The Sickness (16 page)

“Why are we here? Each of you has a very personal reason for being here. It may be that the reason is a cause of shame or sadness to you. You feel weak, vulnerable. You're afraid. Do you know what? You're not alone. No, you're not the only ones. Look around. There are men and women here, young and old. There are white people, brown people, black people. We none of us look very alike. You probably didn't even know each other until today. And yet I'm sure that at the moment you're all experiencing more or less the same emotions. And I'm going to tell you something. A lot of people wouldn't even dare come to this workshop. I mean it. Even the name frightens them. People just like you, who feel the same, but who have allowed themselves to become frozen, who have closed the door on their life and given up. But you haven't, you've taken the risk, you did it, you're here, at the first session of a workshop called ‘Learning to die.' That's why I'm applauding. I'm applauding you. I mean it. Because I'm really excited to see you here. Because you're amazing and I congratulate you.”

They take the bus back to the apartment. Javier Miranda doesn't want to go on the subway. He prefers to
be above ground so that he can see the city. It's midday, the sky is intensely blue and clear and the sun, high up, is like a white stone. They manage to get a seat and sit down next to each other. Merny says nothing. She only speaks when he asks:

“So what did you think of it?”

“Odd.”

“In a good way or a bad way?”

“I don't know, just odd.”

He looks at her and smiles. And she smiles too.

 

She doesn't even reread the e-mails now, she knows them by heart. She has read them so often that she might even be able to recite them. She doesn't need to look at them. At some point, a transition, a journey took place, and the words of Ernesto Durán stopped being something outside her, on the computer screen or printed on a piece of paper, and became something that lives and breathes inside her. She has even found herself counting adjectives. There are so few. More than once, she has been surprised by the memory of a particular phrase, for example: “There was a ravine inside my body.” Karina takes a worryingly short time to mentally locate that sentence in the first few lines of the fifth paragraph of the third letter sent by Durán on June 12 at 6:24 in the evening.

She hears a report on the radio about people who are setting up a strange society, the National Patients' Union. They want to form a kind of trade union where people can defend themselves against doctors, protect themselves from medicine. It immediately occurs to Karina
that Ernesto Durán is likely to be involved, that he's probably one of the leaders of this infant organization. She tries to listen as closely as possible to the item. That same night, on television, she sees an interview with some of the people behind the movement. The first to speak is a lady who describes how she was bitten on the arm by some strange creature, which she assumed was an insect, although she didn't know which kind. It wasn't any common-or-garden variety, not a mosquito or a gnat or a midge. It was something else, she says. Anyway, her arm started to swell up and turn purple and she had no option but to go to the emergency room. She was seen by the doctor on duty, who—according to her—merely poked around in her inflamed arm with a syringe. He didn't ask her anything, or say anything, or give any explanations. Karina guesses that the woman is telling the truth because, even now, when she recalls the moment, she grows angry and finds it hard to get the words out, she seems about to weep with rage. When the doctor finally grew tired of scraping around beneath her skin, he said that he'd found nothing, left her under observation for two hours and then gave her an antibiotic, explaining that the antibiotic wasn't for the bite, but for what he'd been doing with that wretched syringe. “Don't worry about the bite,” the doctor said. “It's nothing. It'll clear up in time.” She paid a small fortune and went home with an idea jumping about inside her head: a National Patients' Union.

Then several other people speak. A boy whose little sister died from a lack of oxygen in a hospital in the west
of the city. A man with only one leg, who accuses an anesthesiologist of negligence. A nurse who claims to know the world of doctors from the inside and who says that, as well as being a nurse, she, too, is in need of nursing. There's no sign of Ernesto Durán. Karina even tries to get in touch with the organization, and manages to speak to one of the people interviewed, but to no avail. No one knows him, no one knows anything about Durán.

“You're not well. This obsession of yours isn't normal.”

Adelaida thinks someone has put the evil eye on Karina, that someone—who knows, perhaps Ernesto Durán himself—has paid for some kind of spell to be put on her and send her mad. She also believes that Karina should fight back with the same medicine. Through herbs, a medium, voodoo, or a soothsayer, some power that doesn't belong to the known world, that calls for more faith than science. Karina has given her a vague, truncated version of what's happening to her. She hasn't again experienced quite what she did in the video store, although there have been a couple of similar incidents, the worst of which happened only two days ago, on the subway. It was, of course, the rush hour. Karina was standing, crammed up against the other passengers. It took only two seconds for her to realize she was about to have an attack. She was gasping for air, her heart was pounding, she broke out in a cold, sticky sweat, her tongue swelled up so much she felt as if she had a huge toad in her mouth, a rough-skinned creature scraping against the roof of her mouth and preventing her from breathing, suffocating her. She
jumped out at the next station, swearing that she would never again travel on the subway.

Adelaida insists that it isn't something physical or biological. No syringe can protect you against the evil eye. No antibiotics can do battle with a curse. Faced by such a situation, science crumbles, it's a war that has to be waged by different means, with different weapons. Karina prefers to think that it's just a phase, part of the temporary anxiety she's feeling, that it won't last, that she'll wake up one morning and it will be gone, that somewhere a pleasant, calm Thursday awaits her, with no fear, no feelings of asphyxia, no dizziness, a Thursday when Ernesto Durán will not even be a memory.

 

He spent the morning in the operating room. Although he chose to work in general medicine because he'd never felt at ease with surgical practice, Andrés does sometimes help out at the occasional operation. Usually, this is at the request of a friend. Miguel often asks him. Today it was Maricruz Fernández. They had opened up a patient with two tumors on her liver. Maricruz wanted Andrés to have a look at them, to get his opinion. The second tumor, in particular, was causing confusion. Half of it was soft and the other half hard, and only one side of it was cerebroid in appearance. This time, Andrés felt dizzy, something that had never happened to him before. As he bent over the woman's body, he suddenly felt as if the ground had slid from under him, as if he might drown in those intestines, plunge in and be lost forever inside that dark, slimy liver.

