Enemies

Doctors said the limbo my father was in after the surgery would have a good turn. They could neither find the source nor the cause of the permanent drowsiness that kept him motionless on the health centre bed, surrendered to the oxygen mask, malleable to the nurses and absent to me. They said: “post-operative stress.” I thought: “Great, he’s off.” Why staying awake if life could only offer him its edges, its outskirts, its shores, the most terrifying ones; a puerile dependence, the injections, the pills, the pulp urinal, the kinesiologist’s grasps stretching his legs, looking for his vein, palpating his body without the slightest stealth?

The trouble was feeding him. He wouldn’t open his mouth. And if he did, he would nod off without chewing. I used to go every midday and every evening to feed him. I told him:
“Yummy chicken, here.”

He slept, or pretended to do so. Plunged into his post-operative stress. I speared a piece of unsalted chicken and opened his mouth with one hand while with the other I brought the mouthful near him. When he accepted I helped him setting the rhythm:
“One, two, three, yummy. Again. One, two, three, yummy.”

We had done worse things all over that long month, he and I. For some days, I myself had to set the rhythm of his breath to him. Because post-operative stress was tricky: my father forgot about breathing. So, at the moment of feeding him I didn’t feel utterly let down. It was unpleasant putting in and taking off his false teeth every time I started my daily rite, but human nature is appealing, inscrutable: one ends up doing the most disgusting things with certain naturalness. It must be some gen that is activated in middle-aged adults when they have to aid their parents in medical emergencies.

That night, I insisted on my yummy chicken, already used to getting in exchange for my faded enthusiasm the sheerest of my father’s ignorance, when suddenly I saw him raising a twinkling hand, as if asking for silence or a pause. He said, in a voice older than the one I recalled:
“I’ve got the feeling nobody is my enemy.”

I stood with the fork in my hand, motionless. I didn’t know if such an assertion was a signal that he was either coming back or leaving. As he nodded off instantly again, I called the doctor and told him what had happened. The doctor, a young practitioner who wanted to be taken into account, asserted that patients, when they suffer from post-operative stress, sometimes speak. I stared at him. An idiot.

Young doctors love having the sick’s relatives looking at them, chicken-faced, as if the very life, the whole life, the life beyond the sick and all the complex composition and perspective of the family depended on what he is about to say. Anyway, I tried him to sit well with me because I was about to go back home and I left less worried if my father was in the care of a doctor that sat right with me.

I went out. It was August. It was cold. I got into my car and drove down Callao St. I was thinking about my father’s words. I thought it was great to reach the end of life with that feeling. He had said reconciliation “feeling”. He was undergoing it now. While he was under that bloody post-operative stress. The feeling of not having enemies: his dying body, his disturbed mind devoted, in some imperceptible dimension, to make it up with facts and people that had gone by his life. The feeling in the body he had been expropriated from. Having no enemies, in his soul.

All of a sudden, in the dashboard a red light turned on. I didn’t get the sign, but in a nervous breakdown I recalled the mechanic had said I would be in trouble with the water pump. I didn’t know what a water pump was, if the water pump exploded like dynamite or just like a carnival firework. I was too startled. I had palpitations. My car would break down, I would have to call the service, and I was so, so exhausted after giving my father his yummy chicken. I wouldn’t put up with it.

What a good beginning for a short story, I thought as I drove on, looking alternatively at the street and the dashboard: a woman that leaves after seeing her father unconscious and listening to him saying a wonderful phrase, which sounds as a farewell, and whose car breaks down when she’s coming back home. Many things were breaking down that August. At forty, childhood was definitely breaking down. My family photo was breaking down.

“It won’t happen because I thought about it.” I thought to make myself feel better. That’s my cabala. I think about the worst things so that they can’t occur. Nothing terrible ever happens to me, but I live hunted by my thoughts. “The car won’t break down if I think it’ll break down,” I went on thinking. And I cheered myself up as I drove down Córdoba Avenue, and block after block I reached my bedroom. I wanted to take my shoes off and have a warm shower and have a tranquilizer and sleep. The following day I had to come back to the health care centre to try again and unsuccessfully my fight for the yummy chicken.

