THE RED BLOCK HOUSE

As chance would have it, we not only moved to the same house, but arrived on the same plane. In fact, it wasn’t one plane, but two. First, a long, transoceanic journey. Then, a domestic flight on a little plane that looked like a toy.

We made each other’s acquaintance right there, in the airport we were departing from. The same formalities, the same visa. We arrived after about a thousand hours with our enormous suitcases, once night had fallen, and the city struck us as small and charming. Our new home was a wooden house that seemed to have come out of a sixties movie. Old, blanched, with a front and back porch and earth disturbed by a family of squirrels that hid their booty by the door to the basement.

We found out about the squirrels later. That first night, we simply arrived, retrieved the key from the place where the landlord had left it, a little hidden from the eyes of passers-by, and took possession of our respective abodes. She, Mia, would live in number 12, while I would be in number 12½, which meant she would go in through the main door, while I would use the side door; she would occupy the ground floor, while I would be upstairs.

Living in half a house struck me as both exotic and unsettling, but most of all it seemed to be an accurate reflection of reality. The basement and garden were shared, and the rest of the house was divided into two identical, independent dwellings. Apart from sharing a house and nationality, we would share our work and also, soon, a circle of acquaintances and friends. We had no choice but to get on well, or at least to try to do so.

From the beginning, there were those who got us confused. I could understand it: to foreign ears, our accents sounded similar, we were the same height and had the same complexion. We were radically different people, but in general terms we shared several external features. At one point, somebody joked that we were the same person. We found this funny because it was so absurd and started saying it often, amid laughter.

Our neighbours on one side were a couple approaching their sixties. They were called Tim and Kate. The first one I saw was Tim, a couple of days after our arrival. I had placed my worktable next to a window, from where I could observe a part of their house. The curtains always drawn, the garden well tended, and a perfectly painted white fence enclosing everything. The first few days after we arrived, Tim was struggling with the door of the basement: adjusting the hinges, painting it inside and out. He had a comical appearance: curly grey hair sticking out in all directions, like Einstein, round, slightly bulging eyes, and shorts, which looked fairly absurd on a man his age and which revealed his spindly chicken’s legs.

A few days later, I met Kate, and she struck me as the kind of person who one day presents you with a sponge cake as a welcome and the next points a shotgun at your head for stepping on her tulips. She asked me some typical questions out of courtesy: where I was from, what I was doing there, how long I planned to stay, whether my downstairs neighbour was from the same country and doing the same as me. Cordial, pleasant, distant. She fit the stereotype in my head of what my neighbours in that country would be like.

Tim and Kate spent the whole day fixing up the house, an imposing house of red blocks, with two enormous floors and a garden that was double the size of the building, pertinently protected by the white fence, with several trees dotted about the terrain. Whenever I looked up from the computer, I always came across one or the other sorting things here and there. Tim devoted himself more to the interior, while Kate spent more time outside, cutting the grass that surrounded the property, pruning the plants, or touching up the fence here and there. I never found out what they did for a living, but they must have had fairly flexible timetables, judging by the number of DIY jobs they completed one day after another.

Life transpired calmly, as generally happens in small places. Lots of work, lots of hours in front of the screen, and a social life that gradually increased, thankfully for my mental health. The summer went by, and the cold arrived. It arrived slowly, as if allowing me time to adapt. The squirrels and rabbits began to put on weight, getting ready for their hibernation, and the trees quickly went from green to red and started shedding their leaves.

Our back garden was visited almost every day by a couple of hilarious rabbits with tails like pom-poms and a habit of freezing when they saw us, as they tried to camouflage themselves behind the grass. Since there was no fence or wall around the house, the animals could come and go as they pleased. Although the garden had always been used as a parking lot, neither of us had a car, so we decided to install a pair of hammocks, a foldable table, and to let the grass grow, so it would cover the bald patches created by the constant passing of wheels. In the middle of the day that autumn, when the sun was still a little warm, we would go down to read or work in the garden. Sometimes me, sometimes Mia, sometimes the two of us would coincide. We had lived in all sorts of urban pigsties and found having a garden with rabbits, birds, and squirrels a real luxury we had to make the most of.

One of those days when the forecast said temperatures would be a little higher and it was good to be in the garden, there appeared a van which parked inside it. Two men got out, unfurled a vast array of tools, and headed over to the house opposite, the one belonging to Tim and Kate. I watched it all from the kitchen window while having breakfast. I asked Mia whether she knew anything about it, and she said no. When the van left after a couple of hours, I forgot about the matter. I didn’t know yet, but that nonsense would be the start of everything.

The life of our neighbours attracted me, perhaps because I spent a lot of hours sitting next to the window, working. I was curious to find out what they lived from. They seemed too young to be retired. They had a large, expensive house, but not so large and expensive that they might be considered rich. I discussed it sometimes with Mia; we would come up with conjectures, invent disparate lives, each more absurd than the last. During one of those conversations, Mia asked if I had ever seen them together. I thought about it for a moment. “No,” I said, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen them together.” “That’s it,” she replied. “They’re the same person, just like us.”

And so, every day, I would chuckle as I looked at them out of the window, imagining Tim putting on a blond wig and a pair of tits before coming out to touch up the paint on the fence or to cut the grass.

