Don't Move (24 page)

“It’s an emergency,” I told her. “Where’s the physician on duty?”

Without waiting for a reply, I kicked open the doors of a nearby room. Frightened, the girl followed me at a distance, accompanied now by a little chap wearing a white coat that was much too short for him, like a nursery school smock.

At last, I found an intensive-care room. This, too, was empty of people, its rolling shutters were down, and it was crammed with hospital equipment that had evidently not been used for quite some time. I attached Italia to an oxygen bottle and turned toward the girl. “I have to do an ultrasound.”

She stood stock-still. I grabbed her by the arms and jerked her toward me. “Hurry up!”

Soon the ultrasound cart was rolling in my direction, pushed by the male nurse with the short coat. I opened the medicine cupboard and fumbled with a bunch of useless boxes. When the physician on duty arrived—a middle-aged man with a bristly beard covering his cheeks all the way up to his glasses—I was injecting Italia with an antibiotic.

“Who are you?” he asked. He had the dirty voice of someone abruptly awakened.

Without even turning around, I said, “I’m a surgeon.” The ultrasound monitor lit up.

“What’s wrong with her?” he asked.

I didn’t answer him. I pressed the probe against Italia’s stomach and kept my eyes fixed on the monitor . . . but I couldn’t see anything. Everyone was standing around me in silence. I could hear the other physician’s breathing, very close behind me, the labored breathing of a heavy smoker. And now I understood what was wrong, even though I didn’t want to believe it, and the others understood it, too. Her abdomen was full of blood, and yet she hadn’t had even the smallest discharge. The hemorrhage was wholly internal; it was possible that some of her lower organs were already necrotic.

“Where’s the operating room?”

The physician on duty glowered at me in great vexation. “You’re not authorized to perform an operation in this building. . . .”

I was already pushing Italia’s gurney, but without knowing which direction to take. The young female nurse stepped to my side and took hold of the gurney, trying to steer it. The operating room, identical to the other rooms, was there on the ground floor, at the end of a corridor lined with pale blue tiles. The lights were off, and the room was stuffy with the odor of evaporated alcohol. The electrocardiograph machine had been shoved into a corner, together with an empty instrument cart. We entered that dark space. I pushed the gurney into the middle of the room, under the OR lamp that hung from the ceiling. When I switched the lamp on, I saw that many bulbs were burned out.

I told the nurse, “Pull the shutters up! Open up everything!” She carried out my orders robotically. I asked, “Where are the instruments?”

She slipped into a little room, where the doors of a large metal cabinet were just visible. She opened the cabinet and began to rummage around in it. When I entered the room, she was crouching on the floor, going through a drawer, from which she eventually pulling out a sealed bag filled with scissors—nothing but scissors. She looked at me. She had no clear idea of what I might need. I yanked the drawer off its slides and turned it over, spilling its contents onto the floor. I did the same thing with another one, and then another. In the end, I found what I needed: cold scalpel, forceps, retractor, cautery, clamps, needles. Everything was there, packaged in sterile bags. I threw it all on the instrument cart.

I cut Italia’s dress in two and pulled the two halves apart, revealing her body. The sight of her flesh, surreally white in that cold light, of her bony sternum, of her small pink nipples, crisscrossed by blue veins—this sight struck me like a blow.

“Electrodes,” I said.

They were suction electrodes, and the nurse attached them to Italia’s chest for the electrocardiogram. Then I intubated her myself, slowly, so as not to hurt her. I took two green cloths from a stack and gently placed them on her, one across her legs and the other on her upper body, high enough to cover her breasts. I prepared the correct dose of Pentothal, then scrubbed hastily and put on a sterile coat over my street clothes. The physician on duty came over to speak to me. His voice was more metallic than before. He said, “This hospital is little more than an outpatient clinic. We’re not equipped for this kind of operation. If anything happens, you’re in trouble, I’m in trouble, we’re all in trouble. . . .”

