The Sickness
Page 15
Dear Dr. Miranda,
I hesitated for a long time before writing to you again. I finally decided that I would and I’m going to explain why. I haven’t heard from you for a while now. The last time I wrote, I was in the middle of a crisis, I asked you for help and you failed me. You never phoned. I was in urgent need of help, and you didn’t come.
It wasn’t easy. It took me weeks to recover, but fortunately my body slowly pulled itself together and, eventually, my condition stabilized. All this has had its consequences, of course. Among other things, let me just say that I lost my job. Gradually, though, I’m returning to normality. I can’t deny that, at first, I felt very bitter toward you. I determined that I wouldn’t write to you again. And I didn’t. I never again sent you an e-mail. I didn’t follow you either. I didn’t come to the hospital looking for you. I wanted to erase you from my life, Doctor.
“Has he finally replied?” Adelaida is standing in the doorway, watching her. “I know your face, Karina. It’s from him, isn’t it?”
Karina nods, rather put out by the interruption.
“So what does he say?”
“It isn’t for me. It’s for Dr. Miranda.”
“I don’t believe you,” exclaims Adelaida, coming to peer at the screen over Karina’s shoulder.
But I couldn’t do it, Doctor. Every day, I woke up with the same feeling of emptiness in my hands, as if something was missing. I went to bed with the same anxiety. This wasn’t just a repetition of my old symptoms, it was something else, something much deeper. Then, this morning when I woke up, I saw everything so clearly. I need to write to you, Doctor. Even though you’ve let me down, even though you don’t read my letters, despite all that, I need to write to you.
If you answer me, that’s fine. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter. But writing is the one thing that makes me feel better, the only thing I really need. Before, I always thought that one wrote for other people, for the other person to read what one had written. Now I’m not so sure.
“The guy’s nuts!” mutters Adelaida. “Doesn’t he say anything about that time he came to see the doctor? Or about the letter you wrote him? Doesn’t he say anything about that?”
“Exactly,” says Karina.
“What do you mean ‘exactly’?” Adelaida stares at her in bewilderment. “Don’t you see? That’s his only sickness.”
Karina nods, a strange, glad smile on her lips. And tapping lightly on the keyboard, she begins writing her response.
In the corridor on floor five, outside room 508, Mariana and her children are waiting in silence. Inside, Andrés, for how long he doesn’t know, has been sitting bent over his father, an uncomfortable position, but it’s the only way he can get close to him. Everything is so ephemeral. They are the only solid thing in that room. When he hears his father cough, he sits up. They look at each other again.
“What do you want? What can I do for you?”
His father thinks for a moment.
“Talk to me,” he says with some difficulty, as if he had to drag the words to his lips. “Talk to me about us.”
Silence is a sharp stake. Andrés feels as if his tongue were a stone in his mouth. Then he realizes that this is all they have, the one shared thing that remains to them: their last words. That hoarse, weak voice signals the end of the body, sound is the only bit of life they still have.
What are last words like? What do they taste of?
His father makes a small gesture, again reaches out his hand, as if to draw him closer, to have his son still nearer. Andrés bends forward, almost crouched over him now.
“This is how I want to go,” murmurs his father. “Listening to you talking.”
And he again closes his eyes. Perhaps even opening and closing his eyes hurts him now. Passing the time hurts too.
Andrés feels as if his mouth were full of tree bark. He feels a deep, deep sadness. He’s crying, not holding back now, not trying to stop his tears. His father’s hand between his two hands feels ever lighter. Why do we find it so hard to accept that life is pure chance?
His father opens his eyes again, tries to smile, and gives him instead a look of fragile tenderness.
“Talk to me,” he says again. “Don’t let me die in silence.”
The translator would like to thank Alberto Barrera Tyszka for all his help, and, as always, Annella McDermott and Ben Sherriff.
ALBERTO BARRERA TYSZKA, poet and novelist, is well known in Venezuela for his Sunday column in the newspaper El Nacional. He cowrote the internationally best-selling and critically acclaimed Hugo Chávez, the first biography of the Venezuelan president. The Sickness won the prestigious Premio Herralde—an honor previously bestowed on Roberto Bolaño and Javier Marias, among others—and was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2011.
MARGARET JULL COSTA has translated many Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin American writers, among them José Saramago, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and José Régio. She was joint winner of the Portuguese Translation Prize in 1992 and won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1997.
CHRIS ADRIAN is a pediatric oncologist and the author of three novels, most recently The Great Night, and a collection of short stories, A Better Angel. He is a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars and a writer in residence in the Program in Narrative Medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Copyright © 2006 Alberto Barrera Tyszka Translation copyright © 2010 Margaret Jull Costa Introduction copyright © 2012 Chris Adrian
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and New York, New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barrera, Alberto.
[Enfermedad. English]
The sickness / Alberto Barrera Tyszka ; translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa ; with an introduction by Chris Adrian.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-935-63926-8
1. Hypochondria--Fiction. 2. Fathers and sons--Fiction. 3. Physicians-Fiction. 4. Cancer--Patients--Family relationships--Fiction. 5. Stalkers--Fiction. I. Costa, Margaret Jull. II. Title.
PQ8550.12.A62A2 2012
863’.64--dc23
2011051580
First published in Spanish as La Enfermedad by Editorial Anagrama,
Barcelona, 2006
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by MacLehose Press
First U.S. edition 2012