Meningitis and its Shadow · II

Yes, it is clear. As I expected, Ayestarain was here this noon to see me. I could not help asking him about the patient and her meningitis.

“Meningitis?” he said to me. “God knows what it is! At first it looked like it, and last night too... Today we no longer have any idea what it will be.”

“But, anyway,” I objected, “always a brain disease...”

“And spinal, of course... With some little lesions who knows where... Do you understand anything about medicine?”

“Very vaguely...”

“Well; there is a remittent fever, which we don’t know where it comes from... It was a case to march at full speed toward death... Now there are remissions—tick—tick—tick, as exact as a clock...”

“But the delirium,” I insisted, “does it always exist?”

“I should say so! There’s everything there... And by the way, we expect you tonight.”

Now it was my turn to practice medicine in my own way. I told him that my own substance had already fulfilled its curative role the night before, and that I didn’t plan on going anymore.

Ayestarain looked at me fixedly:

“Why? What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing, except that I sincerely do not believe I am necessary there... Tell me: do you have any idea what it is to be in a humiliatingly ridiculous position; yes or no?”

“That’s not what this is about...”

“Yes, that is what this is about, of playing a stupid role... Strange that you don’t understand!”

“I understand all too well... But it seems to me something like...” don’t be offended, “a matter of self-love.”

“Very nice!” I blurted out. “Self-love! And you people can’t think of anything else! You think it’s a matter of self-love to go sit like an idiot so they can hold my hand all night in front of all the frowning relatives! If you people think it’s a simple matter of self-love, sort it out among yourselves. I have other things to do.”

Ayestarain apparently understood the grain of truth in the foregoing, because he did not insist, and until he left we did not speak of that again.

All this is fine. What is not so fine is that ten minutes ago I just received a note from the doctor, conceived thus:

Friend Durán:

With all your baggage of grudges, you are indispensable to us tonight. Suppose once more that you act as chloral, veronal, the hypnotic that least irritates your nerves, and come over.

I said a moment before that the bad thing was the preceding letter. And I am right, because since this morning I have been expecting nothing else than that letter...

For seven consecutive nights—from eleven to one in the morning, the time when the fever abated, and with it the delirium—I have remained by the side of María Elvira Funes, as close as two lovers can be. She has sometimes held out her hand to me like the first night, and other times she has troubled herself to spell out my name, looking at me. I know for a fact, then, that she loves me deeply in that state, not being unaware either that in her lucid moments she does not have the slightest concern for my existence, present or future. This thus creates a case of singular psychology that a novelist might draw some profit from. As for myself, I can say that this double sentimental life has touched my heart strongly. The case is this: María Elvira, if perchance I haven’t said so, has the most admirable eyes in the world. It is well and good that the first night I saw in her gaze only the reflection of my own ridiculousness as an innocuous remedy. The second night I felt my real inadequacy less. The third time it cost me no effort at all to feel the happy entity I was pretending to be, and ever since I live and dream that love with which the fever binds her head to mine.

What to do? I well know that all this is transitory, that by day she does not know who I am, and that I myself perhaps do not love her when I see her on her feet. But dreams of love, even if they are of two hours and at 104°, are paid for in the day, and I much fear that if there is a person in the world whom I am exposed to loving in broad daylight, she is not my vain nocturnal love... I love, then, a shadow, and I think with anguish of the day when Ayestarain considers his patient out of danger, and no longer needs me.

A cruelty this which will be appreciated in all its warm sympathy by men who are in love—with a shadow or not.

Ayestarain has just left. He has told me that the patient continues to improve, and that he is much mistaken, or one of these days I will find myself free from the presence of María Elvira.

“Yes, companion,” he says to me. Free from ridiculous evening gatherings, cerebral loves, and frowning brows... Do you remember?

My face must not express supreme joy, because the crafty physician bursts out laughing and adds:

“We are going to give you some compensation in return... The Funeses have lived these fifteen days with their heads in the clouds, and do not be surprised, then, if they have forgotten many things, especially regarding you... For the time being, today we dine over there. Without your blessed person,” so to speak, “and the aforementioned love, I don’t know how that would have ended... What do you say?”

“I say,” I have replied, “that I am almost tempted to decline the honor the Funeses do me by admitting me to their table...”

Ayestarain burst out laughing.

