Learning to Talk to Plants Read online

  LEARNING TO TALK TO PLANTS

  MARTA ORRIOLS

  Translated from the Catalan

  by Mara Faye Lethem

  pushkin press

  For you, Miquel.

  Days and nights and those hours that can’t be measured on a clock.

  We’ll never forget you.

  I miss you and I love you. Still and forever.

  “You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.”

  JULIAN BARNES, Levels of Life

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Before

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  After

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  BEFORE

  We were alive.

  Terrorist attacks, accidents, wars and epidemics weren’t our concern. We could watch movies that made light of dying, others that turned the act of dying into an act of love, but we remained outside that zone where the true meaning of death resided.

  Some nights, protected by the arrogance of our late youth, we would lie in bed, surrounded by huge, soft pillows, and we would watch the news in the dim light, our feet intertwined, and that was when death, without us knowing, settled, all bluish, into the lenses of Mauro’s glasses. One hundred and thirty-seven people died in Paris in attacks claimed by the Islamic State, six deaths in less than twenty-four hours on the roads in three different head-on collisions, an overflowing river caused four deaths in a small town in southern Spain, at least seventy dead in a chain of attacks in Syria. And, scared for a moment, we might have said things like “What a world” or “Poor guy, in the wrong place at the wrong time” and the news, if it wasn’t too harsh, would dwindle that very night in the confines of the bedroom of a couple, a couple that was also fizzling out.

  We would change the channel and watch the end of a movie, and meanwhile I’d confirm his arrival time the next day or remind him to go past the dry cleaner’s to pick up his black coat; if we’d had a good day, in those last months, we might make love, but matter-of-factly. If the news was momentous, its effects would last a little longer, be part of the conversation on a coffee break at work or in line at the fishmonger’s.

  But we were alive, death was for others.

  We used expressions like I’m dead to convey our exhaustion after a long day at work, and the word didn’t affect our mood. When we were first together, we were capable of floating out in the middle of the sea at our favourite cove, and joking, with our lips drenched in salt and sun, about a hypothetical drowning that ended with a scandalous mouth-to-mouth scenario and cackles of laughter. Death was something distant, as if it didn’t belong to us.

  What I’d lived through as a girl—my mother became ill and died just a few months later—had become a hazy memory that no longer stung. My father came to pick me up at school just an hour after we’d come back from lunch. Hundreds of us, girls and boys, were climbing the spiral staircase to return to the classrooms from the cafeteria, with the high jinks typical of life, which keeps on moving despite the silence of those who are no longer among us. My father came to the classroom with the headmistress, who knocked on the door just as the science teacher was explaining that there were invertebrate animals and vertebrates. My memory of my mother’s death will always be linked to white writing on the green chalkboard that divided the animal kingdom in two. My classmates, who up until then had always been my equals, now looked at me with new eyes. I remained very still, overcome by the feeling that I was retreating to a third kingdom, the kingdom of wounded, motherless animals.

  Even though it didn’t make it any less terrible, that death was forewarned, and the warning had given us some time for goodbyes and well wishes, her decline gave us the chance to express all our love. Most of all, there was the naivety of believing she was going to the heaven that had been drawn for me, and the innocence of being seven years old, which saved me from comprehending the finality of her departure.

  Mauro and I were a couple for many years. Then, and just for a few hours, we stopped being one. He died suddenly some months ago, without warning. The car that struck him carried him off, along with many other things.

  Without the comfort of a heaven, and with all the unwieldy pain of adulthood, I often think and speak of Mauro using the adverbs before and after, to avoid the past tense. Life split down the middle. He was alive that afternoon with me, he drank wine and asked if they could cook his steak a bit more, he took a couple of calls from the publishing house while he played with his napkin ring, he jotted down, on the back of a business card from the restaurant, the title of a book by a French author he was enthusiastically recommending to me, he scratched his left earlobe, uncomfortable and ashamed, perhaps, and then he told me. He was almost stuttering. A few hours later he was dead.

  The restaurant had a piece of coral in its logo. I look at it often, on that little card where Mauro, in his flawless handwriting, had written out that book title. Perhaps because we are all free to embellish our misfortune with as many fuchsias, yellows, blues and greens as our little hearts desire, since the day of the accident I imagine the before and after in my life like the Great Barrier Reef, the largest coral reef in the world. Every time I think about whether something happened before or after Mauro’s death I make an effort to envisage the barrier reef, fill it with colourful fish and sea urchins, and turn it into an equator of life.

  When death ceases to belong to others, you have to carefully make a place for it on the other side of the reef, because, otherwise, it feels completely within its rights to take up any and all available space.

  Dying isn’t mystical. Dying is physical, it’s logical, it’s real.

  1

  “Pili, check the equipment, fast! Is she breathing?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s start positive-pressure ventilation.”

  I repeat the baby’s vitals in a whisper, like a litany. I know, little one. This is no way to greet you on your arrival into this world, but we have to get you breathing, you hear me?

