See How Much I Love You

Chapter Three

WHEN DOCTOR CAMBRA STARTED HER TWENTY-FOUR-hour shift on the 31st of December, she couldn’t have guessed that the new century would usher in a radical change in her life. Nor did she suspect that the events of that night would help her make decisions she didn’t think she was ready for.

She wasn’t actually supposed to be on duty that day, but she swapped her shift with a colleague because she would have found it very hard to spend New Year’s eve at home on her own for the first time in her life. In the last few months she’d taken extra shifts on numerous occasions. Still, this one was something special, given what the arrival of new century meant for so many people. The Casualty Ward of the Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau was prepared for a very busy night. Few staff were hoping to get more than two or three hours’ sleep. But, in fact, before midnight they admitted fewer, less serious cases than on a regular day. Although she didn’t have much to do, Doctor Cambra walked up and down trying to keep herself busy. She would go to the pharmacy, restock the cupboard with gauze, and make sure they had received as many bottles of saline solution as had been ordered. Every time she walked into the staff room where the TV was on, she would hang her head and sing to herself in a mumble to stave off her despair. She was afraid she might break down in front of her colleagues at any moment, like that time she had burst into tears in the middle of an examination, while the nurse looked on in distress, not sure whether he should tend to the doctor or to the elderly woman who couldn’t breathe because a rib was pressing on her lungs. Now, every time Doctor Cambra heard her name through the loudspeakers of the casualty ward, she went wherever she was needed without thinking about anything except her work. At times an intern with a badly receding hairline and an aquiline nose would remind her of Alberto, who was still her husband. But, unlike a few months before, she was able to smile. She could even picture him cooking dinner with that radiologist who was obsessed with the gym and the hairdresser’s; he who had never done the dishes and had never opened a kitchen drawer except to take out a corkscrew. The last time she’d seen him it looked as though he had dyed the grey hairs on his temples and sideburns. She also imagined him belly dancing for the radiologist, and chasing her around a coffee table, in one of the wild cat-and-mouse games that he hadn’t played with her for years. Her feelings for Alberto had changed from sadness to irony, and from irony to sarcasm. She would never have imagined that someone who had been such an important part of her life since her youth would become, in barely ten months, a sort of rag doll, an empty, fake being — a veritable bastard. She found it hard to remember what he looked like when they’d met, at the time when he drove around Barcelona in that white, impeccable, polished, perfect Mercedes of his, it was just like him. A doctor from a family of doctors, a young cardiologist with a brilliant career, he’d been seductive, intelligent, handsome. Now, Doctor Cambra could not rid her mind of the image of her husband of twenty years chasing the young radiologist. When she bumped into Doctor Carnero, the anaesthetist on duty, she was still wearing a sarcastic smile on her face. They looked at each other in complicity.

‘This is the first time I’ve seen anyone smile on a New Year’s Eve shift,’ said the anaesthetist as she walked by.

‘I guess there’s a first time for everything.’

A voice called Doctor Cambra through the loudspeakers. Before the message was over, she was at her station.

‘In number four there’s a young woman with fractured limbs. A motorcycle accident.’

Doctor Cambra’s blood boiled. Her face flushed and her heartbeat accelerated. She walked over to the room they’d indicated, to find a very pale young woman being tended to by a nurse and an assistant. The girl looked scared and helpless, and the doctor immediately felt her legs grow weak. She tried to regain her composure, and said, in an annoyed tone:

‘Who took her helmet off?’

‘They brought her in without one. She probably wasn’t wearing it.’

The doctor lifted the girl’s eyelids and shone a little torch in them. She couldn’t help taking her hand and squeezing it. The girl’s other hand looked dead and was scratched all over. The doctor pressed gently on her thorax, spleen, kidneys, and stomach, saying: ‘Does this hurt? And here?’ The girl moaned, but shook her head.

‘Let’s see. Tell me how it happened.’

The girl mumbled something, but she couldn’t string her sentences together.

‘Do you feel a bit sleepy?’ asked the doctor. ‘Don’t fall asleep now. Go on, tell me what you can remember.’

As the girl tried to make herself understood, the nurse took her blood pleasure.

‘We’re going to need a CAT scan.’

The assistant wrote it down. The girl went on talking, now more coherently.

‘Blood pressure’s eleven-eighteen.’

‘How old are you?’ asked the doctor.

‘Nineteen. I have to be home for dinner.’

