The Plimsoll Line by Juan Gracia Armendáriz Page A

him in a blood draw lab and very diligently filled a jar with a urine sample he handed to the nurse on the other side of the laboratory counter, as if he were serving her a shot of whisky. Later he picked up the results and took them to his general practitioner’s office—a complete, exhaustive analysis the doctor either did not want or did not know how to interpret, simply listening to his chest, taking his blood pressure, and asking him, after a moment’s hesitation, what color his urine was, whether it was blond like beer, like a sailor, or oily in appearance, olive-green, with shades of sienna or ocher, perhaps accompanied by splashes of blood, or else off-white, perhaps transparent, like water, whether the act of urinating made any white foam or large bubbles, whether he had recently been going to the bathroom less frequently, whether he had noticed a smaller volume of liquid, or his urine was weak, perhaps in the last few months he had felt an itching sensation at the tip of his penis, and in the face of his hesitant answers, the doctor ordered that the analysis be repeated. Two days later, he called the doctor’s office and was referred to the nephrology specialist. By this time, doubt and fear were forming a yellow, scented cloud inside his head. Over the days that followed, he scrutinized his urine, counted the times he went to the restroom, filled plastic containers and noted down the amount of liquid, filled small, transparent glasses so he could observe the color of his piss against the light, like an oil taster, and finally resigned himself to the conclusion that there was little difference between the color of his urine and Bezoya mineral water.

    The nephrologist’s face was illuminated in the semidarkness with an aquatic iridescence. It took him a while to link this effect to the light being emitted by the computer screen. While the doctor compared the results of the lab tests, he glanced around at the shelves in the office, full of books and scientific magazines, the framed medical diploma on the wall, the certificates of attendance at international congresses, and the sporty detail of a bronze sculpture in the shape of a racket, whose pedestal read, “First Padel Tennis Championship, Golf Millennium Club.” He cleared his throat, stared at the tips of his shoes, and compared the doctor’s hands with his own. He had the impression all doctors had very thin hands, without any hair on their phalanges, and wore repulsive business socks. As if he had read his thoughts, the nephrologist waved his four-colored Bic pen, shuffled the papers, lifted his eyes toward him, and spoke briefly in English.
    “Something is moving on.”
    He lowered his eyes, blinked, and at his gesture of surprise, repeated “something is moving on” in a neutral voice, without any inflection, from the other side of the methacrylate table on whose unblemished surface his slim fingers without any hair on their phalanges were reflected. He felt he was just waking up, as if the expression “something is moving on,” pronounced in language-academy English that was a bit stiff and no doubt learned—he thought afterward with a chronic sufferer’s resentment—in order to give lectures at international nephrology congresses had acted like a spell, opening an invisible frontier between them, a liquid surface, like the inside of a fishbowl. That’s why he immediately felt certain that, having said “something is moving on,” the nephrologist and his industrious young man’s beard already belonged to a place as near as it was unreachable across the methacrylate table and the screensaver’s aquatic light.
    He summoned enough energy to uncross his legs, lean over that liquid surface, and ask,“What do you mean, doctor?” His voice sounded a little high-pitched to him.
    “Something is moving,” said the doctor in Spanish.
    He considered looking out of the window and, as if declaiming something in front of an audience, adding, “The