Ms. Smaig

Ms. Smaig

There is a well-known but not particularly provable theory that animals have psychic abilities. Most animals anyway. It is claimed that they can detect magnetic fields, changes in electrical currents, pregnancies, divorces, and track the phases of the moon. As evidence, its supporters offer the fact that one often finds them staring with bated breath and hackles raised at a white wall, a blank, lifeless wall, in intense communion with a horribly white wall.

I was playing jump rope. I remember that. When I played jump rope, time stood still. All that mattered was a rope coming and going like waves in the sea. Between jumps, they called my parents. They called to tell them that something-had-gone-wrong. They had to spell it out. In my body. A wasteland. An anomalous gene or bacteria. It wasn’t yet clear. Indicators, health issues, bad luck. And especially and with all due respect: the horrors of the night sky.

That was when I started to get interested in animals. And they me. They’d stare at me without blinking, for a long time, like they were contemplating a dying maggot. To them, I’d become a person of interest, someone battling on the cusp of life and death. An odd-looking helicopter flying without rotors. They approached me to sniff out my delicate condition, the abstraction of a youthful ailment. They sniffed me with relish, pleasure, anger. Anatomically. I was their latest discovery. I had something floating inside of me, an indeterminate substance. I gathered more data over time: The sense of smell of certain animals, especially dogs and cats, is ten thousand times more sensitive than that of humans.

Most of the phrases were informative. The rest were fantastical or urban legends about amazing cats and dogs. The ones that approached me, however, were ordinary except for the strange marks on their necks. The fact is that a disease—a flickering entity that keeps one only half alive—drastically restricts your movements. I forget the words: What is the jugular? Occasionally one must gather the strength to jump rope and stop time. A powerful statement. But the really interesting theories are rarely provable.

All the great stories have two versions: While I was learning about animals, psychic abilities, the make-up of the atom, and the shiver of storms, I was surrounded by horribly white walls, in a white hospital, wrapped in white sheets. Death, my death, did not dress in black. I’ve seen her up close, I can describe her: she is young and pale as a cracked sugar bowl.

I drew a chart showing all the different theories. My hand, hooked up to a drip, scribbled at a rapid, robotic pace. Internal time is superior to the external variety. I wanted to preserve my thoughts for posterity, if, that was, I had any right to posterity at all. Posterity, I thought, must be like a faded tattoo on your brain.

I was alone most of the time. The things we do alone, at home, in a hospital, in an insane asylum, aren’t that strange. Not at all: they seem strange. Because we’re alone and look often at ourselves in the mirror, to see ourselves, as an act of reaffirmation, sending a message with our bodies: I’m still here, tangible, alone, and alive. And we talk to and hug ourselves, it’s rather sweet (and a little desperate), reaching as far back as we can.

A mirror is an excessively realist confirmation of life. I once read a very well-known children’s story: A woman had a talking mirror that told her she was the fairest of them all. The mirror kept saying so. One afternoon, the mirror caught on fire and stopped talking. Shortly afterward the woman turned into a witch. Things went to hell and all because of a talking mirror.

If the mirror hadn’t spoken, it would have been like all the other mirrors: a mute object. The woman would have dressed like any other woman, with bed head every morning, and nothing unusual would have happened. But then it wouldn’t be a story, nor would it be like real life. My preoccupation with psychic powers and animal perception stayed with me, growing more intense over the course of several months during which I was injected with morphine, sedatives, and antibiotics, hemmed in on all sides by extremely white walls.

What with all the injections and medication, I forgot some very basic things: for instance, how to solve an equation, the difference between a vegetable and a legume, the name of my Greek teacher, and the sound of my brother Nico’s laugh. I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that somewhere at that very moment an animal was perceiving the proliferation of my disease. I never lost the feeling that animals understood me.

