Breathing Through the Wound Read online

  “I really don’t feel like talking about this anymore,” Eduardo said.

  “Well you’ve got to talk to someone about it. It’s been fourteen years since they died. You spent the last thirteen locked up, and I don’t just mean physically. You’ve been trapped, reliving the accident. You think you’re over it? Shit, Eduardo, you’re not even close, and now you tell me you’re going to be some kind of beacon of hope for that woman. It’s absurd.”

  Eduardo fished around in his trouser pockets and he came out with a wrinkled cigarette. He smoothed and lit it, attempting to calm down, and then anxiously glanced around as though searching for something. Olga followed his eyes and realized what it was.

  “It’s eight o’clock in the morning, Eduardo.”

  “Life is short,” he replied.

  “If you say so.”

  She had glasses somewhere, but wasn’t sure where. Eventually she unearthed a grimy tumbler. She rinsed it in the sink and poured Eduardo a vodka—no ice, no lemon. He downed it in one, spilling a few drops on the floor, hands trembling. Suddenly he got that shifty look that made others avoid him.

  Olga was now standing by the window. She looked distressed. Fourteen years on, she still felt like she owed Eduardo something. She worried about him, brought him clean clothes—often leaving a couple of hundreds on his table on the way out—and once in a while even agreed to drink with him in run-down, sordid dives that stank of old smoke, just to keep him company. In exchange for all that, she expected just a modicum of consideration, of appreciation. And he categorically refused to give it to her.

  “I’m worried about you, Eduardo.”

  Eduardo had poured himself another shot. This one he sipped, feeling less desperate. Shielding himself behind the scratched rim of the glass, he eyed Olga. He still wondered who she really was, why she’d suddenly appeared in his life. Without the commissions she got him, Eduardo would have ended up as a night watchman in an underground parking lot, reading bad novels, eating pre-packaged pastries, drinking vending-machine coffee and smoking his life away. She’d also been the only one who showed any concern for him when he was locked up in the prison’s psych ward in Huesca. She had come see him on visiting day, each of them spending the twenty-minute communication period in silence, sitting facing each other, separated by a thick, dirty glass panel inevitably smudged with the fingerprints and breath marks of those who couldn’t touch the person on the other side. They’d found nothing to say, barely daring to glance at one another. That same ritual was repeated month in and month out, same day, same time, neither one expecting anything from the other, neither asking anything of the other. From time to time she sent him cigarettes, magazines, art books, new clothes. And then, one fine day, she’d just stopped coming, and slowly her packages stopped arriving, too. She didn’t tell him why and he didn’t ask. He simply let it happen. But when he got out, thirteen years later, Olga was there, waiting for him in the parking lot. And still Eduardo didn’t ask why.

  “Look, I don’t need you to worry about me, or feel sorry for me, or protect me. I’d be happy if you just left me alone.”

  Olga attempted a look of disdain, hidden contempt she actually felt for herself.

  “You’re right. The next time you decide to slit your wrists, you can find someone else’s door to knock on. If you’ve made up your mind to screw up the rest of your life, or fall in love with some illusion, that’s none of my business. And now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone for a while.”

  She walked Eduardo to the door, placed her hand on the knob and turned it, but as she stood in the doorway she turned sideways.

  “You never asked why,” she said, eyes flashing beneath her lashes, which were thin as a little girl’s without mascara.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I could have gone to the cops, but instead of heading for the nearest police station, I told you. You never asked me why that was what I did. You never asked me why I started visiting you at the clinic—or why I suddenly stopped. You weren’t even surprised to see me waiting for you in the parking lot the day you got out…You never asked a single thing.”

  Eduardo pondered coldly how to reply. From among the multitude of tangled thoughts and suspicions swirling in his mind, he came up with a few words by way of response.

  “Maybe I never wanted to know the answers.”

