In his university days, corpses were divided into two groups: the mummies and the freshers. The names said everything. The stiffs, which had been used before, belonged to the first group; the newly dead to the second category. No one liked working with the mummies. It was like being with a dummy, it always felt slightly unreal. The mummy was like an old vinyl record that has become more and more chipped over time. A mummy might have a couple of toes missing from its right foot. Once, some joker stubbed out a cigarette on the cheek of a dead boy. That kind of thing happened with the mummies. Any sessions with them gave rise to laughter, childish jokes, distance. The freshers, on the other hand, provoked, at least initially, silence and a strange intimacy.
For Andrés, corpses were an ideal middle path, halfway between books and the emergency operation. They weren’t the mere illustration of a text; they had volume, presence, they were real bodies and yet, at the same time, not entirely real, not the whole truth: they lacked warmth, feeling, urgency. It was precisely in that unreal reality that Andrés found his place. So much so that, more than once, he had wondered if his destiny didn’t lie in performing autopsies; he felt almost condemned to the field of diagnosing lifeless bodies, in which the only signs are the past, in which nothing beats and everything is merely mark or trace. For a long time, he felt his vocation was closer to producing “damage reports” than to “the saving of lives.” He belonged to the group or league who always arrive when there’s nothing to be done, when all that’s needed is a signature on the final balance sheet.
As he progressed in his career, it became clearer to him that in his professional life he was more suited to research or teaching. The prospect of dealing with patients on a daily basis, as part of his work routine, became less and less attractive. It implied a risk he wasn’t sure he wanted to run—making a mistake. Making a mistake in a laboratory was quite different from doing so in an operating room. At the time, Andrés began to fall under the spell of the famous Flemish doctor, Andreas Vesalius. He shared with him not only a first name, but a passion for study, a fascination with how the human body works. From him he also learned that curiosity is a high-risk occupation and that peering in at the enigmas of medicine can prove fatal.
Andreas Vesalius was born in Brussels in 1514. He was a brilliant man and considered to be the founder of modern anatomy. He studied in Paris, taught at Leuven, became a professor at Bologna University, and ended up working as a doctor in the imperial court of Charles V. In 1543, he published his work De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, a groundbreaking study of the structure of the human body that openly questioned Galen’s theories. The book was illustrated with more than three hundred engravings that showed human anatomy as it had never been shown before in the history of civilization. From early on, Vesalius had made his mark on history. He would probably have gone on to do much more, but his life was touched by tragedy: in 1561, in Madrid, the court of the Holy Inquisition sentenced him to death.
Vesalius honed his talents largely on the work he did on dissecting corpses. He had also been given the necessary permissions and blessings to carry out this work. As far as one can ascertain, one fateful day, a body betrayed science: Vesalius opened up a dead man who wasn’t dead. Beneath the skin, beneath the thorax, a heart was still beating. Very feebly perhaps. Perhaps the last flicker of a life about to be extinguished. There was nothing to be done. But in that moment, science became a sin. Some studies say that the body belonged to a nobleman close to the throne, which seems unlikely, but what is known is that Philip II spoke up for Vesalius before the Inquisition and saved his life. One legend has it that the doctor was dressed in sackcloth and sandals and, to pay for his error, was condemned to wander the desert for the rest of his life. Another version of the story has the same tragic tone: Andreas Vesalius paid for his guilt by making a long pilgrimage to the Holy Land. On the way back from Jerusalem, the ship in which he was traveling was wrecked in strange circumstances, taking Vesalius down with it. Thus he paid for his curiosity: either devoured by the desert or by the sea. Drowned in the void.
“Don’t succumb to Vesalius Syndrome,” Professor Armando Coll often said to them. “Don’t let that paralyze you.”