Doctor Cambra held her breath and looked away. That may have been the same thing her daughter had said six months before, when a doctor at the casualty ward had asked her what she had just asked the unknown girl. Nineteen. Her daughter had turned nineteen in March. As they took the girl away for her scan, Doctor Cambra left the room. Her daughter’s death would not come between her and her work, but she could not forget it either. Just like this girl, she’d been nineteen, and was riding her moped with her helmet hanging from her arm, heading home for dinner with her mother. However, it had been her father who got the call. At the hospital, Alberto’s name was well-known. They didn’t even have to look up his number in the dead girl’s diary. It was on file, at reception, along with the frequently used numbers. Montse didn’t know what hurt her the most, how long they’d taken to let her know, or the fact that it had been her husband, in a deep voice filled with self-possession, who had told her that their daughter had died. Besides, he had shown up with the radiologist, as if he wanted his lover to witness his fortitude.

An hour later, when Montse bumped into doctor Carnero in the staff room, her sarcastic smile had been replaced by a vacant gaze. On seeing her, the anaesthetist knew her friend was about to slip back into that deep hole she was trying to climb out of.

‘Coffee?’

Doctor Cambra nodded. It felt good to be surrounded by people and talk about mundane things.

‘How’s your son?’

The anaesthetist squinted at her and tried to smile.

‘Oh, he’s fine. But how are you? A moment ago you were smiling to yourself and now I come here and find you…’

‘I’m fine. My head’s not always where it should be, that’s all.’

‘We all get that, Montse. It doesn’t really make you special, you know.’

‘Nothing does, Belén. I’m the least special person on the planet.’

Belén tried not to take her friend’s observation too seriously. She knew better than anyone that Montse didn’t need words or advice but time for her wounds to heal.

‘Listen, Montse,’ said the anaesthetist. ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’

‘Nothing much, I guess: I’ll watch the ski jumping and the waltz competition on TV, and get fat with no regrets.’

‘I was thinking you could come round for dinner. Matías has brought some of that cod you like so much from his hometown.’

‘Cod on New Year’s Day? What about turkey and rice? The tradition that made our cuisine so great?’

‘You couldn’t be more old-fashioned!’

The door opened and an intern walked in, wearing gloves and surgical mask at a crooked angle.

‘Montse, we need you.’

Doctor Cambra stood up and left her coffee on the table without having even sipped from it.

‘All right,’ she said before leaving, ‘tomorrow at yours. If you like I’ll tape the ski jumps.’

‘No thanks. I’ll watch them live. My son loves them.’

Between eleven and twelve-thirty, the Casualty Ward was particularly quiet. A few staff members went over to the cafeteria for a bite to eat; others preferred to share home dishes in the staff room. It was the worst period of the night for Doctor Cambra.

The girl’s parents appeared a little before the clock struck twelve, harrowed by their daughter’s accident. Doctor Montserrat Cambra took special care of them. Against hospital regulations, she even allowed them to go in and see their daughter for a few minutes.

‘She’s been very lucky,’ she told the parents, who wept in front of the badly injured girl. ‘Don’t be scared by the intubation and all the bandages. It’s only saline solution and pain killers. Her head is absolutely fine. She’s broken a collarbone and a tibia. The worst thing, though, are the injuries to her hand, but with surgery and proper physical therapy there’ll be no serious consequences.’

The mother burst into tears as soon as she finished the report.

‘But she’s fine, trust me. In a month she’ll be nearly back to normal.’

Doctor Cambra was doing her best to lift the parents’ spirits, but she herself was sinking deeper into the terrifying hole. As soon as she could, she excused herself and walked away. Back in the staff room, the doctors and nurses on duty were toasting the new year in with plastic cups and making confetti out of old spreadsheets. The new century had crept in. A doctor from traumatology kissed her and wished her a happy new year. He was nervous and particularly clumsy, and nearly spilled coffee all over her.

‘You haven’t called me all week,’ he said, trying not to sound reproachful.

‘I didn’t get a chance, Pere, honestly. I had a million things to do here.’

‘Well, if that’s the only reason…’

‘Of course it is. You’re a great guy, honestly.’

The doctor walked off, wary of prying eyes. Belén approached her friend from behind and whispered in her ear:

‘You haven’t called me all week, Montse.’

She blushed so much she thought everyone would see.

‘You’re a great guy, honestly,’ continued the anaesthetist, imitating Montse’s affected tone.

‘Will you shut up! Don’t you realise he’s listening?’

‘Who, Pere? He’s deaf in one ear, as I’m sure you know. I myself anaesthetised him for the operation.’

‘You’re a witch.’