  * * *

  —

  It was very late by the time Eduardo managed to get to sleep, as usual. He never slept deeply and his dreams were always a struggle from which he awoke utterly exhausted. But this time it wasn’t his nightmares that awoke him but the cries coming from the other end of the hall. Horrific, animal-like howls. He knew, however, that those blood-curdling shrieks were not coming from an animal. Eduardo had grown accustomed to hearing them every once in a while.

  He turned on the light and found his slippers. Walking to the door, he knew no one else would come out into the hallway. Despite the racket, not a single other tenant would come to help, no one would admit to knowing what was going on; if anything, the incident would simply serve to fan the flames of gossip whispered by those spying from the other side of their peepholes.

  Graciela was at her apartment door, which stood ajar. They looked at each other and said nothing. She pulled her hair back in exasperation, lips trembling.

  “She woke up.” Her eyes implored him to help.

  Eduardo heard Sara’s frenzied cries. Graciela was attempting to pacify her daughter, cooing and speaking softly through the crack in the door without letting go of the handle, but Sara’s voice grew louder and louder, finally erupting into a crazed blend of laughter and tears, incomprehensible insults and threats. He heard banging, more shouting, objects being smashed, and finally Eduardo pushed Graciela aside and opened the door in alarm. Sara was totally out of control, her eyes glassy and glimmering wildly, like a blind man staring directly into the sun. As soon as she saw the door open, she hurled herself at it in an attempt to escape. The girl was desperate to make it out onto the street, fixated on the idea of running away.

  Graciela held her arms, but Sara broke free, kicking her and biting at the air. She was as strong as an adult, especially during these fits of rage. Eduardo managed to avoid her snapping jaws twice, but not the kick that got him right in his injured knee. He repressed a cry of pain and wrapped both arms tightly around Sara like a beast, so she couldn’t shake him off, despite her writhing like a snake.

  “Call an ambulance!” he shouted to Graciela, who had suddenly gone motionless, as though she’d lost all her strength. “Graciela, for God’s sake, call an ambulance!” he repeated, short of breath.

  Forty minutes later, Sara was in bed, sleeping deeply, at the hospital. Her thin fidgety body, so like that of her mother, could be seen breathing easily beneath the sheet. There was no sign of the snake-spirit that had whipped through her a few minutes earlier; it seemed never to have happened. She was just a normal girl, perhaps a little on the pale side, the tiny veins on her eyelids too pronounced, her mouth a bit too tense. Listening carefully, you could hear the sound of her teeth clenching and grinding as she dreamed, but that was it. The little bedside lamp projected the shape of her defeated body onto the wall.

  “The sedatives will make her sleep for hours, but they won’t stop the frantic thoughts churning in her mind. She’s boiling, I can feel it. It’s like a river of lava beneath her skin, and her brain is on fire,” Graciela said, one hand on her daughter’s sorrowful forehead, smoothing away a few sweaty strands of hair.

  In the morning, Sara would wake up and it would be like part of her body was still on the other side of that dream; it would be days before she returned completely.

  “The nurses will take good care of her. You heard the doctor. It’s better for her to spend the night, for observation,” Eduardo said.

  She nodded absently. Eduardo studied her, watching as she
performed mechanical movements: opening the armoire, taking out a toiletries bag, a clean change of clothes, hanging them up on the hanger…Each action required superhuman strength just to keep her from collapsing—she looked so fragile. Eduardo took the small overnight bag—the one that was always packed and ready to go, in case Sara had a fit—from Graciela, just before it fell from her hands.

  “It’s okay, I’ll take care of it.”

  And she began to cry. But not even then did her tears flow as she’d have wished—freely, torrential, liberating. Instead they were constrained, released in small, measured doses. Without knowing why, Eduardo stroked her lips with the tip of his thumb, as though attempting to erase her sorrow and provide the kiss his lips could not give. She cleared her throat, and then shook her head the way people do in India, a yes that looked like a no.

  Graciela pulled away from his touch, drying her eyes with the back of a hand.

