Alberto Barrera Tyszka - The Sickness

Once he dreamed that all his dead patients got together, that they were members of some kind of club: Dr. Andrés Miranda’s lost patients. He doesn’t like that word “lost.” It seems unfair. Perhaps because he knows that, sooner or later, doctors always lose. They are never going to have a good average. Defeat is their destiny. In that dream, his patients looked as ill as when he knew them, as if time had frozen them in that particular passage of their life. They were all very pale, or, rather, gray, but they were all almost exactly as he remembers them. Don Agustín Mejías was stumbling along, dragging with him a stand from which hung a saline drip. Señora Arreaza was in a wheelchair. Tomás Hernández still had a bandage round his head. Silvina Rossini was wearing a printed scarf over her bald head and was coughing loudly. Old Pimentel was lying naked on a stretcher, eyes glazed and lips parched. They all looked just as they had the last time he had seen them. His unconscious mind had gone no further, but had simply made do with the first images it came across. In the dream, none of his patients were looking at him. They were just walking about. Occasionally, they would exchange brief greetings, but they never turned round to see him; they acted as if he didn’t exist. “The next time I have this dream,” thinks Andrés, “my father might be in it. Perhaps he’ll pass me by too, without noticing me, without looking.”

Mariana finds him lying on the bed, alongside the scan results. It’s five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon.

“Are you alright?”

Andrés doesn’t answer. His eyes are closed, but he’s obviously not asleep. Mariana goes over to him, sits down beside him, runs her fingers through his hair and gently scratches his scalp.

“Come on, let’s go to the movies with the kids,” she says.

Andrés emits a low groan, then slowly shakes his head.

“You’ve pretty much ignored them for three weeks now. They know you’re looking after Grandpa, but they still need you. They miss you,” she adds, placing a slight emphasis on the last three words.

Andrés opens his eyes.

When his father and Mariana first met, Mariana was naked. Andrés and Mariana had been going out together for a month. Taking advantage of a weekend when his father had gone off with some friends to Barquisimeto, Andrés had invited her over to spend the night at the apartment. They cooked seafood risotto — the squid was hard and chewy and they’d used too much saffron — drank white wine and made love into the small hours. On Sunday morning, they took a shower together. There they were, under the shower, arms around each other, kissing, when they heard the front door open.

“Andrés,” called his father. “Are you home?”

It was eleven in the morning. The sound of water bouncing off the tiles filled the whole apartment, as if thousands of needles were hurling themselves to their deaths on the floor. Mariana instinctively sought shelter in his arms. Andrés tried to wrap the plastic shower curtain around them, meanwhile frantically thinking what to do next. He didn’t have much time. His father was already in the bathroom.

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“Yes, yes, of course. I just wasn’t expecting you.” Andrés tried to sound natural, pressing Mariana to him. “I thought you weren’t due home until tonight?”

“Oh, the whole thing was a disaster. The axle shaft on the car we were traveling in broke before we even got as far as Chivacoa. We wasted the whole afternoon getting it fixed and had to spend the night in Urachiche. That’s why we came home this morning.”

Then Mariana and Andrés heard the familiar sound of pee falling into the toilet bowl. His father was standing right next to them, peeing. Andrés imagined him pointing his penis at the water; Mariana inadvertently let out a nervous giggle. It was a strange sound, like an elongated squeak, a stifled exclamation. Andrés gave her a warning squeeze, but it was too late. Surprised and concerned, his father pulled back the shower curtain. He stared in astonishment at the sight of a completely naked Mariana clinging to Andrés’s body.

“Hi, Dad,” Andrés said, making an attempt at a smile.

His father left the apartment and didn’t come back for two hours. He returned bearing a pizza and behaved as if the scene in the bathroom had never taken place. Even when Andrés tried to talk about it, he quickly changed the subject. Two weeks later, when Andrés introduced him formally to Mariana, his father held out his hand and said hello with just a hint of mischief in his eyes. And that was that.

“What are you thinking about?” asks Mariana.

Andrés didn’t reply at once. For some time now, he’s had the feeling that his memory has become part of a new privacy, of a space he can’t share. He even remembers things differently, in more detail, storing up different sensations; he feels that the past has become too lively a corpse.

“What are you thinking about?” Mariana asks again.

“About Inés Pacheco,” he says.

It’s true that she does still occupy his thoughts. Or perhaps she’s simply part of that past of which he knew nothing, a past that was lost and now suddenly appears in this emphatic, obsessive way. Señora Pacheco has taken up residence in his mind. She lives there now. Several days have passed and his father still hasn’t said anything to him about her. He can’t understand why. He assumed she would tell his father, that she would have phoned him up at once: “Your son has just come to see me. You might have warned me.” Why, then, has his father said nothing? Why did he never mention this woman? Why does he still keep her hidden away, why does he hide this part of his life? Andrés cannot help but feel hurt. This is hardly the moment for him to be feeling that his father is a stranger too.

“Perhaps they don’t see each other anymore,” says Mariana. “Perhaps they’re not even friends,” she adds after a pause. “Perhaps they even hate each other.”

“You’re forgetting that she phoned his apartment just two weeks ago. I answered her call,” Andrés counters.

“You think it was her, but you don’t actually know that for sure. You’re playing the detective, but you could be wrong. The woman who phoned your father wasn’t necessarily Inés Pacheco.”

“Okay,” agrees Andrés, “you’re right, but Inés Pacheco does exist. And something went on between her and my father.”

“Is that what bothers you?”

“No, of course not.”

“Like I said some days ago, everyone has a private life. Even your father.”

Andrés suddenly picks up the image of his father’s brain and shows it to his wife.

“What the hell is this, then, Mariana? Isn’t this someone’s private life?”

She looks at him slightly reproachfully and tensely. Andrés calms down and bows his head. She leaves the room, saying that she’ll go to the movies with the kids on her own. Andrés falls back on the bed again. For the first time, it occurs to him that the illness might take away from himself and his father something he had never thought it would: conversation, the ability to talk to each other. The illness is destroying their words as well.

The pact between Javier Miranda and Merny also includes going together to the workshop. Merny accepts it as another of her duties, as another contribution to the bus ticket that will save her son. They always go in the mornings, behind Andrés’s back. Javier Miranda found out about it from a nurse.

“The workshop has helped a lot of people,” she told him.

At first, he wasn’t interested, but after the third session of chemotherapy, he asked the nurse for more information. Now here they are, for the first time. Merny seems uncomfortable and keeps looking uneasily about her. He seems almost distracted, as if he’d ended up there by mistake. They’re in a large room on the ground floor, where a couple of dozen plastic chairs are arranged in a circle. There’s also a small table with a pile of papers on it and a thermos of coffee. A very pleasant lady welcomed them and took their enrollment money. When told that companions were not allowed, Javier paid for Merny to enroll as well. The other participants look as glum as he and Merny do. A kind of lukewarm sadness seems to circulate among them. There’s one lady with a walker, a very thin, pale young man, another man with only one leg, a woman who keeps rubbing her hands together and staring at the floor. I wonder how I seem to them? thinks Javier Miranda. What will they make of me? Merny is asking her own questions. Will one look tell them she’s the servant, the help? Or will someone assume she’s Javier Miranda’s partner? Or will they think there’s no connection between them at all, and that she’s there because she’s ill too, because she, too, needs to negotiate with death?