The Dying Animal Read online

  The loveliest fairy tale of childhood is that everything happens in order. Your grandparents go long before your parents, and your parents go long before you. If you're lucky it can work out that way, people aging and dying in order, so that at the funeral you ease your pain by thinking that the person had a long life. It hardly makes extinction less monstrous, that thought, but it's the trick that we use to keep the metronomic illusion intact and the time torture at bay: "So-and-so lived a long time." But Consuela has not been lucky, and so beside me she sits, under the sentence of death, while the nightlong merriment unfolds on the screen, a manufactured childish hysteria about embracing the open-ended future in ways that mature adults, with their melancholy knowledge of a very limited future, cannot have. And on this insane night, no one's knowledge can be more melancholy than hers.

  "Havana," she says, and she weeps more forcefully by the moment, "I thought someday I will see Havana." "You will see Havana." "I won't. Oh, David, my grandfather..." "Yes, what about him? Go ahead, tell me, talk." "My grandfather would be sitting in the living room..." "Go on." I was holding her in my arms while she began to speak about herself as she never had before, never had cause to before, as, perhaps, she'd not even known herself before. "With The NewsHour on, with The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour on, and," she said, through her copious tears, "he'd suddenly sigh, 'Pobre Mamá.' Who'd died in Havana without him. Because their generation, that generation, did not leave. 'Pobre Mamá.' 'Pobre Papá.' They stayed behind. He would just have this sadness, this longing for them. Terrible, terrible longing. And that's what I have. But it's for myself. It's for my life. I feel myself, I feel my body with my hands, I think, This is my body! It can't go away! This can't be real! This can't be happening! How can it go away? I don't want to die! David, I'm afraid to die!" "Consuela dear, you're not going to. You're thirty-two. You're not going to die for a very long time." "I grew up as an exile. So I'm scared of everything. Did you know that about me? I'm scared of everything." "Oh, no. I don't think that's so. Of everything? It may seem so tonight but not—" "It's so always. I didn't want my family's exile. But you grow up and you hear 'Cuba, Cuba, Cuba' all the time ... And look! Those people! Such vulgar people! Look what he has done to Cuba! I will never see it. I'll never see the house. I'll never see their house." "Yes, you will. Once Castro is gone—" "I'll be gone." "You won't be gone. You'll be here. Don't panic. There is no need to panic. You're going to be fine, you're going to live—" "You want to know the picture I've had? Of there? All my life? The picture in my head of Cuba?" "Yes. Tell me. Try to calm down and tell me everything. Do you want me to turn off the TV?" "No—no. They'll show something else. They have to." "Tell me the picture in your head, Consuela." "Not of the beach, not that. My parents had that. My parents talked about how much fun they had there, kids running around on the beach, people sitting in lounge chairs, ordering mimosas. They would take a house out on the beach and so on, but it wasn't that memory that I had. It was something else. I've had it forever. Oh, David—they buried Cuba long before they were buried. They had to. My father, my grandfather, my grandmother, they all knew they would never go back. And they never did. And now I never will." "You will," I told her. "What is the picture you've had forever? Talk to me. Talk," I said. "I always thought I would go back. Just to see the house. That it would be there." "Is the picture in your head of the house?" I asked her. "No. It's a road. El Malecón. If you see any kind of photos of Havana, you see a picture of El Malecón, this beautiful road right by the water. They've got this wall, and in the pictures everyone sits on the wall and hangs out. Did you see Buena Vista Social Club?" "I did. Because of you, of course I did. I thought of you when I saw it." "Well, it's the road there," she said, "where the waves were crashing. That wall. You see it for just a moment. That's where I always thought I would be." "The road that might have been," I told her. "Should have been," Consuela said, and again she was weeping uncontrollably while up on the screen, beneath their lampshades (each, we learn, weighing fourteen pounds), the showgirls parade aimlessly across the stage. Yes, this is definitely Castro saying "Fuck you" to the twentieth century. Because it's the end of his adventure in history, too, of the mark he made and did not make on the score of human events. "Tell me," I said to her. "You never told me this before. You didn't talk like this eight years ago. Then you were a listener. My student. I never knew this. Go ahead. Tell me what should have been." "That wall," she said, "and me. That's all. Hanging out there and talking to people. That's it. You're by the water but you're in the city. It's a meeting spot. It's a promenade." "Well, it looked pretty rundown," I said, "in the movie." "It did. But that's not how I've seen it all my life."