“She’s septicemic.”

“Load her in the ambulance and take her to a proper hospital. Please, listen to what I’m telling you. If she dies on the way, it won’t be anybody’s fault.”

I took him by the face, Angela, by a piece of his beard, an ear, whatever I could get hold of. I grabbed that man and threw him against the wall. He went away. I scrubbed once again.

“Gloves,” I said, spreading my fingers. The dark-haired nurse did her best to put the surgical gloves on me smoothly, but her own hands trembled.

The young male nurse, the one with the ill-fitting coat, was lurking in a corner of the operating room. Now he had on a long operating gown and a surgical mask. I glanced in his direction; his face seemed strangely trapezoidal. I asked him, “Are you sterilized?”

“Yes.”

“Then come give us a hand.”

He obeyed me and took up a position near Italia’s head. “Don’t take your eye off the monitor,” I told him. “And be ready to defibrillate if we have to.”

Outside the window, a bluish light was making itself visible. Italia’s face was serene. I felt strong, unexpectedly strong, Angela. This was a familiar scene—I’d seen it somewhere, who knows where, perhaps in a dream. I’d already lived this moment, and maybe I’d even been waiting for it. We were keeping an appointment, she and I. And it seemed to me that my life finally made sense, that I had penetrated the mystery. The terror at the sight of blood that I’d felt as a boy, the incision, that white moment when the flesh, though cut open, has not yet begun to bleed . . . maybe all that was her. That scalpel sliced into her body. The blood I feared was hers, just as I feared her love. She was already there. One who loves you is always there, Angela, there before knowing you, there before you. I wasn’t afraid now. Warmth suddenly spread through my shoulders, an intense, beneficent sun meant for me alone.

“Scalpel.”

I took hold of the tool, tightened my grip, and held the blade over her flesh. I love you, I thought, I love your ears, your throat, your heart. And I made the incision. I heard the sound of her opening, and I waited for her blood.

Then I went to work. Blood from the hemorrhage had damaged the organs; the parts of them that were most exposed had already taken on the dark color of necrosis. I moved the intestine. Her uterus was gray, her tubes were enlarged, and there was pus everywhere. A great mass of it was festering under the pouch of Douglas. I immediately thought about her abortion, Angela. This infection had been caused by a traumatic operation—and yet something didn’t make sense: Women die of septic abortions pretty quickly. She must have undergone a second curettage, and that one had been faulty, too. So she had just dragged herself along like that, with the infection inside her. I moved my eyes and took a step backward. Right, I told myself. Let’s add
that
thought to the list. I looked around; the young man with the trapezoidal face was staring at me in terror, and the nurse wore an equally distressed expression, along with a streak of blood across her forehead. I looked at Italia’s little, waxen, sleeping face, slightly tinged with the green reflection of the cloths surrounding her. That was when I asked God to help me. I raised my arms above my head and clenched my bloody gloves into two fists. It was going to be a struggle, I wasn’t going to let her go, and I wanted him to know it.

I put a stop to the hemorrhaging, cleared away the pus, performed a small resection of the intestine. It was only at the end that I turned to her uterus and saw that a hysterectomy was the only choice. Her womb was too compromised—the infection had spread everywhere—and I couldn’t risk the consequences of leaving it in place. So I extirpated the gray sheath that should have borne our child. I didn’t raise my eyes again, Angela. Sometimes, but only every now and then, when I needed a new instrument, I shifted my gaze to the right, toward the black-haired nurse, who was never certain what she should present.

