One AM: The Nurse from Samper Mendoza

At ten past one in the morning, the needle of the analog VU meter swung gently to the cadence of a rare bossa nova tape that a university architecture student had carried back from Rio de Janeiro in July. Out on the avenue, the mountain gale quickened, rattling the telephone cables against the street facades with a metallic whistle that seeped through the window putty. I opened my spiral station log and noted the precise time with my fountain pen: 01:15 AM. I struck a wooden match, lit my second cigarette of the night, and watched the blue smoke coil toward the cracked plaster ceiling.

Inside that high-ceilinged room, solitude ceased to be an absence and became a tangible, protective presence. Shelved along the pine planks were hundreds of TDK and BASF cassettes meticulously lettered by hand with drafting nibs: shortwave radio rebroadcasts intercepted from Havana, underground acoustic sessions by exiled Chilean balladeers, and field recordings of steam locomotives grinding across the savannah that my uncle had captured on open-reel Scotch tape. Each cassette represented an unheralded archive of emotional resistance against the relentless commercialism of daytime life.

The rotary telephone chimed once more with its hesitant, muffled rattle. I lifted the receiver knowing that past one o'clock, the character of our callers shifted fundamentally: casual greetings ceased, replaced by the hushed disclosures of those keeping vigil beside sickbeds or guarding solitudes unseen by the rest of the world.

—Good evening, Radio Neblina on the air —I spoke gently.

—Hello, Sofía —replied a woman's voice, remarkably clear, tired, and warm, speaking in a deliberate murmur so as not to awaken those nearby—. This is Beatriz. I'm calling from the nurses' station at the Samper Mendoza pediatric burn ward.

—Good evening, Beatriz —I answered, feathering the background music down on my monitor headphones—. What a comfort to hear from you. How does the ward rest tonight?

—At peace, by the grace of God —the nurse replied, the faint rhythm of a distant faucet and the hum of a vaccine cooler audible across the line—. All seven children in the ward are asleep. I have my two-battery Sanyo transistor radio propped on the dressing trolley, set to volume notch two so the music reaches the beds without startling them from their dreams.

Beatriz described the texture of her graveyard vigil: renewing sterile saline gauze wraps at two in the morning, monitoring intravenous drip rates in the semi-darkness, and warming the trembling fingers of young rural children who woke startled by night terrors of burning thatched roofs. The ward smelled of medicinal carbolic wash and sweet peppermint tea that the auxiliary nurses brewed on a hotplate concealed inside the linen closet.

Beatriz told me that the little Sanyo radio had belonged to her older brother, a locomotive engineer with the National Railways who had worked the La Dorada line before the state closed the workshops of La Sabana. In the dim silence of the treatment room, that faint green dial was her solitary tether to the mountain slopes and the whisper of distant rain. She explained that the graveyard-shift nurses shared an unspoken covenant: whenever exhaustion threatened to break their spirits, they took ten-minute turns beside the speaker in utter silence, cupping a tin mug of scalding coffee between their gloved hands.

The mental image of that tiny plastic transistor radio illuminating a dim ward in a public hospital in south Bogotá with its green tuning dial moved me to the core.

—What recording can I spin to accompany your vigil, Beatriz?

—I didn't telephone to request a song, Sofía —she said after a pause in which I could hear her steady her breathing—. I called to thank you. In this unit we witness depths of grief that never make the morning newspapers. We receive tenant families who arrive without a spare coin and mothers who lost everything in hillside shack fires. Over the past two years, whenever the two-in-the-morning fatigue threatened to break my resolve, your voice was like a steady hand resting upon my shoulder, whispering that it was worth remaining awake for one more hour.

Tears gathered along the rims of my eyelashes beneath my reading spectacles. I gripped the steel stem of my microphone tightly so that the tremor in my vocal cords would not betray my composure over the airwaves.

—The vigil is yours, Beatriz, sustained by your own devotion —I answered tenderly—. An operator in a darkened room merely slides potentiometers; it is people like you who bind up the wounds of the living world. Promise me you will take good care of that little Sanyo radio when the morning comes.

—I promise you, my dear —the nurse replied, a gentle smile audible through the receiver—. Play us that string suite that sounds like gentle rain falling upon plantain leaves. The little ones rest far easier when the radio sounds like quiet water.

I cued up an archival cello concerto recorded in Prague that I had purchased for fifty pesos in the flea market of San Alejo. The cello's resonant timbre flooded the sleeping city, traveling upon invisible airwaves into the sterile corridors of Samper Mendoza, spinning a bridge of velvet between two women who had never touched hands but kept vigil together in the capital's nocturnal shadow.