The Sickness by Alberto Barrera Tyszka Read Free Book Online Page A

into the bedroom, where they lay down naked on the bed and talked. Andrés had felt nothing special when he first met her. Nor had Mariana. It wasn’t love at first sight, or even second or third. But a taste, an inner liking hovered and grew around them, until one night, at a friend’s house, much as
had happened just now, except that then they had drunk too much wine, they wearied of watching a Russian film on video and went off into another room. There they started talking, recognized their mutual attraction and, without quite knowing how, started to take off their clothes between kisses and caresses. They clutched and clung to each other. They had sex the way two strangers, two bodies, usually have sex for the first time, bodies that have not yet constructed their own intimacy. Then they spent all night talking, sitting naked on the granite floor. That is perhaps what they most remember about that first time—the cold of the granite on their buttocks.
    â€œDad has cancer,” Andrés says.
    Those words, hard and all of a piece, fall onto the bed. They lie down between them. Mariana is surprised, taken aback. She doesn’t know how to react.
    â€œIt’s lung cancer.”
    â€œBut . . .”
    â€œThere’s nothing to be done,” adds Andrés, making a great effort. Each word weighs on him, hurts him, tastes of glass.
    â€œThat’s not possible. We have to do something,” she says, shaken, moving her naked body closer to his.
    â€œWe can do all the usual things—chemo, radiotherapy. But it’s stage IV. It’s spread. He has metastasis to the brain.”
    â€œOh God!” is all Mariana manages to say, like an exhalation, before covering her face with her hands and breaking into sobs.
    Andrés puts his arms around her. He, too, would have preferred to use a different term, less definitive, less final.
Suddenly, that stumbling of one t against another, that precipice of s ’s in the word metastasis leaves them clinging to each other, unable to speak, simply crying.
    Tears are very unliterary: they have no form.
    â€œAre you going to tell him?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    Mariana pulls on her dressing gown and goes into the kitchen to get a glass of water. Andrés still isn’t hungry. He rolls over so that he’s lying on his back, still naked, gazing up at the ceiling. This was almost a sport for him when he was an adolescent and used to spend hours staring at the ceiling. He can even remember the different lamps he had in the different bedrooms of the many apartments he lived in with his father. His father liked moving. That, over time, is the only explanation he has found. Every two years, Javier Miranda would be seized by a strange restlessness, by an uncontrollable enthusiasm for new property. He would search the classified ads for a new place to live, another apartment to rent. He did this with such intense interest that Andrés came to feel that each move was a journey to another country, a marvelous excursion. Instead of taking vacations, they moved apartments.
    After the accident, his father never again boarded a plane. Never. Andrés remembers this now. He also remembers that he himself had to overcome the same fear. He was always looking for an excuse not to travel, until his wedding and the honeymoon, which Mariana was reluctant to spend on the Venezuelan plains. Thanks to an uncle who owned a travel agency, she had been offered a
bargain break in the Dominican Republic. Before Andrés even had a chance to confess his fears, she had the air tickets in her hand. On the outward journey, he took 6 milligrams of bromazepam, and on the homeward flight, he drank a whole bottle of rum. He spent the four days in between shaking. Each time he remembered that he would have to get on a plane again, he was gripped by terrible anxiety. The Dominican Republic was an exception, and had it not been for therapy, it would have remained