He made an excuse and left as quickly as he could. He went to the cafeteria and drank a glass of orange juice. Now he's sitting outside the door of the chemotherapy room, staring into space, thinking. In the last week, his father has deteriorated terribly fast. The voracity of certain diseases is truly repugnant. Andrés finds his tolerance for such things is decreasing as his own suffering increases. He even finds the clinical terms unbearable:

These are words that travel up and down hospital corridors all the time. He closes his eyes and he can hear them. They glitter and gleam in the middle of any conversation, they stand out among the other simple words, the words that serve only to live, but not to confront death. It seems to Andrés now that they form part of a pretentious, useless dictionary. This morning, when he went to fetch his father, he found him sitting on the bed, naked. He looked unconscious, although his eyes were open. Andrés hesitated for a few seconds, thinking that his father might feel embarrassed. Such unexpected intimacy was very cruel. He decided to go over and sit down beside him. His father didn't move. From closer to, Andrés could see how fragile he was. His spindly legs. His limp penis, like a finger fallen asleep in the wrong place, as if it had never been a penis. His bones were more prominent. They now
provided the dominant framework of his body. The expression on his face was one of deep disillusion.

“How are you?” Andrés put his arm around his father's shoulder, taking care to feign a quite incomprehensible optimism.

“Terrible.” His father still didn't look at him. “I've had enough, Andrés. I don't want to go on. I don't want any more treatment.”

“You've just woken up feeling a bit low, that's all,” Andrés insisted, although the words felt rough on his tongue. It seemed to him it was his duty, his role, to say something of the sort.

“I woke up today feeling exactly as I did yesterday. And the day before yesterday. And the day before that.”

“Come on, I'll help you get dressed.”

“No, I mean it. I don't want to go.”

“You have to.” Andrés crouched down in front of him. They looked hard into each other's eyes.

“It hurts,” his father said after a pause, almost in a whisper. Almost like an exhalation. “Everything hurts. It hurts like hell.”

Now, sitting in the corridor, he can no longer hear the clinical words, no more
neoplasm ischemia pleural empyema
. It hurts like hell. That's all he can hear.

Julio Ramón Ribeyro wrote in his diary: “Physical pain is the great regulator of our passions and ambitions. Its presence immediately neutralizes all other desires apart from the desire for the pain to go away. This life that we reject because it seems to us boring, unfair, mediocre, or absurd suddenly seems priceless: we accept it
as it is, with all its defects, as long as it doesn't present itself to us in its vilest form—pain.”

Andrés decides to spend the rest of the day with his father. He invites him to have lunch in his favorite restaurant, a discreet place whose food has been much praised, assuring him that they make real homemade fare. His father doesn't seem very keen. Andrés insists. So much so that, in the end, it's as if his father were making a real sacrifice in accepting. They don't enjoy the food. His father is feeling horribly nauseous. He has such chronic acid reflux that he can't eat anything. They go home in silence. His father undresses and gets into bed. Andrés sits down beside him again. What can he do? What does his father expect of him? Is there anything he can do, is there any way of helping him? His father lies down on his back, staring vacantly up at the ceiling. Andrés opens the drawer of the bedside table.

“I was looking for your pills the other day and I came across this,” he says, and shows him the book.

His father doesn't seem particularly interested, and so Andrés holds the book in front of his eyes. His father eventually manages to whisper:

“A nurse at the hospital recommended it to me.”

“
Dying with Dignity
,” Andrés reads. “Not exactly optimistic.”

“Life isn't optimistic.”

Andrés sighs, leans closer and affectionately strokes his father's bald head.

“You're not thinking of doing anything foolish, are you, Dad?”

“The only foolish thing I can do is to die, and I'm doing that right now.”

Andrés doesn't know what else to say. He drops the book onto the bed and continues stroking his father's head. They both stay like that for a few moments, until Andrés decides to take a risk.

“Why did you never tell me?”

“About what?”

“About Inés Pacheco.”

His father sits up and looks at him. He seems more disappointed, even angry, than surprised. Despite his weak state, he maintains a haughty, almost severe mien.

“I met her. I went to see her,” says Andrés.

And then the old man slowly deflates, as if that sudden burst of spirit had simply emptied out through some secret hole. He gives a snort and slumps back onto the bed. Then he closes his eyes, as if he didn't want to hear any more.

“Didn't she tell you? Didn't she mention it?”

His father remains sunk in his own thoughts.

“Does she know what's happening to you, that you're ill?” Andrés continues asking questions even though his father refuses to answer.

After a few moments of silence, Andrés also lets himself slide very slowly onto the bed, so that he's lying beside his father. Then he, too, lies staring up at the ceiling. They probably both just wish it would end, that it was over. Death is preferable to pain. Illness is a very bitter toll to pay, a tax so capricious that it can make death the object of all our final desires.

“I smell bad,” his father says suddenly, still with his eyes closed.

He's right, but Andrés doesn't respond. Every illness produces inside the body its own particular distinguishing marks.

“It's as if I'd already started to rot.”

Andrés doesn't look at him either. He doesn't dare.

“It's just that you're very depressed, Dad,” he whispers, a lump in his throat.

“Can't
you
smell it? I smell strange, of ammonia and things. Even when I've showered, I still smell.”

Andrés gently reaches out and takes his father's hand in his. He closes his eyes, as if he wanted to close his memory too, as if he didn't want it to hold on to that image.