We went to visit Pura without wasting any time. We brought pickled cabbage because he liked it. —We liked it even more than he did.— His face was battered, his ribs cracked.
We pestered him until he told us how he had fallen.
At last he confessed: it had happened while he was trying to catch a bird with his mouth.
We laughed.
“What are you laughing at? The story being told is yours,” he said.
It got on all our nerves, the way he had started using sayings in the most unlikely places now that they had acquired their true meaning, but we said nothing.
Pura’s words could seldom be arranged on a single shelf. Then again, we had no shelf to put them on.
Pura said someone had cast the evil eye on him.
He was going to visit the old woman who spat away curses when he got out.
He had placed a curse on someone for the first time. We asked what he had said. “You drove me mad with love; may the same befall you,” he told us.
We laughed again. Pura announced to everyone that his curses came true.
Stop talking nonsense, Pura, I said. “The spitting woman can’t cure this,” Vera cut in. “This isn’t the evil eye, Pura.”
At that, Pura fixed his eyes on the drops in the IV bottle. A drop fell when it had reached its own fullness;
drip. The IV fell and travelled along Pura’s arm like a cold river.
drip. A tear fell to open a salty pond on the bandage.
From the outside, buried under all those casts, Pura looked as though he had dropped his enthusiasm on the ground, shattered completely with it, then been fastened back together with plaster.
The doctor studied the X-ray and counted, “three fractures here, two there,” while Pura thought, there can’t be so few.
Vera pulled the stool closer to the bed and sat down. She looked at Pura’s suspended foot, then at the white bandages around his jaw.
“They don’t order casts for the places that don’t show up on an X-ray, Pura,” she said.
drip. The IV.
drip. A tear.
Pura’s jaw was fixed in place, but his eyes wandered over every broken thing in the room. He tried to speak, but his voice emerged short and muffled, as if from beneath a mound of mortar beginning to dry:
“Even if we fixed every piece in place, I still couldn’t be myself again,” he said.
drip. The IV. Another drop was added to Pura.
drip. A tear. Another drop was taken from Pura.
Vera took out her lace handkerchief. Gently, without causing harm, she wiped away the wetness running towards Pura’s cast.
“Don’t cry, Pura,” she said softly. “If the plaster gets wet, it won’t set. Let it set.” Pura had only just started the job. “He’s on leave now anyway,” I added.
drip. The IV. The vein in Pura’s arm filled.
drip. A tear. Pura’s pillow did not dry.
Unable to bear it any longer, Vera asked, “Pura, are you all right?”
“Which one?” said Pura.
“What do you mean, which one?”
“The IV or me?”
Vera fell silent. I laughed.
drip. The IV. Something flowed inside Pura.
drip. A tear. A line remained on Pura’s cheek.
Pura ran a finger along the line and put it in his mouth. “Salty,” he said. Then we all laughed.
“Isn’t that enough, Pura?” I said when every conversation had run out. “This is becoming indecent. A person should at least fall apart with some decorum.”
“I didn’t fall apart,” Pura said. “I scattered. And talked a little nonsense.”
Then Pura closed his eyes. The drops went on falling: one washed the debris ground to dust inside him; the other became a blanket over the pieces that had fallen away.