Alberto Barrera Tyszka - The Sickness

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:

neoplasm exeresis staphylococcal empyema pleural empyema anastomosis iliocolostomy biopsy hemostasis prosthesis laparotomy ischemia lithiasis

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?”