The first time I saw the sun

   I opened my eyes, and there was light. My roommate was still sleeping. The night before, he had told me he slept so much because of his medication, which left him totally groggy. The liquid dripping drop by drop into my veins through a needle way too big for my tiny arm was helping me sleep, too.

   I have been very tired, completely exhausted, ever since I was born. “But that’s all going to change with the surgery,” my mother used to say, trying to hide the fact that she was scared to death. I imagine seeing me in the hospital for so long, at just four years old, was more than she could bear. When I was thirteen months old, I had been diagnosed with polio, and she blamed herself for giving me so many kisses and covering my face in drool.

My mother said that as a baby I was always crying, and she would get overwhelmed because she didn't know what was wrong with me. Until one day the doctor warned her that my head, arms, and legs hurt very badly. He must have also told her not to put me on the floor, for fear that I might fall and hurt myself. Until then, the only height I had ever known was the distance between the floor and her arms.

  

   Pablo woke up and turned toward me, looking at me with his big brown eyes.

   “Good morning, Antoñito!” he greeted through a yawn. “How are you feeling today?”

   “Tired, as usual,” I replied.

   “Well, today is the big day. Are you nervous?”

   “A little bit, but the nurse told me they’re going to put me to sleep, and I won't feel a thing. And when I wake up, I’ll have longer, stronger legs.”

   “Like a superhero.”

   “Yeah, just like that!”

   The nurse walked into the room to do her morning rounds.

   “How are my boys doing?”

   “Goooood!” we both answered at the same time.

   “Antonio, your mother is on her way. She’ll be here with you before we take you to the operating room, so don't you worry.”

   Adela was the head nurse. She must have been very old because her face was full of wrinkles, far more than my mother had. But she was a darling of a woman. Every morning she greeted us cheerfully. Then she would sit on the edge of my bed and look at me as if I were a little puppy while she stroked my hair. She would chat with me until another nurse, younger than her, brought us our breakfast tray.

   “Antonio, sweetheart, you can't have breakfast today.”

   “Why? I’m hungry…”

   “Don't pout at me, you rascal. You can't eat anything before the surgery because we’re going to put you to sleep.”

   “Well, I eat dinner every night and then go to sleep, and nothing happens.”

   Adela smiled and went on with her explanation.

   “It’s because this will be a deeper sleep—so deep that if the food comes up to the pit of your stomach and you feel like throwing up, you won't even realize it, and you could choke on your own vomit.”

   “Eww, gross!” Pablo gasped, scrunching up his face.

   I couldn't hold back my laughter seeing him.

   “Okaay, no breakfast, but when I wake up after the operation, you have to give me something yummy.”

   “Of course, sweetheart, it’s a deal.”

   When I woke up, I was terrified. I had no idea where I was. The only sound was the distant beeping of one of those machines that tell you whether you’re alive or not.

   “Who are you? Where am I? And where’s Adela?” I asked, pronouncing each syllable with great difficulty.

   “My, didn't you wake up full of questions!” the nurse chuckled.

   “I’m Esperanza, and I’m going to take care of you for a little while. You’re in the recovery room. As soon as the anesthesia wears off, we’ll take you back up to your room.”

   Eager to get back to my friend Pablo, I closed my eyes and drifted right off. I dreamed I was about twenty years old. I was dressed as Superman, and my legs were long and strong.

   “The surgery was a success,” the surgeon commented. “Your son is resting, and they’ll move him up to the ward shortly.”

   “Oh, thank God!” Antonio’s mother exclaimed, pressing her palms together in a gesture of gratitude.

   “The next few days are going to be tough for him. It’s completely normal for him to experience mood swings and even blame you for his situation. I ask that you please be patient.”

   “What do you mean by that, Doctor?”

   “I mean that even though the operation went well, your son must face the aftermath. We performed osteotomy and placed a Wagner external fixator to achieve elongation. And now comes the hardest part: the recovery process. He will have to stay in the hospital for several weeks, and once you’re back home, you will have to handle it personally.”

   “Me? But I have no idea how to do that.”

   “Don't worry, we will explain everything to you in detail. Plus, you’ll be able to observe the nurse while the boy remains in the hospital.”

   “But… I thought we could go home as soon as he recovered from the surgery.”

   “And you can. But it’s a long process. We’ve attached a metal bar outside the skin, parallel to his thigh. From that bar, perpendicular pins go straight through the flesh and screw directly into the bone. In the middle of the bar, there’s a mechanism with a nut. By turning that nut with a wrench, the bar expands on itself like a telescope, pushing the pins outward and moving the femur. In a few days, once the soft callus begins to form, we’ll start turning the nut to separate the two ends of the fracture millimeter by millimeter. The body will try to fill that gap by creating new bone tissue.

