“Go back to your bed,” said the nurse, “when someone becomes available they’ll attend to you and get your papers in order so you can leave. Please go back to your room.”
4
Fluzst entered his house in a hurry and immediately locked the door, turning the lock three times. His wife, Clairie, ran over to him.
“What happened?”
Fluzst didn’t respond and headed toward the bathroom.
“Bring me alcohol and make these clothes disappear.”
He took off his clothes.
“Everything’s fine. I’m going to take a bath. Pick up all these clothes and burn them.”
“Are you hurt?”
“Don’t be stupid. Do as I say.”
CHAPTER XI
1
With his wife at his side, Joseph Walser walked into his house. His gestures were cautious, succinct, and completely restricted to his left hand. He kept his right arm at his side, no matter what position his body happened to be in, and he held his right hand, shamefully, behind his back.
Even though he’d only been away for a day, that absence made it so that he entered this familiar space as though he had suddenly recovered a lost memory. He looked at the desk where he kept the key to his study.
“Do you want to be alone?” asked Margha.
Joseph Walser didn’t respond. He walked straight over to the key, grabbed it with his left hand, and used the same hand to open the door. In the meantime, his wife backed away from him.
Joseph Walser stepped into his study; the customary noise of the lock as it was locked from the inside. Margha sat down; she cried.
Joseph Walser stood before his collection. He felt comforted: everything in its place. Countless pieces of metal were arranged in an orderly fashion on over fifty shelves. And below each one was a label with a corresponding number. On the desk, directly across the room from the door, there was a notebook with a black cover, and beside it a gray, shiny ruler.
Walser had started his collection eight years earlier. He picked up any piece of metal he could find, but with two restrictions: they had to be solitary pieces, not connected to anything else — thus, unattached to any other components; and each of the dimensions of the piece — length, height, and width — had to measure less than four inches.
The sight of his perfectly organized collection was oddly comforting to him, given that it had only been one day since his accident. He smiled: with his left hand he searched around in his coat pocket for the metal object he had brought home from the hospital. It was the round wheel guard from one of the stretchers. It had come loose and fallen on the floor, and Walser had snatched it up.
Over the years he had developed an exceptional perceptive ability when it came to pieces of metal that could possibly have a place in his collection. His perception of reality and events gradually transformed into a dual perception: he watched events as they took place and eventually ended, and sometimes he even took part in these events as they happened — which constituted his lived experience — but behind this level of perception, which sought out the best means of survival, Walser had a second level of perception, or perhaps the same level of perception, but with a second set of objectives, which, instead of being focused on people and their interactions, or on the things that could interfere with these interactions, was focused on his search for small metal objects.
He was perfectly aware that his collection was, beyond being merely useless, absurd. He never talked about it. Even in his own house, as we’ve stated, he was the only one with a key to the study, where he organized his “finds.” It was clear that his wife, Margha, had seen some of these pieces of metal, but she was forbidden to enter the room, and Joseph had never spoken to her about it. The only references he ever made to it were by way of these simple, almost abstract, words: “my collection.”
Joseph Walser pulled out the chair and sat down. He rested his left hand on the desk. Everybody already knew what had happened during the accident.
For the first time since the day before, he paid exclusive attention to his right hand: he started to raise his arm, a movement that seemed obscene to him at first. But he didn’t stop.
He slowly laid his right hand on the desk next to his left hand. He looked directly at his hand, which was still closed into a fist, and then opened his hand, spreading apart his fingers. He focused all his attention on his right hand. There were only four fingers resting on the desktop. They had amputated his index finger.
2
“You should go visit him. They had to amputate one of his fingers.”
Fluzst was still uneasy, but his wife insisted on telling him about what had happened at the factory: Walser’s accident.
“His hand slipped, no one really knows how it happened. His sleeve got caught on one of the levers of the machine. He’s already back from the hospital, he’s back at home; you should go visit him tonight. You’re his friend.”
Fluzst was smoking a cigarette. He was trying to calm himself down.
“Joseph Walser is a coward,” he said. “He won’t miss that finger at all.”
3
He had opened the anatomy textbook to the chapter entitled “Hand.”
There was one drawing after another of hands in different positions, each one with five fingers.
Joseph Walser looked at the names for the first time. Names of things that had belonged to him for quite some time. The “opponens pollicis (thumb muscle),” the “flexor retinaculum of the hand,” the “adductor,” the “abductor.”
The skeleton of the hand made a real impression on him. In the wrist area, eight little bones were stacked on top of each other: “carpal bones,” he read. Then, between the wrist and the fingers, the five metacarpal bones, one for each finger. Each of the fingers, in turn, was made of three consecutive bones, “like train cars,” he muttered; their names were almost infantile: “proximal phalanges, intermediate phalanges, distal phalanges.” The thumb was an exception in this case: it only had two phalanges, instead of the three phalanges the other fingers had.
It was simple: the amputation of his index finger, in concrete and objective terms, had removed three phalanges from his body. Of the fourteen phalanges that he used to have on his right hand, now only eleven remained. On his left hand he still had the fourteen phalanges he was born with.
He looked at the drawings of the muscles of the hand. The two essential movements of the fingers: flexion and extension. Each finger had a flexor muscle that was attached to the distal phalange. He would never again be able to flex or extend the index finger on his right hand.
Muscles and bones were the two essential substances that Walser had lost in the accident. All the other substances were basically supports for these two, which were responsible for two movements, flexion and extension. With the anatomy textbook open, Joseph Walser once again set his hands on the desk and opened them wide. He looked at the drawings: ten fingers. He looked at his hands: nine fingers.
He suddenly became terrified, as if he were looking at the hands of a monster.
CHAPTER XII
1
With his left hand, Walser took the metal object that he’d brought home from the hospital out of his pocket and placed it on the desktop. With some of the fingers of his right hand he opened his notebook and began to turn the pages until he reached the one he was looking for.