“Don’t kid around!... I repeat that they didn’t know where their heads were...”

“But for opium, and morphine, and mademoiselle’s calming draught, yes, eh? For that they didn’t forget me!”

My man turned serious and looked at me closely.

“Do you know what I think, companion?”

“Speak.”

“That you are the happiest individual on earth.”

“Me, happy?...”

“Or luckiest. Do you understand now?”

And he kept looking at me. Humph!—I said to myself:

Either I am an idiot, which is most likely, or this physician deserves to have me hug him until the thermometer breaks inside his pocket. The malignant fellow knows more than he seems to, and perhaps, perhaps... But I return to the idiot part, which is the surest.

“Happy?...” I insisted nevertheless. “Because of the outlandish love you have invented with your meningitis?”

Ayestarain looked at me fixedly again, but this time I thought I noticed a vague, very vague hint of bitterness.

“Even if it weren’t anything more than that, you great fool...” he murmured, taking me by the arm to leave.

On the way—we went to the Águila, to have a vermouth—he has explained three things quite clearly.

1st: that my presence by the patient’s side was absolutely necessary, given the state of profound excitement—depression—all in one—of her delirium.—2nd: that the Funeses had understood it thus, neither more nor less, in spite of how strange, surreptitious, and inconvenient the adventure might seem, knowing full well, of course, the artificiality of all that love.—3rd: that the Funeses had simply trusted in my good breeding, so that I would realize—extremely clearly—the therapeutic meaning my presence had had before the patient, and that of the patient before me.

“Above all the latter, eh?” I added by way of comment. “The object of all this talk is this: that I never go so far as to think that María Elvira feels the slightest real inclination toward me. Is that it?”

“Of course!” the doctor shrugged his shoulders. “Put yourself in her place...”

And the blessed man is right. Because at the sole probability that she...

Last night I dined at the Funeses’. It was not precisely a cheerful meal, even though Luis María, at least, was very cordial with me. I would like to say the same of the mother, but no matter how much effort she made to make the table pleasant for me, she evidently sees in me only an intruder whom her daughter prefers a million times at certain hours. She is jealous, and we must not condemn her. For the rest, she alternated with her daughter to go see the patient. The latter had had a good day, so good that for the first time in fifteen days there was no serious rise in fever that night, and although I stayed until one at Ayestarain’s request, I had to return home without having seen her for a single instant. Can this be understood? Not seeing her all day! Ah! If by God’s blessing the fever, a fever of 104, 176, 248°, any fever, were to fall upon her head tonight...

And here it is: this single line from the blessed Ayestarain:

Delirium again. Come at once.

Everything mentioned above is enough to drive a sensible man half mad, come what may. Consider this now:

When I came in last night, María Elvira held out her arm to me just as she had the first time. She rested her face against her left cheek, and, comfortable like that, fixed her eyes on me. I don’t know what her eyes were telling me; possibly they were giving me all their life and all their soul in an infinitely blissful surrender. Her lips told me something, and I had to lean down to hear:

“I am happy,” she smiled.

After a moment her eyes called to me again, and I leaned over once more.

“And afterwards...” she barely murmured, closing her eyes slowly. I believe she had a sudden flight of ideas. But the light, the senseless light that strays the gaze in flashes of happiness, flooded her eyes once again. And this time I heard quite clearly, felt clearly upon my face this question:

“And when I recover and am no longer delirious... will you still love me?”

Madness that has seated itself astride my heart! Afterwards! When she is no longer delirious! But were we all mad in the house, or was there here, projected outside of myself, an echo of my incessant anguish about the afterwards? How is it possible that she said that? Was there meningitis or not? Was there delirium or not? Then my María Elvira...

I don’t know what I answered; I presume it was something that would have scandalized the entire family if they had heard me. But I had barely murmured; she had barely murmured with a smile... and she fell asleep.

On the way home, my head was a living vertigo, with wild impulses to leap into the air and shout out shrieks of happiness. Who among us can swear that he wouldn’t have felt the same? Because things, to be clear, must be put like this: The sick girl in delirium, who by some psychological aberration or other, loves X, only in her delirium. This on the one hand. On the other, the same X, who, unfortunately for himself, does not feel strong enough to restrict himself exclusively to his medicinal role. And behold the patient, with her meningitis and her unconsciousness—her undeniable unconsciousness—murmurs to our friend:

And when I am no longer delirious... will you still love me?

