The Sickness Read Online Free PDF Page B

down. Then she told me that Efraín wanted to die. I was really surprised. I thought perhaps she might be joking. Of course he must want to die, but the tone in which she said it implied something else. She said again that he wanted to die, that he was fed up with the whole business and tired of living like that. In principle, the procedure was simple: he just had to stop coming for dialysis. That’s all he needed to do. If, for one reason or another, he stayed at home, that would be that. His body wouldn’t be able to stand it, some organ would simply stop working and he would die. You could almost call it a natural death.”
    Andrés nods silently. He signs to the waiter and asks for another whisky.
    â€œThat’s what the guy wants,” Miguel goes on. “He just wants the nightmare to end. So do his family. They’ve had enough, they’re as ill as he is. His illness has infected them, it’s killing them as well. They’ve spent years in the same hideous situation. You know what it’s like. The man can’t do anything for himself now, he’s half-blind, he stinks of bicarbonate from the machine, he has to take special medicines; they have to ferry him back and forth, keep an eye on his blood pressure, feed him, wash him . . . Viewed coldly and objectively, for his family it would be a great relief, in every sense, if he were to die. And there’s another point too: if you consider the situation from an institutional point of
view, from the point of view of providing a public service, it would suit society as well if old Efraín were to die. You and I have discussed this kind of thing before. He’s nearly seventy and, given his age and state of health, he has no chance of being selected for a kidney transplant. But he’s taking up a place, a turn, on a dialysis machine. At the time, there was a seventeen-year-old girl on the list, waiting for a chance to start treatment at the unit. Wouldn’t it be fairer for that girl to be there, rather than Efraín? I know that someone else, hearing this same story, might think it was tantamount to sanctioning homicide or murder or assisted suicide. But at the time, we all thought that Efraín’s death could be a blow for justice as far as the girl and her family were concerned, and for Efraín as well. As you yourself said: he already knew what his end date, his deadline was. All he wanted was to exercise his right to hasten that moment and not to continue this painful, long-drawn-out death. I talked to a priest about all this once. He, of course, gave me a sermon. I waited, and when he’d finished, I asked him: is masochism a sin? He was surprised, he hesitated, and then he said, yes, it was. Well, Efraín didn’t want to go on sinning. Living, for him, was a masochistic act. He simply wanted his death to be a gentle one, he wanted his death to put an end to the torment of his life.”
    â€œWhat are you getting at with all this? What did you do?”
    â€œDo you know what happened? We decided to take the risk. All of us in the unit. If anyone had found out, we would have been in big trouble. The media would have had a field day, but that didn’t frighten us; we decided
to take the risk anyway. I took it on myself to speak to Efraín’s family, to his wife and his eldest daughter. It was rather awkward, as you can imagine, one of those conversations in which no one says exactly what they mean; we spoke as if in code. There was a silent, secret pact. Efraín agreed to it too. He would go home, stop coming to dialysis, and that would be that. But it came to nothing. It all fell flat. And do you know why? Because we needed a signature, we needed one member of Efraín’s family to sign a piece of paper, saying that Efraín Salgado had stopped coming to the dialysis unit of his own free will. It was just a way of protecting ourselves, so that no one else in his family could come to