Taking Lives by Michael Pye

Author:Michael Pye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307428042
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Five

I drove Arturo to the hospital in the morning, slowly, like some black car in a solemn procession.

The old man must have seen the mist in the trees most mornings of his life, seen it shift out of shape and drift through the headlights with the tar steaming below, but now he chose to stare at it; and Zulmira sat upright in the backseat. The two of them were sharp as scared animals.

Their daughter, Isabel, tried to take Zulmira’s right hand. She couldn’t break Zulmira’s grip on herself.

The hospital had the manageable look of a picture in a prospectus: oleanders, parking spaces, towers of glass. But inside, it was frantic like a market, women in black, bags and bundles, a whole civilian population turned out to mourn its men in the wars: men cut up by machines, men whose hearts exploded or whose brains stopped because of the drink, men broken, men who wore out when they could least afford it. Every grating and corner was full of people waiting; the hard glass and tile of the walls had gone soft with cloth and eyes and hands.

Arturo wasn’t quite expected, was about to be shunted aside to wait in line for an office that could tell him which line he should wait in next. There were processions of the sick between this office and the next.

I couldn’t bear the sight of his resignation, his patience. I barged up to the admitting desk and used my proper bourgeois manner and the oddness of my accent to get attention. After a few minutes, a nurse came for Arturo and led him away, cardboard case in one hand, down a long, dark corridor that sometimes shone with the light from a far window.

Zulmira went after him at once. But a squadron of doctors bustled by, and she stopped out of deference. She sat down in the corridor and began to check the food she’d brought in another bag.

“He won’t need that,” Isabel said.

“They don’t feed you in places like this.”

“They won’t let him have it.”

“I brought the right thing, didn’t I?” She appealed to me as if it was my business, a jamjar of bean stew in one hand.

“I don’t know,” I said. “He won’t be able to eat much before the operation, and afterwards maybe he won’t feel like it.”

“He’ll want this. To build him up.”

Isabel said, “You don’t have to stay. We’ll stay.”

Zulmira looked at me directly. Her right hand had relaxed a little, and in it was a crucifix: a metal Christ on a wooden cross. The crucifix had bitten her hand hard.

She went entirely blank for a moment, face like paper, eyes dead; and then she came back to us, still focused only on Arturo.

“He’ll want the food,” she said.

“You know he can’t have it,” Isabel said. “We’ll bring him food when he’s getting better.”

“I made it for him,” Zulmira said stubbornly, but she had no more energy. She’d watched over Arturo all night in this hospital before, watched

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