As had always happened when life attempted to prohibit him something, my father’s solution was high-handedness: he sent me off to collect a wad of bills he’d stashed in the house and ordered me to use the money to bribe “the damned head nurse” or go to a drugstore and buy the stuff. I explained that we’d need a prescription, and he spent the following days insisting to the downy-cheeked physician that he had to have that document because the hospital morphine cost an arm and a leg. The doctor finally gave way and I was able to buy two types of morphine: injectable and in pill form (to cover all eventualities), so that my father could enjoy that last pleasure life had conceded him as he himself saw fit.
I sometimes think that if it hadn’t been for the morphine, my father would have died in a matter of weeks. Instead, he survived for almost three months, floating on an ever higher and denser cloud of opiates until any distinction between sleep and death was hairsplitting. Only then did he have the courage to finally die.
Two and a half years on, my existence is, like his during those months, restricted to the width of a bed. From here, in the tangle of my sweat-stained sheets, accompanied only by these notes—by these notebooks in which I scribble as a form of salvation, and these words I weave together in search of meaning—I’m able to understand the infinite pleasure my father must have experienced on discovering, after a whole life of work, the sweet honey of immobility.
One evening at the hospital, while waiting for the arrival of the doctor to carry out his daily examination, I asked my dad why he’d continued going to the office during those months, when he was already feeling tired and ill, had found blood in his stools, and had to take cabs everywhere because he got dizzy when he drove himself; why he hadn’t visited the doctor earlier or called me to say that he wasn’t well, that he had symptoms; why he hadn’t asked me to go with him to the hospital. “I don’t know,” he responded grouchily. “I had a lot of outstanding business.” I imagine that when he did finally consult the doctor, someone else immediately replaced him at the bank and took over the outstanding business that couldn’t be put off and weighed so heavily on his mind. He was a wholly dispensable employee. Perhaps the only way my father had of feeling important was to behave as if he actually were.
A number of his colleagues came to see him in the hospital while we were waiting for him to get around to dying, but none of them seemed particularly close to him. They used to tell him dull stories, pretending they were funny, pass on best wishes from the secretaries, bring flowers that would probably remain fresh longer than his body, and then depart, leaving behind the smells of aftershave, tequila, and dry-cleaned shirts.
Apparently, during his fifty-nine years of life, my father had never formed any close relationships or had intimate friends who could, in those final days, have helped him swallow the bitter pill of truth, or just in some way accompany him. Until that moment his isolation had always seemed quite natural, something that happened to all men of a certain age and so couldn’t be put down to his personality. I myself had no friend I’d want to see at my deathbed. But when I saw my father’s happy, relaxed expression after a dose of morphine—his brow clear for the first time, the querulous twist of his lips finally erased—I understood that his lack of friends was, in fact, a personal defect; a stain on his character that possibly indicated some deeper turbulence; a fundamental blemish that I, as everything seemed to indicate, had inherited.
9
WHILE MY CLOTHES WERE DRYING IN THE SUN on the small clay-colored patio, Mariconchi switched on the TV and told me that I could watch whatever I wanted. She was going to prepare quesadillas for us both: “You must be starving, sweetie.” I asked if she’d managed to get through to my father or sister, and she nodded before disappearing into the kitchen, from where, as if avoiding eye contact, she shouted, “Your daddy will be here in the early evening, sweetie. I’m going to take you to the airport so the two of you can get the next flight home.”
All the TV channels had poor reception, except for one, which was showing a telenovela. I moved the rabbit-ear antenna around in vain and after a while switched the set off. On the telephone table, from where Mariconchi must surely have called my father, I found a small square message pad. I tore off one of the sheets and settled down to making an origami figure on the flowered dining room tablecloth, although I would have preferred a harder surface to obtain sharper creases. I only knew the basic folds by heart; for any animal I’d have needed to consult my instruction manual. But folding pieces of paper in half calmed me down, even when the activity had no actual end in view.
My great adventure was about to draw to a close, and it had been a failure. During the last fifteen hours, I’d become friends with Rat, one of the neighborhood celebrities; I’d made my debut as a smoker and had, for the first time, crossed over into forbidden territory, going beyond Taxqueña and Miramontes without the supervision of a responsible adult; I’d boarded a bus on my own, confronted a soldier with evil intentions, and now I was on a planet called Villahermosa, trying to do origami while the adoptive mother of my fantasies was preparing quesadillas. But all those incidents had served for nothing: I hadn’t reached Chiapas, I hadn’t found Teresa,
