In that room, at Jose Macamo Hospital, we were a herd of patients eating sleep debris and grass on the beds of dirty sheets. My God, the nurses came dragging tubes of serum and we were the herd. Each patient had his own shepherd who stuck needles in him, who corrected the sheet in the corner of the bed, who turned the little serum tap on and off....
In that room we disputed the small slices of air, the more severe ones sucked with huge straws the oxygen nestled in metal bottles. And the nurses, drowned in masks, changed our IV feed like birds, stuffed our mouth holes with pills, and collected our urine in balloons, our blood, and our spit.
.
It was a miracle to wake up alive there. First it was Mr. Hugo, a mulatto, who was discovered buried by death among the sheets, then it was a child with ear wounds, who was evacuated by the feet to the morgue with his tongue hanging out like a goat. The flies came looking for the little girl's wounds, yet she was no longer there. She spent her childhood in a drawer in the morgue.
.
One day, a thin, black-haired gentleman tripping over white threads entered the room with a swarm of gentlemen in suits. It was Pascoal Mocumbi. He went walking from bed to bed, examining the files and surveying the symptoms as if he wanted to take them home.
So nice, so thin: Pascoal Mocumbi. I was still a child, but I don't forget his warped teeth from which emerged a lazy smile that crept across his lips. With a huge rope of elegance disguised as a necktie, Pascoal Mocumbi opened one of my eyes with the corkscrew of his fingers and I cried because I feared that this giant would eat my whole eye. He examined my eye patches and moved on to other patients.
.
And the swarm of gentlemen in suits followed in Pascoal Mocumbi's footsteps; a fat lady spiked her teeth with a BIC cap and spilled her glasses on an agenda to write down our moans; and Pascoal Mocumbi filled the whole room with a smoke of hope saying "tomorrow you'll get out of here"; he kept repeating this over and over; it was as if he was spraying the room of deaths and hopelessness. "Tomorrow you will get out of here." After circulating from bed to bed, like a servant collecting sheets for the tank, Pascoal Mocumbi left the room and the swarm of facts trailed behind him.
.
Of course we all stood there disputing that phrase like dogs fighting over a bone. "Tomorrow you will get out of here". And slowly we were leaving with the sabotage of the disease: some to the drawers of the morgue and others were carried by ambulances to wait for death in other hospitals. But we all got out. We all got out.
Leave a Reply