“I’m on vacation,” he said.
And yet that isn’t enough. Whenever he’s alone with his father, he doesn’t know what to say, how to look at him. Javier Miranda seems to feel the same. He doesn’t say anything either. He stares at the floor or mutters some brief response, says he’s tired and falls asleep or pretends to. Andrés stays with him, in silence. It seems to him cruel, absurd. This is exactly what will await them both when it finally happens. Silence. This is their sole destiny. Silence. This is precisely what they both fear and what hurts them most. Silence.
Perhaps he’s imagining his death. Perhaps his father is thinking about that all the time, about the exact situation, the precise moment when his existence will end. When Andrés thinks about his own death, he has more fears than certainties. A recurring image troubles him: he’s with some friends at a restaurant. Everyone is eating, drinking, and talking. Suddenly, he suffers a massive heart attack. Out of the blue. No burning sensation in the stomach, no shooting pains up the left arm. It’s like a gunshot, like a bullet that doesn’t leave his body, but stays inside, that fells him in half a second. That’s the last thing Andrés sees: a few glasses, an ashtray, an almost empty bread basket. . that is his final landscape as he crashes face-down on the table.
But his father would never have imagined that his death would be the way it presents itself to him now. Sickness is a mistake, a bureaucratic blunder on nature’s part, an absolute lack of efficiency. Everyone wants a swift death that lasts only a second, that is as surprising as it is lethal. It’s a very deep desire, part of the human condition. Sudden death is almost a utopia.
His father, however, avoids thinking. He resists, he forces his imagination or his memories to move on whenever he feels those thoughts approaching, trying to corral him. At first, immediately after they got back from Isla Margarita, he started doing inexplicable things. Every morning, he would walk to the newspaper kiosk three blocks from his house, buy a pack of cigarettes and, on the way back, break each cigarette in half, one by one. He kept up this routine for a week and a half, every morning.
Then he started buying things he didn’t need. One Saturday, he went to the Chinese market and bought various bottled sauces, bean sprouts and other herbs that he subsequently threw in the bin. One afternoon, he went to the building where he had worked for thirty-eight years. He stood at the door, as if stunned, just looking. He saw himself going in through that door, every day, for years and years. He saw himself in different suits, the pale gray one, the brown one he bought in December, the blue one with the wide lapels, and the different ties he wore. It was a film repeating the same shot ad infinitum, that one brief scene. For thirty-eight years, Javier Miranda worked as an administrator for the oil industry. First, when they were still American-owned companies, and after they were nationalized too, but always in the same building. At sixty-five they retired him, him and his whole generation. He doesn’t know for how long he stood there. He thought about going in, about going up to the eighth floor, but felt afraid. He probably wouldn’t know anyone now, and no one would know who he was. He walked home. He was walking for several hours.
His habits changed too. He stopped watching television. He even lost interest in baseball. But sometimes, he would spend hours in silence, staring at the blank screen, watching the faint reflection of his body in the lifeless, opaque glass. Even at moments like that, he didn’t want to think, he wanted just to sit there in the void and let drowsiness and lethargy sweep over him. But that’s not possible. Sooner or later, he has to stop running away, the attempted escape always fails. How would you like to die? Now he thinks that we should all have the right to answer that question.
This evening, while his father is sleeping, the phone suddenly rings. Andrés answers, but the person calling immediately hangs up. When this happens again with exactly the same result, Andrés concludes that this cannot be mere chance. The person ringing doesn’t want to speak to him. He becomes suspicious. His father doesn’t have a service that identifies the caller, and so he can’t even find out where the call came from. Who could it have been? Someone who doesn’t want to speak to him. Why?
A week later, the same thing happens. His father is having a shower. He’s getting steadily weaker, but he still resists being helped by Andrés. It also embarrasses him for his son to see him naked, “like a wet chicken.” The phone rings. Andrés answers, says “Hello,” and immediately the other person hangs up. It happens again. Now, though, Andrés picks up the phone and says nothing. He can almost feel the breathing at the other end, a hesitation wrapped in a breath. It’s only a matter of seconds, but he can touch them, feel them. Then suddenly:
“Is that you?”
Surprise paralyzes him. The woman’s voice disarms him, he doesn’t know what to say. She immediately ends the call. He hears the click of the phone being put down.
“Who was it?” asks his father from the bathroom.
Andrés hesitates before replying. Then, as if testing him out, he says:
“I don’t know. They hung up when they heard my voice.”
“Perhaps it was a wrong number,” says his father softly, after a pause, and without much conviction.
Andrés makes of this possibly unimportant detail an enigma that he tries obsessively to resolve. Mariana even pokes gentle fun at him for this. Perhaps it’s mere coincidence, a banal fact of his father’s day-to-day life. But nothing is the same for Andrés anymore. Or so it seems. He suddenly feels that he has never paid much attention to his father’s private life. He has never known him to have a girlfriend or partner or even a fleeting affair. Nor was he ever very interested. But now, that woman’s voice on the phone has become a source of curiosity: it uncovers all kinds of questions that Andrés has never asked himself, a slice of his father’s life of which he knows nothing. It’s true that Javier Miranda never remarried. He devoted himself entirely to bringing up his son and then, when Andrés got married, he carried on working and cultivated a routine that seemed to have no room for love or sex.
“Your dad has a right to a private life too, you know,” Mariana says. “Perhaps he did have girlfriends, but didn’t want you to find out. There’s no reason why you should know everything.”
But Andrés wants to know everything. He leaves his father with Merny at the hospital for another session of chemo, and goes straight back to the apartment. He wants to poke around, rummage, pry, as if he were a private detective. Javier Miranda’s bedroom is fairly austere. No decorative details. A double bed with blue sheets, two pillows, a wooden bedside table on which there is a lamp, a book, and a remote control for the TV. The book is one Andrés gave him a few weeks ago. The jokey, slightly nostalgic memoirs of a Caracas journalist. It was the only thing Andrés and Mariana thought he might like.
Gray curtains at the windows. A large wardrobe, with two wide doors. Andrés opens them gently, as if not wanting to make any noise. There’s a shelf on which sit three photos: one of Andrés’s mother, one of Andrés and his father crouched together on a beach; the third of Andrés, Mariana, and the grandchildren. The clothes hang there, still and perfect. Andrés opens the drawers and glances inside. At that moment, he feels ashamed, embarrassed. It strikes him as rather ridiculous being there, behind his father’s back, handling things, looking through his father’s underwear, riffling through his shirts. What is he looking for? What does he really want to find? Is it possible to find a life that’s over, that might already be lost to them both?
In the drawer of the bedside table he comes across an envelope stuffed with letters. Again he feels ashamed, dishonest, but he has come too far now, there’s no point in turning back. They are short letters, unsigned, but clearly in a woman’s handwriting. Or so Andrés believes. Besides, the letters themselves tell him this. They appear to be brief declarations of love, either delivered by hand to his mailbox or slipped under the door. No dates, no names, no concrete details. It all seems to indicate a clandestine affair, one that must be kept hidden. One note in particular attracts his attention: it’s written on the back of half a dry-cleaning ticket. Just two lines: “I dropped by this afternoon. I wanted to surprise you. I needed a kiss. I needed you.”