At four in the afternoon they asked me to leave, although I'd spent no more than ten minutes with the patient, but I went back the next day, first thing, and after confronting the aggressive bureaucracy of the San Pedro Clinic-the trip to the administrator's office, the request for a permanent-access pass that included my name and identity card and which I should keep well visible on my chest, the declaration that I was the patient's only relative and, therefore, only visitor-I stayed until after twelve, when I was kicked out by the same nurse who'd kicked me out the night before: a woman with thick makeup whose forehead was always sweaty. By my second visit, my father was beginning to wake up. That was one of the changes. The other was told to me by the nurse as if she were answering exam questions. "There was an attempt to remove the respirator. He didn't respond well. Fluid collected in his lungs, he lost consciousness, but he's a bit better now." There was one more tube wounding my father's body: it filled with bloody fluid and emptied into a bag with numbers on it to measure the quantity. Fluid had gotten into his lungs, and they were draining it off. He moaned about different pains, but none as intense as that from the tube inserted between his ribs, which obliged him to lie almost on his side despite the fact that this was precisely the most painful position for the incision in his chest. He couldn't speak for the pain: sometimes his face would contract into dreadful grimaces; sometimes he rested, making no sounds about what he was feeling, not looking at me. He didn't speak; and the tube in his mouth gave his complaints a tone that in other circumstances would have been comical. The nurse came, changed his oxygen, checked the drainage bag, and left again. One time she stayed for three minutes exactly, while she took his temperature, and asked me what had happened to my father's hand.
"What does it matter to you?" I said. "Just do your job and don't be nosy."
She didn't ask me any more questions, not that first day or in the days that followed, during which the routine was repeated. I took up all the visiting hours, exploiting the fact that my father had insisted on keeping the operation secret, so no relatives or friends came to lend support. Nevertheless, something seemed to indicate that this wasn't ideal. "Isn't there anyone outside?" was the first thing he asked me on the morning of the third day, as soon as they took the tube out of his mouth. "No, Dad, no one." And when the evening visiting hours began, he pointed to the door again and asked, through the haze of the drugs, if anyone had come. "No," I said. "No one's come to bother you." "I've been left all alone," he said. "I've managed to end up all alone. That's what I've endeavored to do, I've put all my efforts into it. And look, it's come out perfectly, not just anyone could manage it, look in the waiting room, quod erat demonstrandum." He remained silent for a while because it was an effort to speak. "How I wish she were here," he said then. It took me a second to realize he was referring to my mother, not to Sara. "She would have kept me company, she was a good companion. She was so good, Gabriel. I don't know if you remember, why would you remember, I don't know if a child realizes these things. But she was wonderful. And a fellow like me with her, imagine. The way life goes. I never deserved her. She died and I never had time to deserve her. That's the first thing I think about when I think of her." I, on the other hand, thought about a misdiagnosed pneumonia, I thought about the clandestine maneuvers of the cancer; I thought, most of all, of the day my parents received the final diagnosis. I had been masturbating over a lingerie catalog, and the impression made by the coincidence of the illness and one of my first ejaculations was so powerful that I was feverish that whole night; and the following Sunday, when I stepped inside a church for the first time in my life, I had the bad idea to confess, and the priest thought it obvious that my perversions were responsible for what was happening to my mother. Only much later, well into, even comfortable in, what they call the age of majority, could I accept my innocence and understand that the illness had not been a punishment from on high or the chastisement that corresponded to my sin. But I'd never spoken of that to my father, and the variegated scene of intensive care, that seedy hotel of bad omens, didn't seem the ideal setting for such frankness. "I dreamed about her," my father was saying. "You don't have to tell me," I said. "Rest, don't talk so much." But it was too late: he'd started talking. "I dreamed I went to the cinema," he said. In the stalls, sitting three rows in front, was a woman who looked very much like my mother. The film was Of Human Bondage, which seemed incongruous given the cinema and also the audience; during the scene where Paul Henreid walks by himself in a poor area of London (it's a silent, nocturnal scene), my father could stand it no longer. From the darkness of the aisle, kneeling to keep out of people's way, he made out his wife's profile in the intermittent light from the film. "Where were you?" he asked her. "We thought you had died." "I'm not dead, Gabriel; what silly things you say." "But that's what we believed. We thought you had died of cancer." "You're both so silly," said my mother. "When I'm going to die I'll let you know." One of the darkest frames then appeared on the screen, maybe the black sky or a brick wall. The stalls went dark. When daylight reappeared in the film, my mother was walking between the rows toward the exit, without touching the knees of the people in the seats. Her sculptured face turned to look at my father before she left, and she waved good-bye.
"I wonder if it means something," my father said. And I was going to answer that it didn't-you know full well, I was going to say to him, in a rather impatient tone, that dreams don't mean anything, don't let the surgery fill your head with superstitions, they're electric impulses and nothing more, the synapses of a few disordered and confused neurons-when the patient took in a gulp of air, half opened his eyes and said, "Maybe we could let Sara know."
"Yes," I said. "If you want."
"Not for me," he said. "It's more for her. If we don't tell her there'll be hell to pay later."
I can't say I was surprised. The fact that we'd both thought of her in the space of a few days was less a coincidence than symptomatic of the discreet importance she had in our lives; once again I had the feeling about her that I'd had on several previous occasions, the notion that Sara Guterman was not the innocuous friend she seemed to be, that inoffensive, almost invisible foreigner, but rather someone with something more behind her image, and the confidence my father had always had in the image was moving. "I'll call her tonight," I said. "She'll be very pleased, that's for sure." I was about to say, She'll be very pleased that you've survived, but stopped myself in time, because confronting my father with the notion of survival could be even more harmful than a failed survival. That was him: a survivor. He'd survived the machete-wielding men and then his heart-that capricious muscle-and if he could talk to me about this, he'd say he'd also survived this city, where every landscape is a memento mori. Like a hostage who had been freed by his kidnappers, like a woman saved from a bomb blast by altering her itinerary at the last minute (by not doing her shopping at Los Tres Elefantes, by going for lunch with a friend instead of going to Centro 93), my father had survived. But suddenly I found myself wondering: What for? Why does a man want to keep living who at sixty-seven years of age could be said to be a superfluous element, someone who had completed his cycle, someone who had nothing pending in the world? His life didn't seem to hold much meaning anymore; at least, I thought, not the meaning that he would have wanted it to provide. Seeing him looking so small, nobody, not even his own son, would have guessed at the private revolution that was beginning to take shape inside his head.