  “It’s been like this for years. I can’t take it anymore, I’m exhausted. Sometimes I feel like she’s hijacked my life, but then I realize that’s not true. The fact is, I gave up long before she was born.” She was speaking softly, wearily, not thinking about what she was saying but also not keeping the words from streaming from her mouth.

  “What about her father?”

  Graciela waved a vague hand through the air.

  “Her father was…very handsome.” She laughed at her own quip, exasperated. “Isn’t it sad that that’s the only thing I can say about the man who got me pregnant? I’ve always had a weakness for green-eyed assholes who refuse to grow up. He held out for a month, maybe two, promised he’d take care of Sara—and I know he really did make an effort to accept it when the doctors told us she’d never be a normal girl—but in the end he couldn’t hack it, and that’s what counts. He started cheating on me pretty quick, and maybe at first he felt guilty—he must have felt at least a little remorse, with some random girl sucking his dick in the doorway while I was tearing my hair out upstairs, desperate because I had no idea what was the matter, up all night because Sara couldn’t get to sleep and wouldn’t stop crying. But he got over that pretty fast. One day he just took off. Didn’t say goodbye. Erased us from his lives. Some people are just like that, you know?”

  “You’ll find someone,” Eduardo replied, mostly because he assumed that was the kind of response he was supposed to give. Graciela deserved better luck than she had. But in the end, he was convinced that luck had nothing to do with the choices people made.

  Graciela accepted his insincerity with a forced smile.

  “There have been other men since then, of course. There always are, as long as you’re prepared not to be too picky…Did you know I had a mastectomy six months ago?” She asked this, staring straight into his eyes, emptily, as though talking about some trivial matter. Eduardo blushed slightly and said nothing. “Most guys get scared the second I take out the padding, even though I warn them. They can’t help but look bereft as soon as they see the scar. Some of them get over it, but very few think it doesn’t matter. And when they meet Sara, even those guys get scared—the kind words get stuck in their throat—and they can’t run away fast enough when they realize what the prospects are. Honestly, I’ve given up hope.”

  Everyone hopes for something, until they give up, Eduardo thought, unsure how much of what Graciela said was resentment, and how much was an attempt to conceal secret optimism.

  “You’re not scared, though,” she said, eyeing him curiously. “I know you saw me in the bathroom. The truth is, I wanted you to. And you don’t get freaked out by Sara’s attacks, you know how to handle her. She likes you, it’s so obvious that she’s fond of you.”

  Eduardo asked her to stop right there. But Graciela went on. She took his elbow to keep him from moving away, trying to trap him with her eyes, her pained expression, her desperate hands.

  “I know you lost your wife and daughter, and I know that all these years you haven’t wanted to be with anyone. But we all have a right to start over, Eduardo. You’re a good man—and I’m not quite ready to feel like my life is totally over yet.”

  Eduardo gently but firmly pulled her hand from his elbow.

  “I’m not a good man, Graciela. Really, you know nothing about me.”

  “I know enough.”

  “No, you don’t. Now let’s drop it, please. I have to go; tomorrow I’ve got to be up early.”

  Graciela nodded, her eyes full of sadness. Sadness for herself, for Sara, for him. She tried to hide it, repositioning a vase on the shelf.

  “A bouquet of dry flowers is as close as we get to knowing the ephemeral, don’t you think?”

  Eduardo eyed the flowers. They were roses, freshly cut. And they’d been cut for the express purpose of dying in a vase, their agony contemplated by others.

  “Give Sara a kiss when she wakes up.”

  “I will.” Graciela brushed her cheek against his, feigning a quick air kiss. The layer of foundation she was wearing made her skin feel like velvet.

  She let him go, walk away, leave the room without stopping him, without asking him to stay just a little bit longer, to hold her even for a moment. She’d pull herself together before long; she could manage, carry on as she always had, with Sara, the two of them, alone together—but sometimes she needed just a little love…just a few drops of tenderness, a little company.

  * * *

  —

  What is love? Nothing. A transient feeling. Something we think we possess but that never really belongs to us.”

