Red Eyes

Until that moment, it had been a normal day, endless and tedious, with the notable exception of the white rat. It laid immobile, face-up, on a stainless steel tray placed in the middle of the teacher’s desk. Beside it, it was a beaker over a universal support, filled with a colorless liquid, possibly saline solution, plus another tray with syringes, cotton, a rack of test tubes, small labeled bottles, and surgical instruments. The piece of furniture was placed, strategically without a doubt, in the middle of the room to maximize the attention of the students.

“Finally, something interesting”, she thought. At least, that was what she expected.

At the beginning of her second year in med school, the physiology department had divided the students' group into sections of ten each. The idea was “to maximize the experience” of knowing how the human body functioned, with the peculiarity of doing so in one-month intervals per system, consisting of three weekly classes, four hours in a row each. To the young woman's disappointment, who wished above all things to learn, this hasty assimilation of knowledge, plus the teachers' almost null didactic capacity, turned out neither striking nor stimulating.

For example, the doctor in charge of the nervous system, a well-known neurologist, limited himself to speaking and showing a slideshow. His lectures were given in a small classroom, next to his office; it was as dark as a wolf’s den, the temperature kept as low as a freezer’s. The mix between dark and cold sparkled with the professor's soft voice —it was impossible to deny it, the man had the type of voice that could melt—, made her feel drowsy. The only remarkable half-hour in that whole month was when, to explain the nervous impulse speed, the professor made his assistant place electrodes in a cockroach's legs.

Who should teach them the respiratory system functioning, a foreign physician, used a guide made by himself and of obligatory purchase, written in such a way that there was no manner to make any sense of it. At the end of the period, confusion ran rampant to such an extent that no one knew if the answers given in the two tests they had answered what the professor wanted.

The study of the digestive system hasn’t been much different from its predecessors. The classes were given by an old doctor who, if the gossips were true, had been retired for about a decade, though continued teaching in his field because they weren’t able to find a substitute. One of her classmates took a peek at his identification and said that his I.D. number made his grandfather look young.

The white rat was a step forward. During the last classes, they had studied the functioning of the small intestine. The young woman imagined that the old doctor would use the little animal to show, in the practice, what he was been teaching in a theoretical fashion.

A long time ago, she had interacted with rodents, the first being when she was eleven. A couple of mice had the bad idea of making their nest inside an organ, a gift from a family musician. They had started eating the electronic compounds that had caused damage in the instrument; it was old, true, but it still had a good sound. Her mother wanted to put an end to that, so, while the girl stood at a safe distance holding a long stick, she shook the furniture in a not so delicate manner, and then one of the unwanted tenants ran away. The girl brandished the stick like an ax, with such an aim that almost shop the head of the body. Of course, she didn't get close to the corpse, whose disposition was left to a neighborhood child, who lacked her scruples.

The second time was at the university, without any kind of violence in the mix.

During the introductory course, she was taken on a guided tour of the faculty. Among the different facilities, they entered in one —its name went in one ear and out the other— where animals, most of them rodents of any kind, size and color, cramped cages. From this hatchery, she did remember the smell, typical farm, but with a distinct purpose; these creatures were going to be used for the benefit of science.

Logic dictated that whatever it would be made to the animal shouldn’t affect her. After all, not a year passed, she had participated in a human body dissection. However, this was different. Something unsettled her, she couldn’t pinpoint what it was, but a growing feeling of wrongness started seizing her.

The old doctor began the class by explaining the white rat’s presence and the proceeding he was to perform with it. However, the young woman found it impossible to pay any heed to his words; all her attention was centered on the creature’s red eyes, fixed on the roof. Its little chest went up and down at a steady, calm rhythm, she supposed due to some kind of anesthetic.

Once he finished talking, the professor began the procedure. Using a scalpel, he made an incision in the rat’s belly. After that, with his fingers, he made way between the organs of the abdominal cavity. Then, using tweezers and the scalpel, he removed a section of the intestine. At any time there was bloodshed.