The Orchids

I SEE JUAN moving through the rippling heat toward the verandah. From the bottom of the stairs he looks up at me worriedly.

“El Doctor Ludtz está muy mal,” he says.

“Sí.”

“Muy mal, Don Pedro,” Juan adds with gentle insistence.

I rise from my chair and start down the stairs. Juan offers his hand, and I allow him to ease me down to the ground. In Spanish, I tell him that I will look in on Dr. Ludtz. He nods his appreciation.

At the cottage, I tap lightly at Ludtz’s door and it opens before me. Dr. Ludtz is lying on his back, breathing in short, painful gasps.

“How are you, Dr. Ludtz?” I ask.

He does not respond. His eyes are closed. The sheet draped over him is damp. For a while he kept two canaries in the empty cage that stands near his bed. One morning he awoke to find that both had died. “Look at that,” he said to me worriedly. “Just like that.” He was frightened, even a little mystified that death could come so quickly, and, old man that he was, he saw in every death the shadow of his own.

I shake his body lightly. “Dr. Ludtz?”

His eyes dart about under the closed lids, and his lips part slightly, but he says nothing. The lips close.

“Dr. Ludtz?” I repeat.

His head shifts. A part of the pillow case clings to the moisture at the back of his neck. There was a time when I believed that he might one day wake up to find his mind tattooed, though not his hand.

“Do you need anything, Dr. Ludtz?” I ask.

“Ich kann nicht …” Dr. Ludtz breathes, but the sentence trails off and is covered by a rattling wheeze.

I pour a glass of water and put it to his lips. They tremble slightly but do not open to receive it. In El Caliz it is the custom to take the dying from their fetid, steamy cottages and lay them out under the Spanish moss, so that when it moves in the breeze, the flies will be driven from the face.

I pull a chair up to the bedside and sit down. It is, I think, one of our more kindly customs to insist that no one die alone.

Dr. Ludtz opens his lips, and I put the rim of the glass to them. He flinches away from the glass, as if slapped.

I lean back in my seat and notice that Juan has taken it upon himself to open the shutters. The light that falls through them is very harsh and bright. I rise and close them once again. In this place, if Dr. Ludtz should suddenly open his eyes and see light, he would think himself in heaven.

“Ich …” Dr. Ludtz mumbles. “Ich …”

I lean toward him. “Was, mein Freund?”

“Ich …”

“Ich bin hier, mein Freund,” I tell him.

Dr. Ludtz’s hands close and open, close and open, as if he were reaching for ropes to pull him back to earth.

“Ich bin hier,” I tell him. “Was kann ich tun?”

Dr. Ludtz does not respond. His lips close tightly and begin to turn bluish. Blue, as I recall, was his favorite color. He used to say it was the shade that eased his nerves, the shade of peace.

I turn and see Esperanza standing in the doorway. She says nothing but lifts a severed chicken’s head in my direction, the blood dripping on the floor.

I wave her away.

“Para el doctor,” she says.

“No,” I tell her.

“Para el doctor,” Esperanza repeats. She does not move from the doorway.

I rise threateningly. “No!”

Esperanza frowns resentfully, steps back slowly, and disappears behind the door. If I were to leave Dr. Ludtz unattended, she would slip back into the cottage once again, open his mouth, and place the chicken’s head in it.

“Ich bin nicht …” Dr. Ludtz mutters. He does not finish the sentence.

During our first days at El Caliz, Dr. Ludtz sat sullenly, squatting behind a tree, raking his bald head with trembling fingers. Later he gave his grief expression in an art as unadorned as the tumblings of his brain. On canvas after worthless canvas he drew figures with his brush. Sometimes they stood before hazy swashes of green, which represented trees, sometimes before squares with crude windows, which represented houses or churches or schools. Always three figures with long hair. His wife and two daughters.

“Ich kann nicht …” Dr. Ludtz whispers.

I met her once, his wife. She was a large-boned woman with a curiously delicate face. It was clear that Dr. Ludtz thought her immensely beautiful, though she was rather plain except for two lambent blue eyes. We all sat together and drank a few steins of beer in a rathskeller a few blocks from the Institute. It was a trivial conversation, but as Ludtz began to feel the affects of the alcohol, he grew somewhat suggestive in the gestures he made toward her. Soon they rushed off to their apartment, tottering toward the door, comically bumping against the tables of other patrons. It was never Ludtz’s way to court a reluctant lover.

I lean forward and ask if he would like some water.

He does not hear me.

I take a handkerchief from my pocket, dunk it in the water basin on his table, and wipe his forehead. His eyes seem to steady for a moment under the closed lids.

“Ich kann nicht …” Ludtz begins again. I cannot.

But what is it that he cannot do? If suddenly he were to open his eyes and say, “Ich kann mich nicht verzeihen,” I cannot forgive myself, it strikes me that I would love him until I died. But this he will not do, because his mind is too woolly to understand its own monstrosity. In this, he is like so many of the others. The Minister of Air sneers from the witness stand, batting away the prosecutor’s insistent questions with a cynical flippancy as damnable as himself. The Commandant of the Camp stands in the shadow of the gallows and declares himself a kindly family man who never personally harmed anyone. And in the bowels of Jerusalem, among the tortured survivors whose specificity engendered all his enterprise, the Obersturmbannführer and former traveling salesman for the Vacuum Oil Company declares himself the product of Kantian philosophy. Dead to thought when they began, they remain dead to thought in their squalid termination.

“Magda …” Dr. Ludtz moans.

It is the name of his wife. If still alive, she is by now a jovial suburban grandmother pressing fruitcake into the mouths of her laughing grandchildren.

“Magda …” Dr. Ludtz repeats. If she is dead and I could raise her from the grave and transform her black, rotting lips into something soft and pink and pliant, I would press them next to his.

Dr. Ludtz raises one hand slightly, then it drops to his side. I reach over to feel his pulse. There is none.

I rise, walk to the door, stop, and look back. Even now I want to go to him, shake him back to life, and lead him along the trail of his past, convince him that freedom from moral pain is not the only value.

But he is gone now, into the oblivion of perfect blue.