The Sickness (9 page)

His father says he would and they both make their way to the bar. The ferry is almost empty, apart from a few German tourists, who always look slightly lost, as if someone had tricked them, as if Venezuela were a geographical error, a mistake in their Berlin travel agent's pamphlet. One of the tables inside is occupied by a man and a woman. Andrés had noticed them when they boarded the ferry. She is a good-looking mulatta of about thirty, with straight hair and a slightly sad expression. She's wearing a pair of beige shorts and a white sleeveless T-shirt that barely contains her small, firm breasts. The man is a classic fat guy, with the typical belly of a forty-something male who spends more time drinking beer than doing sit-ups. In fact, he's drinking a beer right now. He's also glued to his cell phone and talking in a very loud voice, moving about in his chair,
making grandiloquent gestures, and looking scornfully at the woman, as if she were a nuisance, as if being with her were a tiresome duty. His attitude is so blatant that Andrés begins to wonder if he's actually talking to anyone. He speaks so loudly, issuing orders and instructions, as if he were addressing employees, mere subordinates. He never receives any calls. As soon as he ends one call, he immediately dials another number and recommences his brief routine: he gets to his feet, paces up and down, beating the air with one hand, projecting his voice and generally strutting about, with the clear intention of being noticed and heard by other people. He shows no hint of embarrassment and never lowers his voice. Andrés concludes that the whole thing is an act, an act that the woman finds harder and harder to bear, which is why she has that melancholy look tattooed on her face; she clearly does feel embarrassed and probably thinks this must be obvious to anyone. Perhaps she's thinking that her husband, boyfriend, partner, or whatever is making a complete fool of himself. At one point, when he's some distance away, he shouts something to her that Andrés doesn't quite catch, and then he realizes that the fat guy has ordered her to go and buy him another beer. He's gripping his cell phone in his right hand and the empty can in his left. The cell phone survives, but the can is crushed, crumpled and hurled into the sea.

“Do you mind having to travel by ferry?”

His father feels guilty: the only reason they're on this five-hour boat trip is because of him and his phobias. If he wasn't still so afraid of flying, they could have made
the same journey by plane, gliding through the air for a mere thirty minutes. Andrés tells him it doesn't matter, it's fine, they're in no hurry, besides, he's enjoying being back on a ferry. Javier Miranda isn't so sure and thinks his son is just saying this to keep him quiet. Not that he minds; in fact, he's very grateful. His fear of flying is far greater than any other fear. He can't control it. He feels that he couldn't even step onto a landing strip without trembling. He imagines he would turn blue, that his lips would swell up, and he'd feel a sharp pain in his cheekbones, as if his eyes were trying to escape into his body. The mere image of a plane in the air is enough to make him feel sick. He needs to think about something else.

“The last time we made this trip, your mother had just died,” he says.

“Yes, I know. You wanted to take my mind off things,” replies Andrés. “You wanted to get me out of the apartment. That's why we came.”

Then Javier thinks that perhaps they're doing the same again, only in reverse. It takes him a while to unravel that sentence, although he understood it perfectly well when he thought it: they're making the same journey, but this time, perhaps it's Andrés, his son, who's trying to take
his
mind off things. Can this be true? It's a question he doesn't dare ask himself.

When they can just make out the port of Punta de Piedras, when it's still only a smudge of shadow sewn onto the bottom of the sky, the fat guy asks the woman to get him another beer. Now everyone is out on deck. Most of the few passengers gather at the front of the boat
and watch the coast, their next fixed destination, coming nearer. A boy is shouting insistently at the sea, the same word over and over:
dolphins!
He elongates the vowels, stretches them out until they squeak: Dooolphiiins! And then he whistles to them. Perhaps someone has told him that dolphins are like dogs. At any rate, the boy shouts at them as if he believed they were. He shouts at his parents too, protesting, complaining that during the whole trip, they haven't seen a single memorable sea creature. Not a whale, not a tuna, not a dolphin.

“You lied to me!” he screams.

His parents look thoroughly fed up and, as if their son were the responsibility of the other passengers, go back inside, leaving the child on deck.

“We'll be right back, Roberto,” they say.

“Dooolphiiins!”

Andrés goes inside too. The truth is he's intrigued by the woman with the fat guy. On the pretext of getting a coffee, he heads toward the covered part of the boat. His father stays outside, staring at the horizon, at the fringe of land that is still no more than a mist, a distant stain. The interior of the boat is air-conditioned, but it still doesn't make things very cool, or at least not cool enough. There are flies as well, buzzing unsteadily about, almost as if they were giddy; they drift drowsily around in the middle of the room. It occurs to Andrés that the boy on deck would be better off looking for flies rather than dolphins. But he forgets the thought at once when he approaches the bar where the woman is waiting for the beer she's ordered. He leans on the bar next to her
and smiles, trying to be friendly. He's suddenly filled by a sense of the ridiculous: how many years has it been since he did something like this? He doesn't want to seduce the woman, simply to play at seducing her, to flex his flirting muscles and return to a gym he hasn't visited in a long time. The woman smiles back. It seems to Andrés, however, that the smile is just a smile, and so he says nothing. A few seconds pass, then Andrés gives a half yawn, a fairly bad imitation, but he can't do any better, and he smiles again. He orders a coffee. He waits a few seconds more, looking at the woman out of the corner of his eye before attempting to start a conversation:

“It drags a bit, doesn't it?” he says, but immediately regrets having said this. “It drags a bit.” What does that mean exactly?

“Yes, it does,” she replies, after a pause.

