The Plimsoll Line Read Free Page B

the brow of a hill a few miles from the ski resort. He relaxed the tension in his fingers and changed ears when the voice, with a demonstration of prosody worthy of a better cause, indicated that an ambulance had taken her to the city hospital. Without understanding very well something to do with a team of firefighters and the difficulty of the rescue operation, he jotted down the name of the medical center. He looked around in search of his cigarettes, then the keys to his car, but the voice, guessing his intention, asked him to remain calm, Laura was in good hands, all means had been placed at her disposal, so there was nothing he could do right now except drive carefully, without haste but without delay, to the city, where he should head to the medical center’s intensive care unit. He thanked him and very slowly detached the receiver from his ear. Ana watched him with a strange smile on her lips, pale, very still behind the preparations for the Christmas Eve dinner. Under the champagne-colored light, she asked if something bad had happened. “Laura,” he said, avoiding his wife’s eyes, “has been in a car accident,” and his gaze followed the figure of the cleaning lady who was busy poaching the lobsters for the dinner and now turned toward him, biting a finger, and he added, “it seems it’s serious,” and Ana stifled a scream. They got their coats. “Let my brother Óscar know,” he said before closing the door, and the woman nodded, still fingering her apron with hands red from the heat of the stove on which the lobsters were boiling.
    In the car, Ana recalled that Laura had arranged to meet her friends Sandra and Claudia after dinner. Young people nowadays, she reflected, are in the habit of going out to have fun on Christmas Eve, perhaps she should inform them, tell them not to worry, but he focused on the road, the slightly spectral light of the fog lamps, while calculating that the journey to the hospital could be completed in under seventy-five minutes, so while he kept his foot on the accelerator and asked Ana to light him a cigarette, he imagined he could see the objects for the Christmas celebration on the table, the cutlery, the amber light of the lampshades, and the voice of Frank Sinatra,
New York, New York
, cradling an atmosphere he now imagined as sunk in spacious desolation, dropped noiselessly on top of the room, like a sheet, and this descent must be reflected in the glittery baubles and the wrapped presents they’d left piled at the foot of the Christmas tree, but all of this was being swallowed up by the mist, as if these details already belonged to a faraway world, while they advanced without talking, and this impression of now unreachable distance became more obvious when Ana tuned into a radio station playing music, a Bach fugue, and even more so when they left the mountain pass behind them and reached the first houses of the city. When they entered the hospital parking lot, he turned off the radio, looked at his watch, and said, “Seventy-two minutes,” as if the fact of having reached the entrance to the hospital in seventy-two minutes, not a minute more, not a minute less, was a margin, an argument that could be used in support of Laura’s cause, but Ana, out of the car by now, looked at him without seeing him, and he followed her clumsily, her fur coat in his hand, trying to place it on her shoulders in a vain gesture of politeness, first while they were walking over the icy asphalt of the parking lot, then in the corridors of the hospital.
    He believes he felt something akin to compassion, at least for a few moments, when the doctor mumbled excuses adorned with incomprehensible medical jargon in order to conclude that the serious injuries sustained by Laura in the accident were “incompatible with life” and he was very sorry, really and truly. He wondered what this nonsense meant, while at the same time shifting his gaze between the surgeon’s flustered face and, he