The Sickness (12 page)

“Who's coming to fetch you today?” asks the nurse, helping his body to sit down in a chair in the corridor.

“My daughter-in-law,” whispers Javier Miranda.

“Well, I'll leave you here then,” says the woman. “Now you just sit and wait for her, alright?”

He merely nods sadly, his lips sagging, hanging down toward his jaw. The doctors and the nurses know as well. They don't talk to him, they converse with his body, with that other creature who has to be treated like an idiot child, with that wound that can barely stand, that will soon collapse completely.

While he waits, a nun walks past him along the corridor. She's accompanying an old lady who is clearly in the final stages. Perhaps that's how he looks too. The woman is walking very cautiously, looking fearfully around her. Perhaps she simply wants to escape from this torment, this aseptic horror. The nun by her side is wearing a long, floor-length habit, so that you can't see her feet. When she walks, she seems to be floating. She's a nun floating down a hospital corridor. She's wearing a wooden cross around her neck. Jesus Christ experienced death, he thinks suddenly, but he never experienced illness. The gods die, they don't fall ill. That's their advantage.

 

As soon as he started studying medicine, Andrés Miranda knew that his vocation was not entirely pure. In a way, he always felt incomplete because he didn't share the other students' surgical passion; he was more interested in slides and microscopes than in the practical sessions; he preferred the blackboard to the scalpel. While his colleagues couldn't wait to get down to some practical work, Andrés was happy to postpone that moment. The idea of being in an operating room, dealing with some
emergency, didn't excite him at all. It didn't repel him either, but it obviously wasn't the clinical area for which he felt most enthusiasm. He always felt it was a purely personal thing, and felt more drawn to research, to observation and analysis, than to the practical application of medicine. Many years later, reading
The Wounded Body
, an invaluable philosophical dictionary written by Cristóbal Pera, Andrés at last found the words he had so needed to read during his first years at university: “If we use the
war-like language
so often used as a global metaphor in surgery, the
cruel
surgical operation is an
act of violence
, in which physical force is needed to penetrate the patient's anatomical space, to subjugate the ‘enemy'—the sickness made concrete in the lesion—to disarm and destroy it.” That definition perfectly described a spirit, an inner attitude that Andrés did not have, had never had. The thought of actually
invading
another body didn't thrill him in the least. Even assuming that it was necessary and was an
act of salvation
, his medical vocation seemed always to be somewhere else, stirred by different impulses. Cristóbal Pera adds: “Surgical
violence
has created the image of the surgeon's
power
over the patient and the latter's surrender in a ritual of submission.” Nevertheless, for Andrés, the power lay elsewhere, in the space occupied by knowledge. This was his way of coming to terms with what might be considered a weakness. He preferred the knowledge of books to the knowledge of the hands.

He still remembers how the time he spent working in hospitals was always the most tiresome part of the whole
course. Understanding how bodies work was still his passion, but doing something to a living body, interfering in another's breathing, intervening in another's blood, invading another's flesh, was not an important part of his vocation. He never rejected the experience, but he probably never enjoyed it either. The idea of knowing that he was before, on, or in a living body slightly inhibited his own motivation, his own skill. It wasn't the bodies that intimidated him, but knowing that he had a definite responsibility toward them. Perhaps that's why he felt more comfortable with corpses.

In his university days, corpses were divided into two groups: the mummies and the freshers. The names said everything. The stiffs, which had been used before, belonged to the first group; the newly dead to the second category. No one liked working with the mummies. It was like being with a dummy, it always felt slightly unreal. The mummy was like an old vinyl record that has become more and more chipped over time. A mummy might have a couple of toes missing from its right foot. Once, some joker stubbed out a cigarette on the cheek of a dead boy. That kind of thing happened with the mummies. Any sessions with them gave rise to laughter, childish jokes, distance. The freshers, on the other hand, provoked, at least initially, silence and a strange intimacy.

For Andrés, corpses were an ideal middle path, halfway between books and the emergency operation. They weren't the mere illustration of a text; they had volume, presence, they were real bodies and yet, at the same time, not entirely real, not the whole truth: they lacked
warmth, feeling, urgency. It was precisely in that unreal reality that Andrés found his place. So much so that, more than once, he had wondered if his destiny didn't lie in performing autopsies; he felt almost condemned to the field of diagnosing lifeless bodies, in which the only signs are the past, in which nothing beats and everything is merely mark or trace. For a long time, he felt his vocation was closer to producing “damage reports” than to “the saving of lives.” He belonged to the group or league who always arrive when there's nothing to be done, when all that's needed is a signature on the final balance sheet.

As he progressed in his career, it became clearer to him that in his professional life he was more suited to research or teaching. The prospect of dealing with patients on a daily basis, as part of his work routine, became less and less attractive. It implied a risk he wasn't sure he wanted to run—making a mistake. Making a mistake in a laboratory was quite different from doing so in an operating room. At the time, Andrés began to fall under the spell of the famous Flemish doctor, Andreas Vesalius. He shared with him not only a first name, but a passion for study, a fascination with how the human body works. From him he also learned that curiosity is a high-risk occupation and that peering in at the enigmas of medicine can prove fatal.

Andreas Vesalius was born in Brussels in 1514. He was a brilliant man and considered to be the founder of modern anatomy. He studied in Paris, taught at Leuven, became a professor at Bologna University, and ended up working as a doctor in the imperial court of Charles V. In
1543, he published his work
De humani corporis fabrica libri septem
, a groundbreaking study of the structure of the human body that openly questioned Galen's theories. The book was illustrated with more than three hundred engravings that showed human anatomy as it had never been shown before in the history of civilization. From early on, Vesalius had made his mark on history. He would probably have gone on to do much more, but his life was touched by tragedy: in 1561, in Madrid, the court of the Holy Inquisition sentenced him to death.

