JOEL PABLO SALUD

On the third night after her delivery, Cristina decided to exercise her legs along the corridors of the pediatric section of the hospital. She was scheduled to leave the next day. She adjusted her vacation to another month before returning to the ER. While breezing slowly through the half-lit hallway, an old woman walked up to Cristina and asked for her name. A second later, the old woman handed her a note, on which was written: My hand is your hand. The script was eerily familiar. All of a sudden, her heart skipped a beat as a surge of conflicting emotions rose from her soul. 

She asked the old woman who had given her the note. “He has been waiting for you. I’m a friend…” the old woman whispered as she cupped Christina’s trembling hands. When the old woman pointed to a room at the farthest end of the hallway, Cristina began to run despite her fresh wound toward a door left slightly ajar. She entered gradually, careful not to make any noise. She saw an old wrinkled man lying on the hospital bed, a thin white sheet of cloth draped over his body, a book on poetry by Rilke opened on his chest, and some lose sheets of tattered paper scattered on a chair. 

She tried to remember his face, but it was in vain. “I’m one of his closest friends,” the old woman muttered. “We’ve been friends for decades, since college. He suffered a stroke and hasn’t awakened from his coma since. I have been reading your letters to him since the day he was confined to this hospital, and this book of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, which I know is his favorite. Before the attack, surprisingly, he asked me for a favor: to look for you. I tried for years, calling your number, even visiting your parents’ house. I thought I had failed my dearest friend. It was only yesterday that I found out you’re your younger sister you are here…” 

Cristina couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Gently, she drew near the old poet, the pain of her stitches subsiding quite miraculously. She stared at his face, and noticed the long, curved lines that had been carved callously by time. She could not remember how he looked, save for the mole on the lower part of his left eye. It was Rodrigo all right, her beloved poet. She began to feel her eyes swell, because of joy or the pain of seeing her poet so exposed and helpless, she did not know. Here she was, finally a doctor of medicine, a virtual deity in her own imperfect way, and she cannot even lift the finger of the one who had imparted life to her when she most needed it. She could’ve sworn she heard his voice, “Doctors are not omnipotent to matters of the soul. Only poets are.” 

Amid the jingle and tones of the machines attached to the old man’s frail body, Cristina moved even closer, now within touching distance. Finally, she thought. Finally. “He hasn’t moved since,” the old woman added. “I miss the way he typed on his old black typewriter. His children just left hours ago to arrange his papers. I know he can hear us. I think he knows you’re here.” Her hands, trained as they were to bring life into a man’s body, felt impotent that very second. 

The urge to suddenly caress his face became immense. She never imagined she could be this close to the very soul, the very eyes, the very hands she once considered her own. Cristina picked up a piece of paper that fell from the chair, crumpled and tattered now with age, and read what she recalled as the poem he wrote for her while he was under a fire tree:

To reach the remoteness you call your soul,
What does it hold for me?

All things!
All that I have died for, 
and will die for still.
The world knows nothing of this,
This distance we call rhymes.
I have only to die, I know,
To reach you, to feel you
Where nothing touches you.

In the tapering width of unanticipated silence, she was suddenly jolted from her thoughts as Cristina felt a touch, the subtle stroke of a finger on her skin. She almost pulled back her hand, but she did not. It was Rodrigo’s forefinger, mustering the last ounce of strength and life to break the distance of rhymes that had kept them from each other for years. 

She wanted so much to scream as the bitter reality of loss dawned like a long-forgotten dream, but her voice has left her. She could not even call his name because of apparent hopelessness. And like the child that she was to the old poet during those years of lines and verses, Cristina silently broke into tears as she crumbled onto his chest, only to sense the quietly fading rhythm of his heart next to her cheeks.

At last, the poet’s hand slumped lifeless on her hand, very kindly, the distance of a tender kiss between them.