  And then the grief, then the weight of sadness for all that her family had lost, for her father and her grandparents dying in exile, for herself about to die in exile (and an exile she'd never before felt so cruelly), for all of the Castillos' Cuba that Castro had ruined, for everything she feared she was about to leave—all of it was so great that in my arms, for a full five minutes, Consuela went out of her mind. I saw, externalized, the terror that her body was feeling. "What is it? Consuela, what can I do for you? Tell me and I'll do it. What is it that's torturing you so?"

  And here's what she told me when she was able to speak. Here, to my surprise, is what she told me tortured her most. "I always answered my parents in English. Oh, God. How I wish I had answered him more in Spanish." "Who?" "My father. He loved when I called him Papi. But after I was little, I never would. I called him Dad. I had to. I wanted to be an American. I did not want all their sadness." "Dearest Consuela, it doesn't matter now what you called him. He knew you loved him. He knew how much..." But there was no consoling her. I'd not heard her speak like this before, nor had I seen her behave as she did next, either. In every calm and reasonable person there is a hidden second person scared witless about death, but for someone thirty-two the time between Now and Then is ordinarily so vast, so boundless, that it's no more than maybe a couple of times a year, and then only for a moment or two and late at night, that one comes anywhere near encountering that second person and in the state of madness that is the second person's everyday life.

  What she did then was to take off her hat. To throw off her hat. All this time, you see, she'd been wearing that fezlike hat, even when she was otherwise naked and I was taking the pictures of her breasts for her. But now she tore it off. With New Year's Eve abandon, tore off her funny New Year's Eve hat. First Castro's farce of a sexy stage show and now Consuela's mortality completely unveiled.

  It was appalling to see her without the hat. A woman so young and beautiful with sort of feathery hair, very short, thin, colorless, meaningless hair—you'd rather have her bald after having been to the barber and been shaved than to see this idiotic fluff on her head. The transition from thinking of someone in the way you've always thought of that person—as just as alive as you are—to whatever signifies to you, as her fuzzy hairlessness did to me, that the person is close to death, is dying, I experienced at that moment not only as a shock but as a betrayal. A betrayal of Consuela for my having so rapidly absorbed the shock and made this accounting. The traumatic moment was upon us when the change occurs, when you discover that the other person's expectations can no longer resemble yours and that no matter how appropriately you may be acting and you may continue to act, he or she will leave before you do—if you're lucky, well before.

  Itself. There it was. All the horror of it in that head. Consuela's head. I kissed it and kissed it. What else was there for me to do? The poison of the chemotherapy. All it had done to her body. All it had done to her mind. She's thirty-two, and she thinks she's now exiled from everything, experiencing each experience for the very last time. Only what if she isn't? What—

  There! The phone! That could be—! At what time? It's two A.M. Excuse me!

  It was. That was her. She called. Finally called. I have to leave. She is in a panic. She is having surgery in two weeks. She had her last chemotherapy. She asked m
e to tell her about the beauty of her body. That's why I was away so long. That's what she wanted to hear. That's what she's been talking about for nearly an hour. Her body. Do you think that after surgery a man will ever love my body again? This is what she asks again and again. You see, they've now decided to remove the entire breast. They were planning to go underneath the breast and to take a part of it. But now they think it's too serious for that. So they have to remove it. Ten weeks ago they told her they would remove only part of it, and now they tell her they are going to remove the whole thing. Mind you, this is a breast. It's not a small thing. This morning they told her what is going to happen; now it's night, and she's all alone and the whole prospect of everything ... I have to go. She wants me there. She wants me to sleep in the bed with her there. She has not eaten all day. She has to eat. She has to be fed. You? Stay if you wish. If you want to stay, if you want to leave ... Look, there's no time, I must run!

  "Don't."

  What?

  "Don't go."

  But I must. Someone has to be with her.

  "She'll find someone."

  She's in terror. I'm going.

  "Think about it. Think. Because if you go, you're finished."

  * * *

  PHILIP ROTH

  In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America.