But this man was almost motionless in front of the bar, and he did not turn around. Lluís, for one, used to bury his face in her breasts while she stroked his head like a little boy. The men who came from the war did not have that air. He had entered the bar without looking at anyone, with a decisive air about him. Just like the back, so still, propped up at the bar. A broad back, with slightly square shoulders. She had not been able to detain the doctor’s white back with a glance today either. “You’re always joking, Zelda,” said the doctor as he disappeared behind the screen. “Even if you’re short of beds, I don’t intend to kick the bucket just yet,” she replied, opening her eyes completely. He would disappear to the rhythm of her breathing.
But the visits from the young man in the white coat were too brief. He did not speak in diminutives like that witch of a nurse. The doctor had just come in and was looking at her mischievously. “Well, it looks like we’re in a good mood today, eh.” A group of hikers were singing it and it started like this: “Tomorrow belongs to me…” She never heard it again, only that day, in the bar, while she was having a drink with her parents. She had started to hear the buzzing when she had the stroke, shortly after a blast of blood exploded in her brain it was a humming which sometimes almost became a melody. And the breathing of the old woman next to her became more distant, like the metallic noise of the bucket belonging to the cleaning lady, or the noise of the breakfast trolley as it made its way down the corridor. Whenever she felt the soft caress of her eyelids, those rose-coloured veils that separated her from the objects in the room, from the window, the walls and the screen, she knew that she was alive. This makes more sense in the context of the story, and is medically accurate. *The original text refers to “cortisol” as a “growth” hormone it is in fact a “stress” hormone. Some died more quickly, others took somewhat longer. The bodies of two old women installed in the room on the upstairs level, transferred from the ward to die there. No, nothing linked her with the body on the other side of the screen. She allowed her lungs to fill with oxygen as if it had to make its way right down to her stomach, and then she exhaled through her nose, softly, rhythmically. For every inhalation by the other woman, she inhaled twice. Bodies do not have anything to say to each other, though she always tried to breathe with a different rhythm. She never said anything to the women on the other side of the screen. That was why she liked to sense her eyelids covering her eyes, to open them slowly in order to confirm that everything was still in its usual spot. The doctor from the ward had once told her that this phenomenon was due to cortisol, the stress* hormone.
The gap between inhalations would be ever greater, the sound ever harsher until, at daybreak, she would not hear anything any more. The woman on the other side of the screen would be the fourth one to die since they had transferred her to that room. A death rattle, the sound of someone dying. It was a harsh sound, as if she had a machine on top of her chest. She heard the laborious, constricted breathing of the woman behind the screen. They were returning to their places at the end of the night, so short. She saw the peeling white walls and, in the middle of the room, the folding screen. She looked up: the milky light of the first hour of the day, still sleepy, was coming in through the window. She would open her eyes because she wanted to, just as she could choose to move her hands and turn her head a little from side to side. Then she would slowly start opening her eyelids and confirm that everything was still in its usual spot. She liked to have her eyes half shut, as if covered by a transparent, light pink handkerchief. She did this every morning before the nurse came in. Her eyelids were not tightly shut they were merely closed. I turn my back on the ominous day that is today Īnd a new burst of faith still encourages me, Our Shared Neuroses Andrew Kaye Kauffmannīefore the final night comes to a close for me,.FOUR COLLAGES ON LONELINESS katiehamill.Litro #182: Experimental – The Book Fight Chihoi.
#SCREENIT HAND OVER NOSE MOUTH SKIN#
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