The Mutations

by Jorge Comensal

  Just then, Ernesto’s cell phone rang. He answered it then and there, and his booming voice distracted everyone present. No one responded to Ramón’s remark. His mood, already soured, began to fester.

  When Ernesto deigned to end his call, the conversation resumed along well-trodden paths that ended in pools of expectant silence while Ramón wrote down what he wanted to say. Ernesto downed his fourth tequila of the evening and asked for a blackboard to fast-track his brother’s contributions, since otherwise they’d end up having dinner at three in the morning. No one laughed. Alicia tried to control the damage with baseless flattery.

  “With these delicious hors d’oeuvres, we aren’t in any hurry.”

  “We have to be practical,” said Ernesto. “Although, frankly, that isn’t your strong point. You lawyers make everything so fucking complicated.”

  “Keep that up and I’ll have to sue you,” Carlos joked.

  Ernesto seemed on the verge of making another stupid remark, but Carmela preempted him by asking everyone to come to the table. On his way from the living room to the dining room, Ramón thought about Carlos and Ernesto’s exchange. Libel, slander, and calumny had been decriminalized at the federal level several years earlier. That abolition was irrefutable proof of just how devalued words had become; their use for defamatory purposes merited only the paltry seventeen thousand pesos’ compensation recommended in the ridiculous Law for the Protection of the Right to Privacy, Honor, and Reputation.

  As host and birthday boy, Ramón was seated at the head of the table, where it was easy to be cut off from the conversation. Carmela sat to his left, and Ernesto to his right. His brother was determined to be the center of attention and told a string of off-color jokes. Along with the difficulty of fishing for the croutons in the carrot soup, this caused the guests to forget to turn toward Ramón, and little by little he ended up completely excluded.

  A silent witness, Ramón dined on a small portion of soup, and a plate of ground beef that Carmela served him separately. Without a tongue to push the food between his teeth and back into his throat, chewing was a slow and laborious process. He had to tilt his head back to swallow and let gravity do the rest. By the time everyone else had finished, Ramón still hadn’t eaten even half of his beef. He signaled dishonestly to Carmela that he was full, and asked her to remove his plate.

  Paulina and Mateo, who’d had dinner in the kitchen with Ernesto’s daughters, helped clear the table. A few minutes later, Carmela turned out the lights and Paulina emerged from the kitchen with a glass dish of chocolate pudding. In the middle burned a single candle, long and thick like a paschal candle, tilted to one side in the viscous cream. Once Paulina had placed the dessert in front of her father, Carmela straightened the candle with a finger, and signaled for everyone to start singing. Ramón endured the cacophony, his gaze fixed on the tongue of fire that symbolized his fifty years. It was a precise and fickle symbol, surrounded by noise and darkness. Applause. Paulina told him to make a wish and blow out the candle. Ramón imagined the assembled company crying at his funeral. He blew out the candle with a desultory puff and had a coughing fit. Happy birthday.

  The sight of the dollop of pudding on his plate made Ramón think of the shapeless feces of a dyspeptic dog.

  “Here’s your slice,” Carmela joked as she served the dessert. The guests smiled out of obligation.

  Carlos fetched the bottle of champagne he’d brought, poured it into the clean glasses, and proposed a toast. Carmela whispered to Ramón to remind him that he couldn’t drink. She told him to pretend to take a sip, and that she would finish his glass for him.

  “My dear Ramón,” said Carlos. “My wife and I sincerely hope that you continue to be an example of strength and bravery to us all. May this year bring you many blessings. Cheers!”

  “Cheers,” everyone mumbled.

  Ernesto, who was now thoroughly inebriated, quaffed his champagne in a single gulp.

  “Moët Pérignon. A taste of the high life!” he said.

  Ramón noticed the mistake immediately: the bottle Carlos had brought was Moët & Chandon, which was much cheaper than Dom Pérignon, the princess of all champagnes. Ernesto’s mix-up of the names might have been an innocent mistake, but Ramón was convinced that he’d done it on purpose to embarrass his friend.