Day after day passed at the hospital. The more days passed, the more tubes were plugged into me. It was hard to tell which tube went to which part of my body. I got tangled up in them, then cried out in pain as I tried to extricate myself in my sterile surroundings. Hospitals don’t echo. At night I listened to other patients pass by in the hall. I could tell the time from the sound of their footsteps. Three in the morning. When they stopped walking, it meant breakfast was about to be served. That was life at the hospital. No stimuli. Every move I made hurt and caused more damage.

In between operations, I’d leave the hospital like someone venturing into the Amazon for the first time, both frightened and enthralled. For some reason, I never got better there. I yearned for them to let me go, and when they did, I spent my free time at home walking around and going to the cinema. I was so skinny that they forced me to eat popcorn. The only movies I ever watched were romantic comedies.

Wasted time—that which fell between tears and the anesthesia—was an apple that I bit into slowly, until I reached the marrow.

My mother, who took care of me and kept me company at the hospital, made more friends than she ever had before. She’s always been a solitary woman. During the first few days, patients’ families take refuge by the various windows, letting the breeze blow over them and soaking in the colors of the garden. It was a normal response to their situation; they sat there cursing the world and trying not to cry. But little by little, most begin to gather at the same window. They form a gang of victims, murmuring, holding hands, fanning one another. Chewing gum in sync. Writhing in self-pity, then boredom, then back to pity again. They exchange postcards from trips they’ve taken, happy times spent under an umbrella. Look: evening in Lanzarote. Marco’s birthday in ’87. All together, in tentative harmony.

Of all the animals of the jungle, elephants have the best sense of smell. They have olfactory lobes in their brains, which is why they come equipped with such long trunks, so they can hoover up everything that is to come.

Elephants have vast stores of intuition. Memory too. I once saw an African elephant faint. The whole mountain shook. The rivers veered off course. It was on its way to the elephant graveyard to get lost among calcifying bones and damp earth. It was going to die. But on the way it fainted and died somewhere else instead. The worst things happen en route. The sensation of getting bogged down in the attempt, of time stopping, of being forgotten in the long run, of overly vast chambers. The worst things happen in gerunds.

Most of the time, death takes us with our eyes open. We’re stuck with fixed gazes, open to the world. Striving to get a last look at the sky in the belief—often—that it will be our penultimate one. But people who close their eyes completely (the rarest cases) end up with one eye open and one closed. Or squinting. Or with a tic, blinking like the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings. A tic in a dead person is what you might call an unforgiveable oversight. Which is why there are professionals who specialize in closing the eyes of the dead. They have a knack for it. Their fingers and palms are very soft, and they moisturize them with creams at dawn and exfoliate them with sea salt in the afternoon. They keep their nails clean and trim. Their pulses are steady and movements precise. You mustn’t wear gloves; delicacy is paramount.

It’s in the nature of the ill to remember these things. One starts to look at people’s hands, everyone’s hands. Biopsies and flowers travel the hospital corridors. Test results and teddy bears. Glitter and scalpels. Defibrillators and stain removers. X-rays and candy. Neither drama nor euphoria are permitted. Visitors forget their umbrellas and get wet in the rain on their way to the parking lot, which makes things worse. Sometimes they forget their scarves, glasses, and even their radios. The lost and found department is always full. All those dead objects, more and more every day. On the verge of collapse. One day, they found a bandage that didn’t belong to anyone.

A nurse told me that after several mishaps, they had decided to close the ward.

Forever. She wasn’t joking, she was telling us in case we’d lost something. Something important. Departments close, life speeds up, the Atlas V rocket will continue on its journey to Pluto, Earth couples will break up and reconcile, have children and great-grandchildren. A gentleman with a mustache will invent the definitive hair growth formula and an actor from Wisconsin will be chosen to promote it.

I thought about that bandage. Who would get it?

No one ever goes back to hospitals, although they lie in the vast majority of people’s futures. On one of my outings—while I was still sick—I went to the zoo.

At times, when a dangerous disease has settled into your body, you don’t know what your name is. Your name. It’s hard to articulate. Maybe because you’ve lost yourself a little bit. You remember the disease, all its different accents, its consequences, history, and development. It takes up a lot of space inside a person. Inside me. At the time I was called borderline.

