let’s see if it clears up
Lina, Lucina, Ignacio burst out, relieved or exhausted and confused, Lucina, getting tangled up among my names, Lina, with his back tight and his neck complaining: get up, Lekz is waiting for you. He had stationed himself by the door, Lekz, to let me enter while Ignacio stayed seated. He had me climb into the mechanical chair that I called electric and that he directed with his legs. He didn’t need to tell me to lean my forehead against the bar and press forward. We’d had two uninterrupted years of training: he and I had practiced in that position like two resistance fighters, measuring our strength, taking our pulses and breaths; him examining me with his mechanical eye, me letting him scrutinize my inner workings. Letting him burn my retina with laser flashes, all so it wouldn’t come to this. But now Lekz was taking his time sitting down across from me, he was bypassing the routine, eluding the exam, taking an interest in the detailed account of that night, the party, and the days that followed: what I had seen and what I could no longer distinguish. With his hand perhaps lost in his abundant hair, Lekz quizzed me about glimmers, flashes, iridescent sparks, and he wanted to know if I felt throbbing back there, behind the eye. He paused over my file before sitting down and finally lifting his arm to open my eyelid with his specialist fingers; only then did he peer into the dilated hole like it was a keyhole. What do you see, doctor? What are you seeing? I was asking a question and impatiently demanding an answer, a clearing of the throat, a sign he planned to give some kind of clue. But the doctor only let out perplexed sighs. He was seeing the same thing I was, I realized. The same bloody nothing I saw. In spite of his infinite magnifying lenses, Lekz couldn’t make out a single detail on my retina. He leaned back absolutely resigned and said, We’ll have to wait, see if it clears up so I can take a look at this mess. And if it doesn’t ever clear up? I interrupted. If my body doesn’t absorb its own blood? If it doesn’t happen, he answered haltingly, if it doesn’t ever happen — because, it’s true, it’s very unlikely an eye will clear up on its — if it doesn’t disappear we’ll have to take our chances and operate. Blindly. One eye, then the other. Lekz had bits of words between his teeth, pieces of little words hanging from his nose and sliding down his cheek, fragments of calamitous syllables that put off any immediate interruption. One eye and the other but not now, he said, later, dry as a recording, like a machine on repeat although Lekz’s tongue seemed to be palpitating inside him. It was a throbbing tongue darting into my ear with its thick, still-warm drool. Gulping air, choking down myself and all my frustration, my resentment, my blind hate for that life I wanted to tear away from, stifling myself so I wouldn’t poison him with my rage, I told him with a thread of a voice to please take me out of that uncertainty and put me into the hospital. The operating room, immediately, tomorrow, please. I felt my eyes more swollen than ever, and throbbing. We have to wait, replied Lekz, immutable. Wait for what, doctor, a donor? But no. We are, he told me, still very far from a transplant. I was starting to slowly deflate, nicked by the scalpel of medicine. One whole month you have to wait, he insisted, making a note in my file. No fewer than thirty-one days, while your eyes clear up and we also clear up your case with the insurance company. I repeat, he repeated, implacable, before one month is up we cannot from any perspective operate on you. And in the meantime, doctor? What do I do in the meantime? Weren’t you going to go to Chile to see your family? Go to Chile. Take a vacation.
pure Chile
It was too late to back out now: I would fly to Santiago on the date we’d agreed, and Ignacio would fly to Buenos Aires to give his speech. When he was finished, he promised, he would come to Chile to get me. The airline tickets, already printed and folded in the drawer, were our pledge to meet again. We had left the purchase of the Bolivian leg of our trip pending, but that flight had crashed and burned in the eye doctor’s office. Boulivia, Lekz had said, making an effort to imitate my pronunciation, Boulivia, better we didn’t go there, the high pressure and lack of oxygen would not only lead to altitude sickness, it could also burst my veins. But it hadn’t been necessary to reach the heights of La Paz; all it took was a ninth floor with a view of the hollow left by the twin Manhattan towers. The red I saw, first in one eye, then the other, had settled the question of that trip. We would not go to Bolivia. And I wouldn’t go to Argentina, either. Now I’d only fly to Santiago, I’d go without doubt, without hesitation, without delay: I was leaving in just a few days, and still. The phone calls from Chile started up, with a calling card or charges reversed, calls insisting that I travel sooner. That I should have the surgery there, where they were: my family, that turbulent clan of Mediterranean origins, armed to the teeth with love. Have it where they, all together or in shifts, could take care of things. Come with me to surgery, if necessary. Give instructions to the specialists. Advise me during my convalescence. Without realizing, they were conspiring against the little inner peace I had, against my powerful need to be a little alone with my fears and my enormous ingratitude. With myself and my dark purposes. But they were having none of that. They interrupted me. They held forth without listening to me. They promised prayer chains and homemade remedies without giving a thought to the agonizing state of my phone bill. They swore my anxiety would disappear under the weight of their own. Don’t worry about a thing, they repeated in a chorus, a rowdy and tense chorus, not a thing, because added and multiplied and all tallied up, the balance of my family’s anxiety would crush my own, which only went up and up, swelling like yeast and secreting a suffocating bile. Red lights were flashing everywhere: the word care stung, loss of control burned, return was dangerous and have surgery in Chile a punishment to which I didn’t plan to subject myself. I had already agreed once before to see that other doctor, with his inflated cheeks, who diagnosed eyes from atop an imperious podium. You’re about to burst, he’d told me, putting on determinist airs. I don’t know how you aren’t already completely blind, because any minute now. Here there is nothing to do except remove them, he finally said, looking at me fixedly and inflexibly, with impatience, letting me know that other patients were waiting. I would never go back. I’d promised myself. I’d told them that and yet, possessed of an atomic energy, they exhorted me to give him another chance. The no I gave them was round. An uppercase no. At the other end of the line they complained about my lack of willpower, my lack of consideration, my lack in generaclass="underline" my absence, my dispassion, my contempt for religion. They reproached me for their rushed and perhaps wrong but now old decision, at thirty years old — years that had been happy until then — to return to Chile when I. To suspend all their plans when I. And the phrase hung suspended, encrusted in all of their teeth. No one said: that disease, yours. No one said the tests, the diagnosis, the daily injections, the special diet, my mother’s exhaustive care, and a life far from family support. They didn’t talk about the difficult decision to leave splendid jobs in that hospital where overspending was the norm, nor of the fortune my parents would have amassed if only I. They didn’t say it, but there were truths hanging by the thread of that pause. Truths swinging in the breeze. It was an insult that I’d returned to the same city three decades later, at the age my parents were when they’d left it. And I was paying for that affront with a new technical glitch in my anatomy. They insinuated that returning to Chile to be with my parents was the right thing to do. They half-said it while the timer ran on my international bill and they finally said it while I visualized my body being sucked out into an abyss, my skeleton covered in its muscle and fat falling vertiginously toward Chile, my skin stretched ever tighter, my hair electrified, all my parts attracted by the law of national gravity, as I turned into an amorphous substance that, when it fell, would flatten the rest of my numerous family. I would crash into them, they would fall one after the other in a line across the tabletop. They’d knock one into the other, propelled by the weight of my mother, the stoutest of all our dominos and at the same time the most fragile.