Vesalius honed his talents largely on the work he did on dissecting corpses. He had also been given the necessary permissions and blessings to carry out this work. As far as one can ascertain, one fateful day, a body betrayed science: Vesalius opened up a dead man who wasn't dead. Beneath the skin, beneath the thorax, a heart was still beating. Very feebly perhaps. Perhaps the last flicker of a life about to be extinguished. There was nothing to be done. But in that moment, science became a sin. Some studies say that the body belonged to a nobleman close to the throne, which seems unlikely, but what is known is that Philip II spoke up for Vesalius before the Inquisition and saved his life. One legend has it that the doctor was dressed in sackcloth and sandals and, to pay for his error, was condemned to wander the desert for the rest of his life. Another version of the story has the same tragic tone: Andreas Vesalius paid for his guilt by making a long pilgrimage to the Holy Land. On the way back from Jerusalem, the ship in which he was traveling was wrecked in strange circumstances, taking Vesalius down
with it. Thus he paid for his curiosity: either devoured by the desert or by the sea. Drowned in the void.

“Don't succumb to Vesalius Syndrome,” Professor Armando Coll often said to them. “Don't let that paralyze you.”

One afternoon, after class, he went for a drink with his students in a small, insalubrious restaurant called La Estrella China. It was near the university and the students went there because the booze was cheap enough for them to get drunk without spending the whole of their allowance. Professor Coll ordered a whisky. After two hours, and feeling less sober and in a more confiding mood, he confessed that he himself was a hostage to Vesalius Syndrome. That's what he called it. He found the story terrifying. He couldn't understand how humanity could have punished one of its most outstanding geniuses like that. “Vesalius was almost another Da Vinci,” he said. Andrés Miranda drank in every word, full of surprise and admiration. Before taking his leave, Professor Coll looked at them with a kind of melancholy pity.

“All it proves,” he said, “is that the birth of medicine is irremediably bound up with the birth of negligence. They are two inseparable practices, living side by side. Prepare yourselves.”

 

At first, she counted them one by one: she got as far as nine. She could stand it no longer. Ever since the morning of that brief and terrible letter in which Ernesto Durán begged for help, nine days had passed and she had done nothing. There was nothing she could do. She couldn't
phone Durán, nor could she tell Dr. Miranda what had happened. She'd been left locked up alone with her anxiety. Then more days passed; she didn't count them this time, but there were a lot. Too many. Ernesto Durán never wrote again. Nor did he phone. Each morning, though, she repeated the same ritual and rather longingly looked for a letter from him in Dr. Miranda's inbox. Nothing. The last she'd heard from him was that brief message, that cry for help, giving his phone number. Sometimes she's assailed by the image of that e-mail and then she can see Ernesto Durán lying on his bed, very pale, mouth half-open, his breathing labored. He hasn't shaved for days. He looks feebly upward, as if his eyes barely had the strength to see as far as the ceiling. The bed is filthy. There are pools of vomit. The image is filled with the stench of shit and urine. She's also imagined him lying on the floor of his apartment, as if he'd managed to drag himself a few yards before fainting. He's naked. He's been dead for two days. His skin is turning dark, almost violet in color. His mouth is open. An insect buzzes and dances, like a tiny vulture, over the awful stillness of his corpse.

Ernesto has slipped into her nights as well. At two in the morning, Karina starts fearfully awake: in her dream world, Ernesto Durán is holding a knife with which he's cutting his femoral artery. The blood spurts out and spatters the whole dream.

“If you're that worried, why don't you call him?” Adelaida says, appealing to her common sense and meanwhile chewing on a raw carrot. They're both on a diet again.

“What would I say to him?”

“Don't say anything. At least you'll know he's well, that he's alive. Do you want me to phone him?”

Karina shakes her head. When she saw that he was no longer sending e-mails, she had tried phoning him herself on various occasions and at various times. She just wanted to hear his voice and then hang up, nothing more. She just needed to be sure he was safe. But no one ever answered. The phone just rang and rang.

She has also considered going to see him. She found his address in his medical file. He lives in the city center, near Avenida Fuerzas Armadas, on the corner of San Ramón. She could always leave work a little early one evening and simply go over there. She could, for example, wait on the pavement across from his building for a while, where she wouldn't look too obvious, just to see if he went in or out, to make sure he was still alive.

“Do you feel guilty?” Adelaida unleashes the question without warning, one evening when they're both leaning at the bar of Las Cibeles. “Because that's what it looks like.”

“No, I just can't stand not knowing what happened, not hearing from him. That's all. Does that seem odd to you? He sends that message and then . . . nothing. Absolute silence, he's just vanished.”

“Perhaps he's punishing you.”

“Me? If he's punishing anyone, it's Dr. Miranda.”

“Perhaps he got fed up and realized that the doctor's never going to help him, that it's all a bit of leg-pull, that he's never going to take him seriously. Perhaps that was
the final test. And now it's over. The guy disappears for ever.”

But Karina's anxieties are not so easily soothed. That same evening, she stays late after work and decides to try one last thing. She feels more desperation than fear, which is why she takes the risk of writing another letter.

Ever since the illness installed itself between them, their relationship has become less fluid, pricklier, more difficult. Now there are three of them. There is always an
invisible weight between them. They are father and son plus one, the other, a third unnameable force that never leaves them alone. They spend a lot more time together, but time is different now. They talk less and less. They know it, they feel it, but they don't know how to express it, what to do. It may be that both of them would like to leave, run away, never see each other again, but they daren't do that either. They can't bear the thought that they will say goodbye like this, although they have no option. In more than one sense—although it's a dreadful cliché—there is no easy remedy.