He doesn’t remember having asked the patient whether he has children. Probably he does, because the man carries an old-married or fatherly look, there is a certain physical wear and tear, a burden of responsibility on his shoulders, of worry. It was the weariness, the vague overall exhaustion, that brought the patient here. The doctor didn’t tell the man that in the blood test he was ordering a specific analysis would be included. He didn’t want to alarm him, to offend him. “Who do you take me for?” the patient might have said. “What kind of life do you think I live?”
The man will be there in a few minutes, and the doctor will have to say those words, the name of the illness, spoken cautiously, with clinical objectivity, using the euphemism of the initials. Of course we will repeat the test, but I must also tell you that the chance of error is small.
Those words, spoken so many times, always neutral and yet horrible, the panic and the shame, and so much predictable anguish, and the never-mitigated bitterness of the doctor’s impotence. That is almost another form of contagion, a fatigue like the one his patients suffer, a vague, persistent, and inexplicable malaise, the awakening in certain specialized cells of the unnoticed guest, hidden for years, but also obedient to genetic codes that even now no one knows how to decipher, just as the ultimate nature of matter is not decipherable, the whirlwind of particles and infinitesimal forces of which all things are made, the light of my computer screen and the lamp above the keypad illuminating my hands, the shell I am feeling this moment, remembering a summer, two summers to be exact, alike and yet so different.
You will not swim twice in the same river, nor will you live the same summer twice, nor will there be a room that is identical to another, nor will you walk into the same room you left five minutes ago, the same darkened doctor’s office where you were only once, sitting across from a doctor who spoke slowly and asked shocking questions, and who nodded as he listened to your answers, attentive, fingering a white shell on his desk at the left side of his computer keypad, symmetrical with the mouse he touches almost secretively with long, white, hairy fingers as he looks for a file, the data the patient gave by telephone to the nurse when he called the first time asking for an appointment.
FROM THE BEACH we could see a row of white houses on the cliffs to the east, half hidden in the foliage of their gardens and surrounded by high whitewashed walls, their large windows and terraces facing south, toward the bluish line of the coast of Africa. We were told that high up in the naked rock, where no vegetation grew, was a cave with Neolithic paintings and the remains of Phoenician sarcophagi. I got up very early one morning, just as it was getting light, quietly put on my clothes and running shoes, trying not to wake my wife, and left the hotel, cutting through the deserted garden reflected in the mauve, motionless water of the swimming pool. In the restaurant, beneath unflattering electric light, the waiters on the first shift were setting up trays for the buffet, arranging china and silver on the tables, silent as sleepwalkers. I noticed with pleasure the spring in my step, the comfort of the running shoes in which I’d walked and run hundreds of kilometers. The cool air numbed me in my T-shirt, so I began jogging slowly, breathing easily, but instead of heading toward the beach, as I did every morning, I followed the highway curving up the hill. Because the hill was so steep, I quickly grew tired and slowed to a walk. Seen at close range, the houses we had viewed from the beach were even more imposing, protected by walls topped with broken glass, by security company warnings, and by dogs that barked from gardens as I passed and that sometimes hurled themselves against the gates, rattling bars as they stuck their muzzles through and growled. Except for the barking and the sound of my steps on the gravel, the only thing I could hear was the methodical click of sprinklers watering lawns that I couldn’t see but that emitted a strong aroma of sap and well-fertilized soil.
Now and then I glimpsed the silvery body of an enormous German-made car through the bars of an iron fence. I turned a corner, and before me lay the vertiginous expanse of beach and sea. The hotel looked like a scale model, or one of those cutouts my son liked to put together when he was younger: a picture-postcard blue pool, the line of windows. Behind one of them, my wife was still peacefully asleep in a night preserved by drawn curtains.
I found no path that would take me to the top, to the cave containing the Neolithic paintings. I abandoned the asphalt road, striking out through thick clumps of rockrose in which I thought there might be a path. I came to the road again, which narrowed between rocks and weeds before ending abruptly at a wall with a tall metal door painted a military green. Several dogs were barking behind it. I recognized the high terraces and arched windows we had seen from the beach: the house on the highest point of the hill. Beside the door, on a ceramic plaque, was a name in Gothic characters: berghof. I had read that name somewhere, in some book, but I didn’t remember which one.
I turned back. I was tired. When I reached the hotel, it was no later than 9:00 A.M., but it was already beginning to get hot, and the first German tourists, red from the sun and stuffed from breakfast, were beginning — with careful deliberation — to claim the best chairs, the reclining loungers arranged on the shady side of the pool. I opened the door of my room cautiously and listened in the darkness to my wife’s breathing, and smelled the shared scents of our lives. I sat on the bed beside her; she was wearing nothing but her panties and was sleeping on her side, curled up and hugging her pillow. To see you naked is to remember the earth. I brushed the hair from her face and saw that her eyes were open and that she was smiling at me. I remembered that word: Berghof.
I wish I could hold every detail of those July days in my mind as completely as I hold this white shell, because if any of it, essential or trivial, is lost, the equilibrium of things may tip out of balance. In my student encyclopedia I read the story of how for want of a horseshoe nail, an empire was lost. How many small coincidences were needed for Pablo Casals to find Bach’s suites for cello in a stall in Barcelona filled with old manuscripts? This shell is dragged by waves for a year or for two hundred, and is thrown so hard against a rock its outer edge is nicked, then it lies buried in the white sand of a beach that fades into the horizon toward the west so that one July afternoon Arturo can find it, and so that I in turn may have it here now within reach of my hand, as part of the familiar kingdom of the sense of touch: the plastic of the computer keyboard, the rough wood of the table, the porcelain of the coffee cup, and paper shining in the light from the lamp where I am writing words that are indecipherable to anyone except a pharmacist.
THE DOCTOR IMAGINES he is speaking with a friend, telling him the story, he who confides in no one but his wife, the story of those two summers, of the second summer, the one of repetition, the return two years later. If there is something I truly yearn for, it isn’t youth, it’s friendship, the mutual affection that joined me to others when I was fifteen or twenty, the ability to talk for hours, walking around my deserted city on summer nights, recounting every detail of who you are, what you want, what you suffer, to do nothing but talk and listen and be together, because often we didn’t have money to go to a bar or a movie or play billiards. Hands in our empty pockets and heads sunk between shoulders, we leaned toward one another to share thoughts and conspirings. I miss that bashful male tenderness, feeling accepted and understood but not daring to express gratitude for it — not the rough male camaraderie, that boasting or poke of the elbow or drooling wink at the sight of a desirable woman.