(To Hermenegildo, N.C)
When I woke up it was January 1st and I imagined N.C living in a summer dream. The nurses threw bouquets of white roses representing the year 2023 and carefully placed other bouquets of red roses in water to welcome 2024.
Reality had changed in a single second and had become a strange febrile delirium. At my 38º I wondered: What would happen if the years spoke and if a common fever changed everything?
It wasn't December, I wasn't in this health center. It was hot and we were practically alone on an island in Macaronesia.
The English nurse, very thin and persistent, had become a beautiful gray horse. When I wanted to feel better, the horse would be inside my eye, asleep on my eyelid. When I wanted freedom, I would open my eye so that the horse would be thrown out, in freedom, trotting.
I heard very distant voices of a Bolivian doctor making a video call to his family. Fertility rites and colorful Cochabamba cholas came to me from Cochabamba. I heard a certain Miguelín, shouting to his uncle doctor Happy New Year uncle! What are you doing over there?
I heard the noise of the last cars clinging to the heat of summer. They had invented a gigantic closet next to the health center with a large shoe rack inside. In each shoe box there was a car. All of this constituted a perfect, harmonious parking lot, and the colors of P. Klee shot out from the engine of the cars. In their ascending collision they caused the fireworks that I could hear from box number 1.
N.C was 20 m from me, but he couldn't come in to see me. N.C didn't drive, but he had rented a scooter with which he reached the end of the world and with it he had crossed the Andes bordering the Pacific Ocean. He was a kind of hero in critical moments.
I don't know how he had come to this island. His presence was as strange as the change of season we were experiencing at that moment.
Suddenly the English nurse touched my shoulder. In a forceful tone, like someone pronouncing a Kantian categorical imperative, she said that I was much better and that in about 10 minutes she would remove the serum and I could go home.
My phone kept receiving messages of congratulations for the new year. I saw everything blurry. I had forgotten my glasses. Reality and the new year were absolutely blurry. I decided to add fantasy and humor to the haze, as I usually do in my worst moments. However, the fact that N.C was in a sad waiting room worried me.
N.C, in addition to being an explorer, was a kind of magician of words. His adventures reassured me, his voice reassured me, seeing him smoke reassured me.
When I got up I felt cold. That August cold of the island that many say does not exist. I made a stupid bun in my hair to look as neat as possible, but there was no remedy...I looked like a real corpse.
In the waiting room I quickly identified N.C's motorcycle helmet. I approached him, who seemed calm, and we congratulated each other on the year. I quickly moved away, fearing to infect my febrile fantasy and my horrible virus.
When we left the health center everything was very dark.
N.C brought a zucchini cream for my recovery and a can of sardines for my cat.
I asked for a taxi while N.C said goodbye, insisting again and again that he would be watching over me and would call me the next day.
When I got into the taxi I thought that N.C and I could have been a beautiful summer story.
Those summer stories that are not corny, those summer stories that are never written.
