There were three people ahead of her. Karina couldn’t believe this was happening to her. She tried to calm herself, tried taking deep breaths, clenching her fists and digging her nails into the palms of her hands, as if pain might help her keep control. Inevitably, the same fear she had so often read about began to surface. Was she about to lose consciousness? She wasn’t going to faint right there, was she? To conceal these feelings, she crouched down, pretending to check some detail on her shoes. This allowed her to rest one knee on the floor and to feel safer, steadier, more balanced. This wasn’t her idea. She’d read about it in a letter. Ernesto Durán had told her of something similar happening to him when he was queuing up at the bank. The other customers, of course, haven’t heard that story. Women don’t usually keep bending down to check their shoes while they’re waiting in a queue. Karina was aware of this, but couldn’t help it. Whenever she got up again, she would give a stiff smile, make some gesture, some pointless attempt at explanation. Then she was almost immediately overwhelmed by a terrible feeling of fragility. She was sweating profusely. She felt as if she were hyperventilating, as if a strange weakness were invading her being, as if she could no longer stand the lack of oxygen. There was now only one person ahead of her in the queue. Being able to look outside, through the glass door, was the one thing that gave her a tiny bit of peace, but even that was not enough. Then came a burning sensation, a fierce pricking in her throat. Karina started to scratch her neck. She was afraid it might be an allergy, although she couldn’t help connecting it with the unrelenting feeling of asphyxia. She swayed back and forth on the spot; she stretched out her arms, tried to expand her lungs, took deep breaths through her nose and mouth, rested her hand on the shelf containing sweets to one side of the counter, bent down, checked her shoe again, and straightened up, wiped the sweat from her cheek with one hand, glanced out of the corner of her eye to see if the other people behind her in the queue were looking at her. Then she could stand it no longer. She plonked the film down on top of some chocolate bars and raced out of the shop. Gasping for air, she only got as far as the steps leading out of the small shopping center. She sat down, not caring now or even thinking about the people hurrying past her, their legs almost brushing her.
She doesn’t know how long she sat there. She can only remember feeling that she had been saved. Only just in time, at the very last second. Was this what Ernesto Durán experienced? Was this how he felt? Had she caught it from him, did she suffer the same sickness?
Andrés is studying the results from the latest CT scan. He’s brought them home with him and is sitting on the bed, holding the image up to the light coming in from the window so that he can view his father’s brain. The bluish sheet reveals the spots with a clarity he now finds unbearable. Mystery always helps to make death a little more bearable. All this scientific exactitude is intolerable. What’s the point of it? Who does it help?
Suddenly his hand feels heavy, he finds it hard to keep holding that picture aloft. How many of these has he seen before? Too many. How often has he been faced with definitive images like these? He lost count long ago. After a while, you only count the ones you save, the exceptions. The dead go into a separate account, they keep their own tally. Perhaps he’s remembering that novel by Louis Ferdinand Céline, in which a doctor “described illness as he would describe the face of an old acquaintance.” That is what weighs on Andrés now. His long, long relationship with illness. Perhaps he has seen too many people die.
Once he dreamed that all his dead patients got together, that they were members of some kind of club: Dr. Andrés Miranda’s lost patients. He doesn’t like that word “lost.” It seems unfair. Perhaps because he knows that, sooner or later, doctors always lose. They are never going to have a good average. Defeat is their destiny. In that dream, his patients looked as ill as when he knew them, as if time had frozen them in that particular passage of their life. They were all very pale, or, rather, gray, but they were all almost exactly as he remembers them. Don Agustín Mejías was stumbling along, dragging with him a stand from which hung a saline drip. Señora Arreaza was in a wheelchair. Tomás Hernández still had a bandage round his head. Silvina Rossini was wearing a printed scarf over her bald head and was coughing loudly. Old Pimentel was lying naked on a stretcher, eyes glazed and lips parched. They all looked just as they had the last time he had seen them. His unconscious mind had gone no further, but had simply made do with the first images it came across. In the dream, none of his patients were looking at him. They were just walking about. Occasionally, they would exchange brief greetings, but they never turned round to see him; they acted as if he didn’t exist. “The next time I have this dream,” thinks Andrés, “my father might be in it. Perhaps he’ll pass me by too, without noticing me, without looking.”
Mariana finds him lying on the bed, alongside the scan results. It’s five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon.
“Are you alright?”
Andrés doesn’t answer. His eyes are closed, but he’s obviously not asleep. Mariana goes over to him, sits down beside him, runs her fingers through his hair and gently scratches his scalp.
“Come on, let’s go to the movies with the kids,” she says.
Andrés emits a low groan, then slowly shakes his head.
“You’ve pretty much ignored them for three weeks now. They know you’re looking after Grandpa, but they still need you. They miss you,” she adds, placing a slight emphasis on the last three words.
Andrés opens his eyes.
When his father and Mariana first met, Mariana was naked. Andrés and Mariana had been going out together for a month. Taking advantage of a weekend when his father had gone off with some friends to Barquisimeto, Andrés had invited her over to spend the night at the apartment. They cooked seafood risotto — the squid was hard and chewy and they’d used too much saffron — drank white wine and made love into the small hours. On Sunday morning, they took a shower together. There they were, under the shower, arms around each other, kissing, when they heard the front door open.
“Andrés,” called his father. “Are you home?”
It was eleven in the morning. The sound of water bouncing off the tiles filled the whole apartment, as if thousands of needles were hurling themselves to their deaths on the floor. Mariana instinctively sought shelter in his arms. Andrés tried to wrap the plastic shower curtain around them, meanwhile frantically thinking what to do next. He didn’t have much time. His father was already in the bathroom.
“Didn’t you hear me?”
“Yes, yes, of course. I just wasn’t expecting you.” Andrés tried to sound natural, pressing Mariana to him. “I thought you weren’t due home until tonight?”
“Oh, the whole thing was a disaster. The axle shaft on the car we were traveling in broke before we even got as far as Chivacoa. We wasted the whole afternoon getting it fixed and had to spend the night in Urachiche. That’s why we came home this morning.”
Then Mariana and Andrés heard the familiar sound of pee falling into the toilet bowl. His father was standing right next to them, peeing. Andrés imagined him pointing his penis at the water; Mariana inadvertently let out a nervous giggle. It was a strange sound, like an elongated squeak, a stifled exclamation. Andrés gave her a warning squeeze, but it was too late. Surprised and concerned, his father pulled back the shower curtain. He stared in astonishment at the sight of a completely naked Mariana clinging to Andrés’s body.