‘And you’re a bit jumpy today. Didn’t you know Pere is the hospital’s most eligible bachelor?’

‘And did you know that the most eligible bachelor falls short where it matters?’

Belén covered her mouth in a exaggerated gesture of surprise.

‘Really!’

‘You heard me.’

‘Well, nobody’s perfect, darling.’

The rest of the shift went as everyone expected: people coming and going up and down corridors, opening and closing doors, pushing gurneys in and out of rooms. It would have ended like any other shift Doctor Cambra had worked in her long career, had it not been for a series of coincidences that took place in the first hours of the new century.

At three-fifteen in the morning, an ambulance from the Casualty Ward of the Hospital de Barcelona picked up a twenty-five-year-old Arabic pregnant woman, who had been run over at the airport. First coincidence: the ambulance, which was speeding at over ninety kilometres an hour along Gran Via de Les Cort Catalanes, encountered a traffic jam when it reached Carrer de Badal; three cars had crashed and were on fire. That was the shortest way to the Hospital de Barcelona, but it was now impossible to pass through the fire engines and police cars gathering in the area, and so the driver carried on along the main road looking for the nearest hospital. Second coincidence: when the driver radioed the Hospital Clinic i Provincial, who told him they were expecting four people with severe burns, and advised him to proceed to his initial destination. Third coincidence: when the ambulance was about to take a turn at Plaça de les Glóries Catalanes in order to go back up Diagonal towards the Hospital, the driver made a mistake while turning a sharp corner and ended up on the wrong road. Fourth coincidence: as the driver was trying to orientate himself, he chanced on the main façade of the Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau, and before he knew where he was, he saw the red lights of the Casualty Ward. The moment the stretcher crossed the threshold, the woman lost all her vitals, and presently a nurse realised she was dead. Fifth coincidence: just when doctor Cambra was seeing an old man who’d been admitted with an asthma attack, an orderly and an intern left the gurney with the body of the pregnant woman next to her. A certain something made Doctor Cambra take notice of that woman: perhaps the beauty of her features, the colourful piece of cloth wrapped around her, or her advanced pregnancy. Though no one asked her to, Doctor Cambra took her pulse at the throat; then she lifted her eyelids and found the pupils dilated and non-reactive, which confirmed that the woman was dead. Her features were placid, as if she’d died with a smile on her face. At reception, meanwhile, there was a bit of a commotion, and a discussion started between the administrative and ambulance staff. Doctor Cambra, without really meaning to, learned all the details. The victim’s husband, who had not been allowed on the ambulance, had taken a taxi to the Hospital de Barcelona, where he was no doubt asking about his wife at that very moment. Also, all the woman’s papers, passport and documents were in Arabic, so no one knew who to contact about the death. Doctor Cambra stepped in and tried to make some sense of it all.

‘Call the other casualty department, explain what’s happened, and tell them to send the husband over as soon as he gets there.’

They looked at each other, with all the tiredness one feels at half three in the morning.

‘And don’t mention she’s dead.’

Doctor Cambra looked again at the woman’s disquietingly peaceful face. In other circumstances, it would have looked contented. As two assistants put what the woman carried in her pockets and purse on a little table, Montse picked up a form and examined her injuries, trying to figure out how the accident had happened. In the form she entered the estimated age of the victim: twenty-five. It made her shiver. For a moment she saw herself at that age, walking arm in arm with Alberto, or dancing with him at Caldaqués, pregnant and envied by the resentful girls from Barcelona also on holiday at the seaside. Then, another coincidence, she leaned on the small table to write more comfortably, and the woman’s personal effects fell off. This wouldn’t have mattered much in itself if, on bending down to pick them up, Montserat Cambra hadn’t seen three or four photographs, one of which strongly attracted her attention.

It was in black and white. Two men appeared in the centre, shown from the knees up. They were the same height. Both smiled at the camera, as though they were the happiest people in the world. Behind them was the front of a Land Rover with a spare wheel on the bonnet. Further back there were countless Bedouin tents, lined up all the way to the horizon. Among the tents there were groups of goats lying on the ground. The two men had their arms around each other’s shoulders, in a gesture of comradeship. They were very close to one another, their faces nearly touching. One of them had Arab features: he was wearing military clothes and making the V sign with his hand. The other was clearly a Westerner, in spite of his attire. He was dressed like Laurence of Arabia, with a long white tunic and a dark turban, undone and hanging loose over his shoulders. He had very short hair and an old-fashioned moustache. In his right hand he was holding a gun in a very cinematographic gesture. What most attracted the viewer’s attention were the men’s smiles.

