Some nights in the hospital, when I was alone, keeping watch over my father, I’d walk to one of the waiting rooms to read. I’d stay there with my book until dawn, then go back to the room and doze in the uncomfortable armchair until the nurse arrived to carry out her routine morning checks and give my father a bed bath.
Since I tended to be too tired to concentrate on anything dense or demanding, I decided to reread some of the titles that had made an impression on me in my childhood. Naturally, I wouldn’t have had the patience to skim the pages of my Choose Your Own Adventure novels (wouldn’t have even known where to find them), but I did feel the urge to return to other classics that had at some moment or other helped me to forget the systematic contempt my classmates displayed during my last two years at elementary school.
So, in the off-white light of the waiting room, I reread The Call of the Wild by Jack London, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and part of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which I finally gave up on when I lost the necessary concentration. My eyes ached constantly and the neon lighting was intolerable. I tried listening to music or podcasts through headphones. I tried playing solitaire or losing myself in the more engrossing games on my cell phone, but sooner or later, I abandoned these activities in despair, and ended by spending the rest of the night doing nothing, staring fixedly at some corner of the waiting room.
It was in that state of idle stupefaction that a nurse found me in the early hours of May 6, 2015, when she came to tell me that my father’s heart rate had fallen dramatically and that the nightshift intern was with him.
On my way back to the room, I stopped to glance in the mirrored glass covering a fire extinguisher. My face, traversed by the instruction “Break in case of emergency,” suddenly seemed very similar to my father’s. The same bags under the eyes, the same forehead with its ever-receding hairline, the same crooked, bulbous nose. I can’t have stood there for more than three or four seconds but, during that brief pause, I was certain that I was seeing myself as others saw me.
I’d spent years scrutinizing myself in the mirror in search of Teresa’s features. During my adolescence I’d kept a careful watch on the changes in my face, hopeful that she would in some way manifest herself, that she would return to my life via the oblique route of DNA. The notion I had of my own features was conditioned by that wistful gaze, by that desire to incarnate Teresa. But all of a sudden, walking toward my father’s death—and toward my own death—I was offered a momentary vision of my face in all its objective ugliness, in all its unhappiness. There was nothing of Teresa there, not even anything of myself: it was my father’s face, stuck onto mine, like something in a bad sci-fi movie. Whatever I did, he would stay with me, breathing within my breath, walking in my footsteps. All that could be expected of the future was that, with the passing years, my face would increasingly resemble his until one day, in a hospital bed, my dying-man’s features would be my father’s, and his pain finally my pain. At that moment, all the hours I’d spent in denial would manifest themselves in my guts, their weight forcing me down to the center of the earth, forcing me down into the tomb.
3
ONE DAY, WHEN WE WERE JUST FINISHING DINNER, the telephone rang. Mariana ran to answer it in her bedroom, but was disappointed to find that the call was for me. I took it in the living room.
It was Guillermo. He was having a birthday party the following week and wanted to invite me. As the tone of his voice was stiffly formal and I could hear muttered words in the background, I deduced that his mother had made him call. I accepted the invitation and put down the phone.
That night, lying in the darkness of my room—not as dark as my former Zero Luminosity Capsule—I considered the possible reasons why Guillermo’s mother would have forced him to make that call. There could be no doubt that the news of Teresa’s disappearance had reached the grown-ups. The school psychologist was untiring in his efforts to get me to say something on the topic, although it was obvious that he didn’t dare ask me outright. Maybe Guillermo’s parents (who were vaguely acquainted with Teresa due to my friendship with their son) planned to interrogate me during the party. Maybe they were working with the police and intended to pump me for information that would lead to my mother’s arrest. Or maybe—this was the most plausible explanation—they felt sorry for me, not just because my mother had, according to gossip, gone to the mountains of the southeast of Mexico to join the revolution but also because, overnight, Guillermo had decided that he hated me.
I tried not to get my hopes up about the party. My friend and his inner circle were still shunning me during recess. It wasn’t just a matter of refusing to say a word to me: there was something arrogant and defiant in the way they ignored me. They used to make a point of passing close by, flaunting their camaraderie to stress my exclusion. They smiled maliciously or whispered among themselves when one of the school bullies gave me a loud slap during the flag-raising ceremony on Monday mornings or pushed me down the stairs on the way to class.
But despite all those
