Free The Sickness by Alberto Barrera Tyszka Page A

marijuana had so forcefully joined together. Vicente was the brother Andrés never had. When
Andrés began studying medicine, Vicente had just started his degree in engineering. They simply stopped seeing each other, and the process seemed so natural that it even occurred to Andrés that their friendship had merely been another subject on the high school curriculum. Just as he had got through math, through the indescribable tedium of Spanish and the apathy of history, so he had got through his friendship with Vicente. Years later, while queuing up to see a film, he met one of his erstwhile friend’s brothers, who told him that Vicente had moved to the States, where he lived a comfortable enough life, an Electrolux life, with his wife and three kids.
    From the Hotel Humboldt, near the cable-car station, you can’t see the city and the sea at the same time simply by turning your head. There are no enormous rocks and not even the sun seems quite so close. Andrés takes his nostalgia for a walk. Even at that age, when he wasn’t yet fifteen, he dreamed of becoming a doctor. If he were asked to say precisely when and how he decided to study medicine, he would have to think about it for a long time. People see sickness as a definitive sign: the body within the body, a sign that is at once troubling and disgusting. Perhaps that’s why it’s usually assumed that medicine is a stubborn, obstinate vocation, almost genetic in its purity: you’re born a doctor, born without a fear of peering into other people’s bodies and with strength enough to cast an unflinching eye upon other people’s blood.
    Andrés, however, doesn’t feel this is so in his case. He thinks that, for him, medicine was, at first, born more out of curiosity than out of a sense of vocation. He’s never
believed that being a doctor is a variant of being a missionary, an almost religious calling, a kind of voluntary service based on a charitable impulse or on the ideal of spending one’s life saving other people. Medicine isn’t a human quality, it isn’t a virtue.
    When he scrutinizes his memory, he always bumps up against the same image: one morning, very early, on El Agua beach, on Isla Margarita. Andrés would have been ten years old, and his mother had just died. Perhaps that’s why his father decided that the two of them should go and spend a week on the island. They traveled by ferry, naturally. It was part of a family plan to dismantle the apartment in Caracas and cleanse it of any hint of his mother’s presence, so as to spare him further traumas. His father took him to the beach while his sisters-in-law checked the shelves and divided up the clothes, the jewelry, and any other belongings that had survived the fatal air crash. On their return, he and his father would find a place with less of a past. The void was preferable. It would be less painful.
    They caught the ferry in Puerto La Cruz. It was a noisy old boat. Andrés felt as if he were boarding a rusty whale. It was a real adventure. He ran about on the deck, spent hours watching the sea, waiting for the dolphins to appear, leaping among the waves. He had never been on a ferry before. He had never been on an island. When he remembers it now, he thinks how terrible those same moments must have been for his father. There is Javier Miranda, widower, and his ten-year-old son.
    â€œCome 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