The Sickness by Alberto Barrera Tyszka

scan . . . There they all are in the middle of the sea. There, too, are an operating room, catheters snaking through the water, drifting gauze, tubes, bits of paper, syringes. The sun is a yellow stethoscope. Andrés snatches a sideways glance at his father, using his right hand clamped to his eyebrows as a sun visor. This could be a good moment to tell him the truth. Is it? Is it a good moment? Isn’t it perhaps too soon? They haven’t even reached the island yet. What would happen then? What would the trip be like once Andrés has told him the truth?
    â€œI don’t know,” his father says, trying to bring what he’s trying to ask to a close. “I just thought there might be something else, you know what I mean.”
    There is always something else. Something that moves and hurts and no longer works. That is the inevitable story of bodies, the biography of deterioration. Health is an immutable ideal. The most perverse of all utopias. Michel Foucault said that, viewed from the experience of death, illness can even be seen as a function of life. “Paradoxically,
from the corpse’s point of view, it looks like life.” Exactly. Health doesn’t exist, it’s a heaven that forms no part of existence: we human beings can only live while sick. It’s just that in his father’s case, the illness is in its final stages. What comes after that? His father is still looking at him, as if secretly he, too, was awaiting that revelation. Why doesn’t he tell him the truth now, this instant?
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    Yadira’s scream is like a blow with a stone. Everyone spins round: she’s not actually lying on the ground, but that’s only because the fat guy has hold of her by the hand. He has just punched her in the face. Yadira is shielding her face and shaking her head.
    â€œLet me go!” she howls.
    The only response from the fat man is to give her a kick. Then another, in her belly or higher up. He may have struck her ribs or her breasts. Andrés tries to rush to her aid, but his father holds him back. “Don’t be a fool,” he says. “Don’t get involved.”
    His father is so tense that his nails dig into his son’s body. The other onlookers cry out; the German tourists watch, not entirely clear if what they are seeing is real or part of some picturesque welcome ceremony; two of the crew members run toward the couple and try to intervene, but not before the fat man has slapped Yadira so hard that this time he floors her. When they grab hold of him, he continues to struggle and roar, heaping insults on her. Another two members of the crew arrive and carry him, struggling, away. Yadira remains alone for a few seconds, sitting on the deck, shrunk in upon
herself. Head bowed, she covers her face and sobs, like a small wounded, frightened animal. Andrés tries again to go over to her, but his father, with surprising force, stops him.
    â€œNo, don’t you go,” he says quietly. “Not unless you want her to get an even worse beating.”
    Andrés looks at him in surprise. A woman goes to Yadira and helps her up, giving her a handkerchief to wipe away the blood on her face. As Yadira walks toward the restroom, she briefly catches Andrés’s eye and immediately looks away.
    As they drive off the ferry, they pass the couple. Yadira still has her eyes fixed on the ground, and beside her is the fat man, talking on his cell phone, while a driver loads their suitcases into the trunk of a taxi. Then the driver opens the car door, and the fat man stands to one side, still talking, so that Yadira can get into the car first. When she does, he roughly strokes her hair, and she, rather unconvincingly, avoids his touch. During the whole journey to the hotel, Andrés keeps looking at the taxi in his rearview mirror. At one point, on the highway, the evening light transforms the taxi into a razor blade, a slender metal blade following them,