The Sickness (13 page)

Andrés goes with him to the chemotherapy sessions and tries to be with him in the apartment after four in the afternoon, when Merny has left. She has finally agreed to come every day to his father's apartment, although it sometimes seems that she doesn't want to get too involved. Andrés thinks she's just protecting herself, that she doesn't want to share in his father's death. Perhaps that's partly how they all feel: the certain sense of imminent death produces other forms of life.

The kids are aware that something's going on too. They may not know precisely what it is, but they know. It's not just their grandfather's pallor, the hair loss, and the look of resigned sadness that seems to have settled in his eyes. Behind the grown-ups' pact of silence, there's something that not even his clinical appearance can conceal. It's hard to define, barely palpable, but, at the same time, obvious. It's there. It's a managed, domesticated violence, but by no means submissive or tame. It remains a brutal violence. Right before their eyes, a life is being
pitilessly laid waste, swept away. There's a lot of gauze, a lot of cleanliness, a lot of qualified staff, but there's no pity. It's a crime to which there are far too many witnesses, a legalized crime, a crime no one can stop.

In Christa Wolf's novel,
In the Flesh
, a woman in hospital realizes with horror: “There's someone trying to murder me.” Exactly.
She
is. Her own illness is. Andrés shouldn't read books like this, but he seeks them out, with ever more determination; perhaps he's trying to find in their pages what he can't resolve at the hospital, at home, at the cinema, or over family lunches on Sundays. Some nights, he reads into the small hours. He's closed his office for a month.

“I'm on vacation,” he said.

And yet that isn't enough. Whenever he's alone with his father, he doesn't know what to say, how to look at him. Javier Miranda seems to feel the same. He doesn't say anything either. He stares at the floor or mutters some brief response, says he's tired and falls asleep or pretends to. Andrés stays with him, in silence. It seems to him cruel, absurd. This is exactly what will await them both when it finally happens. Silence. This is their sole destiny. Silence. This is precisely what they both fear and what hurts them most. Silence.

Perhaps he's imagining his death. Perhaps his father is thinking about that all the time, about the exact situation, the precise moment when his existence will end. When Andrés thinks about his own death, he has more fears than certainties. A recurring image troubles him: he's with some friends at a restaurant. Everyone is eating,
drinking, and talking. Suddenly, he suffers a massive heart attack. Out of the blue. No burning sensation in the stomach, no shooting pains up the left arm. It's like a gunshot, like a bullet that doesn't leave his body, but stays inside, that fells him in half a second. That's the last thing Andrés sees: a few glasses, an ashtray, an almost empty bread basket . . . that is his final landscape as he crashes face-down on the table.

But his father would never have imagined that his death would be the way it presents itself to him now. Sickness is a mistake, a bureaucratic blunder on nature's part, an absolute lack of efficiency. Everyone wants a swift death that lasts only a second, that is as surprising as it is lethal. It's a very deep desire, part of the human condition. Sudden death is almost a utopia.

His father, however, avoids thinking. He resists, he forces his imagination or his memories to move on whenever he feels those thoughts approaching, trying to corral him. At first, immediately after they got back from Isla Margarita, he started doing inexplicable things. Every morning, he would walk to the newspaper kiosk three blocks from his house, buy a pack of cigarettes and, on the way back, break each cigarette in half, one by one. He kept up this routine for a week and a half, every morning.

Then he started buying things he didn't need. One Saturday, he went to the Chinese market and bought various bottled sauces, bean sprouts and other herbs that he subsequently threw in the bin. One afternoon, he went to the building where he had worked for thirty-eight years. He stood at the door, as if stunned, just looking. He saw
himself going in through that door, every day, for years and years. He saw himself in different suits, the pale gray one, the brown one he bought in December, the blue one with the wide lapels, and the different ties he wore. It was a film repeating the same shot ad infinitum, that one brief scene. For thirty-eight years, Javier Miranda worked as an administrator for the oil industry. First, when they were still American-owned companies, and after they were nationalized too, but always in the same building. At sixty-five they retired him, him and his whole generation. He doesn't know for how long he stood there. He thought about going in, about going up to the eighth floor, but felt afraid. He probably wouldn't know anyone now, and no one would know who he was. He walked home. He was walking for several hours.

