A little while ago, a supervisor came up to me with a strange smile on his face and said that a rumor was going around that, lately, I spend most of my time in the bathroom. Another day, I was doing a handstand, as I’ve explained, and a colleague from the next office came in. Needless to say, he was very surprised to find me there like that. I tried to explain the situation to him, but I’m sure he didn’t believe me. Perhaps he thought I was mad. The truth is I feel more and more uncomfortable at work. I can tell they’re talking about me, and they look at me suspiciously. I know that when they see me, they nudge each other and whisper.
The day before yesterday, Doctor, I could bear it no longer. I took advantage of the fact that the office was being fumigated and left early to look for you. I know you only see patients from three o’clock in the afternoon, but I thought perhaps you might be engaged on some other activity at the hospital. I thought you might be visiting your patients or performing an operation. I wandered about all over the place, I even went to the coffee bar. I also asked a couple of nurses if they’d seen you. I didn’t find you, but I have to say that just being there, looking for you, made me feel better.
Then, just when I was about to come home, I spotted you in the distance, on the ground floor. I was walking along and there you were at the far end of the corridor, about to get into one of the elevators that go down to the parking lot. I walked as fast as I could to try and reach you, but I was too slow. By the time I got there, the elevator doors had closed. I felt quite desperate then. And I raced for the stairs, the way people do in films. I tore down them, I even bumped into a lady with a walking stick, but carried on regardless. It was almost a race against the clock: as you know, there are five levels in the underground garage. How could I possibly know where you’d parked your car? How could I possibly know at which level you would get out of the elevator? That’s why I ran down the stairs, almost two at a time, peering in at every level, trying to catch you, trying to see if I might spot you. You were wearing a pale green shirt and blue trousers.
I didn’t find you. I never saw you. I reached level five gasping for breath. The lift doors opened and out came a woman carrying a little girl in her arms. The child had her head in bandages and was very pale. Her lips looked as if they had been painted green. When she saw me, the woman took fright and hurried off to where the cars were parked. I stayed there for a while to get my breath back. Then I started thinking about what would have happened if I’d managed to catch up to you. How would you have reacted? Would you have recognized me at once? Would you know who I was?
I spent the afternoon feeling oddly relieved. Perhaps it’s the same relief I feel when I send you these letters.
Knowing that we’re sure to meet again soon,
Ernesto Durán
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 wa
s 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.”
Andrés was astonished. He imagined that body full of sea, full of water that came and went, that made noises, that went round and round, unable to escape. He thought of it as a secret room, in which the water could circulate freely. That morning, Andrés thinks, marked his initial curiosity about bodies, the discovery of the existence of an order distinct from words, more physical, more tactile, less invisible. His father had to drag him away. The boy wanted to wait for the pathologist to come, he wanted to know what would happen next. His father, of course, feared that the incident would lay bare the very loss he was trying to conceal. One death calls to another. A stranger’s body lying on the sand was also the body of the mother, floating and turning between them, surrounding them, drenching them.
Andrés cannot remember there being any further consequences. He can’t, for example, remember if it was that same day that he spoke with his father about the death, about the plane exploding in midair; he can’t remember if his recurring dream came before or after that morning spent hunting for jellyfish on the beach. He merely pinpoints that moment, almost fancifully, as a first image of his vocation. At seventeen, when he finished high school, he decided to study medicine—in a rather childish way, as is always the case at that age—and he still felt driven by that same curiosity, by the desire to find out what went on inside our bodies.
It’s seven o’clock when he comes down from the mountain. There’s no one else in the cable car. He feels that chance has handed him a rare privilege. The journey back to the city reveals an extraordinary landscape. The illuminated lines of the highways, the lights of the suburbs and the barrios, draw a different map in the darkness, that of an unfamiliar, almost unreal city: a stationary landscape, bereft of movement, a Caracas conjured up in that very moment that will surely disappear as soon as he enters it again. Suspended in the air, almost hanging above the distant precipice that is now the city, Andrés makes a decision, rings his father’s number from his mobile and says:
“Hi, Dad. How do you fancy coming to Isla Margarita with me?”
In its heyday, the bar had been an old-fashioned Spanish tasca. Legs of Serrano ham hung from the walls and customers were always offered a little snack, a tapa, with their drink—some bread and a sliver of potato omelet, a few grilled sardines, some olives. Now, all that’s left of that Spanish heritage is its name: Las Cibeles. It’s just a bar where the people who work locally take refuge after six o’clock. Office workers, secretaries, administrators, and low-grade civil servants meet up to exchange the gossip of the day with the help of a few beers. The whole place is filled with a beery torpor, a chemical smell that even indicates the way to the toilets. At one end of the bar, Adelaida and Karina have had to wait until evening to finish their after-lunch conversation. Ernesto Durán’s latest letter remains the juiciest dish on the menu.
“I couldn’t say anything to Dr. Miranda because he rang in early and said he was canceling all his appointments. He said he wouldn’t be coming in this afternoon. As you know, he’s worried about his father, who’s in a really bad way apparently.”
Adelaida barely has time to nod. Karina seems so resolute, she’s speaking very rapidly and with great determination. She has thought of nothing else all afternoon.
“This has gone too far,” she says now, nervously smoothing her blouse. “If not today, then I’ll have to do it tomorrow, because this is something I really must tell the doctor about.”
“There’s no need to make such a drama out of it, Karina. It’s hardly the end of the world.”
“But what if the guy really is crazy?” asks Karina, genuinely concerned.
“He only followed him once, for one morning. He’s desperate. He needs to see his doctor.”
“Please, Adelaida, I’m being serious.”
“So am I.” She gives her friend a sly look, shifts closer to her and says softly: “We’ve all done crazy things in our time. Do you remember when I asked you to come with me to follow Cheo, and how we ended up in that awful place on Avenida Lecuna?”
“Yes, you wanted to find out if he really was playing dominoes with his friends!” says Karina. Adelaida no
ds sagely and flings her arms wide as if to underline the absurdity of the whole experience.
“Well, wasn’t that a crazy thing to do?”
“God, yes, it was real dive, full of whores and drunks,” says Karina. “You had a kind of hunch that he was two-timing you, cheating on you, but you needed proof.”
“If anyone had seen the two of us there, at that moment, at that hour of night, in that place, tailing my husband and trying to catch him out, what would they have thought of us, what would they have said?”
They look at each other for a second. Is this what’s happening to Ernesto Durán? Does he need proof and is he trying, however ineptly, to find that proof as best—or worst—as he can? He doesn’t care, he’s lost control. As we all do sometimes, as anyone can: it’s not so very hard to lose control; it happens when you least expect it. Just as Adelaida had had her suspicions and needed some evidence to back them up, so too, perhaps, Durán feels the same need to find out the truth, which is what he’s trying to do. He can’t go on living without knowing what’s really wrong with him. Sickness is a form of disloyalty, an unacceptable infidelity.
By the time she’s on her third beer, Adelaida has an idea.
“And what if you answered the letter?”
“What?”
“Why don’t you write to him as if you were Dr. Miranda?”
“You must be out of your mind, Adelaida! How could you even think of such a thing?”
“What’s wrong with the idea?”
“Everything. Dr. Miranda is Dr. Miranda and Karina Sánchez is Karina Sánchez. Besides, you can’t just play a trick like that, you—”
The Sickness Page 6