The Sickness (3 page)

That night, Andrés would have liked to make love with Mariana. Not for any special reason and without even feeling any particular desire for her, but he needed to have sex. It was a need, a furious longing to be on top of her, penetrating her, without thinking about anything, without saying anything, just following the urgent pistoning of hips, the rise and fall. But he didn't know how to approach her. He wasn't in the mood to seduce her and felt ashamed to say what he really wanted. Women don't understand that for men sex is sometimes a sport, one they can practice at any time, at any moment, and
with anyone. Masculinity is too basic, too simple. The love ethic tends to be feminine.

“Don't you think you're blowing things up out of all proportion?” Mariana asked before they went to sleep. “You don't even know the results of the tests yet. Why are you getting so upset?”

Andrés reminds her that his father has become rather forgetful lately. Every detail now begins to take on a new importance for him, a new value.

“Even you commented on it recently,” he says. “We were here, having a meal.”

“Yes, true. But that's normal, isn't it? Even I forget things sometimes, so why shouldn't your father? Don't exaggerate. Why insist on thinking the worst?”

He doesn't know why, he certainly didn't know then. But he had that incomprehensible, unpleasant feeling, as if some fatal, imminent event were circling him, the intuition that what had happened to his father that day was the first sign of something much more serious and definitive: Burkitt's lymphoma, for example, or a cutaneous mucinous carcinoma, or an asymptomatic plasma cell neoplasm. Andrés knows perfectly well that nature translates those words in the most pitiless way. What terrifies him most is imagining his father suffering. His father hunched and screaming, racked with pain and weeping. Pain is the most terrible of the body's languages. A grammar of screams. A prolonged howl.

He left Mariana reading in bed and went out onto the balcony. It annoyed him that he should start believing in presentiments. A doctor with a PhD in immunology
and almost twenty years' professional experience has no right to have presentiments. Susan Sontag said that there are two kingdoms: sickness and health. Human beings often have to move between the two. Andrés has often thought that in the middle, on the frontier of those two geographies, stand the doctors, checking passports, asking questions, weighing things up. They may have their suspicions, but they need proof. It's a job that requires evidence. A doctor sees erythema, hematoma, cells, enzymes, proteic variables; a doctor reads symptoms and takes no notice of vibes, hunches, fleeting images.

The sound of the telephone ringing was like an aluminum finger scraping the air. He answered at once. It was the laboratory. The test results he had asked for as a matter of urgency were ready. While he listened to the figures, noting them down on a piece of paper, he continued to feel the same anxiety. It was as if a voracious, insatiable animal had taken up residence inside him and was still there, panting, even when he could see that all the results were normal. Just as his father had said, the only thing wrong was a slightly raised cholesterol level. Everything else was fine, within the usual range. He glanced at his watch and decided that it wasn't too late to call his father. Not that he was in celebratory mood. The wretched presentiment refused to go away, it wasn't satisfied. There is always some piece of gossip over which the blood has no control. He picked up the phone and rang the hospital again. He booked an appointment first thing the next morning to take some chest X-rays and do a CT scan. He didn't want to leave any room for doubt.

Why does he insist on thinking the worst?

Because sometimes the worst happens.

 

It wasn't easy to persuade his father to go back to the hospital. Andrés almost had to drag him there. He immediately got upset and went on the defensive. Andrés showed him the blood-test results and assured him that everything was fine, but his father reacted as anyone else would have:

“If everything's fine, why are you making me go for more tests?”

There was no alternative. Andrés had to sit down and tell him straight: yes, the blood tests were fine, but he wanted to be absolutely sure, that's why he thought his father should have a couple of X-rays and an MRI scan. It was part of a general examination, a routine exercise, simply to confirm that everything was alright.

“Trust me,” he said. “Believe me.”

His father sighed deeply and only then agreed to be taken to the hospital's radiology unit.

 

His father comes out into the corridor and eyes him gloomily. His naked body is covered only by one of those skimpy gowns that tie at the back. Andrés almost runs over to him.

“There, that wasn't so bad, was it?”

His father doesn't answer. He doesn't even look at him now. He could at least grunt a response.

“Now there's just the MRI and the CT scan,” murmurs Andrés, about to propel his father down the corridor.

His father complies, still without looking at him.

“When someone faints,” Andrés explains again, “there has to be a motive, a reason, a cause. That's what medicine is for. If the blood tests don't give me an answer, then I have to try something else. That's all. That's all it is. A matter of searching for answers.”

“He who seeks, finds,” his father mutters reproachfully and continues on down the corridor, still refusing to look at him.

When Miguel arrives, Andrés is already sitting at a table slightly apart from the other tables, drinking his second whisky and ice. Miguel looks harassed and preoccupied.

“Sorry I'm late,” he says as he sits down.

Andrés merely makes a vague movement with his head, neither a nod nor a shake, as if hoping, nonetheless, to communicate something by that gesture. His face almost breathes unease and distress.

“On the phone you said it was something serious,” says Miguel, “but now that I see your face, I feel quite frightened. Whatever's happened?”

Andrés points to the two envelopes on the table.

“Have a look at those,” he says, almost in a murmur.

Miguel picks up one envelope, takes out the X-rays, and holds them up to the light. First, those showing the lungs, then the images from the brain scans.

“There's no mistaking the signs. There's no other way to read them,” says Andrés. “Or is there?”

Miguel turns toward him, tense, not sure what to answer. The waiter approaches and before he can say anything, Andrés cuts in with:

“He'll have a vodka with ice and lemon. A double,” he tells him emphatically, deliberately, his eyes fixed on Miguel.

“I have to perform a fistula operation this afternoon,” Miguel says in answer to a question no one has asked, although he doesn't sound very convinced.

“Just tell me what you think. There's no hope, is there?”

Miguel doesn't so much sigh as snort, before turning back to the X-rays. He again holds them up to the light, looking at them almost obliquely. The contrast between the blue and the opaque white reveals spots, dark irruptions, shadows that should not be there.

“It's a spinocellular carcinoma, isn't it?” Miguel asks, still scrutinizing the results of the scans.

“Stage IV,” says Andrés. Then he points to one of the CT images. “With cerebral metastasis,” he adds, his voice breaking.

“Whose X-rays are they?” Miguel asks rather fearfully, looking straight at him now.

“My dad's,” says Andrés.

They sit staring at each other for a moment, not saying a word, wrapped in that rare complicity that comes with friendship.

“Shit!” is all Miguel can manage to say after that pause.

Andrés quickly talks him through the sequence of events: first, the fainting fit, then his own presentiment, the results of the blood tests, that presentiment again, the
chest X-rays, and the CT scans. Miguel tries to get more details, to find other possible explanations.

“If he weren't my father,” Andrés says, “you and I would have looked at the plates and concluded that there was no hope, that it's the mother of all tumors, that the patient is basically screwed,” he adds, his voice choked with emotion. “There's no need for a biopsy, there's no point in opening him up.”

“Maybe, but . . .” Miguel would like to say something, but there's nothing to say. He can't fool Andrés.