The Sickness Read online

  “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.

  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.

  Dear Dr. Miranda,

  Did my e-mail not reach you? I’m a bit of a novice on the Internet, perhaps I pressed the wrong button. I’ve been thinking about this while I’ve been waiting. I keep checking my inbox to see if there’s a message from you, but there never is.

  Meanwhile, I haven’t even attempted to phone you. The last time, your secretary told me that those were your instructions, that you yourself had told her not to put me through, that you had even asked hospital security not to let me in if I should show my face there. I don’t believe it, I said. I can’t believe it. And she hung up. I haven’t phoned since. But I’m still worried, Doctor, I don’t understand what’s going on. There’s no logical explanation for all this. That’s why I persist, that’s why it’s so important that I write you another letter, that’s why it’s so important that you should answer.

  It also occurred to me that perhaps you don’t remember me. Is that the reason? It seems rather odd, but then again it might explain why you haven’t yet responded. Or perhaps you’re confusing me with someone else. That’s another possibility. I’ve spent the last few days going over and over all this in my mind. You probably don’t remember most of the people who pass through your office. How many patients do you see a day? Seven, eight, ten, twelve? Possibly more. Multiplied by the five days of the week, of course. That’s a lot of people. You probably think no one could remember that many people. But I’m sure no one forgets you
. For us, you’re the doctor. Our doctor. My doctor. For you, we’re just patients in general, anonymous beings, your patients, people who wait to be seen. The word says it all—patients—people who are patient. For us, on the other hand, you have a first and a last name. You’re Dr. Andrés Miranda. You’re unique.

  I’m worried now that you’ll take what I’ve just written the wrong way. I hope not. I’m only saying all this because it has to do with my relationship with you. If I may, I’m going to remind you of our first meeting. I found out about you while I was visiting another doctor, in one of those medical journals you get in waiting rooms. I read an article you’d written about the relationship between doctors and patients. You said, and I’m sure you’ll remember this, that it was part of the treatment, that the relationship between doctor and patient could contribute to the healing process. You said that we shouldn’t speak of illness but of ill people. That illness, in general terms, did not exist. That only individual people, ill people, existed, and that the relationship between doctor and patient should be a personal as well as a medical one.

  That idea made such an impact on me that I immediately looked you up so that I could come and see you, so that you could be my doctor. I told you all this during our first appointment. And you listened to me very attentively. At least that’s how it felt. I felt that you were really listening to me. We talked about my job at the telephone company. We talked about my life, my family, my parents, my brothers and sisters. I told you about my divorce, about how badly I got on with my ex-wife, and still do. Then we moved on to the physical symptoms. You were very attentive about those too. I felt you were listening to me with genuine and profound interest, with respect. I tried to explain in detail what was going on. Since I don’t know whether you remember or not, I feel I should repeat it all here. If you don’t mind, it’s your turn to be patient.