Alberto Barrera Tyszka - The Sickness

Ernesto Durán

Dear Dr. Miranda,

I’ve just sent you an e-mail that I now wish I could erase. It suddenly occurred to me that I may have come across as too effusive, a bit crazy. Please don’t be alarmed. It was just the reaction of the moment. Please don’t be frightened. It really was a momentary madness because I felt so pleased and happy. I do hope you understand. I wouldn’t want to scare you off again.

Yours sincerely,

Ernesto Durán

Dear Dr. Miranda,

Just one more thing. I thought of it after I’d sent you the previous message. But once you’ve sent a message, you’ve sent it. There’s no getting it back. Then I thought of other things as well. And I wanted to say that, from now on, you set the rules. I wanted you to know that I’m ready to do whatever you say, that, from now on, our relationship will be entirely on your terms. You are the doctor, after all. I promise you I’ve changed. I promise that I’m already much better.

Yours gratefully,

Ernesto Durán

The days they spend on the island are not as Andrés expected, starting with the scenery: there’s nothing about the beach or the sea that reminds him of the island of his childhood. It seems bizarre to think that once, early in the morning, the beach was full of dead jellyfish; now, each morning, it’s full of German and Canadian tourists, hefty men with tattoos on their arms, terribly pale-skinned people who perhaps run a petrol station in Hamburg and are now taking advantage of a cheap vacation in the Caribbean. However, this is just a detail, a daily excuse not to face up to what he’s come there to do. It doesn’t matter which beaches they go to, what plans they make, he still cannot speak to his father. He watches the hours and the scenery pass with the same feeling of impotence, incapable of telling him the truth.

One day, they go to Macanao, the wildest, remotest part of the island, where the sun appears to have got stuck, its gaze fixed forever on one stone. The light is very low. The desert landscape is another version of the sea, with which it contrasts or converses. They are two parts of the same body, the blue sea that seems to move as naturally as breathing and the brown earth, eternally motionless. Not even there, on Playa de Punta Arena, can Andrés confront his father and tell him once and for all the terrible news. He can never find the appropriate moment, there’s always something not quite right, he can never get up the courage. He starts to think then that the trip wasn’t a good idea, that it takes more than just a change of location to be able to speak the truth. The sea and the earth, blue and brown, seem to him parts of the same cadaver.

He finds it very hard to get to sleep at night, and when he does finally manage it, he sleeps badly, fitfully. He never feels rested when he wakes up; he gets out of bed like someone coming home from a dark and arduous task, as if returning to the light after a fierce battle. When he opens his eyes each morning, he feels that he’s in flight from something, that he’s escaped by the skin of his teeth, who knows from what, who knows how? He doesn’t even remember what it was he was dreaming; he just has a feeling of dense anxiety beneath his eyelids, nothing more.

His father, on the other hand, seems to sleep peacefully. Andrés would have preferred not to share a double room, but his father insisted, it seemed to him an unnecessary expense to have a room each.

“After all, we are family,” he muttered to the clerk who greeted them at the hotel reception.

That’s doubtless what family is for, thought Andrés: putting your toothbrushes side by side and sharing the same roll of toilet paper, discussing whether or not to change TV channels, finding hair in the drain of the shower, not being able to sit for a moment in silence without the other person asking, “What’s wrong?”, closing one’s eyes peacefully, turning out the light and not feeling afraid, being near. Every night, his father falls asleep first. Around eleven o’clock, his head starts to droop, to nod, he fumbles with the newspaper, as if trying to hold on to one particular page, until finally the night defeats him. His father wears pale striped pajamas, blue or perhaps gray. He sleeps on his back, with his arms outstretched and his mouth half-open. Andrés is surprised to see this, it almost seems to reveal an excess of trust: his father lies there with such marvelous placidity, certain that nothing will disturb him; he sleeps as if nothing could ever hurt him, as if he were a small boy on a family vacation who has fallen asleep on the grass without a care in the world, knowing that no threat hangs over him. Andrés watches in envy. He, on the other hand, lies on his side, arms folded, almost hunched up, head pressed into the pillow.

His father doesn’t snore either. The first night, though, Andrés lay for a long time, listening to his breathing. When they were lying there in the dark, he realized that the quiet sound of his father’s breathing was beginning to fill the whole room; he felt that the air was creaking as it entered and left his father’s body; he couldn’t help recalling a vast catalogue of neoplasms: a section of lung with multiple tumoral nodules like a piece of meat covered in mushrooms, a lymphagitis carcinomatosa in which the lung resembles a dried fish; images of tumoral ulcerations, of parechymal invasions that leave yellowish areas and hemorrhagic foci; images of pulmonary lymphatic territories on the verge of necrosis. . Unable to sleep, Andrés sat down on the bed and turned on the TV again, but continued to watch his father sleeping, on his back, arms outstretched and mouth half-open, resting, as if nothing were happening around him, as if nothing were happening inside his body either. Andrés went over to him, crouched by his bed and again listened to his breathing. He doesn’t know how long he stayed there, motionless in the shadows and the oblique light from the TV screen, not thinking about anything, quite still, breathing along with his father.

The time when Andrés comes closest to telling his father the truth is the evening they stay on the beach of Puerto Cruz almost until nightfall. They’ve bought a bottle of red wine and are sitting on the seashore where the waves break on the sand. They drink in silence. But Andrés cannot feel at ease by his father’s side; he waits, like a hunter, alert, always ready to leap up and catch the famous ideal moment and thus fulfill the secret reason behind the trip. His father, though, as the days pass, seems to feel more comfortable, calmer, enjoying every moment. They talk a little about everything and, of course, end up, discussing the state of the nation. Everyone does it. It occurs to Andrés that the political situation has probably saved many a married couple who have run out of things to say. At family get-togethers, there’s always a ready-made topic of discussion. Politics renews bonds, revives enthusiasms and passions, but it doesn’t really work with his father. After a brief exchange of views, they grow bored. Andrés refills their plastic cups with wine.

“Don’t you think it’s wonderful,” he says, as if hoping to create the right atmosphere, “I mean, the two of us being together like this?”

“Yes,” says his father slowly, contentedly, looking again at the sea. “Do you know what I find odd?” he adds. “The sea doesn’t smell. The sea doesn’t smell anymore.”

Andrés looks at the sea. He breathes in deeply through his nose. His gaze shifts suddenly to the farthest edge of the vast, undulating blue cloth before them. Is this the moment? What can he say? Is this really the place, the ideal moment, to start talking about diagnoses and suggesting a chat about the nosogenesis of a pulmonary condition?