Marisabelle, Roberto and Tim

Something disturbed me as I drifted out of a deep and troubled sleep. I felt like I was suffocating, smothering.

My eyes opened. In the faint light of the room I was aware of the white blur of the sheets I lay on, and the clammy, clinging sweat-stained pillow. It was stifling and hot. The air was heavy and sticky. A sharp chemical aroma burned my nostrils and my lungs.

A fan was oscillating overhead. It buzzed and hummed. It swayed slowly, from left to right, like a mobile, sightless gray decapitated trophy, bolted to the wall overhead, above the foot of my bed.

The subtle rustle of the air it moved was out of synch with its slow repetitive arc. When the fan faced me, the air was still; when the fan turned away, its breeze fell on me.

Each warm wave of air produced a contradictory feeling of brief relief, and at the same time, of a little dread. Each caress of air would immediately end, to be replaced with a doubly long oppressive moment of heavy stillness. This was punctuated by the acrid stench that forced me out of my sleep.

Beside me, to my left, a curtain was draped from a ceiling track. The soft glow of daylight was diffused through it from the east window.

On the other side of this curtain was another bed. At the foot of it, I saw the figure of a slim dark-skinned woman. Beside her, leaning against the east wall, I saw another woman, short, older, overweight.

The dark young lady was doing something. What was it? She seemed to be sewing. Why was I having so much trouble breathing? I lifted my head to see better. She was handsome. She looked strong. She had long black hair. She sat erect and tall. Her eyes were dark and deep.

A hospital meal-tray on wheels was positioned in front of her. On it were several small bottles and a box of tissues. She was doing her nails. She glanced at me several times but said nothing.

Feeling more and more uncomfortable, I finally said, “Excuse me, but the fumes are choking me. I’m having trouble breathing”. She glared at me and muttered something in Spanish to the old lady.

She continued pulling on her finger tips, and ignored me. I repeated what I said. I told her to please take the noxious liquids out of the room. “I’m having trouble breathing,” I repeated. “I have pneumonia”.

I arrived some days earlier in a delirium, by ambulance, with opportunistic infections which began to plague me at the end of 1994.

I was wracked with pain and riddled with fever.

I remembered that another visitor had been in the room, a handsome young man. One day, he arrived carrying a white cardboard box. In it was a dish for his love, the patient in the next bed. It was a plate of flambéed cheese, freshly fired and rushed over from a Greek restaurant on the Danforth. Tim introduced himself and offered me a morsel of the still warm cheese. It was deliciously sour.

Tim spent every night sleeping on the floor in our room at the foot of Roberto’s bed. Roberto was in worse shape than I was, and I was very sick.

Roberto had a brain tumour. His powers had left him. Day after day he was taken out of the room on a bed with wheels for tests and brain scans. When the curtain was drawn back and I could see him, he usually slept, or perhaps he was unconscious. Tim was always at his side, often in the bed with him, silent, his arms around the poor, dark, frail Roberto.

Now I met his mother.

Marisabelle came with her mother from Caracas to be with her only son. As time passed, she came to be friendly and talkative with me.

She really was very concerned about her appearance, but after a while she realized that her nails didn’t matter very much on the ninth floor in the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome Ward of the hospital.

Roberto was naked, spread eagled across the embrace of both Tim and Marisabelle. Roberto’s almost black figure cut a diagonal slash against their lighter skins and the white fixtures of the room.

One year later, in the summer, I attended a garden party at the Riverdale home of Tim and his new partner. Marisabelle greeted me with a warm embrace. In her beautiful manicured hands she held a souvenir. I still use it to open letters everyday. It is a dagger made of rainforest hardwood. I gave her a hibiscus. She wrote me that she planted it in a shrine for Roberto. It flourishes on the east coast of Venezuela, with red flowers.

Jake Peters