The Sickness (2 page)

“I didn't phone you earlier because I've only just seen the results of your tests,” Andrés says.

“And?”

“In principle, everything's fine,” he says, touching the sealed edge of the envelope.

“In principle? What the hell does that mean, Andrés?”

“Calm down, Dad. I'm telling you that you're fine.'

“You're telling me that, in principle, I'm fine: that's rather different.”

Andrés is perfectly familiar with this stage too. Generally speaking, patients need to squeeze every word, wringing out its most precise meaning, with every nuance washed away. They want to clear up any doubts, even about punctuation. A patient always suspects that he's not being told the truth or at least not the whole truth, that some information is being withheld. That's why they
insist on delving desperately into everything, even language. In this case, though, his father is right. Andrés said “in principle” because he hasn't yet looked at the X-rays. Why doesn't he take them out now, why doesn't he open the envelope and study them? What is stopping him from looking at those results?

The radiologist's face hangs like a balloon in his office. Hospital corridors tend to be full of such balloons. They drift slowly through the air, identical, tenuous bits of plastic on which are painted frowning brows, grave mouths, sober looks: all the outward signs of helpless resignation. It's a ceremony, a clinical protocol. Hospitals are places through which one passes: temples to farewells, monuments to partings.

“I said ‘in principle' because I still don't have all the results. The ones I've just been given are fine.”

“Which means that . . .”

“That there's nothing to worry about, Dad,” Andrés says, interrupting him, already embarrassed. He can't stand lying for any length of time. “Go out for a walk, have a coffee somewhere with your friends. Everything's fine, really.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I'm sure.”

There is a brief silence. A tense, unbearable pause. Andrés wants to hang up. He can sense that his father is still uncertain, still in doubt. He can imagine him in his apartment, sitting on the arm of the green sofa beside the phone, gripping the receiver, thinking. Suddenly, Andrés feels as if he were poised above a chasm of nothingness,
a precipitous drop. They're suspended for a moment not in silence, but in the void, until:

“You wouldn't lie to me, would you?” His father is speaking from his very bones, in the harsh but intimate voice with which all bones speak. “Andrés,” he goes on, “if there was something seriously wrong with me, you wouldn't ever hide it from me, would you?”

Andrés has a hedgehog on his tongue. His throat fills with pineapple rind. Despite himself, his eyes well up with tears. He's afraid his voice might fail him. He makes a huge effort to speak.

“I would never deceive you, Dad,” he says at last, with as much conviction as he can manage.

“That's all I wanted to hear. Thank you.”

Blood is a terrible gossip, it tells everyone everything, as any laboratory technician knows. Hidden inside that dark fluid, stored away in little tubes, lie murky melodramas, characters brought low, or sordid stories on the run from the law. When his father fainted, Andrés insisted on him having a whole battery of blood tests. His father protested. He tried to make light of the matter. He preferred the term “dizzy spell” to “fainting fit,” and insisted on this almost to the point of absurdity.

“It was just a dizzy spell,” he kept repeating, blaming it on the humidity, the summer heat.

It was, according to him, the fault of the climate rather than an indication of some physical ailment. But the truth of the matter is, he had collapsed on the floor
like a sack of potatoes in front of the woman who lived in apartment 3B. They'd been talking about something or other—neither of them could remember what—when suddenly his father collapsed, and the neighbor started screaming hysterically.

“I thought he'd died. He was so pale! Almost blue! I didn't want to touch him because I was afraid he might already be cold! I didn't know what to do! That's why I started screaming!” says the neighbor.

A few seconds later, his father, once he'd recovered consciousness, had tried to calm her down and reassure her that everything was fine, that nothing very grave had happened. Perhaps he had told her, too, that it was just a dizzy spell. Nevertheless, that same afternoon, the neighbor phoned Andrés to let him know what had happened.

“The old busybody!” his father grumbled when Andrés arrived to pick him up and drive him to the hospital.