A few days after this conversation, our parking lot was occupied again. A lorry rolled up, parked in our garden, and disgorged a heap of materials that, surprise, surprise, were destined for Tim and Kate’s house. It didn’t stay long, forty-five minutes perhaps, but the thunderous music the driver was playing made me lose my concentration and, in the end, several hours’ work.

When two weeks later two vans appeared in our garden, parked right alongside the hammocks, and stayed there the whole day while the builders reinforced our neighbours’ roof, I got really angry. First, there were days the rabbits and squirrels had not come back to our garden. Second, this was the land of freedom, so they shouted from the rooftops, the land where private property was sacred. And there were two people in their fifties treating us like idiots.

I called the landlord and asked if he had given them permission to use the parking lot. Not only did he know nothing of the matter, but he didn’t seem to care very much. I left the house in a foul mood and approached the builders, who had just laid out all their tools in the little space left in the garden. According to them, they had been told to park there.

I waited for hours for Tim or Kate to appear. That day, the workmen were parked in front of our house for exactly seven hours and twelve minutes. During those seven hours and twelve minutes, neither of them showed their face. Obviously, I couldn’t concentrate, and the more time passed, the madder I became. I thought about what to say to them. I practised my discourse in front of the bathroom mirror. I weighed up the pros and cons of talking in anger, with laughter, or playing dumb. I selected a look of extreme politeness and, as soon as I spotted Kate through the window, went down, smiled at her, asked if she had a minute, and ever so kindly explained that she couldn’t occupy our garden and please, if she needed it again, to let us know in advance. Without altering the appearance she had of a bored madam, she replied she hadn’t realized this was happening, though it really wasn’t that important, since the garden was always empty, but, needless to say, she would ask for permission the next time. While her response didn’t strike me as entirely satisfactory, I felt relieved at having got rid of part of my irritation.

Two days after this conversation, the same two vans returned, unloaded everything in our garden, and of course there was no sign of Tim or Kate. That day is when the war began.

It would be tedious to go into detail about everything that followed, I’m not even sure I would remember it all in order, as it happened. That day, I asked the builders to be so kind as to vacate the garden. They ignored me until I informed them that I would call the police. At this point, they left. Mia watched my fits of anger with a degree of fear and endeavoured to calm me down, but I was so annoyed I couldn’t keep it under control. That was when dog turds started appearing in our garden. I suppose that is when it began, though it took us a while to find them since it was colder now and we had brought the hammocks and table inside.

I knew they were the ones leaving their dog’s shit by our house, though of course I couldn’t prove it. So the afternoon, when out running, I came across a putrefied raccoon that had been run over, I didn’t hesitate to pick it up by the tail and deposit it at the door of the red block house, on that pristine porch they swept every day. I was unable to see how they reacted when they found it, but a few hours later they had removed it and cleaned everything. I felt glorious as a result of this small act of vengeance, without stopping to think that it might have consequences.

The business with the raccoon was just before the snow arrived. During the months it snowed, a mountain would appear periodically right on the path that led from the door of my house to the main street. We didn’t have any security cameras installed, and I never actually saw him, but I’m quite sure Tim was taking out the shovel every morning after the snowfalls and giving us all the snow from the street, especially the dirty, muddy snow, the one that turned to ice first and became slippery. I kept on applying salt, but at regular intervals a mountain of snow would appear next to the door, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

By this stage, I had stopped bumping into Tim and Kate. It seemed they had learnt my timetable and, although I could see them in their garden or in the house, behind the curtains, I never came across them in the street. This drove me crazy, because what I wanted more than anything was to meet them and insult them in all the languages I knew. My life had turned into hell because of the rage I felt towards them. I was unable to enjoy the beautiful white landscape offered by winter, or conversations with my friends, and my work suffered. All I thought about was what I could do in retaliation for the small, bothersome acts of vengeance they subjected us to. Mia kept herself a little to the margins; she said she didn’t want problems with anyone. Deep down, I think she was frightened of getting into trouble as a foreigner, I don’t blame her for that, but my anger was too much for me. I imagined them laughing at us, thinking we were stupid, and my blood would boil. I hated them, and my hatred extended to the city, the whole country. Yes, I hated that country of sick people who would get up in the middle of the night to shovel snow just to bother some woman next door. That was why, one icy night, I woke up very early and went and splodged paint on their incredibly white fence. They had spent months touching up the immaculate paintwork. I had to hit them where it hurt, and, so long as the snow or rain persisted, they wouldn’t be able to repaint it.

The weeks that followed the graffiti were a haven of peace. I imagined them at home, fibrillating as they thought about the fence that was completely tarnished with red and black paint. Every time I left the house, I was puffed up with pride at my artwork. Mia asked if I had done that, and of course I said no. As far as the world was concerned, I had adopted the discourse of “live and let live”. That’s what I told everybody: I want to live peacefully, I hope they calm down, what they’re doing doesn’t make sense, I’m looking for another house. Of course, it was all a lie.

The calm lasted until I found out it had just been a fiction. The temperatures began to rise; the ice started melting. It became hotter, with lots of rain, and here and there the first leaves of trees and plants sprouted. Here and there, but not in our house. Our garden didn’t manage to get over the winter, and we soon discovered that everything had been burnt: the grass, the flowers, a majestic tree that occupied a corner of the property. Everything, but everything had been killed. The grass had turned brown, the bulbs of plants had been dug up and burnt as well. There were no insects, not a single bird came close to our house. It appeared that someone had poured out litres of corrosive, because there was nothing there with a semblance of life.