This is what I call a small case of madness, clear and resounding. Last night, as I was arriving home, I thought for a moment I had found the solution, which would be this: María Elvira, in her fever, was dreaming that she was awake. Who has not been granted the dream that they are dreaming? No explanation could be simpler, of course.

But when across the screen of that feigned love there are two immense eyes, which, drenching us with bliss, drown themselves in a love that cannot be feigned: when one has seen those eyes sweep with harsh estrangement over familiar faces, to fall into ecstatic happiness before oneself, despite the delirium and a hundred thousand deliriums like it, one has the right to dream all night of that love—or let us be more explicit: of María Elvira Funes.

Dream, dream, and dream! Two months have passed, and sometimes I still think I am dreaming. Was it I or not, for God’s blessed sake, the one to whom that hand was held out, and the bare arm up to the elbow, when the fever made even the well-beloved faces of the house hostile? Was it I or not who calmed in her eyes, during immense minutes of eternity, the love-dizzy gaze of my María Elvira?

Yes, it was I. But that is over, concluded, finished, dead, immaterial, as if it had never been. And yet...

I saw her again twenty days later. She was well now, and I dined with them. At first there was an obvious allusion to the sick girl’s sentimental ravings, all with great tact on the part of the family, in which I cooperated as much as I possibly could, for during those twenty days that had elapsed, no small part of my concern had been to think about the discretion I ought to display in that first interview.

Everything went swimmingly, however.

“And you,” the mother said to me, smiling, “have you quite recovered from the fatigue we caused you?”

“Oh, it was very little indeed! And even,” I concluded, laughing as well. “I would be ready to endure it all over again...”

María Elvira smiled in turn.

“You would; but not I, I assure you!”

The mother looked at her with sadness:

“Poor child! When I think of the nonsense that came into your head... Anyway,” she turned to me with a pleasant look. “You are now,” so to speak, “one of the family, and I assure you that Luis María esteems you very much.”

The person in question put his hand on my shoulder and offered me cigarettes.

“Smoke, smoke, and pay no attention.”

“Now, Luis María!” the mother reproached him, semi-seriously, “anyone hearing you would think we were telling Durán a pack of lies!”

“No, Mother; what you say is perfectly well said; but Durán understands me.”

What I understood was that Luis María wanted to cut short any more or less insipid pleasantries; but I didn’t thank him in the least for it.

Meanwhile, as many times as I could, without drawing attention to myself, I fixed my eyes on María Elvira. At last! I had her before me now, healthy, quite healthy. I had anxiously awaited and feared that moment. I had loved a shadow, or rather, two eyes and thirty centimeters of arm, for the rest was a long white blur. And from that twilight, like a taciturn cocoon, had risen that splendid, fresh, indifferent, and cheerful figure, who did not know me. She looked at me the way one looks at a family friend, upon whom one must let one’s eyes rest for a second when telling a story or commenting on a cheerful phrase. But nothing more. Not the slightest trace of the past, not even the affectation of not looking at me, which I had counted on as the final triumph of my game. She was a subject—let us not say subject, but being—absolutely unknown to her. And consider now how much fun it would give me to remember, while looking at her, that one night, those very same eyes, now frivolous, had said to me, eight inches from my own:

“And when I’m well... will you still love me?”

Why look for lights, ignes fatui of a dead happiness, sealed with fire in the buzzing little coffer of a cerebral fever! To forget her... While being what I would have desired, it was precisely what I could not do.

Later, in the hall, I managed to isolate myself with Luis María, but placing him between his sister and me; this way I could look at her with impunity, on the pretext that my gaze naturally went beyond my interlocutor. And it is extraordinary how her body, from the most invisible hair on her head to the heel of her shoes, was a living desire, and how as she crossed the hall to go inside, every brush of her skirt against the patent leather went dragging my soul along like a piece of paper.

She came back, laughed, crossed right past me, smiling at me of necessity since I was in her path, while I, like an idiot, kept dreaming of a sudden stop beside me, and not one, but two hands placed upon my temples:

“Well: now that you have seen me on my feet: do you still love me?”

Bah! Dead, quite dead, I said goodbye, and for a moment pressed that cold, polite, and fleeting hand.