While the nurse was taking the blood samples, Andrés suddenly noticed that his father had grown smaller. It had never occurred to him before to notice his size, but seeing his father there, arm outstretched, eyes fixed on the ceiling, so as not to have to look at the needle, it seemed to him that his father had become shorter, had lost height. Javier Miranda is a fairly tall man, almost five foot ten. Tall and slim, with a rather athletic build. He always walks very erect, as if his body didn't weigh on him at all. Despite his age and the fact that he's gone gray, he looks cheerful and healthy. His curly hair has won out over any incipient baldness. His skin is slightly tanned, the color of light clay. His eyes are brown too.
He's never smoked, only drinks occasionally, goes for a walk every morning in the park—Parque Los Caobos—avoids fatty foods, has fruit and muesli for breakfast, and every night eats seven raw chickpeas as a way of combating cholesterol. “What went wrong?” he seemed to be asking himself. He had sidestepped time rather successfully. Everything had been going relatively well until, one afternoon, that inexplicable fainting fit had stopped him in his tracks. It was that brief wavering of his equilibrium that had brought him to this place and abruptly transformed him into this weak, wounded, small—yes, smaller—person. The words “Sickness is the mother of modesty” came unbidden into Andrés's mind. They appear in Robert Burton's
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, published in 1621. It's required reading in the first term of medical school. The quote bothered him though. It struck him as not so much sad as stupid; behind it lay the desire to make of sickness a virtue. He looked at his father again. Isn't sickness a humiliation rather than a virtue?

Up until now, his father's health had only ever succumbed to the occasional common cold, and a brief urinary infection two years ago, but that was all. He enjoyed enviably good health and, so far, there had been no other worrying signs. Andrés, however, had a bad feeling. The whole situation produced in him a peculiar sense of apprehension. With no evidence on which to base that feeling, he thought for the first time that the worst could happen, that it might already be happening. It irritated him to feel hijacked by a mere hunch, to be taken hostage
by something as irrational and unscientific as a bad vibe. His father glanced across at him. Andrés didn't know what to say. It suddenly struck him as pathetic that the fate of a sixty-nine-year-old man could be summed up in just four tubes of dark fluid, O Rh positive. What would his father be feeling at that moment? Resigned? Ready to accept that he was reaching a preordained destiny, that this was a natural conclusion to his life; that now he was entering a stage when people would stick needles in him and when he would inhabit a world dominated by the aseptic smell of laboratories? He again looked hard at his father and was filled by a frightening sense that it was no longer his father meekly putting up with being pricked, touched, and bled, it was just a body. Something apart. An older, more vulnerable body in which his father's spirit writhed in protest. Spirit was an odd word. Andrés hadn't used it in ages. He felt that he was using it now for the first time in years.

 

The two of them. For almost as long as he can remember, it has been just the two of them. His mother died when he was ten. For almost as long as he can remember, Andrés has been the only son of a widower, of a strong man capable of struggling with terrible grief, with great loss. His mother died in an air crash, on a flight from Caracas to Cumaná. The plane was airborne for only a matter of minutes before it nosedived. It was a national tragedy. The work of the rescue team was hard and, for the most part, fruitless. A special room was set up in the Hospital de La Guaira, where the victims' families could
try to identify what little was left: a foot, half a bracelet, the crown of a tooth . . . His father returned from the hospital that night, looking drawn and ashen. He talked for a while in the kitchen with the other members of the family, then picked up his son and left. Andrés already knew what had happened. Despite his aunts' attempts to protect him, he had managed to elude them and, in secret, had watched the events on television. When his father, his eyes red from crying, went to enormous lengths to soften the news he had to give him and told him that Mama had gone away on a long, long journey, a journey from which she wouldn't come back, Andrés, still confused, fearful, and bewildered, simply asked if his mother had been on the plane that had fallen into the sea. His father looked at him uncertainly, then said, “Yes,” and put his arms around him. Andrés can't be sure now, but he thinks they cried together then.