I was furious. I didn’t care about the plants, not really, because we were renting the house and would end up leaving. What I couldn’t bear was this level of violence. And people entering our property without our permission. And still not having a fence because the owner refused to spend money on enclosing the garden. But, above all, it was the dirtiness of their vengeance that drove me crazy.

I began to suffer from insomnia. In bed, I tossed and turned; I couldn’t get them out of my head. I didn’t know how to respond to such malice. It absolutely had to be one person to be so perverse; there couldn’t be two such wretched people in the same city, living in the same house. They were the worst people I had met in my life.

Outside the house, I endeavoured to pretend that everything was all right. When talking to Mia, I gave the impression I was possessed by the spirit of Gandhi himself. I would say to her, “Don’t get annoyed, Mia; they will grow tired of being so bad.” But in reality the one not living because of trying to work out how to return the blow was me.

Insomnia is not a good advisor, it doesn’t let you think clearly. That is why, that morning, before sunrise, when I decided to go for a run because I had been tossing in bed for hours, I did what I did. I got dressed in warm clothes because it was still cold, put on my shoes, and, on opening the door, heard a noise. Through the peephole, I saw Tim’s hair moving away from the door. I opened, and there it was: a monumental dog turd on the mat, waiting to be stepped on. My wires got crossed as I looked at it. I went outside, closed the door slowly, followed him, and, as he was about to climb the stairs of his porch, grabbed the first thing at hand and hit him.

I didn’t think anything, or I don’t recall having thought anything at that moment. Nor did I really register what had happened, because I started running towards the main road, as if I had done nothing but go for a jog that morning. I didn’t look back; I carried on running and running until I reached the river. The sun was just beginning to rise above the horizon. I looked at my hands; they were stained with red dust, the kind you get on blocks. I went to a fountain and washed and rubbed them beneath the freezing water. I shook my clothes with damp hands, carried on running for a bit to get warm and dry.

When I felt my tiredness was greater than my nerves, I returned to the house. It was Monday; I had to go to work. As I turned the final corner before arriving, I spotted sirens and, the closer I got, I could see how a stretch of road had been cut off and there was an ambulance and lots of police cars. I quickened my pace, drew near, asked what was going on. I said I lived there, and could I enter my house? They took down my details. Inquired where I was coming from, what time I had left the house, whether I had seen or heard anything. I put on my best face, answered everything while trying to stay calm and feigning apparent astonishment at the few details the policewoman questioning me was giving.

It took me a while to reconstruct everything that happened that early morning when I was out running in the city, though I never managed to understand it completely. In the neighbours’ house, there wasn’t one corpse, but two. One was Tim, on the porch stairs. The other, Kate, inside the house, on the bed. Both with a blow to the head produced by a red block, apparently the same red block, the same blow, the same death. The murder weapon – if a block can be called that – had turned up next to Tim’s body.

The fingerprints on the block belonged to Mia, who had been found with the remains of red dust on her hands and pyjamas. She had been arrested that same morning, when she left the house on hearing the sirens and a police officer saw her with all those dust stains. They never discovered how she had entered the house and killed one and then the other. They never fathomed why she had done it. They didn’t seek out other culprits or a logical explanation for the crime. All the neighbours gave statements, including myself. The landlord, our work colleagues and friends. Mia always maintained she hadn’t done it, but no other suspects were found.

I left the country. I abandoned my work, the house, and left the country. Nobody was surprised by this, given the circumstances. I didn’t talk to Mia again. I tried to keep up with the case, I was a witness at the trial, but didn’t have to be there in person. The case took on an international dimension. She has been awaiting her sentence for months; the trial turned into a media circus. They even made a documentary about her. The gutter press are hinting she might get the death penalty. I haven’t spoken to her, or any of the people I met at that time, since. I’ve been living for months with a sense of panic that she might be sentenced to death and we might really be the same person.

*   *   *

REPTILIAN

First, she talked to them about the history of the mill. It wasn’t that they were all that interested in her, but they listened all the same, nodding their heads whenever the woman offered relevant details and even asking the odd question. It was the oldest and best-preserved mill on that side of the Mississippi. One of the female visitors paid careful attention to the torrent of details coming out of the woman’s mouth, owners’ and governors’ years and names, while the other endeavoured to recall how many s’s and p’s there were in the word “Mississippi”. The two men who formed part of their group had gone upstairs as soon as the woman in the mill greeted them. They were not in the mood for chitchat. Their female counterparts, however, resisted by adopting their best look of interest.

The mill had been preserved not because of the architectural and historical jewel it was, but because of a dispute over land ownership the young women were unable to comprehend. The fact is it had been well preserved, but it was far away from everything, in a county that wasn’t very touristy, on the far side of a nature park that received hardly any visitors. And yet here was that woman to receive the few people that came along, to explain the history of the place to them, and to offer them T-shirts, bowls, and pencils adorned with the mill’s silhouette at reasonable prices.

