He spent the morning in the operating room. Although he chose to work in general medicine because he’d never felt at ease with surgical practice, Andrés does sometimes help out at the occasional operation. Usually, this is at the request of a friend. Miguel often asks him. Today it was Maricruz Fernández. They had opened up a patient with two tumors on her liver. Maricruz wanted Andrés to have a look at them, to get his opinion. The second tumor, in particular, was causing confusion. Half of it was soft and the other half hard, and only one side of it was cerebroid in appearance. This time, Andrés felt dizzy, something that had never happened to him before. As he bent over the woman’s body, he suddenly felt as if the ground had slid from under him, as if he might drown in those intestines, plunge in and be lost forever inside that dark, slimy liver.
He made an excuse and left as quickly as he could. He went to the cafeteria and drank a glass of orange juice. Now he’s sitting outside the door of the chemotherapy room, staring into space, thinking. In the last week, his father has deteriorated terribly fast. The voracity of certain diseases is truly repugnant. Andrés finds his tolerance for such things is decreasing as his own suffering increases. He even finds the clinical terms unbearable:
neoplasm exeresis staphylococcal empyema pleural empyema anastomosis iliocolostomy biopsy hemostasis prosthesis laparotomy ischemia lithiasis
These are words that travel up and down hospital corridors all the time. He closes his eyes and he can hear them. They glitter and gleam in the middle of any conversation, they stand out among the other simple words, the words that serve only to live, but not to confront death. It seems to Andrés now that they form part of a pretentious, useless dictionary. This morning, when he went to fetch his father, he found him sitting on the bed, naked. He looked unconscious, although his eyes were open. Andrés hesitated for a few seconds, thinking that his father might feel embarrassed. Such unexpected intimacy was very cruel. He decided to go over and sit down beside him. His father didn’t move. From closer to, Andrés could see how fragile he was. His spindly legs. His limp penis, like a finger fallen asleep in the wrong place, as if it had never been a penis. His bones were more prominent. They now provided the dominant framework of his body. The expression on his face was one of deep disillusion.
“How are you?” Andrés put his arm around his father’s shoulder, taking care to feign a quite incomprehensible optimism.
“Terrible.” His father still didn’t look at him. “I’ve had enough, Andrés. I don’t want to go on. I don’t want any more treatment.”
“You’ve just woken up feeling a bit low, that’s all,” Andrés insisted, although the words felt rough on his tongue. It seemed to him it was his duty, his role, to say something of the sort.
“I woke up today feeling exactly as I did yesterday. And the day before yesterday. And the day before that.”
“Come on, I’ll help you get dressed.”
“No, I mean it. I don’t want to go.”
“You have to.” Andrés crouched down in front of him. They looked hard into each other’s eyes.
“It hurts,” his father said after a pause, almost in a whisper. Almost like an exhalation. “Everything hurts. It hurts like hell.”
Now, sitting in the corridor, he can no longer hear the clinical words, no more neoplasm ischemia pleural empyema. It hurts like hell. That’s all he can hear.
Julio Ramón Ribeyro wrote in his diary: “Physical pain is the great regulator of our passions and ambitions. Its presence immediately neutralizes all other desires apart from the desire for the pain to go away. This life that we reject because it seems to us boring, unfair, mediocre, or absurd suddenly seems priceless: we accept it as it is, with all its defects, as long as it doesn’t present itself to us in its vilest form — pain.”
Andrés decides to spend the rest of the day with his father. He invites him to have lunch in his favorite restaurant, a discreet place whose food has been much praised, assuring him that they make real homemade fare. His father doesn’t seem very keen. Andrés insists. So much so that, in the end, it’s as if his father were making a real sacrifice in accepting. They don’t enjoy the food. His father is feeling horribly nauseous. He has such chronic acid reflux that he can’t eat anything. They go home in silence. His father undresses and gets into bed. Andrés sits down beside him again. What can he do? What does his father expect of him? Is there anything he can do, is there any way of helping him? His father lies down on his back, staring vacantly up at the ceiling. Andrés opens the drawer of the bedside table.
“I was looking for your pills the other day and I came across this,” he says, and shows him the book.
His father doesn’t seem particularly interested, and so Andrés holds the book in front of his eyes. His father eventually manages to whisper:
“A nurse at the hospital recommended it to me.”
“Dying with Dignity,” Andrés reads. “Not exactly optimistic.”
“Life isn’t optimistic.”
Andrés sighs, leans closer and affectionately strokes his father’s bald head.
“You’re not thinking of doing anything foolish, are you, Dad?”
“The only foolish thing I can do is to die, and I’m doing that right now.”
Andrés doesn’t know what else to say. He drops the book onto the bed and continues stroking his father’s head. They both stay like that for a few moments, until Andrés decides to take a risk.
“Why did you never tell me?”
“About what?”
“About Inés Pacheco.”
His father sits up and looks at him. He seems more disappointed, even angry, than surprised. Despite his weak state, he maintains a haughty, almost severe mien.
“I met her. I went to see her,” says Andrés.
And then the old man slowly deflates, as if that sudden burst of spirit had simply emptied out through some secret hole. He gives a snort and slumps back onto the bed. Then he closes his eyes, as if he didn’t want to hear any more.
“Didn’t she tell you? Didn’t she mention it?”
His father remains sunk in his own thoughts.
“Does she know what’s happening to you, that you’re ill?” Andrés continues asking questions even though his father refuses to answer.
After a few moments of silence, Andrés also lets himself slide very slowly onto the bed, so that he’s lying beside his father. Then he, too, lies staring up at the ceiling. They probably both just wish it would end, that it was over. Death is preferable to pain. Illness is a very bitter toll to pay, a tax so capricious that it can make death the object of all our final desires.
“I smell bad,” his father says suddenly, still with his eyes closed.
He’s right, but Andrés doesn’t respond. Every illness produces inside the body its own particular distinguishing marks.
“It’s as if I’d already started to rot.”
Andrés doesn’t look at him either. He doesn’t dare.
“It’s just that you’re very depressed, Dad,” he whispers, a lump in his throat.
“Can’t you smell it? I smell strange, of ammonia and things. Even when I’ve showered, I still smell.”