One afternoon, after class, he went for a drink with his students in a small, insalubrious restaurant called La Estrella China. It was near the university and the students went there because the booze was cheap enough for them to get drunk without spending the whole of their allowance. Professor Coll ordered a whisky. After two hours, and feeling less sober and in a more confiding mood, he confessed that he himself was a hostage to Vesalius Syndrome. That’s what he called it. He found the story terrifying. He couldn’t understand how humanity could have punished one of its most outstanding geniuses like that. “Vesalius was almost another Da Vinci,” he said. Andrés Miranda drank in every word, full of surprise and admiration. Before taking his leave, Professor Coll looked at them with a kind of melancholy pity.
“All it proves,” he said, “is that the birth of medicine is irremediably bound up with the birth of negligence. They are two inseparable practices, living side by side. Prepare yourselves.”
At first, she counted them one by one: she got as far as nine. She could stand it no longer. Ever since the morning of that brief and terrible letter in which Ernesto Durán begged for help, nine days had passed and she had done nothing. There was nothing she could do. She couldn’t phone Durán, nor could she tell Dr. Miranda what had happened. She’d been left locked up alone with her anxiety. Then more days passed; she didn’t count them this time, but there were a lot. Too many. Ernesto Durán never wrote again. Nor did he phone. Each morning, though, she repeated the same ritual and rather longingly looked for a letter from him in Dr. Miranda’s inbox. Nothing. The last she’d heard from him was that brief message, that cry for help, giving his phone number. Sometimes she’s assailed by the image of that e-mail and then she can see Ernesto Durán lying on his bed, very pale, mouth half-open, his breathing labored. He hasn’t shaved for days. He looks feebly upward, as if his eyes barely had the strength to see as far as the ceiling. The bed is filthy. There are pools of vomit. The image is filled with the stench of shit and urine. She’s also imagined him lying on the floor of his apartment, as if he’d managed to drag himself a few yards before fainting. He’s naked. He’s been dead for two days. His skin is turning dark, almost violet in color. His mouth is open. An insect buzzes and dances, like a tiny vulture, over the awful stillness of his corpse.
Ernesto has slipped into her nights as well. At two in the morning, Karina starts fearfully awake: in her dream world, Ernesto Durán is holding a knife with which he’s cutting his femoral artery. The blood spurts out and spatters the whole dream.
“If you’re that worried, why don’t you call him?” Adelaida says, appealing to her common sense and meanwhile chewing on a raw carrot. They’re both on a diet again.
“What would I say to him?”
“Don’t say anything. At least you’ll know he’s well, that he’s alive. Do you want me to phone him?”
Karina shakes her head. When she saw that he was no longer sending e-mails, she had tried phoning him herself on various occasions and at various times. She just wanted to hear his voice and then hang up, nothing more. She just needed to be sure he was safe. But no one ever answered. The phone just rang and rang.
She has also considered going to see him. She found his address in his medical file. He lives in the city center, near Avenida Fuerzas Armadas, on the corner of San Ramón. She could always leave work a little early one evening and simply go over there. She could, for example, wait on the pavement across from his building for a while, where she wouldn’t look too obvious, just to see if he went in or out, to make sure he was still alive.
“Do you feel guilty?” Adelaida unleashes the question without warning, one evening when they’re both leaning at the bar of Las Cibeles. “Because that’s what it looks like.”
“No, I just can’t stand not knowin
g what happened, not hearing from him. That’s all. Does that seem odd to you? He sends that message and then . . . nothing. Absolute silence, he’s just vanished.”
“Perhaps he’s punishing you.”
“Me? If he’s punishing anyone, it’s Dr. Miranda.”
“Perhaps he got fed up and realized that the doctor’s never going to help him, that it’s all a bit of leg-pull, that he’s never going to take him seriously. Perhaps that was the final test. And now it’s over. The guy disappears for ever.”
But Karina’s anxieties are not so easily soothed. That same evening, she stays late after work and decides to try one last thing. She feels more desperation than fear, which is why she takes the risk of writing another letter.