I entered the zoo slowly; I’d recently had an operation so had to tread carefully. I was still weak, with a scar that split me right down the middle. Scars walk too, I mean they accompany you, move around with you. Before, I used to walk one way and now I walk another. I’m more hunched now. I lean to the left slightly. You always have to adapt to the scar. And then you can go on living.

I wanted to see whether the animals could detect my disease.

The zoo was quiet. The elephants walked around their tiny twenty-square-meter pen and even though I went over cautiously, like another wounded animal, to let them sniff me, they didn’t pay me much attention. The fauna did their thing backstage, eating fish and blackberries, washing themselves, licking a withered tree trunk, and stomping in the mud. The dolphins jumped through hoops. Is there any leap sadder and yet more popular than that of the dolphin?

A tourist was standing next to me, smiling and content as she fed corn to the raccoons. Her name was Smaig. Ms. Smaig. She had two bags full of kernels of corn and fed the raccoons from one of them. The raccoons paid her plenty of attention. Personal service for Ms. Smaig. She used the other bag to fill hollows in the trees. Holes in the wood. The minor erosions of time. She placed each grain of corn with millimetric precision, as though they were destined to occupy a specific place in their assigned tree.

If trees had faces, they’d have held their breath.

Ms. Smaig was papering over the imperfections of the world, which multiplied, followed one another, and clumped together gracefully. The trees bowed to her and splintered in her wake. Even so, Ms. Smaig continued to keep corn with her at all times, looking for the right space in which to complete her terrible puzzle, determined to finish it one day with her smelly, yellow-tinted hands. Occasionally, she surreptitiously sought out trees outside the enclosure—cardboard trees—and stuck the corn to their branches. Ms. Smaig did her work diligently but there were always naughty children who found a little corn residue stuck to the tree like a kind of organic band-aid and ate it, resin and all.

I, in contrast, was standing enthralled, looking at the decorative cages, the strength of the bamboo, the plastic palm trees that lit up the night. The snack bar full of coconuts. Piña coladas and slushies. Baseball caps and goose feathers. Tiger prints and foam guns. The world was full of possibilities whichever way one looked. Of course, the telephone booths also contributed to the worldly chaos; they have folding doors, display the time on a screen, and have buttons that play notes in a major key. What more can you ask for? One day, the planet won’t be able stand up under its own weight. And it will fall in a drunken, dizzy fit.

After several failures during which I was unable to confirm my theory (perhaps animals had lost interest in me?), I decided to continue my tour of the zoo and visit the monkeys who look like humans and are approachable, friendly, amusing animals. They wave, hide, and splutter. And they shiver when it gets cold.

You might say that my time at the hospital was the most sociable of my life. I’ve never received so many visitors, every ten minutes someone would come by, pounding on the door and apologizing for their impatience. Yes, I had got into the habit of receiving visitors with nothing to offer in return. My response tended to be a languid expression and a mumbled greeting. And I started to distinguish between many different types of white. Almost every shade: snow white, ivory, dirty, and bone. Like the Inuit, who can distinguish between thirty different shades of white. These are human skills that one learns over time, I am sure of it. Especially when one finds themselves in the right circumstances. So, all those shades of white danced before my eyes like a winter sea captained by eggshells. The night was so white—a vampiric white—that I was afraid to turn out the light. If I did, I thought, everyone would start screaming, the kind of long, angry scream that stuns the neighborhood with its sordid power.

In a hospital, one gets an expansive view of one’s surroundings. It’s as though the disease came with a pair of binoculars. You can take full stock of your life, listing your friends and relatives. It’s a very simple calculation, hardly requires a degree. Just add and subtract. It’s a hallucinatory, ghostly situation. Suddenly, everyone is there. Waiting. Waiting for what? An avalanche? The doctor’s verdict, or whatever the patient has to say (especially when they don’t have the words) while memory gets lost among the horribly white walls.

