The Sickness Read Free Page B

that cruised past her with an air of extraordinary, almost
bored serenity. It was odd, but in the dream, his mother was wearing a swimsuit and shoes—an orange two-piece swimsuit and a pair of black leather moccasins.
    As time passed, his mother grew more desperate. Several times she struck the ceiling of the plane, making a distant, metallic sound, like a tin can being dragged through the sea. She peered out through a window onto nothing, only dark water, a liquid penumbra no eye could penetrate. The sea had no memory, it destroyed everything too quickly for that. Then his mother, beside herself, almost suffocating, beat harder on the ceiling of the plane and cried out: “Andrés! Andrés! I’m alive! Come and get me out of here!”
    When he woke, he had usually wet himself and was trembling. Even when he got out of bed, he still felt himself to be in the grip of the dream. It would take him almost a minute to get out of that plane and escape from the bottom of the sea, and stop hearing his mother’s cries. His father proved a tireless warrior on his behalf. He patiently helped Andrés to defend himself against those enemies. He was always there, on the edge of the dream, waiting for him.
    These memories crowded into his mind as he watched his father in the examining room. Did he perhaps have the same presentiment? Andrés would doubtless prefer him not to. When you’re nearly seventy, he thought, a bad omen is like a gunshot. At that age, there are no more deadlines, there is only the present.
    The nurse removed the needle and handed Javier Miranda a piece of cotton wool soaked in hydrogen peroxide.
He pressed down hard on the place where the needle had gone in and glanced at his son as if pleading for a truce, as if asking if they couldn’t just get up and leave. Are the monsters of old age as terrible as those that assail us when we’re children? What do you dream about when you’re sixty-nine? What nightmares recur most often? Perhaps this is what his father dreams about: he’s in an examining room, in the bowels of a hospital, surrounded by chemicals, sharp implements, gauze, and strangers all repellently dressed in white; yes, he’s in the bowels of a hospital, looking for a tiny bubble of air, so that he can breathe, so that he can shout: “Andrés! Andrés! Get me out of here! Save me!”
    While Andrés was driving his father home, he tried to avoid talking about the subject. It wasn’t easy. His father kept muttering bitterly to himself. He claimed that the tests were a complete waste of time, that the only thing they would show was that his cholesterol levels were slightly raised, if that. Certainly nothing more, he insisted. Andrés dropped him off at the door to his apartment building. As he was driving away, he could still see his father in the rearview mirror. There had been a time when he had considered having his father move in with them, but had feared that family life might become a nightmare for everyone. Mariana got on reasonably well with his father, and his children had a lot of fun with him, but those were only sporadic encounters, occasional trips to the movies or to a park, to a restaurant or to a baseball game. Day-to-day life is a different matter, a far more demanding exercise. And yet, at that moment, while he could
still see him, a diminutive figure in the rearview mirror, he again considered the possibility. Sooner or later, if you were an only child, you had to pay for your exclusivity. His father had no one else. If, instead of standing in the corridor, talking to the neighbor, he had been alone in his apartment, it could have been really serious. For a second, Andrés sees the scene with hideous clarity: his father goes into the kitchen to turn off the gas under the coffeepot, he bends over, loses consciousness, and collapses. In the same movement, in the inertia of the fall, his head drops forward, propelled by the