  Ernesto leaned across the table, lifted the bottle of champagne, and emptied it into his glass, which overflowed with bubbles. Ramón saw Alicia wince, mortified by the speed of her husband’s drinking. She scolded him inaudibly. Ernesto replied by raising his voice.

  “Leave me alone, goddamn it! You won’t even let me enjoy some Moët Pérignon!”

  Ramón relished the degrading spectacle his brother was causing.

  “I think we should be going,” Laura said to Carmela. Her tone betrayed proxy embarrassment, a quintessentially Mexican variety of commiseration.

  Carlos agreed firmly, perhaps offended by the supposed joke about the “Moët Pérignon.”

  “Don’t leave yet,” protested Ernesto. “The night is young. We’re celebrating my brother’s birthday. He’s even dolled himself up for you!”

  At the beginning of the evening, Ramón hadn’t noticed any unusual reactions to his face, so he’d relaxed in the belief that Carmela’s subtle handiwork on his complexion had gone undetected. But now no one could fail to notice. He was wearing makeup, and Ernesto’s declaration made it all the more humiliating. Ramón tried to muster some obscenities to attack his brother, at least in his mind—to express his mute rage by riddling Ernesto with silent insults—but nothing, not a single word, responded to the call of hatred. All profanity escaped him, crowding onto the tip of his absent tongue.

  Alicia scolded her husband again under her breath.

  “But he looks so adorable,” Ernesto answered back in an effeminate voice.

  No, not a single word deigned to come to his aid. Ramón leapt up from his chair, grabbed the champagne bottle by the neck, and smashed it over his brother’s head in a single, fluid motion. Ernesto barely managed to cover his face. The bottle’s heel struck him squarely on the forehead. Attempting to flee from the attack, he crashed facedown onto the table. Alicia shielded him with a protective embrace.

  The bottle trembled in Ramón’s right hand. Carmela ordered him to let it go. Ramón turned to her, disobedient, with the eyes of a cornered lion.

  Paulina and the girls, who’d been watching a movie, came running out of the study when they heard the commotion and were met with the sight of a bourgeois parody of a bar brawl. Ernesto bellowed threats and insults and struggled to sit up straight while Alicia and Carlos kept him pinned to his chair. Laura and Carmela held on to Ramón by the arms, attempting to push him toward the kitchen.

  “Give me my money!” Ernesto demanded, frothing at the mouth with rage. “Hand it over right now, you fucking faggot!”

  “Shut up,” Alicia begged.

  Laura and Carmela tussled with Ramón, who tried to break free from their grip.

  “You’re going to die!” Ernesto predicted, revived by adrenaline. “Your karma’s going to catch up with you, fucking loser!”

  Alicia tried to gag Ernesto and he bit her by mistake. Her shrill cry pierced through Mateo’s headphones; he was shut in his room, oblivious to the kerfuffle. He ran downstairs and found the girls bawling, two of the women consoling them, and Carlos trying to drag his uncle Ernesto, who wouldn’t stop shouting, to the front door.

  “Get out here, you fucking asshole! We’ll see who pays for your funeral!”

  Ramón listened from the kitchen, panting and cornered against the stove by his wife. He felt more satisfied by the minute with what he’d done. He’d just committed a crime listed in Article 289 of the Federal Penal Code. He felt extraordinarily pleased with himself.

  The cries became more and more distant, then faded completely. Laura informed them from the other side of the kitchen door that everyone had left.

  Carmela poured a glass of water and handed
it to Ramón. There was no need for the gesture. Her husband hadn’t been driven into a rage by his thirst, nor was it time for his medication. The glass of water was there to fill an unbearable void. Ramón accepted it and took a sip. He tilted his head back and felt the insipid, cool water trickle inside him. When he looked down, his eyes met Carmela’s baffled gaze.

  What the hell are you looking at?

  PART II

  Illness is not a metaphor, and … the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.

  —Susan Sontag

  12

  The Aldamas arrived at the sumptuous Church of the Immaculate Conception shortly before the ceremony began. They were attending the wedding out of duty to the bride’s father, a pulmonologist who often referred his patients to Joaquín Aldama’s private practice.

