The door at the entrance ...

[ST (Aug 29, 2006)]

The door at the entrance of the building was the very first thing that caught his attention, the huge, solid, heavy metallic door with a translucent glass sandwiched between black bars at both sides forming a complicated pattern, a door which opened automatically with a cold click after an electronic buzz and creaked heavily on its hinges under his persistent, strenous push to let them both in, he and his mom. The building was provided with an intercom system that allowed for such magical click and futuristic sound from the door, the very first intercom he ever used, still quite a novelty back then. In the hall, a few stairs led to an splendid, old-fashioned lift, so formidable a machine which made him always wonder why it was in such an ordinary hall and hadn't yet been confined to a museum, where it should naturally belong. The lift was very spacious. It had no walls, just a diamond-shaped metallic frame enclosing it. It seemed even heavier than the entrance door, made of iron and painted all black. It had a funny pair of sliding doors which had to be opened manually and closed shut with a loud bang. Since there were no walls the cables that lifted up and down the compartment were all visible, the working mechanism could be tracked there on the fly, which rendered the little trip to the doctor's consulting room the most entertaining. The elevator, however, was surprisingly slow - climbing up the stairs to the fourth floor, which they rarely did, turned always shorter, and less enjoyable, than taking the lift.

The consulting room was in a hall-free, dim-lit apartment, closed and shadowy and poorly ventilated, with a long aisle that ran off from the right of the doorway. On the left there was a small waiting room with old, uncomfortable, dark-brown wooden armchairs upholstered with imitation leather. The furniture in the whole apartment was, if anything, old-fashioned and anachronistic, just like the lift and the building itself. Its tones were also markedly dark and it was highly ornamented, embellished in that dubious style so much favoured among wealthy people. There was a low square table at the waiting room with magazines strewn all over its surface devoted to publicize the gossip and affairs of the eventual celebrities of the moment, their pages printed out in thick, oily paper whose mere touch was as repulsive as flat were their contents. An ugly, big, rectangular painting hanging on the wall opposite the table dominated the room, depicting a hunting scene. A majestic deer was being brutally attacked to death by a pack of hounds biting fiercely its neck and legs and belly. The hunters stood placidly within riding distance, on top of their horses, rifles in hand. Flashes of lightning enhanced the hilly vista in the background, overcast, cloudy, and dark. Night was about to fall.

The aisle was indeed long, which only helped to improve his disliking of the place. At the end on the left was their family doctor's spacious consulting room. The phsysician called out his patients' names from the doorway, a sturdy figure which lumbered along in his walk towards the swivel armchair behind an ample desk. When his name was called he and his mom left the waiting room and in the walk along the aisle his eyes gazed at the little, stained-glass windows on the wall past the bathroom, which failed at the purpose of providing some natural light to the apartment from the empty inner yard the building surrounded. After that his gaze invariably turned to the intriguing excerpt of a poem from Zorrilla's Tenorio which, framed as a painting, someone had nailed to the wall: "Cuán gritan esos malditos / Pero mal rayo me parta / Si en acabando esta carta / No pagan caro sus gritos". Those words, playing a Pavlovian trick with his young mind, remained forever attached to sickness and pain, flu symptoms, high fever, harmful injections in his buttocks, and the like.

The stolid figure of Dr. Meyer waited at the desk for them to step into the consulting room. A little handshake followed, perhaps. A large shelf ran along the wall at his back, filled with technical books and encyclopaedia on medicine. There was a hospital-like stretcher in the room, where he sometimes lay to have his chest and back stethoscoped - the inevitably cold small metallic disk sweeping all over his upper body, tracing for symptoms of whatever disease in his breathing. The consulting room was well equipped. Part of it was hidden behind a thick plastic courtain which contained what looked like sophisticated medical equipment, an X-ray machine among them. The actual visits were usually short, much shorter than the time spent in the waiting room outside, idle, staring at the horrible painting. Dr. Meyer was a competent physician, accurate in most cases with the treatments he proposed, perhaps a straightforward thing to do after a large number of years' experience in dealing with common diseases. They got their treatments written down in illegible handwriting (syrup, pills, jabs to be taken, the usual stuff) and he got his mom's money. That was the very last thing that struck him in those visits, the whole lot of money (the large bunch of notes his mom produced) that such a short time with that man in a white coat, thick steel-rimmed spectacles, and a stethoscope round his neck, was apparently worth of.