proof
(I know that you were committing a slow suicide by nicotine while our fate was being decided. The hours passed by you and you didn’t see them, Ignacio, nor did you see the nurses or the janitors mopping under your feet. You didn’t see anything until you saw Lekz saying goodbye to the court of eye doctors and walking desolately down a hall. His face was shrouded, his arms hung burdened and lifeless by his sides, and Lekz told you we’ll talk tomorrow, we’ll talk about everything, with Lucina, more calmly. For now it’s best you take her home, and you get some rest too, he said, avoiding your name. And he said goodbye without looking at you, leaving you standing in the air, suspended, with the chance for a sudden but maybe premeditated escape, the guilty flight that would one day bring you tamely back. You had nowhere to go, I had become your only place, you told me all this later, don’t you remember? How you felt the need to flee. You went out to buy another pack of cigarettes, to walk through the warm night that suddenly smelled to you like violets, and you walked away following that scent like a goose chasing spring, but the violets disappeared from the breeze and suddenly you were in a square planted with weeds and soulless benches frequented by ruined old men in pants that no one washed, old men who slept alone, each by himself under cardboard sheets until the snow, the ice came, and then. Then? You said aloud, but no one heard your question because you were alone. Like the old man you would soon be, in the future, thinking about that girlfriend you’d abandoned in the hospital, erupting in blood. And then nothing, you shouted, terrified of your own howl, suspicious of the anguished murmur you heard. Were they yours, all those voices arguing savagely inside you? Was it true, had Lucina or her voice really said that to you before she went into surgery? You shook your head, no, it’s not true, then nothing, nothing, you repeated like crazy, but the voice pecked at your head, it wouldn’t let you erase the words I had thrown at you only a few hours before, my voice asking for that, the ancient proof of love. Only one, Ignacio, the proof is only one, I would never ask for both. The smallest proof I could ask you for, scarcely larger than a marble. I asked you because I had no choices left, because I had understood even before Lekz did that all his science had failed. It’s not true, you told yourself, and you repeated that our conversation had not happened, that I would never have dared, ever, but then you started to think otherwise, that I had asked you for something you held so dear, and my request was so vivid, so exact, so simple, that you couldn’t have made it up. Which of us is crazier, you asked, and I know you let out a peal of dry laughter trying to think of something other than my voice, something beyond me; you went on repeating with sudden happiness that the thing you would give me would unite us forever, it would make us equal, turn us into mirror images for the rest of our lives until death. And even after, my voice told you in your head, though we knew nothing about after. What matters is now, that’s what I’d told you, turning my face away when you wanted to put an end to the discussion. Put an end to it as though it had never happened. But what the fuck are you asking me for, Lucina, you asked me, blaring your voice in the park, talking to the air and the rats, the pigeons. How could you even think I’m going to give you that, you said, without daring to name what I was asking for. Just that. But how could you think of that, you said in silence, kicking some burned sticks with rage, with justified distrust, suddenly wondering, jealously, if there was another man who could say yes, yes, Lucina, yes, I do want to be yours forever. A guy capable of saying it and feeling it literally. I know that you were tortured by your own indecision, your difficulty in answering my request with a round yes or an equally definitive no. Listen to me, Ignacio, I’d said. Don’t you think I’d do the same for you? My question resounded, it echoed back to you, it filled your mouth with retching, with bile — because you’d gone hours without eating — empty vomit just imagining that you would give me that and you’d have to live looking at me afterward. And you went on killing yourself with puffs of smoke while I slept, strangely tranquil, dreaming of your myopic and beautiful gaze, dreaming free of that shameless question that now you shouldered in the night. I only ask for one. Lenses won’t help me, colored glass is worthless. You tried not to think about that, you directed your attention to the flame of the match, you counted how many seconds it took to cool and how long your finger could stay pressed against its ember. I know you tried to empty your mind, staring at those skeletal trees that one by one were losing their leaves in the wind, and there you still were at dawn, going in circles around the square and in your head, wishing I hadn’t given you that condition when I said goodbye. If you can’t commit and give me what I want, don’t come back tomorrow.)