  “Thirty seconds.” One, two, three… there’s a woman lying over there, your mum, and she needs you, you see her? Come on, you can do it, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen… come on, breathe, you got this, I promise that if you can do this, things’ll change, this world is a good place to be. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Living is worth the effort, you know? Twenty-three, twenty-four… sometimes it’s hard, I won’t lie, twenty-six, twenty-seven, come on, sweetie, don’t do this to me. I promise it’s worth it. Thirty.

  Silence. The baby girl doesn’t move.

  “Pili, heart rate?”

  My eyes meet the nurse’s vigilant gaze. Thi
s is the second time this has happened recently and I know that warning look. She’s right, I shouldn’t raise my voice so much, I shouldn’t raise it at all, in fact. I’m not comfortable. I’m hot and my right clog is rubbing against a little blister I got from my sandals in the last few days of my summer holiday. In these crucial moments, right after birth, the blister and this heat are the last thing I need. Our absolute priority for the baby is to keep her from losing body warmth. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to travel at the crack of dawn and go straight to work without stopping by the house to unpack and shake off the strange sensation of having spent almost two weeks away, far from work, from my babies’ medical records, from the blood work, from the lab, far from everything that makes me tick.

  New decision. With short, quick movements, I stimulate the soles of the baby’s feet and, as always happens when I do that, I curb my desire to press harder, with more urgency. You can’t do this to me, little one, I can’t start September off like this, come on, breathe, pretty girl. Reassessment.

  I try to concentrate on the information on the monitor and on the girl, but I need to close my eyes for a second since I can’t cover my ears, and the questions launched at me by her mother, which sound like a disconsolate moan in the delivery room, throw me off worse than ever. Other people’s suffering now feels like an overloaded plate after I’ve eaten my fill. I can’t take in any more and it sends me running in the opposite direction. Every pained cry and whimper becomes Mauro’s mother’s sobbing on the day of his burial. It ripped at the soul.

  Breathe, pretty girl, come on, for the love of God, breathe!

  I furrow my brow and shake my head to remind myself that I shouldn’t stir up all that. Not here. Here you shouldn’t make waves. Here you shouldn’t remember. Not here, Paula. Focus. Reality hits me like a pitcher of cold water and instantly puts me in my place: I have a body weighing only eight hundred and fifty grams that hasn’t taken a breath, laid out here on the resuscitation table, and its life is in my hands. My sixth sense kicks in, guiding me more and more. That sense somehow maintains a balance between the most extreme objectivity, where I retain protocols and reasoning, and my shrewd ability to harness my intuition, without which, I’m convinced, I couldn’t aid these tiny creatures with their arrival into the world.

  Listen, little girl, one of the things worth living for is the sea.

  “Pili, I’m turning off the ventilation. I’m going to try tactile stimulation of her back.”

  I take a deep breath and let it out like someone preparing to leap into the void. My mask acts as a wall and holds in my exhalation, a mix of the fluoride toothpaste I found this morning in my father’s bathroom and the quick, bitter coffee I drank in a motorway service station. I miss my things, my normal life. I miss my coffee and my coffeemaker. The smell of home, my rhythm, not owing anyone any explanations, just being able to do my own thing.

  I rub the baby’s tiny back as gently as I can.

  The sea has a rhythm, you feel it? Like this: it comes and it goes, it comes and it goes. You feel my hands? The waves come and go, like this. Come on, beauty, the sea is worth living for, there are other things too, but for now focus on the sea, like this, gentle, you feel it?

  “She’s breathing.”

  The first cry was like a miaow, but we received it with the joyful relief that greets a summer storm.

  “Welcome…” I’m not sure if I’m saying it to the baby or to myself, but I have to struggle to hold back my emotion.

  I wash her with quick movements I’ve made hundreds of times before. It calms me to see her colour improving, that transparent skin taking on a reassuring pink tone.

  “Heart rate?”

  “One hundred and fifty.”

  “Pili, let’s put on a CPAP and put her in the incubator, please.”

  I look over my mask into her eyes to make her understand that I’m sorry about my earlier tone. It’s best to keep Pili happy, otherwise she acts all offended and pays me back by making me wait for the blood work. At least she gets cross with me, which is something in and of itself. For the last few months everyone’s been incredibly forgiving when I lose my patience and their indulgence actually makes me more angry and irritable.

  As I wait for the incubator, I rub the baby’s tiny back sweetly, this time to thank her for making that immense effort to cling to life. But I can’t help thinking that, deep down, I’m touching her for some other, more elusive reason too, something to do with the fact that she’s still here when Mauro isn’t. Because he’s not here, Paula. He’s gone and, yet he comes to me even here as I’m handling these few grams of gelatinous life.

  “Here you go, Mama. Give your daughter a kiss.” I bring the baby over to her mother for just a few seconds so they can meet. “She had some trouble breathing but now she’s fine. We’re going to bring her up to the ICU like we talked about, OK? I’ll be back in a little while to explain everything in detail. Don’t worry, everything’ll be fine.”

