ace my hand on his knee as he sits beside me. He’ll soak some cotton in alcohol and rub my fingertip, then, quick, he’ll prick my finger with the needle, all the while keeping his eye on me. I’ll bear the pain and try to keep the muscles in my face from flinching. I’ll breathe lightly so it won’t be noticeable. He’ll attach a suction tube and draw blood, fill it half way, then stand up, add a liquid to the tube, go back to his office as he tells me I can get dressed. Shoes, slip, dress. I’ll reappear, sit in the chair in front of his desk, and trams and autos go past, I mean cars and more cars, and the afternoon will wind to an end as he holds the tube with my blood up to the light and adds a few more drops of liquid. Seventy percent. I lower myself into the bathtub, quickly soap myself, and shower away the suds as the mirror fogs up and smells permeate. I brush my teeth, comb my hair quickly. The slip. I phone for a taxi. Cornavin. It’s coming from the Cornavin taxi stand. I go down to wait for it. The driver closes the door; I glance at my address book for the house number, I can never remember it. The dizziness begins. Just a bit, very slight. The same reaction I used to get when I was little, when I would smell the varnish on the trams. Ring-ring. The plane trees along Passeig de Gràcia. Starlings soaring above Plaça de Catalunya, tracing triangles and circles in the evening sky, a fury of wings and shrieks. The peacock tower near Plaça de la Bonanova. Under the bridge, near the church. Buy a votive candle and place it on the right side, straight up so the flame won’t gutter. Pull the wick up before you light it. Let’s walk the tram smells bad. Ring-ring and the tram passes us along República Argentina, heading down the hill. Be sure to buy the newspaper for the obituaries. Pont du Mont-Blanc. The Salève is unattractive, barren in places, but higher up the snowy summit is lunar. Majestic peaks the solitude of the snowdrifts sky crossed by eagles black wings snow storms hurricanes. The mountain that metamorphoses: distant, near, invisible in the fog. The fog off the Arve, down by the river, close to the ground. The bridge of the desperate, where the waters mix, the clear with the turbid, the Arve and the Rhône. Those who jump from the bridge are dead when they hit the water. The idea of suicide makes me feel important, and I sit up straight in my seat and watch Geneva drifting past: “Je pisse vers les cieux bruns, très haut et très loin, avec l’assentiment des grans heliotropes.” Going around a curve the taxi throws me against the door. How can I explain the anguish? The desire to scream. It’s wrong for him to do what he’s doing to me. Boulevard des Philosophes. I have to put one foot in front of the other to go down the stairs, and if I need to get up at night for a glass of water, I have to hold on to the wall as I walk because my foot. . Ghastly. Nerves are a bad thing. All those days of sitting down did me no good at all. Nor did the scalding foot baths with salts. Just the opposite. Will it ever get well? Life is such a fragile thing, so difficult to keep it balanced till the end. I asked for little and gave a lot. What if I’m wrong, and I’m exaggerating what I did? I don’t think I’m deceiving myself, playing tricks on myself; I wasn’t brought into this world to play tricks. I get out of the taxi, pay, and go inside. The stairs are sad, the elevator ancient. The nurse is just a girl, young, short, her flaxen hair poking out from beneath her cap. She looks at me carefully, speaks very slowly, as if weighing each word, spelling it letter by letter. The correct words emerge, sure of themselves. I’m in the waiting room with the painting, rock tree sheep. I pull back the sheer curtain and gaze at the street. Foxglove. The elastic waistband has stretched and my panties are sliding down. I pull them up. I glance at myself in the mirror in front of the sofa, pick up a magazine, and sit down. According to the statistics, Geneva is the city that has the most cars in Europe and rains the least. I hear a door shutting at the other end of the apartment. I stretch out my leg and slowly move my foot from side to side. It hurts. I’m drowsy. I put down the magazine but don’t feel like looking at another. When I realize that I am filled with this terrible despair, I think about what he’s doing to me, though he denies it, says I’m just obsessed, the anguish settles under my heart like a huge beast and won’t let me breathe. There’s nothing to know I don’t want to know. Break this silence! Watching cars isn’t enough, I need something stronger to