stop
Behind an Ignacio steeped in the smell of cigarettes came Lekz, like an aseptic and pallid angel, suddenly gray, exhausted circles under his eyes. He did not look good. Am I going to die, doctor, or are you? Lekz made an awkward and resigned grimace. I fuzzily saw him lower his face and swell up with air. He would wait outside with Ignacio while I got out of bed and got dressed. And in the minutes that passed while I pulled up my skirt over my dirty underwear, put on my sweaty socks, my boots, pulled on my undershirt, scarf, sweater, and my anxiety over the verdict, I watched an infinite number of treasured and uneven memories parade before my sick eyes, memories of the times when I’d pretended my illness didn’t exist, moments that were falsely happy when I’d made myself think I could be someone else; they’d debilitated me and left me at the mercy of an estranged solitude that was mine alone. And I came out with my head high, ready to hear what Lekz had to tell me in the little office the hospital ceded us. The doctor cleared his throat more than ever. Lekz and Ignacio cleared their throats and I did too, it was contagious; I cleared my throat before singing to them, coldly, I’m ready, I’m all ears. I saw Lekz knead his head with all his fingers. I saw him rub his face, not knowing how to explain to me but resolved, no beating around the bush now, like a teletype machine, like he was reading a telegram. There are veins in your left eye. Stop. They’re new ones. Stop. Soon they will break the retina. Stop. For now the other eye is calm, but the blood is going to come back. Stop. You’ll be blind in no time. Stop. It was definitive. The blood, its possibilities, they had never really disappeared. They were part of my eyes. I felt Ignacio’s sweaty hand sliding over mine, Ignacio as a whole seeping away toward the floor. Ignacio now an insane color. Ignacio, I told him, leave me alone for a moment with the doctor. And when I heard the door close I leaned my elbows on the tiny, reeking table, I leaned forward and I told Lekz to light a cigarette for me. I know you smoke in secret, hiding it from your wife, from your patients, and most of all from Doris, hiding from yourself. I can smell the tobacco on your breath. Don’t say anything, and I’ll keep quiet too. Anyway, it doesn’t make sense to try to stop the destruction of my eyes anymore. Lekz opened an invisible little drawer and handed me a cigarette. He lit another one for himself, almost grateful to share his secret. I saw the blurry reflection of the lit end lighting up his eyes in the desolation of that Saturday. I saw my own puffs of ghostly smoke in the air while I thought about how to put it. We only have a transplant left, doctor, you owe it to me. Transplant, repeated Lekz in an agonized voice. Transplant, Lina, he mumbled, no longer doubting my name, and he added a couple of words that got tangled up on his tongue. A transplant is very delicate, he told me, but he was talking to himself in that solemn tone of his. Really very delicate, he said, as though I didn’t know. It’s only been tried on animals, never on humans. Doctor, I retorted, and I leaned so close to him my smoke burned his cheeks, I’m nothing but an animal who wants to stop being one. Lekz lit a new cigarette on the old one and, opening my file, thumbing through the infinite pages of my history, making a morose doodle around my ever-shorter name, he told me no. It wasn’t possible, he said. There were no eye banks, because no one donated dead eyes. It was believed, said Lekz, that memory lived in them, that the eyes were an extension of the brain, the brain peering out through the face to grasp reality. Some people thought the eyes were depositories of memory, he said, and others still believed that the soul was hidden there. It’s my only chance, I interrupted, and he was wasting time that I needed; my chance and yours, doctor. I stood up, squinted my eyes so he would feel like I was looking at him, that I wasn’t going to allow him anything but an immediate yes. Lekz looked at me in shock, his lips trembled, full of words that now he didn’t even dare to think. He cowered down a little in his chair. I heard his fingers drumming somewhere. Lekz was gathering a slow courage in that office, so silent in spite of the sound of the cars crossing the city. The world was so silent, I thought, Lekz so hushed in spite of his nervous fingers, Ignacio so lost in some hallway, pacing anxiously, Chile so far away and mute. And that’s what I was thinking when I found myself saying to him, illuminated, electrified, unsteady but sure of what was going to happen. Don’t move, doctor, I whispered. Wait for me here, I’ll bring you a fresh eye.