   Ideally, we aim to lengthen it one millimeter per day. Since Antonio is still so small, we’ll do it in two turns—one at midday and one at night. That turn is what you will have to do once he’s discharged, along with dressing the affected area.”

   The woman buried her face in her hands as the ground swallowed her up, sinking her hopes into a bleak reality.       “Polio left his femur three centimeters shorter; if we don't apply traction now, scoliosis will end up twisting his spine,” the doctor had told her before. Back then, the decision had seemed obvious. Yet the thought of her little boy suffering with every turn of the screw broke her heart. She wanted to turn back time to before the operation. But that was already impossible.

   “Hi!” Pablo exclaimed enthusiastically the moment I opened my eyes.

   My mother woke up from her fitful sleep in the red leatherette armchair and came over to take my hand.

   “My baby, how are you?”

   “Fine,” I said, completely unaware of how short-lived that feeling would be.

   “Look what I brought you!”

   “A present?” My eyes lit up as I tore open the colorful wrapping paper.

   “That’s right. You’ve been a very brave boy, and you deserve it.”

   “It’s a Guisval toy car!”

   “It’s the model you wanted, isn't it?”

   “Yes, Mommy, the Porsche 911 Carrera!” I smiled, admiring it through the plastic window of the box. “I want to see how fast it goes!”

   “Well, you’ll have plenty of time to play with it. Right now, you need to rest. The doctor told me everything went great, and soon you’ll be able to go home.”

   “When? Tomorrow?”

   “No, sweetheart, once you recover. Right now, you need to rest and let your wounds heal.”

   “What wounds?” I asked, entirely obliviously, the butchery they had performed on me.

   My mother stayed quiet. I wanted to look at my legs, but I couldn't move.

   “Pablo, uncover me.”

   He didn't think twice. He grabbed the corner of the bed sheet and pulled it back.

   “You lied to me!” I screamed. “You told me I’d be a superhero, and I look like a robot!”

   I sobbed uncontrollably, as if it were the last day of my life. Suddenly, I stopped being a child and turned into an iron monster with two scaffoldings on my legs. I didn't want to go home, but I didn't want to stay in that hospital any longer either. I wanted to become invisible so nobody else could see me.

   “My love, everything is going to be okay,” my mother tried to comfort me, leaning in to kiss my forehead.

   At that moment, a wave of fierce rage washed over me. I threw my arms up to stop her, accidentally shoving her trachea inward. She gagged, twisting around until she collapsed onto the armchair, clutching her throat as she struggled to catch her breath. I think I hurt her badly. But she recovered right away and came close again, this time without touching me.

   “I know it looks very ugly now, but when it’s all over, you’ll be glad,” she said hoarsely, covering my legs with the sheet again, as if hiding them could hide the horror too. But I wasn't glad. Because every day was sheer torture.

   On top of the iron frames, they had placed a cast covering me from my belly button to my ankles, and my legs felt as heavy as an elephant’s. Right between them, a wooden bar held my thighs apart on the outside of the plaster, making me look like a giant letter “A.” At the bottom, a tiny window left just enough room for me to relieve myself. I couldn't move, let alone get out of bed. I had to pee into a plastic bottle placed between my legs. When I needed to poop, my mother would roll me to one side like a wooden log, place a metal bedpan—scratched and icy—on the mattress right where my rear end would land, and roll me back so I’d settle onto it. It was colder than an ice rink. Who knows how many people had used it before me! The plaster dug into my skin, and the pins pulled at my flesh. My mother would rub her hands with Nenuco baby cologne to mask the odor a bit so I wouldn't feel so humiliated.

   I couldn't eat what I wanted either. They fed me rice, bananas, and other foods to prevent any potential diarrhea—which, under the circumstances, was my worst nightmare. Just thinking that a foul, brown mush could run down my body beneath the cast gave me shivers.

​

   The fabric of the hospital gown was stiff and made my whole-body itch. Besides, I couldn't wear trousers, so I looked like a little girl. The hours dragged on with nothing to do, and I was bored out of my mind. Pablo had already gone home, and I felt terribly lonely. My mother was there, like just another piece of furniture—silent and plagued by guilt. She refused to tell me what time it was, despite my persistent asking, so that the wound dressings would catch me off guard. Now I know she did it to spare me the agony of waiting, but back then, I was still furious at her for deciding to have me operated on.