drive away the anguish that’s devouring me. All the pain I’ve caused him. . just something he invented. It’s all fairy tales, fiction, tall tales. I shouldn’t complicate things. Nothing matters. What’s important today won’t be important two or three years from now. Not at all. Not to middle-aged me. Me, right in the middle of my life. The odor from the tram always used to upset me, and when I got home I needed to smell cologne and sometimes even lie down. How much is the foxglove compared to the Royal jasmine, the starry flower clambering up the wall along the ivy path? Above the white stars in the heart of Sant Gervasi de Cassoles, all the way up to the rooftop. Doing the shopping in the cool early hours. Every morning in front of the grocer’s lies a sad, shaggy dog whose owner pretends to tie him up with an invisible rope to an invisible pole, and he lies there calmly, convinced he’s tied up. In the early morning the gardens are still withdrawn; they must think night perseveres. If plants had eyes, they’d realize it’s never clear when night will end and the sun will begin to gild them and finally annoy them. They’ve closed the door, and I assume a reasonable face. Now he and the nurse must by tidying up, throwing away cotton, changing the linen sheet, disinfecting scissors and tweezers. He’ll wash his hands and come to get me: tall, wearing his impeccable white coat, calm, a smile on his face. So, tell me how you are. My foot aches, and nothing eases the pain. He was recommended by one of Rafael’s coworkers, and while taking his pulse at the house the doctor raised his eyes and saw the woman I’d painted on Canson paper, madly, with a damp cloth, soaking the paper. What is it? A fish? No, it’s a woman. And, still taking Rafael’s pulse, he doubled over with laughter. I showed him more of my paintings. I think I broke the elastic waistband when I sat down. It would be. . Halfway along the corridor I’d be paralyzed, not a true paralysis but because my panties would fall to the floor and shackle my feet. I have a strong urge to laugh and mask it with a tiny cry and cover my mouth with my hand. What is it? Is it a woman? No. It’s a fish. No. It’s a woman. Blue, purple, pink. A triangle for a head, half of her face streaked with fine lines, broken here and there by a wipe of a damp cloth. I showed him to the bathroom to wash his hands, and while he was sudsing them he whispered, “I don’t believe he’s ill; he’s pretending so he can be with you.” I was silent, but when he left I studied myself in the mirror in the foyer. A friend of mine once told me, there’s something inexplicable about your manner, something about you that I can’t put my finger on. I’m uncertain about what’s changed, but I’ve seen it coming on slowly, day by day. Stained teeth? Face full of pores? The whites of the eyes? The whites of her eyes are a bit blue, my grandfather used to say, have you ever noticed? Now it isn’t white or blue, but tending toward ivory, streaked with the odd blood vessel. What does a burst blood vessel mean? Just a little vein that comes and goes. I mean it appears then suddenly dissolves. If my red corpuscles were what they should be. . They’re always low, and I have to take iron. My neck muscles have twitched. Tired of being in place since that first cry. Rebellious, these neck muscles. What’s the matter? Me and my neck against the light. When I laugh I raise my face, but when I’m worried like now because of the pain in my foot. . What’s the matter? The look he gave me made me cover my neck with my hands. As he was washing I heard him say something about a disinfectant and I went over to him. What did you say? And he turned and whispered, his hands under the faucet, “There’s nothing the matter with him. He just wants to be with you.” When he left I went out on the terrace; he placed his satchel in the back seat and, standing by the car, looked up at me and waved good-bye. I closed the door to the balcony and gazed through the glass at the bruise-covered Salève. Nice man, the doctor. You should give him a watercolor. The one with the nest full of birds, their beaks stretched wide-open, spilling out, heads raised, more like seals than birds. Earlier, he’d said nothing was the matter with Rafael, he was only pretending so he could be with me, and I mentioned that my foot hurt. Told him I’d ask for an appointment so he could examine it, been troubling me for a couple of months. But I didn’t say we’d sent for him because Rafael and I had a fight, all through the night, no sleep, and he hadn’t gone to work and needed a a note from a doctor for an excuse.