Meningitis and its Shadow · I

I am still in shock. What on earth do Funes’s letter and then the doctor’s chat mean? I confess I don’t understand a single word of all this.

Here is how things stand. Four hours ago, at seven in the morning, I received a note from Funes, which reads as follows:

Dear friend:

If you don’t mind, I beg you to drop by my house tonight. If I have time I’ll go see you beforehand. Yours very truly,

Luis María Funes.

Here is where my surprise began. Nobody is invited, as far as I know, at seven in the morning for a presumed evening conversation without a serious motive. What could Funes want from me? My friendship with him is rather vague, and as for his house, I’ve been there only once. Of course, he has two rather pretty sisters.

Thus, I have remained intrigued. So much for Funes. And lo and behold, an hour later, just as I was leaving the house, Dr. Ayestarain arrives, another fellow who was a schoolmate of mine at the national college, and with whom I have, in short, the same distant relationship as with Funes.

And the man talks to me about a, b, and c, to conclude:

“Look here, Durán: you know very well I haven’t come to see you at this hour to talk about trivialities; isn’t that so?”

“It seems to me you haven’t,” I couldn’t help replying.

“Of course. So then, you’re going to allow me a question, just one. Anything indiscreet about it, I’ll explain to you right away. Do you allow me?”

“Anything you like,” I answered frankly, though putting myself on guard at the same time.

Ayestarain then looked at me smiling, the way men smile among themselves, and asked me this absurd question:

“What sort of inclination do you feel toward María Elvira Funes?”

Ah, ah! So that was what it was all about! María Elvira Funes, sister of Luis María Funes, all of them Marias! But I hardly knew the person! No wonder, then, that I looked at the doctor like someone looking at a madman.

“María Elvira Funes?” I repeated. “No degree nor any inclination. I know her barely. And now...”

“No, allow me,” he interrupted me. “I assure you it’s a rather serious matter... Could you give me your word as a fellow student that there is nothing between the two of you?”

“But you’re crazy!” I finally said to him. “Nothing, absolutely nothing! I hardly know her, I repeat, and I don’t think she remembers ever having laid eyes on me. I’ve spoken a minute with her, make it two, three, in her own house, and nothing more. I therefore do not have, I repeat for the tenth time, any particular inclination toward her.”

“It’s strange, profoundly strange...” murmured the man, looking at me intently.

The physician was already beginning to tire me, eminent though he was—and he was one,—treading on ground that had nothing to do with his aspirins.

“I believe I now have the right...”

But he interrupted me again:

“Yes, you have more than enough right... Would you care to wait until tonight? With two words you’ll be able to understand that the matter is anything but a joke... The person we are speaking of is gravely ill, almost at death’s door... Do you understand anything?” he concluded, looking me straight in the eyes.

I did the same with him for a while.

“Not a word,” I answered him.

“Nor I either,” he backed him up with a shrug. That’s why I told you the matter is quite serious... Tonight we’ll finally know something. Will you go there? It’s indispensable.

“I’ll go,” I told him, shrugging in my turn.

And that is why I have spent the whole day asking myself like an idiot what relation could possibly exist between the very grave illness of Funes’s sister, who hardly knows me, and myself, who barely knows her.

I am just back from Funes’s house. It is the most extraordinary thing I have seen in my life. Metempsychosis, spiritism, telepathies, and other absurdities of the inner world are nothing compared to this absurdity of my own in which I find myself caught up. It’s a little matter to drive one mad. Behold:

I went to Funes’s place. Luis María took me to the study. We talked for a while, straining like a couple of fools, since by realizing it we avoided looking at each other, chatting about idle trifles. Finally Ayestarain entered, and Luis María went out, leaving me the pack of cigarettes on the table, as mine had run out. My former schoolmate then told me what in short is this:

Four or five nights before, at the end of a reception at her own house, María Elvira had felt unwell—a matter of a bath that was too cold that afternoon, according to the mother’s opinion. The truth is that she had spent a fatigued night, with a good headache. The next morning, greater prostration, fever; and by night, meningitis, with all its train. Delirium, above all, frank and prolonged to the utmost. Concomitantly, an agonizing anxiety, impossible to calm. The psychological projections of the delirium, so to speak, arose and revolved from the very first night around a single matter, one alone, but one that absorbs her entire life. It’s an obsession—Ayestarain continued,—a simple 42° obsession. She keeps her eyes constantly fixed on the door, but she calls no one. Her nervous state suffers from that mute anxiety that is killing her, and since yesterday my colleagues and I have been thinking of calming that... She cannot go on like this. And do you know—he concluded—whom she names when the torpor crushes her?

“I don’t know...” I answered him, feeling my heart abruptly change its rhythm.

“You,” he told me, asking me for a light.

We remained, as one can well understand, mute for a moment.

“You don’t understand yet?” he said at last.

“Not a word...” I murmured, stunned, as stunned as an adolescent can be who, upon leaving the theater, sees the leading lady from the gloom of the carriage keeping the door open toward him... But I was already nearly thirty years old, and I asked the doctor what reasonable explanation could be given for that.

“Explanation? None. Not the slightest. What do you expect anyone to know about that? Ah, well... If you want one at all costs, suppose that in a land there are a million, two million different seeds, as anywhere else. An earthquake comes, stirs that up like the devil, grinds up the rest, and a seed sprouts, any old one, from the top or from the bottom, it’s all the same. A magnificent plant... Is that enough for you? I couldn’t tell you another word. Why you, precisely, who hardly know her, and whom the sick girl doesn’t know any better either, have been the privileged seed in her delirious brain? What do you expect anyone to know about this?”

