The Sickness Read Free Page A

sad as stupid; behind it lay the desire to make of sickness a virtue. He looked at his father again. Isn’t sickness a humiliation rather than a virtue?
    Up until now, his father’s health had only ever succumbed to the occasional common cold, and a brief urinary infection two years ago, but that was all. He enjoyed enviably good health and, so far, there had been no other worrying signs. Andrés, however, had a bad feeling. The whole situation produced in him a peculiar sense of apprehension. With no evidence on which to base that feeling, he thought for the first time that the worst could happen, that it might already be happening. It irritated him to feel hijacked by a mere hunch, to be taken hostage
by something as irrational and unscientific as a bad vibe. His father glanced across at him. Andrés didn’t know what to say. It suddenly struck him as pathetic that the fate of a sixty-nine-year-old man could be summed up in just four tubes of dark fluid, O Rh positive. What would his father be feeling at that moment? Resigned? Ready to accept that he was reaching a preordained destiny, that this was a natural conclusion to his life; that now he was entering a stage when people would stick needles in him and when he would inhabit a world dominated by the aseptic smell of laboratories? He again looked hard at his father and was filled by a frightening sense that it was no longer his father meekly putting up with being pricked, touched, and bled, it was just a body. Something apart. An older, more vulnerable body in which his father’s spirit writhed in protest. Spirit was an odd word. Andrés hadn’t used it in ages. He felt that he was using it now for the first time in years.
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    The two of them. For almost as long as he can remember, it has been just the two of them. His mother died when he was ten. For almost as long as he can remember, Andrés has been the only son of a widower, of a strong man capable of struggling with terrible grief, with great loss. His mother died in an air crash, on a flight from Caracas to Cumaná. The plane was airborne for only a matter of minutes before it nosedived. It was a national tragedy. The work of the rescue team was hard and, for the most part, fruitless. A special room was set up in the Hospital de La Guaira, where the victims’ families could
try to identify what little was left: a foot, half a bracelet, the crown of a tooth . . . His father returned from the hospital that night, looking drawn and ashen. He talked for a while in the kitchen with the other members of the family, then picked up his son and left. Andrés already knew what had happened. Despite his aunts’ attempts to protect him, he had managed to elude them and, in secret, had watched the events on television. When his father, his eyes red from crying, went to enormous lengths to soften the news he had to give him and told him that Mama had gone away on a long, long journey, a journey from which she wouldn’t come back, Andrés, still confused, fearful, and bewildered, simply asked if his mother had been on the plane that had fallen into the sea. His father looked at him uncertainly, then said, “Yes,” and put his arms around him. Andrés can’t be sure now, but he thinks they cried together then.
    For a long time, Andrés used to dream about his mother. It was the same dream over and over, with very few variations: the plane was at the bottom of the sea, not like a plane that has crashed, but like a sunken ship; it was quite intact, sleeping among the seaweed and the fish and the shadows, which, like cobwebs, danced across the dull sand. Inside the plane, a large oxygen bubble had formed on the ceiling. It was a very fragile bubble that was slowly shrinking. His mother was trying to swim along with her head inside the bubble so that she could breathe. She appeared to be the sole survivor, there was no one else, only fish of different colors and sizes