  But I don’t promise her anything. Even though the mother’s eyes are begging me to give them hope, after Mauro I don’t make any promises.

  2

  Lídia will be here soon, her office hours end at one. I feel a wave of relief, knowing I’ll see her. In mere minutes I’ll hear her chattering away, plunging me back into normality, just what my body is demanding from me. After the summer holidays, that’s the key: getting back into my routine.

  I wait for her amid the bustle of the hospital canteen as I move my salad around on the plate. The smell of a huge communal pot of broth is stuck in my nose, sending me back to the school cafeteria, where I hid things I didn’t like in the pockets of my uniform or traded in chicken thighs with the hungrier students. The paediatrician ordered my father to make me toast with honey to keep up the battle against my low percentile, which he pointed to with a pencil on that odious growth chart. Honey became a regular part of my diet and of our grey days without Mum, not to sweeten things, but to fatten me up. I read somewhere that an eighty-three-year-old Hindu ascetic had survived without eating or drinking for more than seventy years. A team from the Research and Development branch of India’s Ministry of Defence studied him for a couple of weeks. The only contact he had with water was when washing or gargling. The doctor who was conducting the experiment came to the conclusion that if he wasn’t obtaining energy from food or water, then it had to be coming from some other source in his environment, such as the sun. When the experiment ended, the yogi returned to his hometown to resume his meditation. It seems he had been blessed by a goddess when he was eight and that allowed him to live without food.

  Four days after Mauro’s death, and by that I mean literally four days, I had ingested only lime blossom tea; luckily, I’d let my father add some honey from his local beekeeper. Unable to put up a fight, I’d allowed it. I don’t know what graph curve he was trying to increase at that point. Once again, my sadness was dripping out in amber tones.

  They were apathetic, unreal days, the shock filled everything, there was no space for hunger. I remember my father’s firm hand turning the wooden spoon and honey rolling slowly through the slits without dripping. My father is a perfectionist and found it inconceivable that I didn’t have a wooden honey spoon. He bought me one. He also organized my cutlery drawer and fixed the door to the pantry where I kept my pots. For a week my father and Lídia took turns, maintaining a constant presence in my home, and I just let them. They filled my fridge with nice things that slowly rotted. Lídia would come at lunchtime or dinnertime to make sure that I ate something and keep me company.

  Everyone assumed, during those weeks following the accident, that my stunned gaze, neglected appearance and lowered blinds were due to my sadness over losing the person who’d been my partner for so many years; no one realized that, clinging to the pain of his death, there was another grief, slippery but slow, like a slug able to cover everything—inc
luding the other pain—with its viscous trail that gradually saturated everything, ugly, so ugly that all I knew how to do was hide it, I was dying too with the shock of this new shame, even more shocking than the death itself.

  I wonder if the two things are somehow linked, if her arrival into my consciousness made him disappear, physically, from my life.

  “Come on, Paula, please, at least have the banana. You haven’t eaten a thing.”

  I looked at Lídia, my head tilted to one side, smiling. I had remembered the story of the yogi and was about to make a joke, explaining that a goddess had blessed me and I didn’t need food, but seeing the worry on her face I decided to keep it to myself.

  “Come on, just a little.”

  I was sitting in a chair in the kitchen and she stood beside me. We could have been two friends on any old day at lunch-time, in some randomly chosen place where there’d been no deaths of friends or lovers. But the scene’s composition was completely deformed. If I bandaged up everything that was hurting inside me, I would have embodied the anachronistic image of a soldier returning from war, mutilated.

  Lídia meticulously peeled the banana. I watched her, distracted, and when she offered it to me, stripped and held up in her fingers, we looked into each other’s eyes and felt an urge to laugh, without knowing what had brought it on.

  “Please, eat. Come on.”

  “I’m not hungry, Lídia, really. It’ll make me feel sick.”

  “Come on, just the tip…”

  We both burst out laughing and I felt my cheeks burning with shame. My laughter calmed her and allowed her to laugh. I needed to calm her first so that she could calm me. The onus of Mauro’s sudden death—with bonus cheating—had taught me things others will never know, for instance, that calmness isn’t truly possible. And I laughed. I laughed but still wasn’t able to eat, I laughed but couldn’t sleep, I laughed clammy with cold sweat. I knew that if I stopped abruptly, if I stopped laughing and just told Lídia the truth, that he’d left me, she’d be appalled and the shock of his infidelity would overshadow his death. Crass, clichéd infidelity would take centre stage. But, for now, we were still laughing. Lídia was laughing and I was laughing with her while I sought out her gaze hidden in the folds of her eyelids, wanting to convey it all without having to put it into words; but no, she didn’t catch my drift. That you’ve been dumped, compared to the death of the guy who left you, isn’t the sort of news that’s easily transmitted in a look.