The day before yesterday, Doctor, I could bear it no longer. I took advantage of the fact that the office was being fumigated and left early to look for you. I know you only see patients from three o’clock in the afternoon, but I thought perhaps you might be engaged on some other activity at the hospital. I thought you might be visiting your patients or performing an operation. I wandered about all over the place, I even went to the coffee bar. I also asked a couple of nurses if they’d seen you. I didn’t find you, but I have to say that just being there, looking for you, made me feel better.
Then, just when I was about to come home, I spotted you in the distance, on the ground floor. I was walking along and there you were at the far end of the corridor, about to get into one of the elevators that go down to the parking lot. I walked as fast as I could to try and reach you, but I was too slow. By the time I got there, the elevator doors had closed. I felt quite desperate then. And I raced for the stairs, the way people do in films. I tore down them, I even bumped into a lady with a walking stick, but carried on regardless. It was almost a race against the clock: as you know, there are five levels in the underground garage. How could I possibly know where you’d parked your car? How could I possibly know at which level you would get out of the elevator? That’s why I ran down the stairs, almost two at a time, peering in at every level, trying to catch you, trying to see if I might spot you. You were wearing a pale green shirt and blue trousers.
I didn’t find you. I never saw you. I reached level five gasping for breath. The lift doors opened and out came a woman carrying a little girl in her arms. The child had her head in bandages and was very pale. Her lips looked as if they had been painted green. When she saw me, the woman took fright and hurried off to where the cars were parked. I stayed there for a while to get my breath back. Then I started thinking about what would have happened if I’d managed to catch up to you. How would you have reacted? Would you have recognized me at once? Would you know who I was?
I spent the afternoon feeling oddly relieved. Perhaps it’s the same relief I feel when I send you these letters.
Knowing that we’re sure to meet again soon,
Ernesto Durán
He takes the afternoon off. He phones his secretary and cancels all his appointments. Then he goes to Maripérez station and gets the cable car. It’s a weekday, so he doesn’t have to wait long. The only other people in the queue are some boys, playing hooky, escaping from that organized tedium known as high school. They spend the whole ride laughing and joking. Andrés says nothing. One of his own kids might skip school one Wednesday to form part of just such a group. They guffaw loudly. One of them has bought a pack of cigarettes. They’re probably planning to smoke them on top of El Ávila. They’re about thirteen or fourteen. Andrés considers talking to them, telling them he’s a doctor, warning them about the dangers of smoking. Smoking kills, even when you’re only fifteen, he could say. But he doesn’t. There’s no point. He was that age once, he’s been there. Adolescence is the most unclassifiable of joys.
It’s been far too long since Andrés has been up to the top of that mountain. There was a time, in his youth, when he would come whenever he could. El Ávila was like nature’s shopping mall, with few if any regulations, and instead of shop windows, there were dark, mysterious corridors full of nettles, lots of paths you could get lost down. Andrés and Vicente, his best friend at the time, used to go there every week. They even made the climb on foot sometimes. They could take any route: La Julia, Quebrada Pajaritos, Cotiza, even, when they were feeling really adventurous, reaching the peak of Naiguatá, the highest point on the coastal mountain range. They used to sit there on a huge rock. If there were no clouds, you could see the city of Caracas on one side and the sea on the other. They would sit there talking nonsense and smoking marijuana. This was no mere diversion for Vicente, a weekend spliff; he devoted himself with real seriousness to organizing this ritual. He took almost a professional pride in it. He used to get hold of all kinds of different stuff. Once, he turned up with some really high-quality Jamaican weed. They smoked their respective joints and stretched out on the rocks, gazing up at the sky. They spent hours like that, not even talking, a faint, foolish smile on their lips.
The light is whiter up there. The sun is like a slap in the face. It burns differently, it spreads itself, as if it, too, were lying stretched out in the upper air. The wind cuts your lips. Its fingers are like razor blades. They didn’t so much climb the mountain as float on it.
The last he heard of Vicente was that he was living near Tampa, Florida, selling vacuum cleaners. It didn’t seem possible that the university timetable could have put asunder what marijuana had so forcefully joined together. Vicente was the brother Andrés never had. When Andrés began studying medicine, Vicente had just started his degree in engineering. They simply stopped seeing each other, and the process seemed so natural that it even occurred to Andrés that their friendship had merely been another subject on the high school curriculum. Just as he had got through math, through the indescribable tedium of Spanish and the apathy of history, so he had got through his friendship with Vicente. Years later, while queuing up to see a film, he met one of his erstwhile friend’s brothers, who told him that Vicente had moved to the States, where he lived a comfortable enough life, an Electrolux life, with his wife and three kids.
From the Hotel Humboldt, near the cable-car station, you can’t see the city and the sea at the same time simply by turning your head. There are no enormous rocks and not even the sun seems quite so close. Andrés takes his nostalgia for a walk. Even at that age, when he wasn’t yet fifteen, he dreamed of becoming a doctor. If he were asked to say precisely when and how he decided to study medicine, he would have to think about it for a long time. People see sickness as a definitive sign: the body within the body, a sign that is at once troubling and disgusting. Perhaps that’s why it’s usually assumed that medicine is a stubborn, obstinate vocation, almost genetic in its purity: you’re born a doctor, born without a fear of peering into other people’s bodies and with strength enough to cast an unflinching eye upon other people’s blood.
Andrés, however, doesn’t feel this is so in his case. He thinks that, for him, medicine was, at first, born more out of curiosity than out of a sense of vocation. He’s never believed that being a doctor is a variant of being a missionary, an almost religious calling, a kind of voluntary service based on a charitable impulse or on the ideal of spending one’s life saving other people. Medicine isn’t a human quality, it isn’t a virtue.
When he scrutinizes his memory, he always bumps up against the same image: one morning, very early, on El Agua beach, on Isla Margarita. Andrés would have been ten years old, and his mother had just died. Perhaps that’s why his father decided that the two of them should go and spend a week on the island. They traveled by ferry, naturally. It was part of a family plan to dismantle the apartment in Caracas and cleanse it of any hint of his mother’s presence, so as to spare him further traumas. His father took him to the beach while his sisters-in-law checked the shelves and divided up the clothes, the jewelry, and any other belongings that had survived the fatal air crash. On their return, he and his father would find a place with less of a past. The void was preferable. It would be less painful.
They caught the ferry in Puerto La Cruz. It was a noisy old boat. Andrés felt as if he were boarding a rusty whale. It was a real adventure. He ran about on the deck, spent hours watching the sea, waiting for the dolphins to appear, leaping among the waves. He had never been on a ferry before. He had never been on an island. When he remembers it now, he thinks how terrible those same moments must have been for his father. There is Javier Miranda, widower, and his ten-year-old son.