His habits changed too. He stopped watching television. He even lost interest in baseball. But sometimes, he would spend hours in silence, staring at the blank screen, watching the faint reflection of his body in the lifeless, opaque glass. Even at moments like that, he didn't want to think, he wanted just to sit there in the void and let drowsiness and lethargy sweep over him. But that's not possible. Sooner or later, he has to stop running away, the attempted escape always fails. How would you like to die? Now he thinks that we should all have the right to answer that question.

This evening, while his father is sleeping, the phone suddenly rings. Andrés answers, but the person calling immediately hangs up. When this happens again with exactly the same result, Andrés concludes that this cannot
be mere chance. The person ringing doesn't want to speak to him. He becomes suspicious. His father doesn't have a service that identifies the caller, and so he can't even find out where the call came from. Who could it have been? Someone who doesn't want to speak to him. Why?

A week later, the same thing happens. His father is having a shower. He's getting steadily weaker, but he still resists being helped by Andrés. It also embarrasses him for his son to see him naked, “like a wet chicken.” The phone rings. Andrés answers, says “Hello,” and immediately the other person hangs up. It happens again. Now, though, Andrés picks up the phone and says nothing. He can almost feel the breathing at the other end, a hesitation wrapped in a breath. It's only a matter of seconds, but he can touch them, feel them. Then suddenly:

“Is that you?”

Surprise paralyzes him. The woman's voice disarms him, he doesn't know what to say. She immediately ends the call. He hears the click of the phone being put down.

“Who was it?” asks his father from the bathroom.

Andrés hesitates before replying. Then, as if testing him out, he says:

“I don't know. They hung up when they heard my voice.”

“Perhaps it was a wrong number,” says his father softly, after a pause, and without much conviction.

Andrés makes of this possibly unimportant detail an enigma that he tries obsessively to resolve. Mariana even pokes gentle fun at him for this. Perhaps it's mere
coincidence, a banal fact of his father's day-to-day life. But nothing is the same for Andrés anymore. Or so it seems. He suddenly feels that he has never paid much attention to his father's private life. He has never known him to have a girlfriend or partner or even a fleeting affair. Nor was he ever very interested. But now, that woman's voice on the phone has become a source of curiosity: it uncovers all kinds of questions that Andrés has never asked himself, a slice of his father's life of which he knows nothing. It's true that Javier Miranda never remarried. He devoted himself entirely to bringing up his son and then, when Andrés got married, he carried on working and cultivated a routine that seemed to have no room for love or sex.

“Your dad has a right to a private life too, you know,” Mariana says. “Perhaps he did have girlfriends, but didn't want you to find out. There's no reason why you should know everything.”

But Andrés wants to know everything. He leaves his father with Merny at the hospital for another session of chemo, and goes straight back to the apartment. He wants to poke around, rummage, pry, as if he were a private detective. Javier Miranda's bedroom is fairly austere. No decorative details. A double bed with blue sheets, two pillows, a wooden bedside table on which there is a lamp, a book, and a remote control for the TV. The book is one Andrés gave him a few weeks ago. The jokey, slightly nostalgic memoirs of a Caracas journalist. It was the only thing Andrés and Mariana thought he might like.

Gray curtains at the windows. A large wardrobe, with two wide doors. Andrés opens them gently, as if not wanting to make any noise. There's a shelf on which sit three photos: one of Andrés's mother, one of Andrés and his father crouched together on a beach; the third of Andrés, Mariana, and the grandchildren. The clothes hang there, still and perfect. Andrés opens the drawers and glances inside. At that moment, he feels ashamed, embarrassed. It strikes him as rather ridiculous being there, behind his father's back, handling things, looking through his father's underwear, riffling through his shirts. What is he looking for? What does he really want to find? Is it possible to find a life that's over, that might already be lost to them both?