Three quarters of an hour earlier, on parking the car, the four had shared out some mushrooms one of them had kept in the freezer for more than a year. They all assumed the time spent frozen would probably have deprived the mushrooms of their magic effect, and it didn’t enter their heads that their properties might have been affected in another way. They shared them out between the four of them equally, except for the woman driving, who decided to eat a smaller portion so she could drive without any problems a few hours later, once their afternoon walk had concluded.

After half an hour, the trees were already floating in front of their eyes, and the colours were changing intensity, the sounds were also becoming more intense, and they had to stop several times and lie on the ground to admire the incredible spectacle of the trees’ branches dancing in the sky, the shapes on the bark of trunks, and the birds’ miraculous singing. Mab was determined to reach the mill before it closed, so she insisted and hurried the group along, promising afterwards they could stop wherever and for as long as they liked. The mill was one of the reasons for visiting that park; the other was the variety of bats that, in theory, lived among those trees. Spending a hot afternoon away from the asphalt was undoubtedly what had made the four agree to take the car and drive an hour and a half until they reached that remote, solitary location.

They were used to people asking them where they were from, though most of the time they didn’t put it like that, saying instead, “Where does your accent come from?” A delicate way of asking about their life journey and calling someone a foreigner without directly asserting their alien status. So, they weren’t surprised when that woman asked where they were from. “Each from a different country,” replied Zay, who had decided not to take off her sunglasses, so her pupils, which were as dilated as galaxies, would not be noticed. “From Latin America?” asked the woman. “You’re not from Argentina, are you?” “I am,” replied Zay. “Were you parents born in Argentina?” “They were,” she replied again. “And your grandparents?” “As well.”

The woman looked at her with a degree of relief. “The Nazis who fled Germany after the Second World War are still living in Argentina. Did you know that? From there they govern the world, from there they manage everything, they’re to blame for all the conflicts and wars that are being waged right now.”

There was no pause between her sentences. The woman seemed to have prepared this discourse for whoever might pass through the door. Zay’s pupils became even more dilated when she heard that, but no one noticed because of her lenses. For her part, Mab suspected she wasn’t understanding well because of the linguistic barrier; she thought the woman might have a strong accent or the mushrooms might have momentarily limited her capacity for understanding, and she carried on smiling while she talked about Nazis and the immense world power that extended its tentacles over the world from the distant Argentine Pampa.

Perhaps it was her smile that made the woman feel she had her backing and carry on talking. “I don’t understand about politics, nor am I greatly interested,” she explained. “But a couple of years ago I started digging online, with my son, and we discovered lots of information about this.” The other two women looked at each other, and one of them dared to ask what she was talking about. “You know, the great malignant world power, the illuminati, the reptilians; you can call them what you like.” They smiled back, but this time it was a nervous smile. No, they weren’t understanding badly. They were understanding very well. For a few seconds, they thought about getting out of there, but what came out of their mouths was a “what”, or a “how”, which the woman interpreted as genuine interest, and she proceeded to give them more information.

“You know,” she continued, lowering her voice. “It’s all related. And you can call it what you like, but it comes to the same thing, a great evil power that governs the world.” Zay repeated the word “reptilians” to herself, with disbelief. “Of course,” replied the woman, “reptilians. They have human form, but they’re not human. They come from another solar system, but they’ve been among us, infiltrated, for millennia, so they can dominate the world. George Bush? Reptilian. Joe Biden? Reptilian. Brad Pitt? Reptilian. Angelina Jolie? Reptilian. Katy Perry? Reptilian. Justin Bieber? Reptilian.”

“Justin Bieber as well?” asked Mab in amazement, remembering how they had been listening to his latest album in the car. “Reptilian down to the core! Have you never noticed his eyes?” exclaimed the woman. “Sometimes they change, and behind them you can see his real reptilian eyes. They think we humans are idiots, but some of us, not many, know the truth. The world’s great evils are down to them, wars, destruction: it’s all part of their strategy to confront and eliminate us. They get in our heads, they attempt to dominate us through politics, through TV, through music. They’re everywhere. Bill and Hilary Clinton. The Queen of England. Reptilian, every one,” she continued. “But the Queen of England is dead,” whispered Zay. “What do you think? Reptilians also die, but she left her son in charge. He’s reptilian as well, like all the European royal families,” retorted the woman, starting to feel uncomfortable at her interlocutors’ disbelief.

Meanwhile, on the upper floor, the two men were exploring the rest of the mill’s machinery, tools, old posters, and the odd object that seemed out of place and whose only interest was the fact it was ancient or appeared to be so. One of them observed how curious it was that the window shutters should be closed and the illumination should be completely artificial. The windowpanes were very dirty, very dirty. He went over to them and called to his friend. There was something strange in those windows, but he couldn’t quite work out what it was. Then he realized and ran downstairs in search of the young women. “Come quickly, come; you have to see this,” he shouted. And, needless to say, they hurriedly apologized and fled from the woman and her reptilian theories in relief.

They lost all notion of time up there, fascinated as they were by the image being offered inside that glass: between the windowpane and the wooden shutter, some tiny, hairy bodies were moving – some could be seen very clearly, while others could only be glimpsed. More than twenty bats were asleep in there, adults and babies, alternately showing their faces and backs, clinging to the wood with their claws, hanging face downwards, as they had seen a thousand times on documentaries and in photos. There they were, with their hairy bat butts, some young seeking out their mothers’ nipples and hooking onto them, rummaging about, stretching, unfolding their translucent wings, and, most of all, sleeping while the outside world panted in the heat.

