“Have you spoken to Mariana?” I managed to ask before he hung up. “What for? She’s not interested. She’s fine as she is, with her girlfriend, her job, and her stuff.” The anger in his voice covered a cry for help: he was asking me to act as an intermediary, to give the news to my sister.
Naturally, that wasn’t a phone call I had any desire to make. Mariana and I weren’t very close at that time. But whereas my father hadn’t been invited to her wedding the year before, I had. And Katia, her wife, had treated me with warm familiarity, constantly demonstrating that Mariana had told her a lot about our childhood, about how important we were to each other after Teresa’s death.
And my father was, and had always been, a troglodyte. I’d become inured to his lack of tact, his rather brusque way of saying just what was on his mind, but Mariana found it almost impossible to grin and bear it. My father’s manner drove her crazy, gave rise to a form of rage bordering on disgust. Any conversation between them about the cancer might go horribly wrong if I didn’t intervene. My father was capable of using the call to complain about her coldness, about not being invited to her wedding, being refused the recognition he deserved for having single-handedly put his two children through college (public and free, but he wouldn’t mention that). And Mariana was capable of lashing out and saying that she hadn’t invited him because she didn’t want to feel ashamed of him in front of her friends; in the heat of the argument, my sister might even have been capable—and not for the first time—of insinuating that my father was alone because neither Teresa nor anyone else could stand him, which was, when you came down to it, true.
When I rang, Mariana was more upbeat than usual. She spent several minutes telling me about the vacation she and Katia were planning to the nature reserve on Isla Holbox. I asked if they had already made a hotel reservation, anticipating the disappointment of having to cancel the trip if my father were to die just before they left. The reservations had been made.
Plucking up my courage, I finally broached the subject. “I spoke to my father just now.” “So what did the fascist pig have to say for himself?” However harsh it might sound, “fascist pig” was the almost affectionate term we used between ourselves to refer to him. “He’s dying. He’s riddled with cancer.” After a few moments’ silence, Mariana replied in a flat voice, similar to Teresa’s monotone: “I’ll have to cancel the trip.” I guess she was hoping that I’d contradict her, say, “Don’t worry. You go ahead, I’ll sort everything out and take you to the cemetery when you get back so you know the location of the grave you’ll never visit.” But I said nothing, and Mariana and Katia canceled their vacation.
Eight days later, my father had been admitted to the hospital and was connected to a morphine drip. Although he’d always said he wanted to “die peacefully at home,” as soon as he found out about the cancer, the pain kicked in, as if the illness had been waiting to be given a name to proliferate and demonstrate its brutality. It was immediately apparent that he’d spend the rest of his days—which would surely be few—in that bed in a hospital in Colonia Roma. And no one wants their father to die alone, when the nursing staff are changing shifts, with Jell-O stains on his clothes, and a game show on the TV in his room, so I began to spend my days with him at the hospital, making occasional trips to the house in Educación to bring him fresh clothes, magazines, and his address book.
To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to share the burden with Mariana. I thought she’d turn up at normal visiting hours, sometimes alone, sometimes with Katia, and would promise to keep an eye on text messages so she could help me with the funeral arrangements when the time came. But on the first night, she appeared carrying a gym bag containing a toothbrush and a change of clothing, and told me we could do shifts—she’d warned them at work that she wasn’t going to be around the whole day—and I could go home. I didn’t go. That evening, we stayed together in the hospital, and during the night went down to the cafeteria a few times, where the flame of our relationship was rekindled. We spoke of everything except Teresa. Unlike me, Mariana preferred not to touch on delicate subjects.
During the following three months, that hospital became the living room of my house, and the cafeteria, my office. My father’s insurance policy covered the expenses of a private room, and no one was hurrying him to vacate his bed (to go home when he was a little better, or to the grave when he could no longer bear the pain). In that bed, my father was slowly consumed by the cancer, while Mariana and I aged, either in the chair at his side or walking the corridors of the hospital when insomnia sank its teeth into our backs.
My father got hooked on the morphine in a matter of hours. He passed so quickly into an idyllic state that I was surprised he hadn’t already developed some other addiction—apart, that is, from his obligatory tequila before dinner and, in recent years, his nighttime Valium. The doctors did their best to keep the dosage low, first arguing that he might accidentally take too much and then, when they realized the weakness of that argument in such