My hands in Italia’s body made the only sound in the room: that slippery, sticky, compressed sound that a surgeon’s fingers make when he’s performing an operation. But now I was optimistic again, full of confidence once more. I was also soiled and quivering, and I stank. Sunlight was coming through the window, flooding the room, and there was a new light, an abundant light, on me, too. The nurse was perspiring from fatigue and heat, and only then did I realize how close it was in that room. I was sewing up the incision, and I could feel the heat sink into my hair and strike my fingertips. The graph showed a regular heartbeat. I passed the needle through her flesh like a careful tailor giving the final touches to a wedding gown. The night was over. And soon afterward, at last, I sat down on the chair behind me. I hadn’t shaved or bathed for two days, and yet I thought myself angelic, sitting there with my eyes closed and my head leaned back against the wall, like the hero of a television show.

39

However, she died. Two hours after the operation, life departed from her. I was by her side, and she was conscious at the end. I’d moved her into another room on the same floor. The bed next to hers was empty. When she woke up, I was standing at the window, which was level with the road. I had seen nothing of my surroundings the previous evening, but now, as I peered out into the daylight, I realized that the landscape was flat and the earth clayey. A large billboard depicted a cowboy straddling a can of beer. This is border territory, I thought, a zone of exchange. The very buildings, the block of structures that constituted the hospital, had the fragile, bureaucratic look of a custom -house. Every love story needs its trials, I told myself. A car passed, a little red jalopy; it passed without a sound. The sun shone powerfully, climbing the sky. Soon it’ll be summer again, I thought, and I smiled.

She stammered something, and I turned around. The sun was inside her eyes, brightening her gray irises with flecks of silver.

“I’m thirsty,” she murmured. “Thirsty . . .”

A bottle of mineral water, nearly empty, stood on the Formica night table. Earlier, when the nurse had brought me the water, I was so parched—the operation had lasted nearly six hours—that I drank almost all of it down without pausing for breath. Now just a few swallows were left, a little pool on the glass bottle’s green bottom. I poured some onto my pocket handkerchief and daubed at Italia’s dry, chapped lips. She opened her mouth like a hungry baby bird. “More,” she said.

I wet the handkerchief again and slipped it between her lips. She sucked at it. And then—this all happened in the course of a few minutes—she suddenly raised her head. Her neck shook, but the voice that came out of her was strong and didn’t sound like her own.

“What should I do?”

She seemed to be addressing nothing and no one, or perhaps a detached image of herself, a twin sister dancing before her eyes, on her head, on the ceiling. I planted my hands on the bed forcefully and leaned into her line of sight.
Where do
you want to go, all cracked and chapped and out of breath? Where
do you think you’re going?
I supported myself on my clenched fists, stiff-armed, careful not to fall on top of her, blocking her vision. I was in shadow, and she lay below me in the light. She’d already crossed over. Her pupils were rolling around in the whites of her eyes, searching for something, for some place high above her, and she floundered about, straining to reach it.

“What should I do?” she asked again, this time in a thin, strangled voice. She seemed to be addressing someone up there on the low sun-streaked ceiling, someone who was waiting for her. I stroked her face; her mandible was unnaturally stiff. Blue veins showed through the flesh under her chin, and her tensed neck was as diaphanous as a parchment lantern in the wind. How many times had I seen her slip away like this? When we made love, suddenly she would bend her head back toward the wall, stretching her neck until it became long and thin, searching for a place all her own in the darkness. She’d squeeze her eyelids together and flare her nostrils, almost as if she were following a scent, the heavy fragrance of a happiness she would never enjoy, no matter how desperately she sought it on the sweaty pillow. I tried once again to command her sight, to make her look at me, but her chin slipped out of my perspiring fingers.

“Love . . .”

She took a deep breath. Her chest rose, then sank again, and her whole body sank in that exhalation, surrendered with it. Then she looked at me, but I wasn’t sure that she could see me. Her lips moved as she spoke for the last time: “Carry me.”

And she didn’t tell me where. Her head rested, unmoving, on the pillow. She was no longer alive and not yet anywhere else, suspended in the nonplace that precedes death. Her face was relaxed, broader; she was looking up, where someone was waiting for her, and her trouble and toil were over. Her last breath was a soft moan, a sigh of relief. That’s how she found the road to heaven, Angela.

