“Come on,” he keeps saying. “What do you want to do next?”
He shows him the sea, points at the curling waves, remains watching by his side, waiting for surprising animals to emerge from the water. There he is, doing everything he can to make his son forget, to stop him missing his mother, to fill up his mother’s absence with sun and salt water. The Caribbean is trying to conspire against Freud. Andrés runs to and fro while his father grants his every whim, buys him an orange drink, buys him a fish pasty; when, at last, they spy the coast of the island, the port of Punta de Piedras, they both lean on the rail to witness that encounter with the land. His father tells him about the beaches that await them, of the wonderful time they’re going to have. That was his way of mourning: organizing a party for his son.
Over the years, Andrés had gradually managed to track down his first flicker of interest in medicine to that time, to that week on Isla Margarita. It happened on the third day. His father always got him up very early, as if he were afraid that Andrés might wake alone, as if he didn’t want him to have a moment without some stimulus, some distraction. As soon as the sun rose, his father would get him out of bed, always eager to invent some new surprise, some new adventure. The previous day they had gone fishing, without success. That morning he proposed running down to the beach to look for jellyfish. At that hour, when the light was still weak and the sand cold, they would be sure to find a few lost among the last fingers of the waves. Some of those white medusas, which could sting you when in the water, always got washed up on the shore during the night. The less cautious, the less experienced, the fat and the flabby, didn’t make it back, but remained there on the sand, along with other detritus from the sea, condemned to a slow death, drying up and suffocating in the air and the sun.
Andrés only woke properly when the icy water touched his feet. They walked for nearly half a mile but found only one small jellyfish. However, parked on the sand at the end of the beach was a police car. Next to it stood a group of officers. He and his father ran toward them. A man’s body lay on the sand. His clothes were slightly tattered, his skin purple, and his lips very swollen. Out of the cavity of his right eye sprouted some yellow foam, like very pale broccoli, like some sort of soft coral emerging from the man’s head. Javier Miranda squeezed his son’s arm and tried to drag him away, but Andrés stayed where he was, absorbed, studying the body. The policemen gave some vague explanation. The man wasn’t a tourist. They assumed he was a local fisherman. They were waiting for a pathologist to arrive and examine the body.
“He’s alive!” said Andrés in an anxious, childish voice.
While his father was listening to what the policemen had to say, Andrés, intrigued, had gone closer to the body. He heard it breathe. He saw the gaping mouth, saw the fat lips tremble slightly; he crouched down and once more heard the man breathe.
“He’s alive!” he said again, shouting this time.
Only his father hurried over to him and took his hand. The officers looked at each other and smiled. One of them laughed out loud. Or that, at least, is what Andrés remembers.
“He’s breathing,” he murmured rather sadly, while his father drew him away from the corpse.
“No, he’s not,” said the policeman. “Listen, kid. What you can hear is the water moving around inside the body. That’s all. Listen,” he repeated, crouching down beside him. They all stayed still for a moment in expectation, and a liquid whisper slipped out onto the air. “Did you hear that? It’s just water. But the guy’s dead alright.”
Andrés was astonished. He imagined that body full of sea, full of water that came and went, that made noises, that went round and round, unable to escape. He thought of it as a secret room, in which the water could circulate freely. That morning, Andrés thinks, marked his initial curiosity about bodies, the discovery of the existence of an order distinct from words, more physical, more tactile, less invisible. His father had to drag him away. The boy wanted to wait for the pathologist to come, he wanted to know what would happen next. His father, of course, feared that the incident would lay bare the very loss he was trying to conceal. One death calls to another. A stranger’s body lying on the sand was also the body of the mother, floating and turning between them, surrounding them, drenching them.
Andrés cannot remember there being any further consequences. He can’t, for example, remember if it was that same day that he spoke with his father about the death, about the plane exploding in midair; he can’t remember if his recurring dream came before or after that morning spent hunting for jellyfish on the beach. He merely pinpoints that moment, almost fancifully, as a first image of his vocation. At seventeen, when he finished high school, he decided to study medicine — in a rather childish way, as is always the case at that age — and he still felt driven by that same curiosity, by the desire to find out what went on inside our bodies.
It’s seven o’clock when he comes down from the mountain. There’s no one else in the cable car. He feels that chance has handed him a rare privilege. The journey back to the city reveals an extraordinary landscape. The illuminated lines of the highways, the lights of the suburbs and the barrios, draw a different map in the darkness, that of an unfamiliar, almost unreal city: a stationary landscape, bereft of movement, a Caracas conjured up in that very moment that will surely disappear as soon as he enters it again. Suspended in the air, almost hanging above the distant precipice that is now the city, Andrés makes a decision, rings his father’s number from his mobile and says:
“Hi, Dad. How do you fancy coming to Isla Margarita with me?”
In its heyday, the bar had been an old-fashioned Spanish tasca. Legs of Serrano ham hung from the walls and customers were always offered a little snack, a tapa, with their drink — some bread and a sliver of potato omelet, a few grilled sardines, some olives. Now, all that’s left of that Spanish heritage is its name: Las Cibeles. It’s just a bar where the people who work locally take refuge after six o’clock. Office workers, secretaries, administrators, and low-grade civil servants meet up to exchange the gossip of the day with the help of a few beers. The whole place is filled with a beery torpor, a chemical smell that even indicates the way to the toilets. At one end of the bar, Adelaida and Karina have had to wait until evening to finish their after-lunch conversation. Ernesto Durán’s latest letter remains the juiciest dish on the menu.
“I couldn’t say anything to Dr. Miranda because he rang in early and said he was canceling all his appointments. He said he wouldn’t be coming in this afternoon. As you know, he’s worried about his father, who’s in a really bad way apparently.”
Adelaida barely has time to nod. Karina seems so resolute, she’s speaking very rapidly and with great determination. She has thought of nothing else all afternoon.
“This has gone too far,” she says now, nervously smoothing her blouse. “If not today, then I’ll have to do it tomorrow, because this is something I really must tell the doctor about.”
“There’s no need to make such a drama out of it, Karina. It’s hardly the end of the world.”
“But what if the guy really is crazy?” asks Karina, genuinely concerned.
“He only followed him once, for one morning. He’s desperate. He needs to see his doctor.”
“Please, Adelaida, I’m being serious.”