A wonderfully intense study
of fear
Por Eileen Battersby
FICTION :
The Sickness , by Alberto Barrera Tyszka,
translated by Margaret Jull Costa, MacLehose Press,
151pp, £14.99
ANDRÉ MIRANDA
is a doctor, well used to dealing with the ill and the
dying. But when test results belonging to his father
confirm there is no hope, the doctor becomes a son
incapable of dealing with the inevitable. Instead of
breaking the news, he decides to lie even though it is
obvious his father already suspects the worst. Dr
Miranda’s personal crisis reduces another problem; an
obsessive patient is now no more than a mere
irrelevance. This insistent, eloquent novel from
Venezuelan writer Alberto Barrera Tyszka is a prose
sonata that gracefully peels away every layer of human
vulnerability.
The patient,
Miranda’s widower father Javier, has dealt with his
life’s grief, the shocking death of his wife in a very
public aircraft disaster. It left him alone with the
then 10-year-old Andreas. Even at that age, the future
doctor was already given to pragmatic curiosity and
had discovered an interest in how the body works – and
doesn’t. The father and son have had a close
relationship but when the father expects to be told
the truth about his illness, his son, although so
experienced in such matters, can not discuss the facts.
It is movingly
described and all too believable. Tyszka’s remarkable
novel is poised and human; through his direct, exact
prose, meticulously rendered into English by Margaret
Jull Costa, one of the finest international literary
translators currently at work, he succeeds in making
father and son sympathetic as both grapple with death.
In a vague hope
of finding the strength and, with it, the right moment
to tell his father how deadly serious his condition is,
the son arranges for them to visit an island, the
place to which his father had brought his younger self
years before during that earlier family crisis. The
days pass, the dying man begins to relax, his son
becomes even more upset: “He finds it very hard to get
to sleep at night, and when he does finally manage it,
he sleeps badly, fitfully. He never feels rested when
he wakes up: he gets out of bed like someone coming
home from a dark and arduous task, as if returning to
the light after a fierce battle.”
This is a study
of fear; fear of death, of loss, of losing the freedom
to act and most of all losing the right to be listened
to. The older man is frightened of dying and the son
is terrified of the reality of his father’s final
leave-taking. He watches for the physical signs of
impending death and notes their arrival, the way the
bones force through the thinning flesh. Miranda’s wife,
the daughter-in-law, waits patiently. After extensive
evasion, the doctor simply blurts out the truth.
Dr Miranda has
long known he is more suited to research or teaching
than he is to dealing with patients. All of this is
obvious to the reader from the opening pages and his
frailty is, ironically, among the many strengths of
the narrative.
But even more
interesting is the behaviour of Karin, Dr Miranda’s
secretary, whom he has entrusted with the task of
dealing with Ernesto, the patient who is convinced he
is desperately ill and for whom the doctor has no
further professional time to give. The doctor orders
his secretary to block his phone calls. Eventually
Ernesto takes to sending impassioned and detailed e-mails.
He reveals he is stalking the doctor. “Let me just
make it clear that I haven’t begun following you
because I want to, but out of sheer desperation.”
The turmoil
shared by father and son is dramatically juxtaposed
with the ongoing panic attacks experienced by Ernesto.
So vivid are his descriptions of his illness, imagined
or otherwise, that Karin is soon drawn into Ernesto’s
despair. Tyszka convincingly follows each of his
characters through their respective situations. Most
authentic of all is the chaotic response of Dr
Miranda: here is the professional forgetting
everything he has ever practised when confronted by
his father’s fate.
On the fringes
of the doctor’s family, is Merny, the woman who has
cleaned Javier’s apartment but no longer wishes to
continue the arrangement as he is ill. She has her own
problems and lives with a man who is not the father of
her two children and he is reluctant to become
involved in her older son’s emerging wildness. She
makes her own deal with the dying man. The son then
tracks down a woman whom he feels was, and perhaps may
still be, his father’s lover. All the while Karin the
secretary has become so intrigued by the nuisance
former patient, she begins to reply to the e-mails,
pretending to be the doctor.
The narrative
is worked out like a game of chess; the timing is
perfect, as is the mixed tone of helplessness and
despair, as well as the various levels of anger. A son
grieves for his father but the most powerful note
struck in the novel is the communal panic described so
brilliantly by Ernesto in his obsessive communications.
At the mercy of her multiple doubts, Karin, a living,
breathing character if ever there was one, begins to
live through these crazy e-mails, they mirror her
loneliness.
She suddenly
realises she has been impersonating her employer. Yet
aside from this realisation are her own panic attacks,
the new terrors she experiences while on a metro; the
gagging that threatens to choke her as she waits in a
queue in a video rental shop.
After all the
games, the lies, the small diversions and the memories,
Dr Miranda is the son at his father’s hospital bedside,
weeping as he grants his father’s final request. “Talk
to me about us,” begs the dying man. “Don’t let me die
in silence.”
Tyszka is a
perceptive, original writer. He has brought an
unusually sophisticated understanding to a wonderfully
intense, little novel. No sentimentality, no polemic,
just emotion at its most resonant.
Eileen
Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish
Times and author of Second Readings: From
Black Beauty to Beckett, published by Liberties
Press
