong into the left eye. He cut, it spattered, he cauterized and meticulously vacuumed the bottom of the eye until his arms started trembling. He washed his hands from the nails to the elbows, he rinsed his face and felt his nostrils vibrate, he dried the nape of his neck, but Lekz didn’t dare issue a verdict. Much less think about one. It was worse than we thought, he confessed, drawn, and he used the plural because his assistant or auxiliary or wife was behind him, still in scrubs, displaying the same monumental circles under her eyes. I have no idea, not the slightest idea, he repeated. To my mother. To my Ignacio, who also looked exhausted from the work of waiting. There was nothing to say about the future. Lekz proceeded to go back over what had happened inside my eyes, over several months. My mother listened, utterly hypnotized. Ignacio was utterly ill. His knees went weak, he staggered toward a corner, and without anyone noticing he’d gone, he pressed his slippery hands against the walls, listening, as though from a distance, to a muffled voice wafting in through a portal to the medical hereafter: we would have to wait another twelve or eighteen hours to know if Lekz had left me definitively blind. That means? my mother, her voice also a distant whoosh, wanted specifics. It means that if she sees light tomorrow, there are possibilities, intervened the assistant wife. If she doesn’t see anything, the doctor broke in, scratching his neck, stretching his shoulder blades like a tattered bird; if she doesn’t see anything, I don’t know, ma’am, we’ll just have to see. You’ll have to see, Ignacio told me he thought, now lying defeated on the floor. You’ll have to see, he repeated to himself before insulting Lekz very Spanishly, la madre que te parió, fuck the mother that bore you, and all doctors, while you’re at it. He put his dizzy head between his legs and that’s where he left it. His mother had advised him to do that when he was a boy; his mother, who wasn’t a doctor or a nurse and who knew no other work besides housework, his mother who had always been illiterate and was now very dead. Lower it. So you don’t faint. Take off your glasses. Breathe very deeply and hold your breath. Like that, his palms still on the floor tiles, Ignacio heard Lekz drag his feet as he moved away down the hall, and he also heard my mother’s high heels echo as she approached.
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.