Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [96]
That night, practically speaking, lasted an entire year. In the beginning, the consequences of the catastrophe had seemed to be merely physical. When Lucho Abril Marroquín recovered consciousness, he was in Lima, in a small hospital room, bandaged from head to foot, and at his bedside (Guardian Angels bringing peace of mind to a soul in agitation), keeping anxious watch over him, were the blond compatriot of Juliette Greco and Dr. Schwalb of Bayer Laboratories. Amid his tipsiness brought on by the smell of chloroform, he was suddenly overcome with happiness, and tears streamed down his cheeks, as he felt his wife’s lips brush the gauze bandages covering his forehead.
The knitting of bones, the return of muscles and tendons to their proper place, and the closing and healing of his wounds—in other words, the mending of the animal half of his person—took a number of weeks, which were relatively tolerable thanks to the superb skills of his doctors, the attentiveness of the nurses, the Magdalene-like devotion of his wife, and the solicitude of the Laboratories, whose behavior toward him was impeccable both from the point of view of sentiment and of cash on the line for his every need. And in the Social Security Clinic, in the middle of his convalescence, Lucho Abril Marroquín learned a gratifying piece of news: his little French wife had conceived and in seven months would give birth to his child.
It was only after he was let out of the hospital and went back to his little house in San Miguel and his job that the secret, complicated wounds that his mind had suffered in the two accidents came to light. Of the many ills that now befell him, insomnia was the most benign. Unable to sleep, he spent his nights wandering all about the house in the dark, chain-smoking in a state of extreme agitation, and muttering disjointed phrases in which, to his wife’s vast surprise, the word “Herod” kept recurring. When his insomnia was overcome chemically through the use of sleeping pills, the result was even worse: Abril Marroquín’s sleep was haunted by nightmares in which he saw himself hacking his own as yet unborn daughter to pieces. His wild shrieks terrified his wife in the beginning and eventually caused her to have a miscarriage. the fetus was probably of the female sex. “My dreams have come true, I’ve killed my own daughter, the only thing left to do is go live in Buenos Aires,” the oneiric filicide lugubriously repeated night and day.
But even this was not the worst of it. The nights when he didn’t sleep at all, or had terrible nightmares, were followed by awful days. Ever since the accident, Lucho Abril Marroquín had suffered from a visceral phobia toward any wheeled vehicle, to the point where he could not get in one, either as the driver or as a passenger, without feeling dizzy, having vomiting spells, sweating profusely, and bursting into screams. His every attempt to overcome this taboo proved completely fruitless, with the result that he was obliged to resign himself to living, in the middle of the twentieth century, as though he were back in the days of the Inca empire (a society in which the wheel was unknown). If the distances that he had to cover were merely a question of the five kilometers between his house and the Bayer Laboratories, this would not have been such a serious matter; for a tormented spirit, the two-hour walk morning and evening might have had a sedative effect. But for a medical detail man whose area of operations was the vast territory of Peru, this phobia toward all wheeled vehicles was tragic. Since there was not the slightest possibility of reviving the athletic era of Indian couriers, the professional future of Lucho Abril Marroquín was seriously threatened. The Laboratory agreed to give him a sedentary job in the Lima office, and even though they did not reduce his salary, from the moral and psychological point of view, the change