  The doctor had spared no expense. The church was festooned with ribbons, bows, and floral arrangements. A troupe of bored paparazzi swarmed around snapping pictures of guests in tuxedos and bow ties or evening dresses. Here and there, the occasional renegade clashed with the surroundings in a clownish tie or a provocative miniskirt. The Aldamas adhered strictly to protocol. Joaquín loathed any outfit that didn’t include a white coat, an indispensable piece of armor for his superiority complex. He wasn’t the only uncomfortable one in the church. Tight corsets, ill-fitting rented suits, high heels, minuscule purses, caked-on makeup, professional hairdos, constant sweat, and postprandial drowsiness afflicted the majority of the guests bused in for the occasion. They took their pews according to an invisible gradient of familiarity: the closer their ties to the bride and groom, the closer they sat to the front of the church.

  The Aldamas sat in the third row from the back, beneath the choir, where a chamber orchestra massacred Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” as the priest and bridal party processed down the aisle. The quality of their playing led Joaquín to surmise that the musicians belonged to a deaf-mute student symphony.

  Once the March had ended and the ceremony began, Joaquín passed the time pondering Ramón’s rhabdomyosarcoma. According to Luis Ramírez’s animist metaphor, the tumor’s cells behaved “like a bunch of fucking socialists,” toiling with rare altruism on behalf of their neighboring cells, arranging themselves into little cavities like alveoli, and secreting chemicals that promoted growth and vascularization. By virtue of this behavior, the rhabdomyoblasts had formed a round and vigorous tumor in the patient’s tongue and were now multiplying into harmonious layers in the petri dishes that hosted them.

  “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” the other guests recited, beating their chests unrepentantly.

  Aldama stayed silent, lost in thought. Usually, the DNA of a malignant cell contained hundreds of pernicious mutations, but Luis Ramírez believed that the rhabdomyosarcoma was caused not by a large number of disorderly genes, but by the alteration of a decisive few, the minimum necessary to spark a disciplined and at the same time unruly process of cellular reproduction. If the pathologist’s suspicions were confirmed, the genome of those cells would represent a catalog of mutations essential for carcinogenesis. Ramírez’s enthusiasm was justified by the revolutionary consequences of such a discovery: a universal cure for cancer, the Holy Grail of oncology.

  “Alleluia! Alleluia!” the least inhibited guests chanted as the priest prepared to read a popular episode from the Gospels.

  “And as Jesus passed by,” he began in a reverential drone that transported Joaquín back to his schooldays with the Marist priests, “he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, ‘Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?’”

  Aldama imagined the unseeing man’s clouded corneas and pictured him sitting beside the dirt road begging for alms. Jesus seized the chance to flaunt his ophthalmological talent in front of his followers. He spat on the ground, kneaded a small lump of clay, and used it to anoint the patient’s eyes. But why would the all-powerful Son of God need to avail himself of an improvised salve to heal one of his children? Perhaps it was a prop he used for dramatic effect, or, in the best-case scenario, an excipient for the active components of his redeeming saliva.

  The Gospel of John neglected to mention whether the clay was applied to the eyeballs or to the eyelids. Aldama preferred to believe that the dirt hadn’t come directly into contact with the blind man’s eyes. Jesus commanded his patient to go and wash in the Pool of Siloam. Once again, the advice seemed gratuitous. Jesus had all the resources he could possibly need to heal the blind man, so why send the poor wretch off in search of a pool?

  “He went his way therefore, and washed, and came seeing. The neighbors therefore and they which before had seen him that he was blind, said, is this not he that sat and begged? Some said, This is he. Others said, He is like him: But he said, I am he.”