   Every time the nurse entered the room, the blood drained from my face, and I could feel my own pulse pounding under every screw that pierced me. She would approach me carefully and turn the nuts with a silver wrench, as if I were a robot. But robots don't feel pain. And with every single turn, my back arched in agony. My wounds burned from the inside out. Salty tears escaped my eyes, and the gaping holes in my legs wept tears of blood.

After the first dressing, I overheard the nurse telling my mother: “There is a risk of bone infection, ma'am. If the pins start oozing green pus, let me know immediately.” Green pus! As if I didn't have enough to deal with it! How disgusting!

   When the painkillers took effect and the pain wasn't as intense, I spent hours playing with my orange Porsche, sliding it across the plaster cast as if it were racing down a snowy mountain. The motion of the vehicle—standing out against the white plaster with its black hood and sporty side stripe—hypnotized me. It made me forget where I was for a little while.

​

   As the days passed, I learned to figure out the time using the food the nurse brought and the sunlight streaming through the window as my guide. I got used to the smell of rubbing alcohol and Mercurochrome, which looked like artificial blood with a golden sheen. Even the pain became part of my daily routine.

   Several weeks later, they took me to the treatment room to strip off the whole apparatus. First, a male nurse removed the screws using a sort of hand crank. He began unscrewing them through the gaps in the cast, and I felt like I was breaking apart inside. I thought I was going to die. Then he approached with a saw, and I thought he was going to cut off my legs. I will never forget that deafening noise, the vibration of the metal scraping against the plaster, or the stale smell of damp chalk and dead skin.

   When the cast cracked in two like an eggshell, I looked at my legs: they were thin and stiff as matchsticks. My brain gave them the command to move, but they weighed as much as lead. The skin was cracked and covered in yellowish scales flaking off, like a snake shedding its skin. I had six raw holes surrounded by hard, brown scabs and traces of the dark red Mercurochrome.

   Along with the daily wound care, the painful massages and forced movements of physical therapy began, but my legs just wouldn't respond.

   The good part was that I was finally able to get out of bed and walk down the hallways using a very heavy iron walker. And that’s how I heard it.

   “Mommy, what’s that noise?”

   “What noise, sweetheart?”

   “That sound in the distance, like many roars all at once.”

   I followed the sound, pushing my walker until I reached a window where a man was leaning halfway out toward the street, smoking a cigarette.

   “That sound, Mom! Don't you hear it?”

   “I only hear the traffic,” she replied as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

   The traffic… During my confinement in the hospital, the outside world had vanished. Inside, everything was silence. The windows were shut sealed, and you couldn't hear what was happening outside. My room faced an inner courtyard, so the only view I had seen for a long time was pipes, the roof of the adjacent building, and a fire escape. There were no phones ringing, no people talking, no cars other than the Porsche on my cast. I stood there spellbound, gazing toward the window, enveloped by the smoke and the smell of dark tobacco. My mother picked me up in her arms and nudged her way in.

   “Excuse us, sir?”

   The man walked away without answering, without even looking up, leaving the vastness of the world all to us.

   “Look, Mom! The cars are just like mine, but bigger! And there are people inside!”

   She laughed for the first time in ages and hugged me with a tenderness so deep I can still feel it today.

​

   The next day, I was discharged. I had to continue my rehabilitation exercises at home and go back to the hospital for periodic X-rays and checkups to make sure everything was progressing as expected. It was warm out, so my mother brought a pair of shorts. “This way the wounds can breathe through the bandages,” she told me. She washed me, dressed me, put cologne on me, and carried me on her hip like a doll.

   “We’re going home!”

   She carried me down the stairs, a smile lighting up her face. I bounced with every step, enjoying the movement that had been denied for so many months. When she opened the exit door, an intense light blinded me, and the heat slapped my face.

   That was the first time I saw the sun. Or, at least, that I can remember.

​

   The years following my surgery were not easy. I suffered continuous bullying at school. As a teenager, girls looked at me with pity; none of them saw the boy beneath that fragile shell. The disease ran its course, and crutches became my only constant companions. I discovered that my best friend was a Spanish guitar my mother gave me for my eighteenth birthday. I spent hours playing it, without looking at the clock, without remembering to eat, until I became a true professional.

   I took refuge in music and pulled away from everything else including my mother, who never forgave herself for causing me so much suffering when I was so small.

   Now that I am a father, I understand what she must have gone through, and I would never want to be in her shoes. Poor thing… she left this world without ever knowing that, in truth, her kisses were the only thing that eased my pain during those first years of my life. And her voice. She had a beautiful voice.