In the drawer of the bedside table he comes across an envelope stuffed with letters. Again he feels ashamed, dishonest, but he has come too far now, there's no point in turning back. They are short letters, unsigned, but clearly in a woman's handwriting. Or so Andrés believes. Besides, the letters themselves tell him this. They appear to be brief declarations of love, either delivered by hand to his mailbox or slipped under the door. No dates, no names, no concrete details. It all seems to indicate a clandestine affair, one that must be kept hidden. One note in particular attracts his attention: it's written on the back of half a dry-cleaning ticket. Just two lines: “I dropped by this afternoon. I wanted to surprise you. I needed a kiss. I needed you.”

There's a book in the drawer too:
Dying with Dignity
by Hans Küng and Walter Jens. Andrés can't help feeling a
slight tremor. Where would his father have got that book? The top right-hand corner of page thirty-five is turned down. That's as far as he must have got. Perhaps he stopped on that very page last night. Andrés reads the chapter heading: “Euthanasia discussed: the merciful death.” He closes the book and the drawer. The fact that his father has it hidden away in there means that he doesn't want anyone else to see it. And anyone else means Andrés.

 

His father and Merny have made a pact. Or, rather, he has imposed a pact on her. They both reached crisis point one afternoon, when they were alone together in the apartment. He was having a really bad reaction to the chemotherapy. The immediate aftereffects were ghastly: he felt dreadful, his blood pressure was low, he was feeling dizzy and nauseous, and he was taking epamin to avoid possible convulsions. He'd had a chemo session earlier that morning. At lunchtime, Merny had served him what the nutritionist had recommended. He ate reluctantly, muttering and protesting.

“It all tastes the same,” he said.

Merny did not respond. She wasn't having a good day either. Willmer had been out all night. She hadn't been able to sleep. He'd been behaving oddly for some time, and she knew something was wrong. The neighbors said her son was getting into bad company, that he'd been seen with boys from another barrio.

“Not good,” thought Merny.

Not good meant crack, guns, police, prison, and cemeteries. Willmer finally got in at six in the morning.
Merny wanted to slap him, but didn't dare. Jofre didn't either. After all, he wasn't the boy's father. Willmer went straight to his room, without saying a word, he appeared to be under the influence of drugs. Merny left for work, because she has to work, because she can't miss a day, because now more than ever she needs money to get Willmer out of the barrio. That's the only solution. Send him somewhere far away from there. To her sister in the country, for example. That, she thinks, is the only way to save him.

 

The old man leapt out of bed and ran screaming to the bathroom. He just had time to kneel down by the toilet bowl, but it was too late, he had already vomited his guts up on the way there. The corridor and the bathroom floor were a real mess. In the washbasin, too, there were the remains of his lunch mixed up with other fluids, saliva and dribble, remnants of Javier Miranda's own body. He stayed hunched over the toilet bowl, trying to withstand the retching. He let out a low roar. Everything the body expels stinks, is disgusting and shameful, repellent leftovers no one wants to see, that should be swiftly cleaned up, covered up, erased. That's what Merny's there for.

But Merny had her own crisis. She vomited up her existence in another way. She exploded. She screamed. She'd had enough. She took off her apron and flung it down. She couldn't help it. There she was, just about to leave, having left everything spotless. She had her own dirt, in her own house, far away, in another world. She didn't want any more work to do. For a moment, the scene seemed
utterly incomprehensible. The old man hugging the toilet bowl, coughing and groaning, and Merny standing nearby, beating the wall with her fist, shouting and crying. They remained like that for a while, two bodies furiously flailing and protesting, until gradually they calmed down, not looking at each other, not touching, each in their own place, letting their breathing return to normal.

Between them, they cleaned it all up. They had to put bleach on the floor and the tiles. The fetid smell had invaded the apartment. It was like a second skin tattooed on every object. The apartment was like the belly of some infected animal. Javier invited her to go out somewhere for a drink. Merny declined, embarrassed, saying she really should go straight home. In the end, he made her go with him. They went to a nearby café. She didn't want to order anything, so he ordered them each a coffee. When they finally felt able to talk, the first thing Merny did was to apologize. The old man had a hard time convincing her that it wasn't necessary. It was even harder to get her to open up and tell him what was going on in her life. That was when they made their pact. Javier Miranda offered to give her all the money she needed to send Willmer off to Los Andes, where one of Merny's sisters lived. In exchange, they would have a private agreement, behind Andrés's back.