Don’t move.

I saw my saliva dripping on her—my mouth was full of it. I didn’t release her, not from my eyes, not from my anguish. I stayed where I was, breathing on her, bending closer and closer to her, maybe hoping I could save her with my breath. Then I lay across her, and my face came undone. . . . I felt a gentle force emanating from her, like vapor rising from water. I wasn’t thinking about doing anything medical—I’d forgotten I was a doctor. I looked at her the way one looks at a mystery, with attentive, moist eyes; I looked at her the way I’d looked at you a few hours before, when I’d watched you being born. I let her die like that. I let her last breath pass her lips, and the wind from that last breath touched my eyebrows. And she was gone, fled away, absorbed into the ceiling. Instinctively, I raised my head to look for her. And that’s when I saw him, Angela. I saw our son. His face appeared to me up there, just for a second. He wasn’t handsome; he had a thin, bitter mug, like his mother. The little son of a bitch had come to get her.

After his face was gone from the ceiling, I noticed a crack in the plaster, together with a moisture stain that looked a lot like him. I snuggled beside what he’d left me, that motionless, still-warm body. I took one of her hands and held it against my chest.
All right, Crabgrass, go on, go away where life can’t
wound you anymore. Do that crooked little dog step of yours and
go away. And let’s hope there’s really something up there, some covering,
some giant wing, because if the black void is all there is, you
got a pretty rotten deal all around.

There was a lot of stuff lying around that room—chairs, medicines, equipment—and I started kicking everything I could reach. Then I looked at my hands, still chalky white from having been inside surgical gloves for so many hours. I clenched my fists; I clenched my entire uselessness. And I took it out on the wall; I took it out on my hands. I swung my fists with a really exceptional ferocity, pounding the wall until the skin on my knuckles broke and bled and exposed the white bone. I didn’t stop until someone came into the room. Many people came into the room, and one of them, a man, overpowered me and twisted my arms behind my back.

Later, they bandaged my hands. I sat on a cot, looking at those wounds without emotion, as if they didn’t belong to me. I felt no pain; I was busy thinking about what I was going to do. I’d rinsed my face, stuck my neck under the faucet, pissed, stuffed my shirt back into my pants—I’d done all of that with those aching hands—and now I was just sitting there with the hair on the back of my head wet and plastered to my skull.

They bandaged my hands, or, rather, a nurse did, a young woman with a lock of copper-colored hair hanging down over her face. The coroner had already come, filled out his forms, and gone. We had to get some clothes back on Italia, but all her other clothes were in her luggage, which was in the back of my car. I wasn’t her husband, I wasn’t a relative, I wasn’t anybody. The nurse who was giving me first aid had the same rights over Italia’s body as I did, no more, no less. She raised her head, swiped the hair away from her eyes, and tucked it behind her ear. I thanked her and got down off the cot.

I went into the hospital director’s office, and from there I phoned a deputy prefect of police I’d operated on a few years previously. Everything got taken care of in less than an hour. A sergeant from the nearest police barracks showed up, a most accommodating man. He’d tracked down Italia’s family, in the person of a female cousin. This woman, he said, had no objection whatever to my making all the arrangements for the interment of her cousin’s body; she had, in fact, seemed relieved, particularly upon learning that I proposed to bear all the funeral expenses myself.

We were standing in the hall, the sergeant and I, and he looked at my bandaged hands. Then he said, “What exactly was your relationship with the deceased woman?”

It was perfectly normal human curiosity, but wrapped in a uniform. I said, “She was my fiancée.”

The sergeant had bright blue eyes. He made a grimace that looked like a smile and closed his eyes tightly, burying that blue light under wrinkles. He murmured, “Please accept my condolences.”

