The sound of a key and I am trembling. A fat woman, in jeans and a belt with holster and baton, orders me to get up. She’s short and smells of old sweat. She cuffs my hands in front of me and blindfolds my eyes. She takes me by the cuffs, and I walk behind her, blind and awkward. Behind me, a guard’s footsteps. The smell of an infirmary. They sit me down like when I first got here, at the edge of a cot. Someone, a man with fat fingers, takes my pulse and my blood pressure. They weigh me. They take my temperature. The coolness of the thermometer in my armpit is pleasant. I think of my father taking me by the hand, sitting on the edge of my bed when I was a child and had typhus and a high fever. He still lived in the house then. My mother, when I got sick, would put on her serious face — her medical technician face — take my temperature, prescribe lemonade, and wait for “new symptoms.” Examination with the stethoscope, ear exam, throat, they turn my eyelids inside out. “Say: AAAHHH. .” It hurts: the little hammer on my knees, reflexes. They palpate my joints. All this calms me, makes me feel taken care of. I move my arms, my legs, my ankles. They palpate my breasts, my stomach, ribs, and spine. The sound of rubber, a glove, I relax, internal examination. I’m happy. After this they’ll let me go. I ask for a glass of water.
The doctor doesn’t answer me. “You’re in good condition,” he says to me. “A piece of advice: if you don’t want them to damage you, give them everything straight away. Believe me, anything else is pointless, it’s self-destructive. It’s up to you whether you make it out of here or not.”
My spirits fall. He is, obviously, one of them.
Back in the cell, the same guard brings me a green plastic glass. The water fills it halfway. Tomasa advises me to only drink a sip so it will last. Some hours later the fat woman brings me a full glass. I sleep. I wake up. They bring us a tray with a watery, lukewarm chicken broth, the kind that comes in a Maggi bouillon cube. I didn’t know I was so hungry. The thirst hid my hunger. I fall asleep. I wake up and pace until I can’t pace anymore, and then I doze and I sleep, perhaps, and I pace. I’m thirsty. I’m hungry. I’m cold. Tomasa wraps me up, she tells me to try to walk. I look for the light of the barred window. When I hear the key, my heart jumps: now they’ll let me go. No. It’s only a glass of water. We’re hungry. Then, I sleep.
Until it happens. They blindfold my eyes, handcuff me, they take me along the hallway, they make me go down some stairs, and — godddamn it! — I’m in a room with a tiled floor that I recognize. They ask me the same things and I repeat the same answers. Pure fear. I don’t want them to punish me for having lied, for not having told them more before. A moment later I’m splayed out on top of the bed frame, tied up, moaning, with a rag in my mouth, subjected to the same technology of pain. At times I hear Ronco’s shout, but it’s a shout that seems far away from me, and then it gets closer and moves away again.
And Gato’s faked voice returns. No one will ever know what happened here, he tells me; none of it matters, he tells me. I let him talk. I hear him from so far away, from my crumbling self. He asks me what I think I will do. I tell him I am too exhausted to think.
SIX
C’est tout, that’s all. I’m telling you all of this because you’re going to write a novel, not an interview, right? How did you find out about me? Oh, you told me already, I remember now. Rumors, of course, those crumbs that feed the hunger of the curious. Why would a writer like you be interested in my wretched story? Anyway, you got lucky. If you had come to see me a while back I would have answered you the same way I did all the others: Not one word about that. End of story.
Call me Lorena. Not Irene. I want to be Lorena to you. You’ll never know my real name. I live here in Stockholm under an assumed name with false papers. I have cancer; I am, as they say, “at death’s door.”
To die is to be gradually overcome by minutiae, indignities, trifles. Death is not of God. My illness sped up my aging. Now the filth is out in the open, the physical fatigue, my obscenely organic nature, and the fragilities of my infancy are sprouting up again. It’s the second childhood, pure oblivion. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. I can’t dress myself: I need someone to help me put on my bra, to help me put on my stockings. It takes time; you have no idea how much. I can’t go to the bathroom by myself, I can’t walk by myself. This, and nothing else, is what it means to die. It hurts here, on my back; my skin is peeling off after so much time in bed. From the position I’m in. They put lotion on me. New pains crop up — stupid, unexpected pains. Sometimes I spend hours with this tube in a vein in my wrist so they can infuse me with chemotherapy or whatever else they feel like. I live vulnerable and propped up by those inoculations. The oxygen dries my throat. The cylinder is always next to my bed, and there are days when my lungs depend on it the same way I do the wheelchair or the nurse’s arm when she helps me to the bathroom. Modesty dies along with a person. The dead are shameless. Sometimes the nurse punishes me with a twisted hatred. I ring the bell and she doesn’t come, or she leaves the wheelchair out of reach. I call her too often, she says. It’s possible. It’s very pedestrian, this business of dying. And it is slow, it takes an eternity. She pressures me, negotiates her moments of independence. It’s a dull, cruel fight, this final battle. If my friend Agda were alive, she would come and see me, she would take care of me. That thought comforts me.
As my illness progresses, the nurse both serves me more and enslaves me more. I am gradually immobilized. If you only knew how long it takes me to put on my shoes, even with my keeper’s help. But she doesn’t bend down, she doesn’t put them on with her hands. She pushes the shoes to me with her feet, she kicks them, and if they make it on, fine; if not, another shot. She hates trimming my stubborn toenails that now grow curved and yellow. My keeper puts that job off longer and longer. When she finally does it, she’s careless, and it’s not unusual for her to accidentally catch my skin in the clippers.
And I dribble. I’m always dribbling when I eat. I move the spoon and fork awkwardly. I hate that. My shaking betrays me. Or if I manage not to spill, I choke. Even drinking water, I choke. I’m not having a metaphysical experience here, as you can see. When I saw myself in the mirror for the first time after chemotherapy, without hair, I thought I was looking at my skull. A cliché. Death is the greatest of all clichés. I live in wait for rigor mortis. But I won’t be watching when it comes. One doesn’t live through one’s own death. That of others, yes, from the other side of the threshold, of course. The dead do not live. What I’m living now is the gradual loss of the capacity for being alive. Dying. For me, that’s what life consists of now. And when the time comes they’ll throw me out, they’ll send me to that trash pile they call by another name, before my stench starts to horrify them and my face and hands — too white, and soon stained with violet — begin to disgust them. Above all, before that stench comes that the bouquets of flowers can’t mask. That’s what it’s about, then, to die: to be left shamelessly exposed, meat no one bought from the butcher’s and that eventually rotted. Then they dress you up in wood and cover you up with earth so they never have to see you again; you disgust them, and they weep, those people you disgust, poor things.