Doctor Menendez, Dreaming of Spiders

The older doctor endeavors to nap each afternoon on the third floor of the nursing home. In order to achieve a restful slumber, he seeks to soothe his senses. He pours himself a neat shotglass of whiskey. He dons a pair of excellent noise-cancelling headphones, pushes “PLAY” on his sound system. Reclining in his ergonomic chair and crossing his feet onto his desk, he drinks in a series of burning gulps. What sounds in his ears is the Habanera, delicate, winsome, even flirtatious, of Maurice Ravel; as if, Menendez thinks, quite consciously seeking the image that he knows awaits, a piece of newspaper were to blow across the wide steps… of the Alhambra. Out of moments such as these — inaugural, incantatory — emerges the likelihood, even the certitude, of a rendez-vous. A searing sensation in his abdomen doesn’t interrupt this invitation to more — only sleep will, perhaps.

Doctor Menendez was born in 1921, in Granada, a city where he no longer has family. He is, however, related to an Israeli family named Ben Porat. He knows this from research that his daughter, beloved, estranged, has recently conducted. With the advent of internet, so much becomes possible! Menendez has the option now of engaging in dialogue with lost family — if the family were willing. The irony (if there is irony) lies in the fact that Menendez has returned to the religion of his forebears, that is, a Maimonidean Judaism, while his relatives in Israel have entirely forgotten about such things. Or so it would seem. Menendez has only his daughter’s word, and she has stopped speaking to him.

Menendez requeues the Habanera, pours himself another shotglass of the whiskey, grown mellower, and presses PLAY. He leans back and closes his eyes. When the image of white wide steps and distant minarets refuses to show itself — only in his mind’s eye, of course — he smacks his lips and plops the shotglass on a heap of intake forms. Three new patients have arrived only this week. The home appears to be thriving. Menendez recalls clearly — clear as the wide steps of the Alhambra, which nonetheless elude him this afternoon — the day the home opened its doors. But while convenient, perhaps, for our purposes, why should he bother? He is old. He is tired — not so much physically as spiritually. His daughter and her woman friend — her lover — refuse to see him “until” he stops drinking. The word until implies so much: a world in which Menendez will, in fact, stop drinking.

“Castrating bitches,” he says out loud.

He pinches the skin between his eyes in an effort to soothe his sinuses. The Habanera has gotten ahead of him again, a danger in listening so often to the same composition. Much as he might wish otherwise, his mind seems to take for granted the entire first section. He re-enters as the winds are presenting en masse their objection to tyranny. In the key of C sharp, they sweep forward across the wide white steps as a tall man, until now only anticipated, strides forward. This man pauses as sunlight obliterates the high domed palace, the minarets, the hazak whose song threatens to break the spell of Ravel’s enchantment. None too soon the woman must make her appearance. As a young man...