Andrés gives her a broad, grateful smile. Her smile is rather less broad, but he doesn't mind. The barman returns with the beer, and the woman pays. Andrés asks if she lives on Isla Margarita, but she says, no, she lives in Maracay, she's with her husband, who has come to the island on business. Andrés understands then that the fat guy speaking interminably into his phone to no one at all is, first, her husband, and second, a man who does deals and goes on business trips. The woman doesn't leave. She appears to be waiting for his coffee to arrive. She doesn't seem particularly bothered about taking her husband's drink to him as quickly as possible. Secretly, it pleases Andrés to think of the beer getting warm. They begin a desultory conversation, as if led on by natural curiosity, as if the only thing
that has brought them together is the implacable need to kill time. Thus he learns that her name is Yadira, that she does little else but be the fat guy's woman, that she's not married to him, although she calls him her husband, that they have no children, and it remains unclear whether they live together or if Yadira is his second front, the branch office of the fat guy's proper family. Andrés lies and says he's divorced and is going with his father to spend a few days at the beach: it's sometimes good to get a change of air, he says. He's not quite clear why he's saying all this, but feels it's part of the game, that this is how he's expected to behave. He orders another coffee. She continues to talk about her life, more cheerfully now, offering more details. The can of beer sits sweating on the bar.

Yadira is talking about her adolescence, telling him why she left school, when, suddenly, the fat guy with the cell phone appears, his face pressed to the fiberglass window, where he's watching them from outside, from the deck. He raps with his knuckles on the opaque plastic, his squashed nose looking even more like a snout. He's obviously not at all pleased. Yadira doesn't even say goodbye. She picks up the can and leaves.

“Where did you go to buy the coffee? Caracas?” his father asks.

“I was talking to a girl,” Andrés says, smiling and proffering the small disposable cup. His father takes a sip and scans the deck, as if trying to locate which girl had kept his son talking.

“That one.” Andrés saves him the trouble and points at the fat guy, who is no longer issuing instructions down
his cell phone, but is clearly telling Yadira off.

“She's pretty,” Javier says.

Andrés nods. Then they turn back to the island. Now it really is an island; they can make out its shape and texture, the yellowish-red color of the parched earth. The glare of the sun burns their eyes. Then his father, by various circuitous routes, tries to find out if there's some special reason for the journey they're making. Andrés senses at once what his father is after and realizes that behind all his father's words lie the clinical tests, the CT scan, the results from the MRI scan . . . There they all are in the middle of the sea. There, too, are an operating room, catheters snaking through the water, drifting gauze, tubes, bits of paper, syringes. The sun is a yellow stethoscope. Andrés snatches a sideways glance at his father, using his right hand clamped to his eyebrows as a sun visor. This could be a good moment to tell him the truth. Is it? Is it a good moment? Isn't it perhaps too soon? They haven't even reached the island yet. What would happen then? What would the trip be like once Andrés has told him the truth?

“I don't know,” his father says, trying to bring what he's trying to ask to a close. “I just thought there might be something else, you know what I mean.”

There is always something else. Something that moves and hurts and no longer works. That is the inevitable story of bodies, the biography of deterioration. Health is an immutable ideal. The most perverse of all utopias. Michel Foucault said that, viewed from the experience of death, illness can even be seen as a function of life. “Paradoxically,
from the corpse's point of view, it looks like life.” Exactly. Health doesn't exist, it's a heaven that forms no part of existence: we human beings can only live while sick. It's just that in his father's case, the illness is in its final stages. What comes after that? His father is still looking at him, as if secretly he, too, was awaiting that revelation. Why doesn't he tell him the truth now, this instant?

 

Yadira's scream is like a blow with a stone. Everyone spins round: she's not actually lying on the ground, but that's only because the fat guy has hold of her by the hand. He has just punched her in the face. Yadira is shielding her face and shaking her head.

“Let me go!” she howls.

The only response from the fat man is to give her a kick. Then another, in her belly or higher up. He may have struck her ribs or her breasts. Andrés tries to rush to her aid, but his father holds him back. “Don't be a fool,” he says. “Don't get involved.”

His father is so tense that his nails dig into his son's body. The other onlookers cry out; the German tourists watch, not entirely clear if what they are seeing is real or part of some picturesque welcome ceremony; two of the crew members run toward the couple and try to intervene, but not before the fat man has slapped Yadira so hard that this time he floors her. When they grab hold of him, he continues to struggle and roar, heaping insults on her. Another two members of the crew arrive and carry him, struggling, away. Yadira remains alone for a few seconds, sitting on the deck, shrunk in upon
herself. Head bowed, she covers her face and sobs, like a small wounded, frightened animal. Andrés tries again to go over to her, but his father, with surprising force, stops him.

“No, don't you go,” he says quietly. “Not unless you want her to get an even worse beating.”

Andrés looks at him in surprise. A woman goes to Yadira and helps her up, giving her a handkerchief to wipe away the blood on her face. As Yadira walks toward the restroom, she briefly catches Andrés's eye and immediately looks away.

As they drive off the ferry, they pass the couple. Yadira still has her eyes fixed on the ground, and beside her is the fat man, talking on his cell phone, while a driver loads their suitcases into the trunk of a taxi. Then the driver opens the car door, and the fat man stands to one side, still talking, so that Yadira can get into the car first. When she does, he roughly strokes her hair, and she, rather unconvincingly, avoids his touch. During the whole journey to the hotel, Andrés keeps looking at the taxi in his rearview mirror. At one point, on the highway, the evening light transforms the taxi into a razor blade, a slender metal blade following them, unhurriedly, always keeping the same distance, the same speed, always there, always sharp, always following them. Andrés looks at his father sitting next to him, overcome by sleep, no longer asking any questions.

Sunk in sleep, he seems happier, he seems safe.