The picture confused Doctor Cambra. A moment later, when she held it up in her shaking hands, she realised why: the moustachioed man in desert clothes was Santiago San Román. She traced the image with her finger, not sure whether it was an illusion. But her doubts were soon dispelled. She flipped the picture and discovered what seemed to be a dedication in Arabic, in blue smudged letters. Underneath it read clearly: “Tifariti, 18-1-1976”. The date was so conclusive that it left no room for uncertainty. If Santiago San Román had died in 1975, as she had always thought, that young man could not be the guy who, on a hot July afternoon twenty-six years to this date, had approached her and her inseparable friend Nuria while they were waiting for a bus on Avenida del Generalísimo Franco.

It happened in the early summer of ’74. Montse would never forget the date, no matter how many years went by. It was the first time her parents had gone on holiday to Cadaqués and left her at home. She’d never been on her own in her life, and that summer she wasn’t either. A maid called Mari Cruz, who cooked, made the beds and looked after her, had stayed at the house on Vía Cayetana. Montse had turned eighteen barely a month before, and had graduated from secondary school with excellent marks. Still, her father thought that in order to study medicine one needed more than an outstanding student record, so Montse was denied a summer holiday for the first time in eighteen years. And, while the days blended into each other by the sea, she attended a private academy in the morning and afternoon, where she brushed up on maths and chemistry and took up German.

The Academia Santa Teresa was situated on the mezzanine of a building on Avenida del Generalísimo Franco. There was a dance academy on the floor above it, which in the summer gave full-immersion courses from eight o’clock in the morning till nine in the evening. While Montse and her inseparable friend Nuria tried to focus on their logarithms, the desks of the classroom would vibrate to the stamping heels of the flamenco dancers or the broken rhythms of a tango. In those conditions it was easy for one’s eyes to stray to the window, and one’s attention would follow the same way, focusing on a handsome guy or the shops across the road. But the monotony was soon to be broken, on a day when Montse and Nuria were waiting for the bus, having lost all hope that something would save them from the boredom of the summer and the heat.

Perhaps it was boredom that made the two friends glance at the white convertible with very big plates that stopped on the other side of the road. It was a foreign car, possibly American. Apart from the unusual model, they noticed that inside it were two young, handsome, very well dressed guys who would not stop staring at them. Neither Montse nor Nuria dared to say something, but they both knew that sooner or later something out of the ordinary would happen. And indeed, in a dangerous, spectacular move, the car drove across the road and screeched to a halt by the bus stop. That was the first time Montse saw Santiago San Román. Although the boy was only nineteen, his brilliantined hair, his clothes and the car made him look more mature. He and his friend got out of the car at the same time and approached the girls. ‘The service on this line has been suspended,’ he said in an accent that instantly gave away that he was not from Barcelona, ‘me and Pascualín have just found out.’ The other people waiting at the bus stop exchanged incredulous glances. Only Montse and Nuria smiled, their curiosity piqued. ‘It’ll take a day or two at most,’ added Pascualín. ‘But if you don’t want to wait that long, myself and my friend here can give you a ride to wherever you’re going.’ As Pascualín spoke, Santiago pointed to the splendid car. Pascualín opened the door on the passenger’s side, and Montse, acting on an impulse she’d never felt before, said to her friend. ‘Come on, Nuria, they’re driving us.’ Nuria sat in the back with Pascualín, and Montse in the spectacular front seat, which was ample and luxurious, covered in very pale tan leather. Santiago San Román hesitated for a second, his eyes wide open, as if he couldn’t believe the two girls had taken him up on the invitation. He got nervous at the steering wheel when Montse asked: ‘And what’s your name?’ ‘Santiago San Román, at your service,’ he replied, in a ridiculous-sounding stab at humbleness.

It was the craziest thing Montse had ever done. Sitting next to Santiago San Román, she felt the heat and the boredom float away. They drove in silence, all four enjoying the sensation, lost in their own thoughts. And so, when they went round Plaza de la Victoria and past Vía Layetana, Montse didn’t say a thing. They drove into Plaza de las Glorias Catalanas as though they were part of a triumphant parade. Every now and again Santiago would glance at her, or turn to look at her head-on as she lifted her hair for the breeze to run through it. After a while they stopped at the Estación del Pueblo Nuevo. The sea air smelled of stagnant water. Once the car was parked, Montse opened her eyes as though she were waking up from a slumber. ‘Why are you stopping?’ she asked, with forced self-confidence. ‘This place is horrible.’