They took photos and videos and tapped softly on the glass to see if the bats would wake up or budge, and for a long time they just stood there, admiring these small, rounded shadows that seemed oblivious to the excitement they were causing. At one point, they heard a voice downstairs reminding them that the mill was about to close and they still had to visit the rest of the park. On the lower floor, the woman was waiting with a forced smile to invite them to leave in a polite, subtle manner. Once outside, they stood for a while, endeavouring to identify the window where the bats lived and remarking on the spectacle they’d had the privilege to observe. “You know how difficult it is to see bats up close?” Mab kept saying. “Not even batologists can see them as well as that,” she added, and Zay wondered whether such a word existed and then came up with alternatives that made them laugh, which they hadn’t had much cause to do that afternoon.

The woman came out of the door and joined them. “So, you like bats,” she said with a look of resignation, assuming they were no longer interested in understanding how the world really functioned. The four responded enthusiastically, exultantly, conveying the wonder of what they had there, how exceptional it was to contemplate those incredible creatures, and describing the natural jewels of the park and the entire state, as if they themselves were a tourist leaflet, their eyes getting bigger and bigger as they spoke, which they didn’t know whether to ascribe to the bats, the mushrooms, the heat, or all of them at once.

The woman mumbled something and closed the door of the mill, twin locks, two turns of the key in each. As she was getting ready to leave, one of the men asked if it was permitted to swim in the river that ran next to the mill. The woman replied that this was a free country and they could swim in it if they so wished. Her tone had become dry, her look had darkened. Without paying attention, three of them hastily took their leave and started walking. Zay stayed behind. She took off her sunglasses for the first time all afternoon and, by way of farewell, winked at the mill woman. The woman was petrified when she saw her eyes in all their splendour. A shiver ran down her spine as she gazed in amazement at the four youngsters heading to the river.

*   *   *

ELEVEN AND A HALF HOURS

When I arrived at emergency, at exactly nine o’clock on the first Saturday in September, I knew it would be a long wait. It was the third time I had been to the hospital that year, but the two previous visits had been during the day and I had come out pretty quickly. At nightfall, the panorama changed slightly.

Initially, I couldn’t bring myself to look around; I was too concerned about myself and my pains. I was nervous, frightened by the blood oozing from one of the cuts on my knee, with a tingling sensation in my legs and arms. I gave my details in Admissions and sat down to wait until a nurse called me for an initial examination.

At half past nine, I heard my name again, badly pronounced, and jumped out of my seat. I didn’t dare correct the person who had summoned me. Vital signs and routine questions. I told the nurse I was bleeding from one of the cuts and pointed to my leg, in case there was any doubt that this red stain was a wound. “Not much,” replied the nurse, and he sent me back to the waiting room until I should be seen by a doctor.

If the nurse didn’t believe I was going to die because of the cut on my leg and the constant tingling I could feel in my limbs, I wasn’t going to contradict him, so I returned to the same seat I had occupied on my arrival.

The room was as aseptic as any other room in a hospital emergency department. White walls, dark green, particularly uncomfortable seats, air conditioning set to an Alaskan temperature in winter, and some grimy white blankets an assistant was handing out to patients to alleviate that awful cold. I don’t know why I didn’t say I wanted one. I spent the rest of the night suffering the cold in shorts and a thin shirt.

Among the seats, right in the middle of the room, was a not very large aquarium full of different-sized fish. The biggest, three black specimens the size of my hand, were barely moving. I watched them for a good long while, trying to work out whether they were alive or dead. After a couple of minutes, one of them moved its mouth, gently, like a sigh. It struck me as a sad gesture. The fish weren’t moving because they had no space to do so.

Sitting in front of the fish was an older woman. She kept slipping down a wheelchair, her feet hanging a couple of inches off the floor, with one of those blankets poorly covering her legs. The woman was muttering something which sounded unintelligible to me, but I didn’t give it any importance because when I was nervous, I lost the ability to understand English. She was very pale and looked disoriented, as if searching around anxiously for a familiar face.

At a quarter past ten, the woman got up from the chair and headed for the exit. She was still talking, but just above my head a programme about house renovations was blaring on the TV. Even if I had wanted to, the presenter’s voice would not have let me hear what the woman was saying. I had chosen my seat badly. If I had to wait a long time, the volume on that TV would drive me crazy. At a slow, but resolute pace, the woman made a beeline for the exit, and the automatic doors parted.

Opposite the fish was an older man wearing white pyjamas, who looked frozen. From one of his feet, all veiny and strangely long, hung an IV line which was hidden by a plaster. As I looked at him, I couldn’t stop wondering whether one’s feet carried on growing when one was old, like the nose, or the ears, or the hair of the whole body, except for the head. The man’s daughter – this is what I took her to be – kept trying to position the blanket over his shoulders, but it kept falling away. The man was bald, but on the back of his neck, from under his pyjamas, sprouted white hairs, which just went to confirm my theory.