Dear Ernesto,
First of all, I must apologize for taking so long to reply to your last e-mail. Unfortunately, as I warned you, I had some urgent business to attend to away from Caracas. For reasons beyond my control, I then had to go on somewhere else and couldn’t check my e-mail for several days. And that’s why I couldn’t answer your call for help.
When I did finally get to my e-mail, it was too late. I’ve been calling the number you sent me, but no one ever answers. I apologize again for this situation and I quite understand if you’re upset and, given that it was an emergency, I do hope you sought help from someone else. But please let me know that you’re alright and were able to cope satisfactorily with the situation.
Hoping to hear from you soon,
Andrés
Ever since the illness installed itself between them, their relationship has become less fluid, pricklier, more difficult. Now there are three of them. There is always an invisible weight between them. They are father and son plus one, the other, a third unnameable force that never leaves them alone. They spend a lot more time together, but time is different now. They talk less and less. They know it, they feel it, but they don’t know how to express it, what to do. It may be that both of them would like to leave, run away, never see each other again, but they daren’t do that either. They can’t bear the thought that they will say goodbye like this, although they have no option. In more than one sense—although it’s a dreadful cliché—there is no easy remedy.
Andrés goes with him to the chemotherapy sessions and tries to be with him in the apartment after four in the afternoon, when Merny has left. She has finally agreed to come every day to his father’s apartment, although it sometimes seems that she doesn’t want to get too involved. Andrés thinks she’s just protecting herself, that she doesn’t want to share in his father’s death. Perhaps that’s partly how they all feel: the certain sense of imminent death produces other forms of life.
The kids are aware that something’s going on too. They may not know precisely what it is, but they know. It’s not just their grandfather’s pallor, the hair loss, and the look of resigned sadness that seems to have settled in his eyes. Behind the grown-ups’ pact of silence, there’s something that not even his clinical appearance can conceal. It’s hard to define, barely palpable, but, at the same time, obvious. It’s there. It’s a managed, domesticated violence, but by no means submissive or tame. It remains a brutal violence. Right before their eyes, a life is being pitilessly laid waste, swept away. There’s a lot of gauze, a lot of cleanliness, a lot of qualified staff, but there’s no pity. It’s a crime to which there are far too many witnesses, a legalized crime, a crime no one can stop.
In Christa Wolf’s novel, In the Flesh, a woman in hospital realizes with horror: “There’s someone trying to murder me.” Exactly. She is. Her own illness is. Andrés shouldn’t read books like this, but he seeks them out, with ever more determination; perhaps he’s trying to find in their pages what he can’t resolve at the hospital, at home, at the cinema, or over family lunches on Sundays. Some nights, he reads into the small hours. He’s closed his office for a month.
“I’m on vacation,” he said.
And yet that isn’t enough. Whenever he’s alone with his father, he doesn’t know what to say, how to look at him. Javier Miranda seems to feel the same. He doesn’t say anything either. He stares at the floor or mutters some brief response, says he’s tired and falls asleep or pretends to. Andrés stays with him, in silence. It seems to him cruel, absurd. This is exactly what will await them both when it finally happens. Silence. This is their sole destiny. Silence. This is precisely what they both fear and what hurts them most. Silence.
Perhaps he’s imagining his death. Perhaps his father is thinking about that all the time, about the exact situation, the precise moment when his existence will end. When Andrés thinks about his own death, he has more fears than certainties. A recurring image troubles him: he’s with some friends at a restaurant. Everyone is eating, drinking, and talking. Suddenly, he suffers a massive heart attack. Out of the blue. No burning sensation in the stomach, no shooting pains up the left arm. It’s like a gunshot, like a bullet that doesn’t leave his body, but stays inside, that fells him in half a second. That’s the last thing Andrés sees: a few glasses, an ashtray, an almost empty bread basket . . . that is his final landscape as he crashes face-down on the table.
But his father would never have imagined that his death would be the way it presents itself to him now. Sickness is a mistake, a bureaucratic blunder on nature’s part, an absolute lack of efficiency. Everyone wants a swift death that lasts only a second, that is as surprising as it is lethal. It’s a very deep desire, part of the human condition. Sudden death is almost a utopia.
