The Sickness (7 page)

At last, she speaks. She does so hesitantly, almost sadly, but without disguising what she feels, without hiding what she thinks. Merny doesn't like the idea of working for a man who is about to die. It's nothing personal, she just doesn't want to be in the apartment when, inevitably, Javier Miranda passes away. That, at any rate, is what Andrés deduces. She doesn't say as much, of course. She utters sighs more than words. She converses
in vague sounds, interjections, thoughtful pauses. In the end, she says that she'll think about it. That's all. She'll think about it.

“I'll tell you later. Now I've got to finish cleaning the bathroom.”

He takes the afternoon off. He phones his secretary and cancels all his appointments. Then he goes to Maripérez station and gets the cable car. It's a weekday, so he doesn't have to wait long. The only other people in the queue are some boys, playing hooky, escaping from that organized tedium known as high school. They spend the whole ride laughing and joking. Andrés says nothing. One of his own kids might skip school one Wednesday to form part of just such a group. They guffaw loudly. One of them has bought a pack of cigarettes. They're probably planning to smoke them on top of El Ávila. They're about thirteen or fourteen. Andrés considers talking to them, telling them he's a doctor, warning them about the dangers of smoking. Smoking kills, even when you're only fifteen, he could say. But he doesn't. There's no point. He was that age once, he's been there. Adolescence is the most unclassifiable of joys.

It's been far too long since Andrés has been up to the top of that mountain. There was a time, in his youth, when he would come whenever he could. El Ávila was
like nature's shopping mall, with few if any regulations, and instead of shop windows, there were dark, mysterious corridors full of nettles, lots of paths you could get lost down. Andrés and Vicente, his best friend at the time, used to go there every week. They even made the climb on foot sometimes. They could take any route: La Julia, Quebrada Pajaritos, Cotiza, even, when they were feeling really adventurous, reaching the peak of Naiguatá, the highest point on the coastal mountain range. They used to sit there on a huge rock. If there were no clouds, you could see the city of Caracas on one side and the sea on the other. They would sit there talking nonsense and smoking marijuana. This was no mere diversion for Vicente, a weekend spliff; he devoted himself with real seriousness to organizing this ritual. He took almost a professional pride in it. He used to get hold of all kinds of different stuff. Once, he turned up with some really high-quality Jamaican weed. They smoked their respective joints and stretched out on the rocks, gazing up at the sky. They spent hours like that, not even talking, a faint, foolish smile on their lips.

The light is whiter up there. The sun is like a slap in the face. It burns differently, it spreads itself, as if it, too, were lying stretched out in the upper air. The wind cuts your lips. Its fingers are like razor blades. They didn't so much climb the mountain as float on it.

The last he heard of Vicente was that he was living near Tampa, Florida, selling vacuum cleaners. It didn't seem possible that the university timetable could have put asunder what marijuana had so forcefully joined together. Vicente was the brother Andrés never had. When
Andrés began studying medicine, Vicente had just started his degree in engineering. They simply stopped seeing each other, and the process seemed so natural that it even occurred to Andrés that their friendship had merely been another subject on the high school curriculum. Just as he had got through math, through the indescribable tedium of Spanish and the apathy of history, so he had got through his friendship with Vicente. Years later, while queuing up to see a film, he met one of his erstwhile friend's brothers, who told him that Vicente had moved to the States, where he lived a comfortable enough life, an Electrolux life, with his wife and three kids.

From the Hotel Humboldt, near the cable-car station, you can't see the city and the sea at the same time simply by turning your head. There are no enormous rocks and not even the sun seems quite so close. Andrés takes his nostalgia for a walk. Even at that age, when he wasn't yet fifteen, he dreamed of becoming a doctor. If he were asked to say precisely when and how he decided to study medicine, he would have to think about it for a long time. People see sickness as a definitive sign: the body within the body, a sign that is at once troubling and disgusting. Perhaps that's why it's usually assumed that medicine is a stubborn, obstinate vocation, almost genetic in its purity: you're born a doctor, born without a fear of peering into other people's bodies and with strength enough to cast an unflinching eye upon other people's blood.