At half past ten, the mumbling woman came back in, clinging to the arm of the security guard who was positioned at the entrance to the hospital. They sat her down in a wheelchair and placed her right in front of the Admissions window. I imagined this was to forestall a second escape. She tried it three more times in a matter of minutes, which made it clear to me the woman was suffering from dementia or perhaps the only thing she wanted was waiting outside, in the open air, at a reasonable temperature, and not inside this walk-in freezer.

By eleven, the daughter of the man in the white pyjamas was acting as a pillow for her father, who, stretched over three green seats, was trying to sleep while his body shook with slight, but constant tremors. He was covered now in two blankets, but his enormous feet kept slipping out, as if they had a will of their own.

On the other side of the fish, which acted as a partition dividing the room in two, was a family. Wife, husband, and two little girls. One of the girls was asleep, curled in her mother’s arms; the other was waiting, sitting up and supported by her father’s arm around her shoulders. It seemed to me the smaller girl was the one who was ill, though, studying their faces, it could have been any one of them. They looked very tired, with eye bags that would only disappear with difficulty after a couple of nights’ good sleep.

I had been in the room for two hours already, watching people go in and out of those doors, but nobody ever called me. Paying careful attention to the order of those who entered the consultation rooms, I thought perhaps they prioritized on the basis of gravity, and it annoyed me a bit that nobody believed I might be grave, or even unconscious, in the waiting room after the terrible blow I had received.

At twelve, things started to liven up. A man arrived who could easily have been the fugitive woman’s son. He took her away from the Admissions window and parked her back in front of the fish, but didn’t say a single word to her while pulling out the footrests and positioning the poor woman, who kept nodding off, so her legs wouldn’t be left suspended. I thought, as I looked at her, if she wanted to escape, now she would have to descend the little step that was the footrest. My head quickly came up with the image of the woman hitting the floor and a set of false teeth endowed with a life of its own chattering along for a couple of yards and snapping at anything that got in its way. Were she to collide with the floor and break parts of her body, what better place to be than a hospital? I felt like throwing myself down as well, so I could get seen to earlier, but quickly rejected this idea and stayed where I was.

At twenty past twelve, a young woman arrived and sat beside me. She was completely soaked, and her raincoat was ripped at the elbows. I couldn’t remember whether it had been raining when I arrived, but I had been there for a little over three hours and anything was possible. After a short while, the woman started smelling of damp. I turned discreetly to check whether the smell was coming from there, but it wasn’t her, it was her feet. She had taken her shoes off, and her feet stuck out like pale, wrinkled skins. She heeded the nurse’s call in bare feet, leaving her trainers behind, but still wearing that raincoat that was ripped at the elbows. As she moved away, I could see the tears in her raincoat were spilling blood, just like my leg, though, by then, my leg wasn’t bleeding anymore because hours had gone by and now I had a maroon layer of dried blood that covered everything, including the tons of asphalt that had got under my skin when I landed on the ground. None of this, however, seemed to concern anyone.

At one, the demented woman and her son were called for a checkup, and the fish went back to being my main source of entertainment in order to escape that awful TV show in which all they did was demolish partitions with hammer blows and decorate houses in fairly dubious taste.

The girl with the raincoat returned to her place and started sobbing, accompanied by a friend who had arrived with a sleepy expression and who she spoke to in a language I was unable to determine, which was peppered with the odd word in English. Her feet were still pale and stinky, and I felt like informing the people in Admissions there was someone rotting away in the waiting room, but then I thought if the nurse thought those feet were still alive, who was I contradict him?

At ten past one, a policeman came into emergency. The girl with the dead woman’s feet waved to him. The policeman had more muscles than was humanly possible and a uniform that was one or two sizes too small for him. On his right arm, he had a tattoo of a fluttering flag in full colour and an army emblem. He sat next to the girl and asked a few questions, listening to her answers with interest. She gesticulated a lot, despite the wounds and the blood on her arms. It was possible not enough time had gone by for her to feel pain. The policeman did a little drawing on paper, and for a moment I thought he was giving her his phone number. But no, he was explaining how the accident in which she had hurt her elbows had occurred. It was slightly strange that the policeman should be explaining to the girl something he hadn’t witnessed and the girl should be unable to explain something she herself had lived through. I tried to come up with hypotheses as to what kind of accident it had been for only her elbows to touch the ground after she had been hit by a car, but, after pondering the matter for a good while, and having heard the conversation with the policeman, I failed to reach any conclusion.

The policeman left at twenty-five past one and, as soon as he departed, the rotting girl and her friend started discussing him very energetically. Even though they were talking in that strange language, in the midst of the conversation I could make out individual words in English like “oh God”, “man”, “tattoo”, and the occasional gesture which led me to interpret the action of tearing off clothes. Miraculously, the girl’s feet had regained their colour and again resembled living extremities, and for a moment it seemed she had forgotten her elbows. At twenty to two, she started crying once more.

Distracted by the policeman, I didn’t realize the man with the IV line in his foot had entered the consultation rooms with his daughter and his place had been taken by a couple of youths aged about twenty. One of them didn’t take his eyes off his mobile, while the other squirmed on his seat with an expression that was halfway between pain and worry.

