an awful nurse

"You'd make an awful nurse!" I have been told twice. Not that I harbor some sweet affection, deep understanding or an overflowing nurturing capacity that's yet to be unearthed. I am grumpy and impatient. Some like it hot-headed. In December 2009, when Robin was frail, transparent and wheezing in the bed he would soon die, I was spraying fake saliva into his mouth and missing the point, I was fixing his pillows to the most uncomfortable position his bones could ever bear. Of Robin, nothing was left but bones. Robin had a T-shirt with Alfred Hitchcock's head in a glass bell jar or an astronaut's helmet that sat perfectly atop his jolly good and mighty belly, giving Hitchcock a 3D quality somehow. That was when Robin used to cook lamb shanks, we'd drink quite a few bottles of wine each, there'd be some singing or somber discussion on the state of academia, he would at some point cheer up, recite dialogues from movies I'd never heard of. As Robin melted away I was in Montreal and consequently in Havana when news of his death reached me via dial up internet in a quiet, hispanohablantes hotel in Kohly. I howled like a wounded animal in a room overlooking the banyan trees and the José Martí Monument in the distance. That very morning something curious happened to me: one of my contact lenses, a light blue plastic disc shattered to many pieces. I traveled across the island to Gibara half out of focus, befitting the state of things, a tropical hurricane had just blown me away to a peninsula in colonial ruins, crooked, roofless bars and clueless seashells thrown inland by the winds.   


December is the month I dread. Thirteen days have passed in Montreal, I am relieved and thankful for January. As I listen to Espace Musique, strong winds shake the tree in front of my apartment but otherwise all seems alarmingly calm. I've just run out of coffee, in and of itself this is already a natural disaster. It's been a week that my unlikely guest mumbled, as he curled in my sofa, "You'd make an awful nurse." Mumbling is his way of communicating if he is not scribbling on napkins or disappearing the way he appeared initially out of the blue, bringing me twisted joy that alternates with "tristesse infantile." He is both frail and stubborn, kind and careless, attentive and distracted. His past hovers around him, a tragic hero of the first degree, the kind I used to fall for abysmally. I bug him, I chatter in cheerful girliness, I ask intrusive questions on his condition, I instruct him to open the door to Monsieur Côté the plumber and Bell guys to fix the modem before I go off with my friends. He concludes that perhaps his parents' would be a better refuge. He concludes that his mother would be there for him, for, a mother is always the best awful nurse. I walk him home and I say something silly as "Lock the door after me, please." "It doesn't work that way." he responds in despair. I hurry down the stairs, an awfully bad caretaker.