  Aldama knew very well that an ointment alone could never have cured congenital blindness. The patient’s cerebral cortex would have lacked the necessary connections to process the information transmitted via the optic nerve. In response to the deluge of incoherent sensations, he would have suffered a fatal epileptic seizure at the edge of the pool. But that wasn’t to be; the blind man came back from Siloam completely unfazed, and since it was Saturday, no one had anything better to do than escort him to the temple so that the Pharisees could witness the miracle. Needless to say, they were less than convinced, and cast him out of the temple for his sins. In the end, Jesus came again to the patient, and revealed the episode’s apocalyptic meaning: “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” What an obnoxious way to end a medical procedure. Hippocrates and Jesus would have had their differences.

  “The Word of the Lord,” the priest concluded, before closing the book and kissing its cover.

  * * *

  During the sermon, Aldama’s mind wandered again. What would the genetic makeup be of the son of a Jewish girl and an all-powerful deity? Had the Holy Spirit fertilized Mary’s egg, or had he in fact placed a divine zygote inside her, fashioned ex nihilo for the occasion by God himself?

  If Catholic orthodoxy held that Mary was the mother of God, then surely she was more than just an incubator. God must have infused her with a breath of holy sperm containing twenty-three chromosomes, including the Y chromosome that made Jesus a boy. The other twenty-three were supplied by Mary’s egg; these carried the genes that determined her son’s physique, the color of his skin and eyes, the thickness of his lips, the shape of his nose. Could the Son of God have fallen victim to cancer? His Father’s chromosomes must have endowed him with infallible tumor suppressor genes—the P53, the NF1, the BRCA1, and the BRCA2. He could have eaten all the sausages he liked, chain-smoked, frequented tanning salons, and handled radioactive waste, all without having to fear the malignancies normally associated with those risk factors. What a healthy life Jesus might have led, if he hadn’t made so many powerful enemies.

  Joaquín’s rambling train of thought was interrupted by the recitation of the marriage vows: Regina and her betrothed promised to love one another and be faithful as long as they both should live.

  During the consecration of the host and wine, Aldama’s phone began to vibrate in his pocket. He peered at it discreetly to see who was calling, and recognized Mrs. Martínez’s number. She had never called him before on a weekend. He worried it could be an emergency and decided to leave the church to take her call. “Let us proclaim the mystery of faith,” he heard the priest say before the door closed behind him. Once outside, he took his phone out of his pocket and saw that she had already hung up. He quickly returned her call.

  Mrs. Martínez apologized profusely for bothering him on a Saturday, but it was a highly sensitive matter. The night before, her husband had attacked his brother with a champagne bottle. “He lost his mind,” she elaborated. Aldama wondered what kind of champagne his patient h
ad used.

  “I’ve made an appointment for Monday with a therapist with a good reputation,” Mrs. Martínez went on. “She specializes in helping patients with cancer. I talked to her on the phone and she was very reassuring. She said she can help us and not to worry, but Ramón’s being really stubborn about it. We’ve been trying to convince him all day, and he’s flat-out refusing to go.”

  “Why did he assault his brother?” Aldama asked casually.

  “My brother-in-law had a few too many drinks and was talking nonsense, and Ramón lost it and hit him over the head. If he hadn’t been so weak, he’d have split it open.”

  “Do you want me to try and convince him?”

  “No, absolutely not. He’d be furious if he knew I’d told you. No, the thing is that yesterday our cleaning lady gave him a parrot, and I said we couldn’t keep it because of what you told us. Ramón got mad like he does about everything these days, and went on and on trying to persuade me, and I told him it was out of the question. Well, just now he handed me a note demanding that I call the cleaning lady and tell her to bring the parrot right back. I’m really stressed because of last night and I didn’t think it through, so I said, if we bring back the parrot, will you agree to see a therapist? And he said yes. So now what do I do? I’ve been wondering what to do for hours, and he just fell asleep, so I thought I should call you and ask if there’s any way we could keep it…”

  Aldama was taken aback by her ridiculous story. On the one hand, he applauded his patient’s outburst. Bashing a drunk on the head with a champagne bottle was an ingenious way of meting out justice. On the other, he was amused by the idea of a maid giving her employer a parrot, and his wife using it as a marital bargaining chip.

  “The parrot isn’t at your house?” the doctor asked, buying himself some time to consider the case.