On the telly, the DIY programme had finished, and another to do with river fishing had begun. There was no longer the din of partitions, but the presenter shouted just the same as he explained the different kinds of hooks and how to cope with water currents. I don’t like fishing, nor am I particularly interested, but at that moment I recalled my grandfather, who used to spend whole days on the river and even bought a little boat and everything when I was still quite little. As a child, I was surprised he never came home with a fish, despite the number of hours he devoted to fishing, until one day I heard my aunt remark that the only thing my grandfather had ever fished was women. It took me many years to realize this fishing wasn’t literal.

As I was reminiscing about my grandfather, a man in a wheelchair, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, came through the automatic door. A policeman was pushing the chair. A policeman who wasn’t the policeman with the flag tattooed on his arm, but a policeman in a uniform that was his size. They paused at Admissions for a couple of seconds and, in the time it took them to be seen, which was lengthy, the policeman walked the man in the orange jumpsuit in his wheelchair from one end of the room to the other. He was handcuffed, and there was a chain around his waist tying him to the back of the chair. He was old and fat; he looked tired and must have been ill. I don’t know whether anyone, on chaining him up like this, stopped to think if he tried to flee, he wouldn’t get far.

After two in the morning, the couple with their two little girls entered the consultation rooms, and another couple, without children this time, took their place. They were each carrying a music case. One looked as if it contained a guitar, while the other was the size and shape of a saxophone. They didn’t appear to be ill, so, to while away the time, I came up with ideas as to what had brought them to emergency, none of which struck me as satisfactory. At least, these were dry and didn’t stink. Beyond the pair of musicians, on the other side of the aquarium, I could glimpse the silhouettes of several people, some sitting and others standing up, but my vision was obstructed. It saddened me to think a sick person might be waiting their turn on their feet in that walk-in freezer.

The twenty-year-olds started chatting to each other, presumably out of sheer boredom. The man with the fish on TV had calmed down a bit, so I was able to hear part of the conversation and discovered one of them had a strong pain in his penis. He kept telling his friend he must have contracted a terrible STD and would never again be able to fuck in peace, explained in such strangely combined words, while his friend searched on his phone and cited different illnesses associated with a strong pain in one’s member.

I wanted to go over and tell them it was probably due to excessive use, which had caused a graze or a minor infection, the same as had happened to me years earlier, when I was in the glory days of my twenties. I wanted to explain that with a bit of rest everything would resolve itself. But then I thought to be listening to others’ intimate conversations was somewhat intrusive and so I remained silent in my seat. It seemed to me the pair of musicians were there for a similar reason, and that was why they had a good appearance. The policeman and the prisoner carried on parading up and down the room, as if it was a crime to stay still in a corner. Neither of them talked.

At a quarter past three, I discovered some bruises that were beginning to form on my skin. I was feeling sleepy and didn’t know how to stay awake. The cry-baby had taken off her raincoat and was keeping herself busy by removing bits of glass from her hands. She wasn’t crying so much now, she only did it at intervals of twenty minutes or half an hour. Her friend had left, and she was there alone, in bare feet. From time to time, she would glance out of the window at the police car that was still parked in front of the hospital entrance.

At half past three, my tingling sensation had practically disappeared, but I could feel a strong pain in my knees and ribs. I went back to Admissions to ask how long it would be before I entered the consultation rooms, though I knew what the response was going to be. By this stage, the cry-baby with the elbows had gone in already. The young man with the monstrous STDs as well. What did they have that I didn’t? The musicians were still in the room, together with other groups of people who had arrived gradually, all sitting behind the fish, not very visible from my position. The fishing programme on TV had finished, and one on the organization of weddings had started.

At a quarter to four, I was finally summoned from the longed-for white doors that gave access to the consultation rooms. I grabbed my rucksack and, without looking back, went as quickly as the pain in my knees would allow me. Following the nurse, I passed through the innards of A&E, an open space with lots of white doors on one side and desks with computers in the middle. They put me in a tiny room full of apparatuses and drew the curtains that acted as a door. All they said was, “A doctor will see you soon.”

At four, a houseman by the name of Nicholas appeared and asked how I was. He checked my knees and arms, asked questions about my state of being and what had happened. I told him the same as I had told the nurse: I had smashed into a tree while riding my bike. The doctor did not hide his look of surprise. I felt a bit ashamed having to explain such an absurd accident and couldn’t do it very well. He asked how it was possible to collide with a tree when, at the time of the accident, there was still some natural light in the street. He asked if I had consumed alcohol or drugs. I said no to everything, but felt like saying yes, so he wouldn’t think me an idiot.

The doctor went to consult something with his superior, leaving the curtain a little open. Directly opposite was the nursing station. Two huge screens with row upon row of data that kept refreshing and a fairly young woman sitting in front of a computer, perusing an online clothing store.

At a quarter to five, the doctor still hadn’t come back. The woman had bought some trousers, a pair of shoes, and a glittery Lycra dress. She barked at me without taking her eyes off the screen when I asked if I would have to wait long.

It was after half past five when Dr Nicholas’s supervisor appeared, who introduced himself with an unpronounceable name and asked the same questions the nurse and his supervisee had asked already. He requested permission to touch my legs, arms, back, and ribs in search of a bone that might be broken or out of place. Judging by the softness with which he touched me through my clothes, I doubted he would find anything unusual. Despite the pain I could feel all over my body, I couldn’t stop thinking about the problem there is in this country with physical contact and missed being at home, where the doctor would squeeze, press the skin and bones fearlessly, to see if there really was some anomaly, and would never even consider requesting permission.