Andrés, however, doesn't feel this is so in his case. He thinks that, for him, medicine was, at first, born more out of curiosity than out of a sense of vocation. He's never
believed that being a doctor is a variant of being a missionary, an almost religious calling, a kind of voluntary service based on a charitable impulse or on the ideal of spending one's life saving other people. Medicine isn't a human quality, it isn't a virtue.

When he scrutinizes his memory, he always bumps up against the same image: one morning, very early, on El Agua beach, on Isla Margarita. Andrés would have been ten years old, and his mother had just died. Perhaps that's why his father decided that the two of them should go and spend a week on the island. They traveled by ferry, naturally. It was part of a family plan to dismantle the apartment in Caracas and cleanse it of any hint of his mother's presence, so as to spare him further traumas. His father took him to the beach while his sisters-in-law checked the shelves and divided up the clothes, the jewelry, and any other belongings that had survived the fatal air crash. On their return, he and his father would find a place with less of a past. The void was preferable. It would be less painful.

They caught the ferry in Puerto La Cruz. It was a noisy old boat. Andrés felt as if he were boarding a rusty whale. It was a real adventure. He ran about on the deck, spent hours watching the sea, waiting for the dolphins to appear, leaping among the waves. He had never been on a ferry before. He had never been on an island. When he remembers it now, he thinks how terrible those same moments must have been for his father. There is Javier Miranda, widower, and his ten-year-old son.

“Come on,” he keeps saying. “What do you want to do next?”

He shows him the sea, points at the curling waves, remains watching by his side, waiting for surprising animals to emerge from the water. There he is, doing everything he can to make his son forget, to stop him missing his mother, to fill up his mother's absence with sun and salt water. The Caribbean is trying to conspire against Freud. Andrés runs to and fro while his father grants his every whim, buys him an orange drink, buys him a fish pasty; when, at last, they spy the coast of the island, the port of Punta de Piedras, they both lean on the rail to witness that encounter with the land. His father tells him about the beaches that await them, of the wonderful time they're going to have. That was his way of mourning: organizing a party for his son.

Over the years, Andrés had gradually managed to track down his first flicker of interest in medicine to that time, to that week on Isla Margarita. It happened on the third day. His father always got him up very early, as if he were afraid that Andrés might wake alone, as if he didn't want him to have a moment without some stimulus, some distraction. As soon as the sun rose, his father would get him out of bed, always eager to invent some new surprise, some new adventure. The previous day they had gone fishing, without success. That morning he proposed running down to the beach to look for jellyfish. At that hour, when the light was still weak and the sand cold, they would be sure to find a few lost among the last fingers of the waves. Some of those white medusas, which could sting you when in the water, always got washed up on the shore during the night. The less cautious, the less
experienced, the fat and the flabby, didn't make it back, but remained there on the sand, along with other detritus from the sea, condemned to a slow death, drying up and suffocating in the air and the sun.

Andrés only woke properly when the icy water touched his feet. They walked for nearly half a mile but found only one small jellyfish. However, parked on the sand at the end of the beach was a police car. Next to it stood a group of officers. He and his father ran toward them. A man's body lay on the sand. His clothes were slightly tattered, his skin purple, and his lips very swollen. Out of the cavity of his right eye sprouted some yellow foam, like very pale broccoli, like some sort of soft coral emerging from the man's head. Javier Miranda squeezed his son's arm and tried to drag him away, but Andrés stayed where he was, absorbed, studying the body. The policemen gave some vague explanation. The man wasn't a tourist. They assumed he was a local fisherman. They were waiting for a pathologist to arrive and examine the body.

“He's alive!” said Andrés in an anxious, childish voice.

While his father was listening to what the policemen had to say, Andrés, intrigued, had gone closer to the body. He heard it breathe. He saw the gaping mouth, saw the fat lips tremble slightly; he crouched down and once more heard the man breathe.

“He's alive!” he said again, shouting this time.

Only his father hurried over to him and took his hand. The officers looked at each other and smiled. One of them laughed out loud. Or that, at least, is what Andrés remembers.

“He's breathing,” he murmured rather sadly, while his father drew him away from the corpse.

“No, he's not,” said the policeman. “Listen, kid. What you can hear is the water moving around inside the body. That's all. Listen,” he repeated, crouching down beside him. They all stayed still for a moment in expectation, and a liquid whisper slipped out onto the air. “Did you hear that? It's just water. But the guy's dead alright.”