‘Okay, but you haven’t told me where you live.’

‘On Vía Layetana,’ replied Nuria quickly, less at ease than her friend. Santiago did a U-turn and drove back the way they’d come. Suddenly Montse became talkative and started asking all kinds of questions.

‘It’s my father’s car, I don’t make enough to own a Cadillac.’ ‘In a bank, I work in a bank. Well, actually, my father’s the manager, and I’ll be the same one day.’ ‘Yes, Pascualín too; we both work at the same bank.’

Meanwhile, Pascualín and Nuria were oblivious to the conversation. As Santiago answered the questions, he dug himself deeper and deeper into a hole. ‘Pull up here, please. This is where Nuria lives,’ said Montse all of a sudden. In fact the girls were neighbours, but Nuria realised what her friend’s intentions were, and reluctantly got out of the Cadillac.

‘Will you not walk her?’ said Santiago to Pascualín, reproachfully. The convertible proceeded down the road and stopped where Montse indicated. For the first time she looked him in the eyes; he struck her as the handsomest guy she’d ever met. She let him tell more lies. Santiago, however, didn’t ask any questions. It was hard enough to have to reply to the ones Montse was continually asking him. Eventually, he said: ‘This feels like an interrogation.’

‘Do you mind my questions?’

‘No, no, I don’t mind them at all.’

It’s just that when I jump into someone’s car I like to know who the guy is,’ said Montse, coyly. ‘Don’t go thinking, though, that I do this every day.’

‘No, no, I don’t think that at all. But the thing is, I’ve told you everything, and you…’

‘What would you like to know?’ she cut in.

Santiago hesitated before asking: ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ For the first time Montse’s confidence faltered. Now it was she who hesitated before replying: ‘No, not a boyfriend as such — but I’ve got admirers,’ she said, trying to keep her cool. ‘What about you, do you have a girlfriend?’

‘No, no; I don’t like commitment.’ Even before finishing the phrase he wished he hadn’t said it. Confused and without exactly knowing why, he placed a hand on her back and stroked the nape of her neck. Montse, also without thinking clearly, drew near and kissed him on the lips. But when Santiago tried to hold her in his arms and kiss her more deeply she slipped away, pretending she was offended.

‘I have to go now,’ she said, ‘it’s getting late.’ She opened the door, got out of the car, and only stopped when Santiago San Román shouted to her worriedly:

‘Do you want to meet up some other time?’ Like a capricious child, she walked back to the car, left the books on the bonnet, scribbled something in her notebook, tore out the page, put it under the windshield wiper, picked up her books again and, after a few steps, turned and said:

‘Give me a call first. There’s the number. I’ve also written down the address and the number of the flat, so you don’t go around asking the neighbours.’ That was all. She walked to the doorway and, with some difficulty, pushed open the enormous iron door. Santiago San Román didn’t even get a chance to reply. After Montse had disappeared, he was still looking at the empty space where she had been. The girl did not have enough patience to wait for the lift. She ran up the stairs two steps at a time, hastily opened the front door, dropped the books on the floor and ran to her room, ignoring Mari Cruz’s hello. From the balcony of her room she just caught sight of the car driving into the traffic and disappearing towards the harbour. Still, she could see that the page was no longer under the windshield wiper. She pictured it folded in four, hidden in Santiago’s shirt pocket: an immaculate, nicely cut white shirt, without a crease, its sleeves rolled up to the elbow, and with a distinction that contrasted with the social class he so tried to hide.

Doctor Montserrat Cambra was walking down the corridor of the casualty ward in a considerable state of confusion. She held the pocket of her coat as though she were afraid that someone might snatch the picture she had just stolen from a dead woman out of it. For a moment she didn’t even know where she was. Then she thought everyone was watching her. However, none of the staff she passed looked at her. She walked into the doctors’ room and closed the door behind her. She had difficulty breathing. She sat down and swallowed a pill. It was the last in the box. The coffee that Belén had poured her hours before was still on the table. She downed it in one, without even noticing it was cold. She picked up the receiver of the phone on the table, dialled reception and said in a trembling voice:

‘Doctor Cambra speaking. Please listen carefully. When the husband of the woman from the airport comes in, I need you to let me know. Don’t forget. It doesn’t matter if I’m busy. Let me know. It’s important. Thanks.’

After hanging up, she put her hand in her pocket and touched the photograph. She sat down without taking her hand out. She experienced the absurd sensation that the picture might disappear at any time. Then it would all vanish as in a dream: another dream turned into a nightmare.