  Mr. Who stared at the computer screen, contemplating what he’d just written. It was five o’clock in the morning and he couldn’t sleep. He’d tried, but his bed was like a shroud and he a corpse staring out at the darkness, eyes open. Tired, scattered, sleepless, he got out of bed and looked through the slats in the blinds. The neighborhood was deserted, illuminated by a streetlight on the roundabout, which was ringed with old olive trees some local government official had decided to plant there, in a little plaza surrounded by concrete. The parked cars had frost on their windshields—it was cold out. He sat at the desk in his underwear and rifled through drawers until he found the Chinese cigarettes, with the unpronounceable name and strong harsh taste that he had started smoking when Chang had told him that that was the brand that real Chinese people smoked. And Mr. Who had decided to become truly Chinese, whatever it took.

  “Ultimately, this is already inside you, you simply need to awaken it after such a long period of oblivion,” Chang lectured. Chang was the one in charge of supervising his progress, so smoking harsh Chinese cigarettes and giving up the light American blond tobacco he had been smoking was far from the worst that could have happened.

  Who massaged his forehead and then cracked his neck like a wrestler, twisting it left and right. He turned back to the screen and, for a few seconds, held his fingers suspended over the keys, as though he were a pianist about to begin his recital. Then he deleted what he’d written—intended as a poem for Mei. In the end he’d deemed it too naive, too childish. Sighing deeply he logged into his secret email account, the one Maribel knew nothing about and couldn’t snoop through. She swore up and down that she never invaded his privacy, that she wouldn’t dare—but Mr. Who had set invisible traps for her, and had discovered that she’d been keeping tabs on the web pages he visited, had been going through his emails, reading his texts. The secret account had been Chang’s idea—that was where the restaurant owner sent him the addresses of new clients.

  He had a new message, ten minutes old—it seemed Who was not the only one with insomnia: a hotel near Calle Montera. After jotting down the directions, he deleted his browser history.

  Mr. Who shuffled down to the kitchen, dragging his slippered feet, and sat down with a can of Coke in his hand, staring fixedly at the steel clock on the wall. He downed his soda, feeling the gut-churning bubbles hit his empty stomach, and, flicking the ash
of his cigarette into the can, listened to it hiss. Then he tossed the butt into the can, and the can into the garbage—making sure to close the plastic container fully—and, finally, aired out the kitchen, opening the door and window. Maribel couldn’t stand the smell of smoke in the house—and though she must have realized Who had taken up the habit, he kept trying to pretend he didn’t smoke, at least in front of her, out of respect. Still, despite his precautions, he soon heard the parquet creak and the mechanical whir of her wheelchair in the living room, approaching the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you; I just wanted something to drink.”

  “And to smoke one of those stinky cigarettes…” Maribel said, from the doorway, fanning the air. She was wearing a fake silk robe with a gaudy floral motif, a kimono she only wore because Mr. Who had given it to her for her sixtieth birthday. Pushing the little lever on her chair, she wheeled over to the counter. Mr. Who got there first, filling the kettle.

  “How long did you sleep, a couple hours? I heard you come in—it was very late,” Maribel said, one hand in her lap. Beneath the red kimono, he could make out her shrunken, atrophied thighs; she had a svelte, well-formed trunk but there was total dysfunction below the waist—her legs were useless. To one side of the chair he saw her drainage bag, with a small quantity of urine in it. Maribel saw him looking and demurely covered it with the kimono.

  “More or less,” Who said, turning to watch the kettle boil. “Mr. Chang is really busy at the restaurant, and he doesn’t have time to teach us until we finish cleaning the kitchen, after closing.”

  The truth was, he’d been at the house of a special client and had dawdled too long, missing his bus connection back to Madrid. He’d ended up having to hitchhike and then walk several kilometers, but it had been worth it. The rich are always worth it.

  “It’s quite admirable, the interest your boss shows in teaching you to write Mandarin,” Maribel replied pointedly, her sarcasm ill-concealed.