It’s nerves, he tells me sometimes. She’s like a child, and it’s all too much for her. “When I get out of the hospital, she’ll calm down,” he adds, to take the sting out of it. At other moments, however, he begins to talk about separating from her. He’s like a kid fantasizing. He won’t tell her until he’s out of the hospital and back on his feet. He’s wary of her tricks, the snares she might set for him.
He talks to me in bursts. He tells me things he’s never told me. He criticizes her, ridicules her, accuses her of being greedy, says that she has the brain of a mosquito, and suddenly the next day he’s defending her again. These are brief moments. Flashes. Most of the time he keeps quiet. Most of the time he doesn’t want to think. Tense, preoccupied, he clings to any distraction. Maybe by denying it, by refusing to acknowledge it, it will go away. Essentially it’s the same kind of behavior that’s always governed him. But not wanting to think about something is already a way of thinking about it. He avoids asking himself why she acts the way she does, but secretly the question is asked and answered.
Consequently, each day he and I grow closer. I entertain him; I deny what he wants to deny. We watch television, talk about things of no consequence, take walks down the hallways, poke fun at other patients, make plans for the future, break the rules in small ways, like eating takeout from KFC when the nurses aren’t watching.
One afternoon I confess that I’m feeling the urge to become a father, and he advises me against it, telling me how exhausting it is to have a child, and then he realizes the incongruity of what he’s said and tries to make up for it by complimenting me. I don’t know what’s more pleasing to me: the rather obligatory declaration of love with which he corrects himself or the masculine camaraderie that for a few instants seems to make him forget that we’re related.
And there’s his tact — inflected with modesty, which always surprises me — in his dealings with others. The nurses, the doctors, his roommates … With everyone he displays an almost pathological humility. With some of the nurses, too, he flirts timidly, a bit perplexed, sometimes, by their excessive familiarity. He’s bothered by the brusqueness, the lack of formality, their casual way of speaking to him and their habit of treating him with the condescension of people used to dealing with patients, their habit of talking to him as if he were a child or an old man. His favorites are the ones who don’t talk to him that way. When his departure approaches, he asks me to buy them presents. It must be hard for a man in his condition, who was once attractive and who always liked women so much, to expose himself to the female gaze. It moves me to realize this for the first time. The speed with which he hides his belly when one of the nurses comes in, his outsize efforts to spare them any contact with his body.
It moves me.
The last days are the worst. The friend he met in Brazil still hasn’t taken responsibility. She misses whole days at the hospital, and when she appears, she stays for only a little while. One morning she says that since he won’t be able to work, they’ll have to sell the house they own together and use his share of the proceeds to defray the cost of his illness. Another time she talks to him about mortgaging his part of the house. Afraid that this is simply a ploy to leave him with nothing, my father refuses the mortgage but accepts the sale, with the intention of separating, he tells me, as soon as it’s accomplished.
“If she’s so worried, why doesn’t she sell one of her other houses instead of making me leave my house and studio, sick as I am?” he asks me.
I’m silent. I could come up with excuses for her, reassure him, but I don’t.
Meanwhile, the fever hasn’t subsided, but I manage to convince the doctors that it may not be caused by an infection, as they fear, but by the tumor, and after several anxiety-ridden days in which he leaves everything in my hands, I persuade them to let us go.
The release has an immediate beneficial effect. It’s only logical. In addition to leaving behind the weariness and despair brought on by such a long stay, exiting the hospital means beginning the treatment, and beginning the treatment means beginning to recover. At least as he understands it.
On his first day of freedom, I take him home. He’s tired, but in good spirits. The friend he met in Brazil greets him with a show of cosseting to which he responds curtly. At one point, when she goes out of the room and leaves us alone, he raises his fists to his temples, pricks up his index fingers, and calls her Beelzebub. I laugh.
For the next few days, until the beginning of the treatment is set, I ferry papers back and forth from the hospital. They explain the routine to me and I explain it to him. It’ll be every other Wednesday. He’ll have to show up at eight in the morning for tests and return at eleven to be hooked up for five hours. Then, until Friday afternoon, he’ll wear a plastic bottle that will continue to introduce a gas into his bloodstream. That’s when I tell him what I’ve had the hardest time coming to terms with: first they’ll have to implant a catheter near his shoulder, in something the doctors call a reservoir, an access port to the body. I’ve been in the chemotherapy room, and I know it isn’t something that all the patients have, but I don’t mention this, not wanting him to ask me for the explanation that I was given. No one has told me whether it’ll ever be removed, whether it’s planned that one day he’ll stop being a cyborg. No one seems to contemplate the possibility. But he doesn’t seem concerned. All he cares about is starting to get better. The day of the procedure, he’s happy when he comes out, declaring how simple it was.
The following Wednesday we arrive at the scheduled time. The patients go in for the testing in fives. Some — most — have come alone. Some hide the patchy balding of their skulls under wigs or scarves. Some speak among themselves as if they’ve known one another for a long time. They have encouraging words for each other and they remark upon how well one or another supposedly looks, while my father takes refuge in his shyness with a patrician air that his excessive humility fails to hide. I joke with him, trying to turn his gaze from the most ravaged, until his turn comes. Then we go out for breakfast. We’re both afraid of the side effects. We don’t know whether he’ll lose his appetite or his hair; we don’t know whether he’ll vomit or grow weak. It’s a time of unknowns, but also of apprenticeship. Back at the hospital, the nurses address him by name when they speak to him, just as they do the other patients who doze connected to sophisticated blue drips, and he smiles, amazed by their powers of retention, grateful for the deference, though he’s aware, I suppose, that it isn’t by chance, that it’s on the instructions of the psychologists. Over the next few hours his sister comes, a friend comes, and finally, the friend he met in Brazil comes … In the afternoon, we’re alone again. It worries my father that I haven’t gone back to see my wife since his operation, and we agree that from now on, I’ll split my time: one week with her and one week in Madrid, coinciding with the treatment days. At first he refuses even this, but then he accepts. He doesn’t say so, but it’s plain that he needs me. It’s plain that he’s grateful and moved. Maybe that’s why he tells me that the friend he met in Brazil has replaced the lock on the door to their house and hasn’t given him the key, so he can’t make me a copy. She claims that while he was in the hospital, I came to the house and stole the holographic document, drawn up years ago, that lists their respective belongings. Of course I’m indignant at this false accusation, and if my father harbored any doubts, he dismisses them when he sees my reaction. My anger is so great at being repaid like this for what I’m doing that when it’s time for us to leave that afternoon and they attach the bottle he’ll have to wear until Friday, I take him home but don’t come inside with him, out of fear that I won’t be able to control myself if the friend he met in Brazil is there.