The Boy of Marble

Short Story

Rafael was sixteen and bald due to chemotherapy. He had asked the nurse not to shave off his mustache and the fuzz on his chin, which didn’t make him look any older but felt right. He refused to wear a cap, even when the windows were open, and the early Spring breeze kept his mind alert. He wove in and out of sleep to the point when he couldn’t tell the difference, and he liked it that way. The nurse fed him three times a day, he remembered that, as the cold spoon on his lower lip tickled pleasantly and he even managed to open his eyes sometimes. The nurse was an older woman with a rough face and soft hands. She had a slight limp, which he had noticed by the uneven sound of her squeaky shoes on the corridor linoleum.

In the last month, beside his parents, Rafael has had several visits from his art high school friends. They were all girls. His best friends were girls, all the same age, except one, who was a year older. She had been held back a year due to poor grades, and joined his class in September to repeat it. But she refused to visit him, he had been told, because she didn’t like hospitals and being around sickness. He didn’t hold it against her, but he missed her jokes and her strangeness, her smell, which was sweaty and damp, and her unkempt hair.

The person who would also never visit was Bronek, simply because, as Rafael assumed, Bronek wasn’t even aware of the situation.

At every period, Bronek would play ping-pong with the senior boys, some of whom sported thick beards and hairy chests and were pushing nineteen. In gym class, Bronek moved like a panther regardless of the exercise. Rafael’s slim frame and lack of coordination relegated him to the sidelines, where he felt safe. He would watch Bronek on the field without a hint of jealousy, simply enjoying his tall body in motion. He liked the confident grace of his movements. But Bronek’s long, wavy hair didn’t match the muscular energy of his actions. His entire head seemed to belong to a different animal.

Unlike Rafael, Bronek couldn’t paint well. He had passed the five-tier entry exam to the art high school, so the skill was certainly there. But in the painting class, Rafael observed, Bronek looked listless. He couldn’t find the form, his colors always ended up muddy. He kept cracking jokes to compensate for his inadequate efforts, which made Rafael feel sorry. Yet, in all the academic courses, Bronek excelled, as if everything that you could find an equation for, or put in a logical sentence, made perfect sense. For Rafael, structure of logic was the enemy.

They talked for the very first time at the school’s library. It was near the half-term, and they had to do research for a humanities class. Rafael, at fifteen, was a devotee of the 19^th Century romantic poetry, for which he harbored a deep, not yet crystallized affection. In fact, for the last three years he had been reading mostly books from past centuries. Modern literature rarely made an impression on him, with only a few authors carrying on themes that made Rafael feel less lonely. At the library, Bronek had asked Rafael for a book suggestion.

Now, at the hospital, Rafael couldn’t recall the specific topic of that conversation but he remembered the feeling of warmth spilling over his entire body. Just thinking about that moment, he felt the warmth again. Bronek’s face, with his prominent nose peeking through the long, dark bangs, looking down on him with a big-lipped smile, nodding, pulling his brows together in focus, smiling again, finally laughing with a voice that had only recently broken into a teenage falsetto. At the time, Bronek, a few months younger than Rafael, was still fourteen.

When he realized that Bronek hadn’t read much beyond westerns and juvenile fiction, Rafael didn’t feel in the least superior. Over the next months, he introduced Bronek to his beloved authors. It felt like sharing a secret, it felt sweet. While Bronek was resistant to poetry, he eagerly took to novels and short stories. They met after school sometimes, discussing writers, with Bronek always ready for new insight and further suggestions. Rafael sensed that he was feeding the same hunger in the boy with which his own mind had been dealing for years.

Late Spring, quite suddenly, Rafael’s body had informed him of a thirst he would only feel in Bronek’s presence. However warm it made him feel, he kept this sensation to himself. There was no shame in it. He knew what it meant. He had read about these matters before in several books. A few novels described this very exact longing in physical, sometimes graphic detail. A few poems had made him understand the impulse and embrace its beauty. But he decided never to act on that feeling unless given a clear permission.

Without notice, Bronek had quit the art high school the following year, shortly after turning sixteen, propelled by forces beyond Rafael’s understanding, with his hair cropped to a crew cut. The permission never came. He hasn’t seen Bronek since.

The warmth was draining from Rafael’s body.

He felt like opening his eyes again, even if he was dreaming. The inside of his eyelids glowed orange, so he assumed he was awake and the sun must have been blasting through the window. He managed a squint and looked at the wall. There were no bookshelves there, so this was not his bedroom. Aha, he thought.

There were no bruises on his body. He rested on a special pneumatic mattress which prevented bed sores. The hum of the pump was constant and pleasant. He wasn’t attached to anything anymore. They had unplugged the EKG machine a few days ago. His skin was translucent and the last time he had seen his own arm it looked like white porcelain with faint blue brushstrokes. The image was fantastic, he had thought, and moved his fingers to animate the pattern.

Now, he couldn’t move anymore. He hasn’t moved for a week. He learned to think of himself as a marble statue. Perhaps one, he imagined, carved by that sacred Florentine androgyne in defiance of the renaissance tenets. A Pietà of one.

He heard the limping footsteps outside in the corridor. Why did they insist on feeding him at this point? He didn’t feel any hunger. No hunger for days. No hunger for anything, really, except to see that beautiful boy again, even once, and even through his closed eyelids which have just begun to lose their orange sheen.