His father, however, avoids thinking. He resists, he forces his imagination or his memories to move on whenever he feels those thoughts approaching, trying to corral him. At first, immediately after they got back from Isla Margarita, he started doing inexplicable things. Every morning, he would walk to the newspaper kiosk three blocks from his house, buy a pack of cigarettes and, on the way back, break each cigarette in half, one by one. He kept up this routine for a week and a half, every morning.
Then he started buying things he didn’t need. One Saturday, he went to the Chinese market and bought various bottled sauces, bean sprouts and other herbs that he subsequently threw in the bin. One afternoon, he went to the building where he had worked for thirty-eight years. He stood at the door, as if stunned, just looking. He saw himself going in through that door, every day, for years and years. He saw himself in different suits, the pale gray one, the brown one he bought in December, the blue one with the wide lapels, and the different ties he wore. It was a film repeating the same shot ad infinitum, that one brief scene. For thirty-eight years, Javier Miranda worked as an administrator for the oil industry. First, when they were still American-owned companies, and after they were nationalized too, but always in the same building. At sixty-five they retired him, him and his whole generation. He doesn’t know for how long he stood there. He thought about going in, about going up to the eighth floor, but felt afraid. He probably wouldn’t know anyone now, and no one would know who he was. He walked home. He was walking for several hours.
His habits changed too. He stopped watching television. He even lost interest in baseball. But sometimes, he would spend hours in silence, staring at the blank screen, watching the faint reflection of his body in the lifeless, opaque glass. Even at moments like that, he didn’t want to think, he wanted just to sit there in the void and let drowsiness and lethargy sweep over him. But that’s not possible. Sooner or later, he has to stop running away, the attempted escape always fails. How would you like to die? Now he thinks that we should all have the right to answer that question.
This evening, while his father is sleeping, the phone suddenly rings. Andrés answers, but the person calling immediately hangs up. When this happens again with exactly the same result, Andrés concludes that this cannot be mere chance. The person ringing doesn’t want to speak to him. He becomes suspicious. His father doesn’t have a service that identifies the caller, and so he can’t even find out where the call came from. Who could it have been? Someone who doesn’t want
to speak to him. Why?
A week later, the same thing happens. His father is having a shower. He’s getting steadily weaker, but he still resists being helped by Andrés. It also embarrasses him for his son to see him naked, “like a wet chicken.” The phone rings. Andrés answers, says “Hello,” and immediately the other person hangs up. It happens again. Now, though, Andrés picks up the phone and says nothing. He can almost feel the breathing at the other end, a hesitation wrapped in a breath. It’s only a matter of seconds, but he can touch them, feel them. Then suddenly:
“Is that you?”
Surprise paralyzes him. The woman’s voice disarms him, he doesn’t know what to say. She immediately ends the call. He hears the click of the phone being put down.
“Who was it?” asks his father from the bathroom.
Andrés hesitates before replying. Then, as if testing him out, he says:
“I don’t know. They hung up when they heard my voice.”
“Perhaps it was a wrong number,” says his father softly, after a pause, and without much conviction.
Andrés makes of this possibly unimportant detail an enigma that he tries obsessively to resolve. Mariana even pokes gentle fun at him for this. Perhaps it’s mere coincidence, a banal fact of his father’s day-to-day life. But nothing is the same for Andrés anymore. Or so it seems. He suddenly feels that he has never paid much attention to his father’s private life. He has never known him to have a girlfriend or partner or even a fleeting affair. Nor was he ever very interested. But now, that woman’s voice on the phone has become a source of curiosity: it uncovers all kinds of questions that Andrés has never asked himself, a slice of his father’s life of which he knows nothing. It’s true that Javier Miranda never remarried. He devoted himself entirely to bringing up his son and then, when Andrés got married, he carried on working and cultivated a routine that seemed to have no room for love or sex.
The Sickness Page 10