For a long time, Andrés used to dream about his mother. It was the same dream over and over, with very few variations: the plane was at the bottom of the sea, not like a plane that has crashed, but like a sunken ship; it was quite intact, sleeping among the seaweed and the fish and the shadows, which, like cobwebs, danced across the dull sand. Inside the plane, a large oxygen bubble had formed on the ceiling. It was a very fragile bubble that was slowly shrinking. His mother was trying to swim along with her head inside the bubble so that she could breathe. She appeared to be the sole survivor, there was no one else, only fish of different colors and sizes that cruised past her with an air of extraordinary, almost
bored serenity. It was odd, but in the dream, his mother was wearing a swimsuit and shoes—an orange two-piece swimsuit and a pair of black leather moccasins.

As time passed, his mother grew more desperate. Several times she struck the ceiling of the plane, making a distant, metallic sound, like a tin can being dragged through the sea. She peered out through a window onto nothing, only dark water, a liquid penumbra no eye could penetrate. The sea had no memory, it destroyed everything too quickly for that. Then his mother, beside herself, almost suffocating, beat harder on the ceiling of the plane and cried out: “Andrés! Andrés! I'm alive! Come and get me out of here!”

When he woke, he had usually wet himself and was trembling. Even when he got out of bed, he still felt himself to be in the grip of the dream. It would take him almost a minute to get out of that plane and escape from the bottom of the sea, and stop hearing his mother's cries. His father proved a tireless warrior on his behalf. He patiently helped Andrés to defend himself against those enemies. He was always there, on the edge of the dream, waiting for him.

These memories crowded into his mind as he watched his father in the examining room. Did he perhaps have the same presentiment? Andrés would doubtless prefer him not to. When you're nearly seventy, he thought, a bad omen is like a gunshot. At that age, there are no more deadlines, there is only the present.

The nurse removed the needle and handed Javier Miranda a piece of cotton wool soaked in hydrogen peroxide.
He pressed down hard on the place where the needle had gone in and glanced at his son as if pleading for a truce, as if asking if they couldn't just get up and leave. Are the monsters of old age as terrible as those that assail us when we're children? What do you dream about when you're sixty-nine? What nightmares recur most often? Perhaps this is what his father dreams about: he's in an examining room, in the bowels of a hospital, surrounded by chemicals, sharp implements, gauze, and strangers all repellently dressed in white; yes, he's in the bowels of a hospital, looking for a tiny bubble of air, so that he can breathe, so that he can shout: “Andrés! Andrés! Get me out of here! Save me!”

While Andrés was driving his father home, he tried to avoid talking about the subject. It wasn't easy. His father kept muttering bitterly to himself. He claimed that the tests were a complete waste of time, that the only thing they would show was that his cholesterol levels were slightly raised, if that. Certainly nothing more, he insisted. Andrés dropped him off at the door to his apartment building. As he was driving away, he could still see his father in the rearview mirror. There had been a time when he had considered having his father move in with them, but had feared that family life might become a nightmare for everyone. Mariana got on reasonably well with his father, and his children had a lot of fun with him, but those were only sporadic encounters, occasional trips to the movies or to a park, to a restaurant or to a baseball game. Day-to-day life is a different matter, a far more demanding exercise. And yet, at that moment, while he could
still see him, a diminutive figure in the rearview mirror, he again considered the possibility. Sooner or later, if you were an only child, you had to pay for your exclusivity. His father had no one else. If, instead of standing in the corridor, talking to the neighbor, he had been alone in his apartment, it could have been really serious. For a second, Andrés sees the scene with hideous clarity: his father goes into the kitchen to turn off the gas under the coffeepot, he bends over, loses consciousness, and collapses. In the same movement, in the inertia of the fall, his head drops forward, propelled by the weight of his body. It strikes the edge of the stove, then the handle on the oven and, finally, the tiled floor. The green veins in his forehead are swollen and tense. His nose is broken. His right eye looks slightly sunken and there is blood on his right cheekbone. There's more blood above his right eyebrow. He could have broken a rib: perhaps, when he comes to, he won't be able to move or call anyone. The water is boiling. Soon there will be the smell of burnt coffee.