“No doubt...” I replied to his ever-questioning gaze, feeling myself at the same time quite chilled at finding myself converted first into a gratuitous subject of cerebral wandering, and then into a therapeutic agent.

At that moment Luis María entered.

“Mama is calling you,” he said to the doctor. And turning to me, with a forced smile:

“Did Ayestarain brief you on what’s happening?... It would be enough to drive someone else crazy...”

This business of someone else deserves an explanation. The Funeses, and in particular the family of which I was beginning to form so ridiculous a part, have a strong pride; for reasons of ancestry, I suppose, and for their fortune, which seems to me the most certain thing. That being the case, they considered themselves passably satisfied that the amorous fantasies of their handsome scion had stopped at me, Carlos Durán, engineer, instead of fluttering over any old fellow of insufficient social position. Thus, in my heart of hearts, I appreciated the distinction with which the young patrician was honoring me.

“It’s extraordinary...” Luis María began again, making the matches slide back and forth with annoyance across the table. And a moment later, with a new forced smile:

“Would you have any objection to keeping us company for a while? You know, right? I believe Ayestarain is coming back.”

Indeed, the latter was entering.

“She’s starting again...” he shook his head, looking only at Luis María. Luis María then addressed me with the third forced smile of that evening:

“Shall we go?”

“With pleasure,” I told him. And we went.

The doctor entered without making a sound, Luis María entered, and finally I entered, all with a certain interval. What struck me first, though I should have expected it, was the dimness of the bedroom. The mother and sister, standing up, stared fixedly at me, responding with a slight nod of their heads to mine, for I felt I shouldn’t go beyond that. Both of them seemed much taller. I looked at the bed, and saw, under the ice pack, two open eyes turned toward me. I looked at the doctor, hesitating, but he gave me an imperceptible signal with his eyes, and I drew near the bed.

I have some idea, like every man, of what two eyes that love us are like when one draws very close to them. But the light of those eyes, the happiness into which they were drowning as I approached, the dizzying flash of bliss, almost to the point of strabismus, when I bent over them, I will never find again in a normal love at 37°C.

She stammered a few words, but with so much difficulty from her dry lips that I heard nothing. I think I smiled like an idiot (what was I supposed to do, I want you to tell me!), and she then held out her arm toward me. Her intention was so unequivocal that I took her hand,

“Sit down there,” she murmured.

Luis María pushed the armchair toward the bed and I sat down.

Consider now whether any person has ever been given a stranger and more absurd situation:

I, in the first place, since I was the hero, holding in mine a hand burning with fever and with a totally mistaken love. On the opposite side, standing, the doctor. At the foot of the bed, seated, Luis María. Leaning against the backrest, in the background, the mother and sister. And all without speaking, looking at us with a frown.

What was I to do? What was I to say? You must think about this for a moment. The sick girl, for her part, would sometimes tear her eyes away from mine, and sweep the faces present one after another with harsh unease, without recognizing them, only to let her gaze fall back upon me, confident in profound happiness.

How long were we like that? I don’t know; perhaps half an hour, perhaps much longer. For a moment I tried to withdraw my hand, but the sick girl pressed it harder between hers.

“Not yet...” she murmured, trying to find a more comfortable posture for her head. Everyone rushed over, the sheets were straightened, the ice was renewed, and once again the eyes fixed themselves in motionless bliss. But from time to time they turned away uneasily and swept over the unfamiliar faces. Two or three times I looked exclusively at the doctor; but he lowered his eyelashes, signaling me to wait. And he was right, in the end, because suddenly, abruptly, like a collapsing dream, the sick girl closed her eyes and fell asleep.

We all went out, except for the sister, who took my place in the armchair. It wasn’t easy to say anything—at least not for me. The mother finally addressed me with a sad and dry smile:

“What a horrible thing, isn’t it? It’s such a pity!”

Horrible, horrible! It wasn’t the illness, but the situation that seemed horrible to them. It was clear that all the courtesies were going to be for me in that house. First the little brother, then the mother. Ayestarain, who had left us for a moment, came out very satisfied with the sick girl’s condition; she was resting with a placidity unknown until then. The mother looked the other way, and I looked at the doctor: I could leave, of course I could, and I said goodbye.

I have slept badly, full of dreams that have nothing to do with my habitual life. And the blame for this lies with the Funes family, with Luis María, mother, sisters, doctors, and collateral relatives. Because if the situation is properly defined, it amounts to the following:

There is a nineteen-year-old young woman, very beautiful without a doubt, who barely knows me and to whom I am profoundly and totally indifferent. This as far as María Elvira is concerned. There is, on the other hand, a young subject as well—an engineer, if you will—who does not remember having thought twice in a row about the young woman in question. All of this is reasonable, intelligible, and normal.

But lo and behold, the beautiful young woman falls ill, with meningitis or something of the sort, and in the feverish delirium, solely and exclusively in the delirium, she feels herself consumed with love. By a cousin, a brother of her friends, a worldly young man whom she knows well? No sir; by me.

Is this sufficiently idiotic? I therefore take a resolution, which I shall make known to the first person from that blessed house who arrives at my door.