Very soon after that, I had in my pocket an official document, covered with stamps, and in my arms a pile of Italia’s clothes. I’d selected various items from her luggage. I’d walked to the parking lot across from the hospital and stood behind my car in the hot sun, bending into the trunk and rummaging around in Italia’s bags. Stop thinking, I told myself. Grab something and get away.

Corpses should be dressed by two people, but I wanted to do it on my own. When the nurse offered to help me, I shook my head and asked her to leave me alone. She made no objection. No one in that hospital, I noted, had dared make any sort of objection to me since the scene with the duty physician. The grief I was suffering from terrified and repelled all who came into contact with it.

Death has swift feet, Angela, and he comes running with great alacrity to take possession of what is his due. Italia was still, and she had no more temperature than the bed, the table, or any other inanimate thing. Dressing her wasn’t easy. I had to roll her to one side and then the other to get her arms into the sleeves of her blouse. For the first time, she gave me no help. And it broke my heart, because I knew she would have helped me had any trace of life remained in her at all. She would have lifted her arms, instead of letting them hang so heavily, and fall, and bang against the iron bed rail. It didn’t hurt. At last, the blouse was on her, sleeves included, and the only task remaining was to get the buttons through the buttonholes. Now that she had taught me to love her, now that I knew I loved her—now she was leaving me.

I was looking at her nipples, one here and one there on the sides of her chest. Pale nipples, as transparent as larvae. By chance, while going through her things, I’d come across the little jewelry bag where she kept my toenail clippings, and I’d put it in my pocket. It was a soft camel-colored velour bag. I hid it between her hands.
There you are, Italia; there are your
jewels. You and these yellowed chips will turn into dust together.

A man arrived. He wore dark glasses and a dark suit, and shiny shoes that resounded on the floor. He knocked on the door and, without waiting for a response, entered the room. This was a discreet but resolute person, one who knew how to behave around people in mourning. He looked into my expressionless face and perceived at once what kind of death he had come to deal with and what level of grief I was feeling. As he stepped over to the bed, his jacket opened, and I saw his black belt and its gold buckle. I was enchanted by that buckle. Its owner was a man of the old school, impeccably dressed, his gleaming pomaded hair slicked back flat against his round skull. The dark lenses erased his eyes, and his mouth was a slash in his face. He looked at Italia and considered her remains. Italia was beautiful, perfectly at her ease in death, fixed in a stony beauty without shadows, without cheapness. The man could not fail to notice that beauty, my child, or the distance that separated it from us. But this was the material he worked with, and I don’t doubt that every dead person taught him something. He had the swift eyes of a seasoned tailor, of one who knows how to take measurements without a ruler. He did his job quickly. Italia was so thin that a child’s coffin would have suited her; anything bigger was a waste of wood. I looked at her with his eyes, the eyes of an undertaker, who has to look very carefully. And then I felt a completely unexpected intimacy with this stranger. We were on the same frequency, two men united by a common thought, two faces turned toward a mystery. His was more accustomed to such contemplation than mine, but he still looked fragile, even behind the framework of the flawlessly pressed jacket and the impenetrably dark glasses.

He put his hand on my shoulder, a warm hand that didn’t move. I’d been in need of that hand without knowing it. I could feel it doing me good. It was a gloomy, resolute southern hand, holding me to the earth. It seemed to say to me, We have to stay behind and forget, without trying to make sense of this darkness that comes over us. He made a broad sign of the cross, slashing the air. I stood next to him and followed his example, like a disobedient child before a priest.

We reached an agreement concerning the next several hours. It was still early, and a certain amount of time had to pass before the body could be transferred to the coffin. I was in no hurry; I wanted Italia to stay in my sight as long as possible. The sun was flooding the sky at my back, outside the window I hadn’t dared look through again, and now the movements of things had ceased to interest me. I gazed at Italia’s fixedness while the light was falling full on her, which meant that the shadow of the world was lowering itself into darkness. Later, in the bluish shimmer that filled every corner of the room, her flesh became blue-gray ashes.