Apparently, everything was normal. I insisted about the asphalt and the earth slumbering in the wounds on my legs and asked if anyone was going to disinfect them for me. “Fine,” said the doctor, “we’ll check to see on a X-ray whether there’s anything in the wounds or not.”

That “we’ll check to see” meant I had to wait in the cubicle until someone came to take me to the X-ray room. The curtain remained slightly open again, but the woman buying clothes had gone. From the other curtained examination rooms came low voices, probably belonging to other doctors telling other patients they would have to sit there until further notice.

At half past six, a radiography assistant came to take me to a room where my left leg was X-rayed first, then my right, in different positions, each stranger than the last. I asked whether this procedure wasn’t harmful for my body. The assistant and the doctor were shielded in another room, behind a pane of glass, every time the machine became active, but it was after six in the morning, and my tiredness was too great to start being demanding. A little radiation was worth it if that meant I found out whether there were any foreign bodies in my legs.

At a quarter to seven, I was accompanied back to my cubicle. On the way, we coincided with the prisoner being pushed by the policeman, now that he had finally made it through the consultation doors. I wondered whether they had a special room for prisoners, a room with greater security, or some security, or whether they treated him like any other patient.

At seven, a bustling nurse came to tell me in a very loud voice, “We’re going to remove what’s in your leg.” “We’re going to remove” meant scrubbing my wounds under a jet of water with a brush that reminded me of the one used by adults for cleaning their nails when I was little. Putting my knees under the tap was complicated, and I had to clamber onto the work surface and contort myself into an awkward position that caused the water to splash all over the floor. Several people came to watch this spectacle: Dr Nicholas, the nurse with an interest in clothes, and the radiography assistant, who happened to be passing. Before all this expectation, I endeavoured to appear brave and bit my lip so as not to cry what are you doing, this is more like a torture than a cure. The procedure was simple, but effective: on the hairs of the brush appeared three little stones, or bits of glass, or who knows what they were, of considerable size. The nurse showed them to me with a broad grin, satisfied at a job well done. The wounds were bleeding again, but all those in attendance agreed that the best thing for the wounds was water, soap, and not to complain a lot. I wondered how much the insurance would charge me for such sophisticated advice.

At half past seven, the doctor with the unpronounceable name arrived with Nick, who had ceased to be Dr Nicholas, now that the experience of removing the stones had engendered some trust between us, and they both confirmed that I could leave. They warned me I would have some pain for a couple of days, since the contusion would take several hours to become noticeable. They explained the medication I ought to take, at what intervals, what I should do if I didn’t get better after the first few days. They wished me luck and an ironic “Have a good Sunday” and showed me the way out, without any intention of accompanying me to the door.

I had almost reached the counter at the exit when I realized I had left my rucksack behind. I retraced my footsteps and veered towards the area of cubicles. I entered the one that had been mine for the last few hours, retrieved my rucksack from the floor, and left. As I was making for the exit, I had the impression everything was strangely silent. It was a quarter to eight. The curtains of the cubicles were drawn, but there didn’t seem to be anybody behind them. The nursing station was deserted, although the data on the screens continued to be updated. The computers, alone; the X-ray room at the far end, empty. I hadn’t a clue where all the emergency staff had gone, and there flashed through my head the possibility of a monumental accident, so big it had displaced all the workers on duty to a single location.

I passed through the door that led to the waiting room in order to head towards the exit. The waiting room was packed and silent. All the people seemed extremely quiet, frozen, as when someone pauses a film and can observe the still image in detail. I didn’t think about this at the time, nor would I reflect on it until I got home after half past eight in the morning. The whole floor was flooded, with more than a span of water, and out of the corner of my eye I could see small shadows flitting about, like little, slippery fish. In the middle of the room, the aquarium, intact and empty, and next to it the demented woman positioning the hanging feet of her son, who was now sitting in the wheelchair. Beside them, the pair of musicians and two girls fast asleep on their laps, but no trace of the parents I thought I remembered from the beginning of the night. The rotten cry-baby, still wearing her raincoat, was sobbing on the policeman’s tattooed arm, while her friend had come back and was staring at the young men with STDs, both of whom were naked from the waist downwards in a position that suggested they were comparing penises. In a corner of the room, a man with a waistcoat and basket was holding up a salmon, showing it to another man with a huge hammer in his hand. Opposite the fish, in the place I myself had occupied several hours earlier, a saxophone and a guitar were lying, which the daughter of the man with large feet seemed to be covering with a blanket. There was no sign of the man. Next to the automatic door, the nurse with the screens had put some trousers and a glittering dress over her uniform in a rather slapdash fashion.

As I headed out of the door, feeling a little disoriented and not really understanding everything I was seeing, I bumped into the inmate in the orange jumpsuit, who was leaning against the wall, smoking and pushing the wheelchair, which was now occupied by the policeman, tied to the back with two turns of the chain, to and fro with his foot. The man in the orange jumpsuit blew smoke into my face as I walked past him. He looked at me and said in a loud voice as I moved away, “Take care, buddy.”

Text © Lara Dopazo Ruibal

Translation © Jonathan Dunne