Falling asleep once more, I saw in a new dream two ladies from the village talking about me, about something that had happened to me and affected me greatly. My salvation, according to them, depended on the perfect pronunciation of the word “emeret,” which I couldn’t pronounce correctly. And so they instructed me in how to relax my body, pace my breathing, curve my tongue and articulate clearly, but my brain, overwhelmed by other words, mixed up the sequence of instructions, and the inflections in my voice didn’t harmonize with the inflections of my being, which was essential for the perfect pronunciation of the word. Different parts of my body were pronouncing the syllables incorrectly and with an awkward cadence … Until, suspended at some point in space, with an “e” and a “t” jammed between my lips, I learned that an “a,” which I didn’t know was in the word, was the key to its pronunciation. But as soon as I discovered this, the dream vanished.
My father was peeling an apple with his pocketknife while a grayish twilight filtered in through the closed curtains.
It was 7:10, or 8:25, or 4:00 in the morning. The room was dark, or, through the window, the midday heat shimmered.
Or a golden air would enter the room in diagonal columns that fastened themselves to the floor, as if my day would build itself or my night would lie down to rest on them, depending on whether it was dawn or dusk. Or to know what time it was, I would find my parents with my eyes; if they slept, it was daybreak, if they were standing, reading, or talking in low voices, night was falling.
Beyond my room lived my friends and my brother. Inside it, all that existed were the space of my suffering and the moment of my misfortune.
In bed, waiting, my being lay in doubt.
On the night of the second Sunday, lying awake at eight or so and noting a great weariness in my parents’ faces, I felt uneasy as I remembered that it was the time they usually went to the movies in Contepec and the beginning of their weekly entertainment, knowing that in order to look after me they had to be shut in as well. I also remembered my Sunday night doldrums after laboring my way up the day as if it were an exhausting ladder leading to floors where doors bore signs monotonously proclaiming, “CLOSED. Open tomorrow.” I would reach the height of tedium around eight, at which time, if the films were boring and I didn’t feel like watching them and my family and the maids were at the movies, I would roam the darkened village on my own, stricken by solitude, and, feeling lost outdoors, I would wander the corridors of our house and the streets.
It was the same when I roved anxiously from room to room at home, from the garden to the kitchen, from the store to the movie theater, morning or night, among friends or with my brother, seized by an ineffable melancholy, as if something within me wanted to speak but couldn’t, as if I had the wish but not the words.
I was the wounded one, the boy who’d been shot by a shotgun. The news had come out in the Sol de Toluca, stating that Dr. Alvear had saved my life by operating on me when I had thirty-two perforations in my intestine. Meanwhile, I was aflame with thirst. I slept and woke and I was thirsty. Treatment of my hand made me howl. The adhesive tape would stick to the raw flesh of my fingers, and the nurses had to hold me down to change the dressings. By day ten, I’d received more than eighty injections, and there was scarcely a part of my body that didn’t ache. A new pain was foretold each time the door opened, every three hours, and a nurse entered.
In the room next door they’d put a boy who had sliced off the fingers of his left hand with the guillotine at a print shop. I could hear his screams all night long, and for days his lamentations were the voice of the invisible patients in the hospital. His hand became infected for lack of penicillin; the nuns asked my father if he could buy some, which he did, and then went to visit the boy.
When the boy recovered, he came to thank me.
Each day the curtains were left open a bit longer. The room was lit by natural light. I began sleeping almost only by night. I was able to have chicken broth and drink noncarbonated water; I nearly finished off the bottle the first time my mother put one to my lips, trying to quench weeks of thirst.
My father brought fruit and magazines. One morning he arrived with books, King Thrushbeard and The Four Skillful Brothers. Within hours I’d read them both.
Next he brought me Emilio Salgari’s Sandokan novels and Michel Zevaco’s Bridge of Sighs.
But as I read them so quickly they were running out of books at the small bookstore in Toluca.
Once I could take small steps they brought me out to the corridor, where they sat me down, accompanied by my mother, to take some sun alongside the other convalescing patients, nearly all women.
Saturday evening they took me to the hospital movie theater, where they were showing a film with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
The entrance to the theater was also the entrance to another spectacle, one of misfortunes portrayed almost allegorically by such pitiful cases that seeing them in succession depressed me. There were old men without legs, armless men, crippled children, women with bandaged chests, and patients who had recently had surgery on many parts of the body, a sampling of the great variety of ills that afflict mankind.
Most of the audience that filled the hall looked so unhealthy you wouldn’t have thought they were there for a screening but rather for a meeting of candidates for the beyond. Some wore awful smiles on their cadaverous faces; one man who was deathly pale, with a greenish cast and trembling hands, stared at me, looking as wretchedly unhappy as if he were being broken apart; and when the show started he kept on staring fixedly at me, seeming unaware the film had begun.
Otherwise, although the movie was funny no one laughed, or they couldn’t laugh because of their injuries, responding to the occasional comic moments with a groan or a sigh. In the silvery light the projection of the film lent the hall, you could see their mournful faces, as if the everyday world where the film was taking place made them deeply long for their own homes, or made them feel they would never return to them.
On their feet and leaning against the walls, the nurses looked from patients to screen and screen to patients. Sitting next to me, my parents didn’t laugh at what was happening on the screen but they didn’t seem unhappy either. The only people who enjoyed the film somewhat were the patients’ relatives, who, obliged to remain in seclusion, found some relief from the continual strain of life at the hospital.
The following day in the corridor when my parents asked a passing nurse why they’d opened the side door that was always shut and she replied that a corpse had been removed and this was the door they always used to remove corpses so the sick patients wouldn’t notice and get scared, I was horrified by the possibility that just a few days ago the door could have been opening for me. Other than that, when I saw my body and studied my face in the mirror, I trembled with joy to realize it was me.
On the way back to my room I passed the dining room and on the table saw some bananas spreading their scent. Some had softened so much they almost came apart in the nurse’s hand, others were barely speckled to a tasty yellow, fully ripe.
Handing me one, the nurse told me to save it for after dinner.
One Saturday we returned to Contepec. I had many books and my parents were glad to get back to our village and our home.
The nurses said they would miss us, as if during our stay at the hospital we’d established a friendly bond. Upon leaving I felt that something of ours would remain forever in the room, and I looked with melancholy at the door about to close on the other person I once was, as if I were abandoning inside the room the body that had carried me from the day of my birth till the day of my accident, to convalesce in this other body that carries me still, whose novelty I felt at the time.