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

the one exception of his life. He would never have gone on any vacations abroad, he would never have attended any medical conferences held outside Venezuela. He would only have known places one could reach by car. That was his father. That was Javier Miranda now. Almost seventy years old and with lung cancer.
    Andrés lies there naked and staring up at the ceiling: when he was an adolescent, he associated that position with having a good wank, with the ritual of masturbation. Age has its advantages. Masturbation is a generous, irreplaceable act that develops self-esteem and promotes good health; nevertheless, it can’t compare with the satisfaction of having sex with a partner. The best orgasms are always to be had with someone else. It was only when he met Mariana, and they both became experts in the art, one with the other, that Andrés began to experience really profound orgasms, real festivals of tremors and tremblings, of indescribable chemical discharges. Sometimes, when he ejaculated, the feeling was so strong that he felt that blood not semen was being expelled from his penis. Physical ecstasy is inevitably and marvelously
bound up with dirt and the idea of dirtiness. Baudelaire believed this was a condition of love. “We are,” he wrote, “reduced to making love with the excremental organs.”
    Mariana is back. She’s carrying a glass of water and looking thoughtful. All this time, she has been pondering the same question, which she can’t shake off: “Are you going to tell him?”
    In the early hours, the same question haunts Andrés. It buzzes like a mosquito in his ear, alights on his left cheek, almost dances on one eyelid. He’s done everything he can to shoo it away, but it’s very insistent. He goes to his shelves and searches out a book by the Mexican doctor Arnoldo Kraus, A Reading of Life , in which he recalls coming across an analysis of the conflict between those who think that “telling the patient everything can be counterproductive” and those who think “it’s unethical to withhold information.” He skims the pages while Mariana, still naked, sleeps beside him. He knows he’s not going to find any magic recipe or instruction or order. Or even advice. Dying should always be a simple act: there’s nothing simpler than a massive heart attack. The difficulty lies in what is not yet over, in sickness. It’s the experience of loss brought to a climax, to a threshold from which there’s no return. Is it really necessary for his father to know the truth? What advantage would that bring him? What can he do with that information? What use is it for him to know that his body is betraying him, that very soon he will die?
    Andrés can analyze the effect of this news on himself. Since he saw the scan of his father’s brain until now,
until this rumpled dawn moment, how has he felt? Tense, nervous. He’s filled with a sense of haste, of hurry and anxiety. It’s an inner despair, almost liquid, that never ceases to boil, to flow, to stain everything. His memory is permanently startled. Memories, images, anecdotes come and go all the time. It’s as if the past had been let out of a box. He is now pure, stampeding fear. Would it be the same for his father? Would all the memories of his nearly seventy years rush into his mind? Would that be the best way to say goodbye to life?
    Andrés reads an extract from Kraus’s book: “In fact, it isn’t at all easy to tell which patients will be capable of being told everything and which will not. It’s a complicated business determining who will benefit from knowing how long it will be before they go blind, before they cease being able to walk or require catheters to ensure that their sphincters continue to function. And yet it’s clear that there are some people capable of handling bad news and others who simply can’t.” Which group does Javier