Free The Sickness by Alberto Barrera Tyszka

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