*
At the end of the corridor was a floor-to-ceiling window looking out onto the landscape: a wooded area and a lake with ducks bobbing on it. Disrupting this view was a girl wearing a baggy t-shirt and a plaid mini skirt that would clash with pretty much any other clothing choice. Her name was Kelly. She was the girl who’d called the ambulance and accompanied Pablo to the hospital. Not that Lucía knew this as she arrived there herself.
Kelly was also one of the girls who’d signed that letter Pablo received the previous semester, just before Christmas, from the high school where he worked. Now she remembered the name, which had appeared at the top of the list of students. It was followed by a ‘J’ and a full stop – which jarred with the formal nature of the letter – and was written in purple ink, in lower case.
The afternoon of the letter, Pablo told Lucía – by way of an excuse, she’d thought at the time, but now she thought it had perhaps been a distraction technique – that he was having a breakdown. Apparently, he wanted to give up teaching and focus on his writing. Lucía would’ve preferred his crisis to a) be more original, and b) take a pragmatic approach that might transform his aspirations into more of a project, and less of a fantasy which had ample – enormous – potential for failure. The day of the letter, Pablo had already been working for a year on a novel about a Colombian island where he’d lived for part of his childhood. He’d been busy doing research about a canal that cut through the island, the construction of which had driven all its fauna to extinction. She didn’t understand how this could form the basis of a novel. ‘What about the plot?’ Lucía had asked him once. He seemed to take it as an ironic question; one he preferred not to answer.
The letter arrived on a Friday. The children were away on a school camping trip, and Pablo and Lucía were sitting down to dinner. He read it out to her at the table. ‘Did you get fired?’ she asked. She could feel a small lump of sauerkraut stuck in her throat. Pablo didn’t answer. Instead he said – as if it were somehow relevant – that on the island he was writing about, there was a swamp that was home to some very strange insects. These insects were, in his opinion, the perfect allegory for explaining most of the social and political history of his country. In fact, he said our country, but Lucía pretended not to hear, so as to avoid getting into their usual argument. He carried on describing the creatures, endowing them with nonsensical features such as protrusions on their heads, poisonous stingers and amorphous trunks which stuck out above the surface of the water, to suck in oxygen. ‘What does that have to do with the letter?’ she asked, interrupting what was turning into a monologue. Pablo was on the verge of tears, his sentences becoming increasingly garbled. He was having a breakdown, it was true, but then again, thought Lucía, feeling suddenly furious, who wasn’t? She poured a glass of water and nudged it towards him. Taking it, Pablo shot her a look that was pleading, yet unreadable. But Lucía was quickly distracted by the bulging veins in his corneas. Red cracks against the yellowish white.
He left the table and went upstairs to the bedroom. The letter lay there, beside the leg of roast pork, the red cabbage, and the potatoes slathered in creamy parsley sauce. Was it necessary to eat like that? She was the one who’d cooked dinner, but now, the sight of that plate of heavy, medieval-looking food physically sickened her. The letter contained serious accusations from the high school principal, concluding with a warning that Pablo needed to change his attitude, or leave. Halfway down, there was an extract from the students’ account, in which they complained about his ‘awkward and offensive’ teaching methods, his ‘unfair and unfounded’ marking system, his frequent absences (‘he spends his days in the local bars’) and his physical appearance (‘the teacher comes in wearing the same clothes every day and smells of piss’). Following that was a list of names, probably in the region of thirty, all written in black ink, except for Kelly J.’s.
‘Seeing as he has no history of heart disease, or anything in his heart that would lead us to diagnose any kind of anomaly, I can only conclude that it’s this syndrome…’
As soon as she was inside the hospital – even before going to see Pablo – Lucía headed straight for Ignacio’s office. He’d been her family doctor ever since she’d arrived in New Haven. Ignacio was Chilean but had lived there for decades, and during that time they’d established one of those friendships which enabled them to bypass all the red tape. So, as soon as she got the call from the hospital, she called Ignacio and asked him to check everything out. She was far too anxious to deal with some doctor who didn’t know her and who would certainly underestimate her need to know every minute detail about what was wrong with Pablo, and about any potential treatment.
Ignacio was now sympathetically explaining to her, with his elegant mannerisms and measured tone of voice, how arteries worked. On his desk was a small plastic heart sliced in half. He was pointing at it with a laser pen. After the lecture came the diagnosis: her husband was a goddamn party animal. Ignacio was telling her about a disease that affects the cardiovascular system and is caused by excessive consumption of alcohol, red meat, salt, saturated fat and certain drugs. An acquired disease rather than a congenital one, it occurs most commonly during the holiday season, when people get wasted and ignore their expanding waistlines.
‘That’s where the name comes from.’ Ignacio cleared his throat.
‘Huh?’
The syndrome was called Holiday Heart.
A sentimental love song, thought Lucía.
A roadside motel with blinking neon lights.
‘In Pablo’s case, this all appears to be accompanied by excessive and, I presume, risky sexual activity.’ He cleared his throat again and Lucía, even in her confused state, had the urge to rummage in her handbag and find him a cough drop. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Ignacio, then fell silent.
The silence nurtured the humiliation.
The office’s peach-coloured walls and the small picture frames adorning them – displaying photographs of caterpillars and butterflies that were either cutesy or pornographic, Lucía couldn’t decide which – all had more dignity than her at that moment. What was he sorry about? Was it really so obvious that the risky and excessive sexual activity did not involve her? And then, shattering the brief period of incomprehension due to Lucía’s narcissism, Ignacio revealed that Pablo had been brought to the hospital unconscious, accompanied by an underage girl.
The silence expanded in the seconds that followed, like a plague, building vast totems of humiliation.
Luckily, Pablo was fine, Ignacio said.
Luckily for who?
He went on: it had been a scare, a minor arterial obstruction that had been easy to fix with a stent. At his age, he was perhaps slightly young for a stent, but nowadays it was no biggie – ‘no biggie’, he said, and she was perturbed by that colloquial expression, like a gob of spit out of a cultivated mouth – lots of men had one, or several.
‘Oh, really?’
Yes, Ignacio said. It was fairly common. As long as he took certain precautions, Pablo could return to normal life as soon as he wanted.
When she left the office, she still didn’t go and see Pablo. She ambled down the hospital corridors, taking her time, as if she were visiting a museum. She passed medical students in their apple-green uniforms, crisp and new. Right there, in another wing, Tomás and Rosa had been born. It was an incredibly difficult birth: the doctor had slid her greased-up hands inside Lucía’s cervix and massaged it in a certain way designed to put pressure on the sides, to help dilation, to ease the babies’ passage. It was a painful method, but effective in eighty percent of cases. Lucía couldn’t endure it. She asked them to cut her open. She’d already suffered enough with the pregnancy. Housing two children in one body, she thought at the time, was a forced and unnatural thing. She would open her eyes in the middle of the night, feel her tight, swollen belly, the movement inside,