A Long Petal of the Sea(87)

At first, Victor was obsessed with existing treatments and experimental ones. He read reports, studied every drug, and memorized statistics selectively, rejecting the most pessimistic and clinging to any shred of hope. He remembered Lazaro, the boy soldier from Estacion del Norte, who came back from death because he had such a strong desire to live. He thought that if he could inject Roser’s spirit and immune system with a similar passion for life, she could defeat cancer. There were such cases. Miracles did exist. “You’re strong, Roser, you always have been. You’ve never been ill, you’re made of iron and will get over it, this illness isn’t always fatal,” he repeated like a mantra, without managing to instill in her any of this baseless optimism that as a professional he would have discouraged in his patients. Roser went along with him as long as she was able to. Just to please him, she underwent chemotherapy and radiation, although she was convinced this only meant prolonging a process that was becoming more painful by the day. With the stoicism that was her birthright, she put up with the horror of the drugs without ever complaining. All her hair fell out, even her eyelashes, and she was so weak and thin that Victor could pick her up without effort. He carried her in his arms from bed to armchair, to the bathroom, out into the garden to see the hummingbirds in the fuchsia bush and the hares bounding past, mocking the dogs already too old to bother to chase them. She lost her appetite but made an effort to swallow at least a couple of mouthfuls of the dishes he prepared by following recipe books. Toward the end she could only keep down the Catalan custard dessert that Carme used to make for Marcel on Sundays. “When I’m gone, I want you to cry for a day or two to show respect, comfort poor Marcel, and then go back to the hospital and your teaching. But with a bit more humility, Victor, because you’ve been unbearable lately,” Roser told him on one occasion.



Right to the end, the thatched stone house was their sanctuary. They had spent six happy years there, but it was only now, when every minute of the day and night was precious, that they fully appreciated it. When they bought it, the house was already in poor condition, but they had postponed the necessary repairs indefinitely. They should have replaced the shutters hanging off their hinges, redecorated the bathrooms with their pink tiles and rusty pipes, rehung doors that wouldn’t shut and others they couldn’t open, gotten rid of the rotting thatch on the roof where mice nested, swept away the cobwebs, moss, and moths, and beat the dusty carpets. But they saw none of this. The house wrapped itself around them like an embrace, protecting them from pointless distractions, the curiosity and pity of others.

Marcel was their only regular visitor. He arrived every so often laden with bags of groceries from the market, food for the dogs, the cat, and the parrot, who always greeted him with an enthusiastic “Hello, handsome!” He also brought CDs of classical music for his mother, videos to entertain them, and newspapers and magazines that neither Victor nor Roser read, because they found the outside world exhausting. Marcel tried to be discreet, taking his shoes off in the doorway so as not to make noise, but he was a big man, and his looming presence and feigned cheerfulness made the house seem small. His parents missed him if he didn’t come to see them for a day, and when he was with them, he left them with their heads in a whirl. Their neighbor Meche also came to quietly leave food on the porch and ask if they needed anything. She stayed only a few moments, understanding that the most precious thing the Dalmaus had was the time they spent together, the time to say goodbye.

The day came when, sitting side by side on the wicker chair on the porch, with the cat on her lap, dogs at their feet, and a view of the golden hills and blue sky of evening, Roser asked her husband to please let her go, because she was very weary. “Don’t take me to the hospital for any reason. I want to die in our bed, holding your hand.” Defeated at last, Victor had to accept his own powerlessness. He couldn’t save her, and he couldn’t imagine life without her. He realized in horror that the half century they had spent together had galloped by. Where had the days and years gone? The future without her was the huge empty room without doors and windows that appeared in his nightmares. He dreamed he was escaping from war, blood, and shattered bodies. He ran and ran through the night until suddenly he found himself in that sealed room where he was safe from everything but himself. The energy and enthusiasm of the previous months when he thought age could not touch him drained from his bones. The woman beside him also grew old in a few minutes. Moments earlier she was still as he had always seen her and as he remembered her in her absence: the twenty-two-year-old with a newborn babe in her arms, the woman who married him without love but loved him more than anyone else in the world, his lifelong companion. With her he had lived everything that was worth living. The proximity of death made the intensity of his love as unbearable as an acid burn. He wanted to shake her, shout at her not to go, they still had years ahead of them to love each other more than ever, to be together and not be apart a single day: Please, please, Roser, don’t leave me. And yet he said none of this to her, because he would have had to be blind not to see Death in the garden, waiting for his wife with the patience of a specter.



There was a chill breeze, and Victor had wrapped Roser in two blankets that came up to her nostrils. Only a skeletal hand poked out of the bundle, gripping him with more strength than she seemed capable of. “I’m not afraid of dying, Victor. I’m happy: I want to know what comes next. You shouldn’t be afraid either, because I’ll always be with you in this life and in others. It’s our karma.” Victor began to weep like a baby, in despairing sobs. Roser let him cry until he ran out of tears and resigned himself to what she had accepted months earlier. “I’m not going to let you suffer anymore,” was all Victor could offer her. As she did every night, she nestled in the crook of his arm and let herself be rocked and lulled to sleep. It was dark already. Victor lifted off the cat, picked up Roser carefully so as not to wake her, and carried her to bed. She weighed almost nothing. The dogs followed him.