setbacks
We raise our arms in the street as if asking for help, but what stops in front of us is a yellow car that takes off like an autumn gale, wildly crossing the city on the highway. Ignacio hands the driver some warm and crinkly bills and we storm in and sit down. Ignacio notes right away that the clientele today is different; Fridays at noon are when they schedule operations with the cataract specialist. They’re all patched like me — because I’ve put my patches back on — but they hold their heads high and proud like fighting cocks. I hear a well-known clucking coming closer. It’s Doris, who kneels down beside me and brings her greasy lips close to my ear to announce: we have a setback. Yes, I repeat, we do, or more like I do. Doris nods and asks if they’ve contacted me as well. Who are they? The company! What company? I say gloomily; I certainly want no company other than Ignacio’s. Doris, who doesn’t know how to attend to more than one office problem at a time, sits ruminating for a second, confused by my confusion, her gaze fixed on some documents until the mystery is resolved and she finds herself with the need to clarify that, right now, this isn’t about me. But for some time now everything has seemed to be about me. But no, says Doris again, forget about yourself and your eyes for two minutes. Doris wants to talk to me, but I feel like there’s no more room inside me, not for any more air or blood or any more bureaucracy, and I’m going to explode while she talks about the damned insurance company. They don’t want to pay for the operation. My operation, I say to myself without contradicting her, but noting that once again we are talking about my body. The company, Doris continues with a brittle air, approved an operation that wasn’t the one you ended up having. Things got complicated in the operating room. Oh, really? I say just to say something, trying to reroute my thoughts toward some zone of my existence that doesn’t entail complication, but I can’t find any. Yes, says Doris, unable to bear the weight of her own body, slowly getting up and sitting on a chair next to us. Yes, she says, the company determined that your tests don’t contain conclusive evidence of any defect or lesion or visual anomaly. And since I’m no longer answering, she is the one who asks the usual rhetorical questions and then responds to them. What did they want? she exclaims, a blind woman with a cane and a guide dog to confirm the operation was absolutely unavoidable? My operation, I think in secret, what would it cost her to say it’s mine, just like my tests, my life, my Ignacio. Ignacio stays silent, determined to not get up from the chair again, and the two of us follow his example, all three of us silent, all three of us glum, our legs crossed, each stringing together various ideas around that millionaire figure that could be for nothing, that the insurance is refusing to pay. But the battle-hardened secretary can’t bear her silence for long, and she abandons it to tell me how they’re some real good-for-nothings, and it’s not the first time they’ve done this to us. We’ll send them the video of the operation (my operation, mine and maybe a little bit yours, Ignacio), along with a box of popcorn, she goes on. We’ll swamp them with photographs blown up and framed to make them understand, and full copies of all your records, we’ll send them all the most recent medical literature, the research protocols, we’ll bombard them with emails. Doris promises to bombard them with calls, overwhelm their phones. Until they get sick of me, she concludes, anticipating victory. They’ll pay us every last penny. Don’t let them scare you. And giving little pats to my hand she gets up laboriously, making the chair creak. As she leaves us she greets Lekz, who is arriving just then, his hair slicked back by the wind. Good afternoon, he says, and his expression when he sees us is puzzled.
recognition
Lucina, I said to him, and I reached out my hand to the air and to him, because I knew he’d already forgotten me. He always forgot, in spite of our unhappy and almost historic adventures through consulting and operating rooms. Lucina, doctor, I know you won’t remember, I said, promising myself I would make him remember me. Lowering his voice impossibly, Lekz asked me to forgive him, it wasn’t me he forgot. It was everyone. Much as he struggled, he watched them enter his office and he didn’t have the slightest idea who they were, that’s what he told me, clearing his throat continuously, the magnifying lens raised before my eyes but still without examining me. With his hand suspended in the air, he confessed that patient after patient would come in and he would greet them all by name, something he’d learned to do mechanically. Greeting them as though he knew them was part of the job. A matter of checking the list that the diligent Doris left typed up for him on the table. Hi Peter. Step inside, Gary. How are you, Ms. Smith, nice to see you. And so they went, entering one after the other, to detail their optical difficulties: one hemorrhage, torn retina, glaucoma, or macular degeneration after another. Such everyday things that they gradually became indistinguishable. After so many years, the names became insufficient too. They don’t say anything to me anymore, he said, effortlessly raising his thick gray eyebrows, wrinkling his brow, aging a century. Their voices say absolutely nothing to me, their faces either. They talked without seeing him, I thought, he looked at their faces without recognizing them. They all seemed discreetly familiar, each one of their gestures, their inflections, generated a fleeting glimmer, a pulsation, a throbbing in the cerebral cortex that never congealed into a memory. Nor did the clinical histories tell him anything, because he was unable to decipher his hieroglyphical notes from previous visits. Like an illiterate lost in an excess of signals, he faced them all, every day. But he sat them down and his lens prepared to read the full story of every eye. On that surface each patient’s identity was revealed to him: as he peered into them, he remembered details. He even remembered the order of his enlightenments. But no, it’s not remembering, Lekz specified as he instructed me to lean my head back; it’s not exactly looking back or recalling. Lean further, he repeated, forcing his voice while he lifted my eyelid to begin the exam and immerse himself in my wide, dilated pupil. It’s not a memory, it’s recognition. Because inside, but also outside, all the eyes were different and now they all had his signature. In spite of the emergency, Lekz sounded faraway when he repeated his passwords: up, first, up and to the right, to the side. All the way. A little down and now all the way down. My neck turned ritually on its axis. And following that circular tour, Lekz lit up the whole perimeter of my retina with that strongest of all magnifiers. I waited for him to tell me what he saw there, what image of me was emerging from the depths of my eye. What did his diagnosis say about my life? What’s happening with my eyes, doctor? Ah, he said, lengthening the a in the voice of an oracle or iridologist or simply a charlatan oculist. These retinas are my masterpiece.