When I got El Salvador, the street I live in, I turned triumphantly: we wriggled out of it, I thought, the dashboard dark and the water pulp withstanding there where God wants water pumps to withstand. Once at my building’s garage, I sounded the horn so that my porter opened the gate. It was taking him long. I sounded the horn again. The gate started to open slowly. I saw two men at the porter’s booth but I didn’t say hello. I was very tired. When I wanted to park my car in my parking lot, I saw a van crossing ahead of me. I sounded the horn one more time. A boy I didn’t know approached me. I was upset. The boy made me signs. I winded down the window glass and, in a bad mood, I told him:
“I don’t understand what you tell me. What’s this van doing here?”
“We’re stealing, madam. Take it easy.” he said putting a gun on my head.

«It’s clear, can’t you see? This is happening because you didn’t think about it. Why hadn’t I thought of a woman who’s coming back after seeing her father unconscious and, on her way back, is afraid her car would break down, and when she arrives a glassy-eyed teen with a worked-up gesture pulls a gun on her?» I’m this way: I blame myself for everything. The boy opened the car door and said:
“Get out.”

Before getting out of the car I checked if I had left the keys in. I wanted to give them that car, I wanted to give them my money, give them all my belongings, say good night to them and reach my bedroom to take my shoes off. But the boy pulled the gun on my head again. I had the tranquilizers in my handbag, but I wasn’t my handbag’s owner anymore. I hadn’t given it to him yet, but the boy with the gun was my handbag’s owner. I realized that meant he had robbed me of my tranquilizers also. I began to despair.

The boy took me to the back of the garage, it was long before I figured out the scene in store for me. Six or seven of my neighbours were lying on the floor, hands behind their heads, and there was another boy aiming at them.
“I need something,” I said under my breath to the one aiming at me.
“Keep cool, madam,” he said.
“Exactly, I need something,” I said again.
“Do whatever we ask you and you go home,” he whispered.
“I need something,” I repeated. We had already reached the backside and the boy was making me kneel down on the floor, next to my neighbours, who had, all of them, hare-in-despair eyes.
“Give me your handbag,” said the boy.
“I need something,” I told him, handing it to him.
“Get stuffed, madam. What do you need?”
“In my handbag,” I sobbed.
“Not the handbag, lady. I’m a thief, I steal handbags,” he told me. He was more relaxed.
“I don’t want my handbag. I need a tranquilizer that’s in the handbag,” I looked at him in the eye. No, his eyed weren’t so glassy.
“A pill?” he answered a bit baffled.
“I’m a bit mad,” I explained to him in a very low voice. “If I get nervous, I yell. Please, I want this theft to turn out right. Give me a tranquilizer. It’s in the handbag’s pocket.”

To my surprise, he opened the pocket’s zip. He put his hand in and rummaged about. He found the blister. He gave it to me. Before he pulled his hand away, I covered it with mine.
“I’ve got an idea,” I told him.
“Take your pill and stop pissing me off, madam,” he said.
“I’ve got an idea for the theft to come off,” my face must have lit up since he approached his so that I could tell him my idea and nobody could listen. “Hand them round,” I told him showing the pills to him. “They are strong, give one each,” I pointed at my neighbours- “so that they don’t piss you off and you can work in peace.”
The boy stood looking at me. Suddenly, we had become partners. He wanted an important, imported car to arrive, and he had to hold us as hostages until that happened. For some reason I ignored and I’ll never get to know, he had that overbearing need that night. As for me, I wanted to reach my house and take my shows off.

I was so weighed down halfway through August that year that nothing, nothing was as important to me as getting home and taking my shoes off. We were partners and we both wanted the theft to turn out right.

The boy dropped a pill on my hand and then started to hand out the ones in the blister among my neighbours.
“Swallow” he said to each of them.
I have horse sedatives. My neighbours started to get slowly into a kind of drowsiness I knew very well. The notion of time and space wasn’t lost, but everything moved away, everything was relative. With one, the one from the second floor C, who was close to me, we even smiled at each other after half an hour. It was terrible, but also ridiculous to be lying down there, hands back on the neck, being aimed at, waiting- both neighbours and thieves- for a BMW to turn up.

The car turned up at about midnight. The owner sounded the horn. The gate opened. One of the boys blocked his way, made him get out, called the other, mine, my partner, that winked at me before leaving, and that’s it. The end.

My neighbours were already outside, a bit dizzy, celebrating the thieves had fled away, a patrol had arrived and the police were taking statements.

I remained leaning against the garage’s back wall, lit up by the gift of being the daughter of a man who has no enemies.