During these, what one might call tragic, difficult, periods, one’s family turns out to be larger than they expected. A family is myriad. An untold horde. A haggard flock. They don’t all fit in the room. Because of you they don’t sleep. Because of you they don’t eat. Because of you they don’t work. Because of you they don’t yawn. And as a further indignity, they don’t all fit in the room. Much as they squeeze into every inch of available space. They have to take turns. And yet a family is one, like an ancient leviathan. I didn’t know whether to thank them or offer my commiserations. I remember that they smelled of damp streets and neighborhood streetlamps. I liked those smells. They stroked my head, took hold of a lock of my hair, and glanced at me sideways because one mustn’t look a disease head on. You have to treat it like it’s normal. Things grow quickly, vanity is a tree without a nest, find virtue in moderation. Who said that? The pre-Socratics?

My brother grew and grew. He got older and I didn’t know how to be at his side. I couldn’t put my arm around him to tell him about the profoundly white vistas. He understood such phrases and many more. Little by little he came to realize that hospitals are empty shop windows. As much as you might want to play there, you never can.

He was becoming an expert in the art of non-communication.

My cousins had new lovers. They met their current husbands there. I greeted them with my best invalid smile: slanted. Deep down, I knew it to be a good thing. Love had made an appearance in my room with the horribly white walls. I spent a lot of time thinking about love. I hadn’t yet been in love. I hadn’t made love. And perhaps I never would. I wouldn’t be able to philosophize or love.

In the end, Ms. Smaig and I walked around the whole zoo together. Very close together. Almost holding hands. We didn’t miss a single cage. It was as though touring the bestiary was our final impulse in life. We were a little absent, a little mystical. Sometimes I had the feeling that it really was the last thing we’d ever do. We had no strength for anything else. And we kept at it, persevering, without eating or drinking or even swallowing our saliva. We were both panting. The beasts locked in their cages regarded us uncertainly. What kind of animals were these? I don’t know what was wrong with her, Ms. Smaig, underneath her wide-brimmed hat. Perhaps her husband had died. Or child. Or maybe she’d lost all her money. Or it was drink, or everything all at once. And she didn’t know what was wrong with me, walking almost beside her. We didn’t want to know. It was comforting to walk like that, among caged animals, without saying a word. It was a perfect moment, but still, I would have liked to have had a ruled notebook. I don’t know why. A notebook for posterity. It’s the kind of thing you miss when you’ve dropped off the edge of the calendar.

We walked slowly for the whole afternoon. It was like we were dragging a menhir along with us. We’d get to a new cage every ten minutes or so. She’d stuff the animals full of corn (it made her happy) and I would stare at the tigers. Did they really not notice that I had been struck by lightning, that a poisonous hive was growing inside me? I got very close to the cages, a few inches closer than was allowed.

After walking for several hours, when we’d done several complete circuits of the zoo—four I believe—snake after snake, buffalo after buffalo, just before closing time, at nightfall, while the tourists and their children were applauding the final dolphin show, I saw that the biggest elephant in the zoo had begun to sniff me. It poked its trunk out through the bars of the cage and nuzzled me in an amiable manner without going too far. Slow and civilized. Painless. No miracles occurred. After a painstaking examination, it retreated back into its enclosure and dropped down, exhausted, out of breath, like it had snorted pounds and pounds of tar. A gray, deflated mammal.

Then the fireworks began. It was the last day of summer. The zoo was changing its opening hours—it would now close at nightfall—so we wouldn’t get to see the penguins under the stars anymore. Until next year. Most farewells are either routine or dramatic. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t say goodbye to Ms. Smaig one way or the other. We were as close as life and death, looking up at the night sky as it flashed and darkened in puffs of smoke. In fact, the bursts of light gave the corn kernels left in her bag an ashen, unappetizing color. Fortunately, fireworks are a farewell in and of themselves and there was no need to say any more.

“La Señora Smaig” from La acústica de los iglús. Madrid/Buenos Aires: Caballo de Troya/Odelia Editora, 2016/2019.

Image by Antonio Carrau.