When Berta was four or five years old and had one of these attacks, I would become alarmed to the point where reality disappeared and the only thing that truly mattered was making sure my daughter was breathing, that she wasn’t coughing up blood, that she was OK. A sick child is a painful contradiction in terms. Something like a paradox that reminds us not only of the fragility of existence, but that everything is the fruit of chance, that destiny is arbitrary, because the normal, logical thing would be for a child to grow up, go to school, enter society, and relieve the preceding generation from their posts, even if we never understand the purpose or meaning of this whole chain of people replacing one another. But this is the logic of the world we live in, and the basis from which we build everything else. And this logic had been overthrown for my daughter. That night, when she managed to stop crying and her breathing became normal again, she told me that for several months she had been playing the prosopagnosia game — which I already knew about — the game where she stared into the mirror while holding her breath for so long that either she could no longer recognise her own face or she had beaten the other players. She always played with Mario and Lucas, and she almost always won, because Lucas got bored quickly (in fact, he didn’t even like the game) and Mario fainted more easily than she did. I remembered that I still had to take her to the doctor to discuss these fainting spells and for her to have a general examination. Berta kept on talking, as if she needed to explain something that she herself couldn’t understand. She needed to reconstruct her story to find any small details she had passed over. During one of these fainting spells, Mario had hit his head against the sink in the boys’ bathroom and bled profusely from his jaw. This is why the teacher had called in the parents of all three children. Mario’s mother had been very frightened because Mario needed six stitches, and he was taken to the doctor to discuss his fainting. I felt guilty for not having done that yet. The doctors said that Mario had a terrible illness, one of those ones that tend to be suffered by old people rather than children. When a fifteen-year-old boy receives a diagnosis like that, it becomes a tragic contradiction in terms.
Berta said that Mario had told them that there was a positive side to his illness: he could get out of most of his classes, and skip the exams. Although she didn’t know how to put it into words, I think her friend’s joke had moved her. I felt a calmness in her story that surprised me. Yes, I had heard her terrible nervous crying, but after that she was talking to me in order to convince herself that she could overcome a situation that was clearly too much for her. Words would give shape to what was happening. Words like chemotherapy, operation, radiation, or transplant seemed out of place in a conversation with my daughter, who was only fifteen years old. It was made even more strange, because these words were mixed with others like report cards, homework, exams, end-of-year trip, holidays. While she spoke, the situation she described existed as a purely semantic problem, until Berta said something like ‘I don’t want to die,’ and then hugged me.
I can’t remember exactly when my daughter discovered death. Perhaps it’s something she discussed with her father. Pablo knew it was one of the things I was most afraid of in motherhood: the day I would have to explain to my daughter that death was a part of life, and that it is inevitable. Perhaps he was the one who told her about Heaven, because it was an idea she absorbed from a very young age in her conception of the world and existence. I had never been in a situation where I had to comfort her, until then.
I would have liked to have been able to calm her, but I couldn’t think of anything better to say than that death was a long way off, that life was long, that she was just a kid, and that there were still many wonderful things that would happen in her life, so there was no point in thinking about death because right now it made no sense. Besides, Mario wasn’t dead, he was just sick, and there were advanced treatments available that could cure illnesses like his. My arguments seemed weak even to myself. I tried to reconstruct everything the artist had told me about material and its resilience, but it was no good, I couldn’t even find a way to begin. But Berta listened to me and seemed calmer. Perhaps all she needed was to express her anxiety to someone and hear a soothing voice, regardless of what that voice was saying. My daughter was too smart to be comforted by the sort of banal things I’d been saying to her.
After a while, she began to speak again. She said she couldn’t imagine living without Mario, that it was thanks to him and Lucas that she made it through the day at school. She said Lucas was an idiot for not listening to Mario when he told them about his sickness, and that afterwards he’d acted like nothing had happened and everything was still the same. Berta said that a world without Mario would be a much worse place. I told her again that it’s possible to fight illnesses, that there are effective treatments that cure them, that I had read somewhere that in seventy-five per cent of cases the illness becomes chronic, which is to say that it will still be there, but it will be stable. Berta let me speak, but when she picked up her train of thought again it was exactly the same as before I had interrupted her. A world without Mario would be much worse because he was one of those people who never gets angry and because he always did whatever he could to ensure other people had a good time. Then she said she didn’t understand why the illness had to affect him, seeing as it was her lot to suffer the ugliest, most terrible things in life. But when she looked at it properly, it did make sense, because in the end she would be the one who had to witness her best friend’s death, after which she would be stuck with Lucas, who was an idiot. So, she would suffer the worst after all. She had seen plenty of films and she thought she knew how things would go from here. What she meant was, she shouldn’t be surprised, because this was her destiny. I tried to interrupt her a couple of times, but she didn’t want to hear my arguments again. I thought I’d have to seek help from some kind of therapist. Maybe at the school, if they were already aware of Mario’s illness, they had thought about making some kind of counselling available to the students. While I was thinking about all of this, my daughter kept sobbing in my arms. She had begun crying again, this time without the nervous coughing, and at times it was difficult to follow what she was saying, but I was able to understand that she was sick of everyone trying to deceive her: teachers, classmates, her father, me… Her father and I had betrayed her, or something like that.