The Accidentals

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Before he died, my uncle was in hospital for three weeks. I found out due to a coincidence, or what the surrealists used to call ‘objective chance’, to describe those fortuitous events that seem dictated by our destiny. Around this time, my best friend Verónica’s mother was suffering from very late-stage cancer and was a patient in the intensive care unit at the same clinic. One morning, Verónica had asked me to go with her to visit her mother, and I couldn’t say no. We left the university, which was in the same neighbourhood, and, instead of going to our Latin etymology class, we got on the bus. As I wandered through the corridors waiting for Verónica to attend to her mother, I amused myself by reading the names of patients on the doors. Seeing my uncle’s was enough to understand he was a relative, but it took me some time to figure out who he was. After several seconds of confusion – a feeling comparable to when we discover in a cemetery a tombstone with our surname on it, with no idea to whom it belongs – I realized that the sick man was Frank, my mother’s older brother. I was aware of his existence, but I didn’t know him. He was the exiled relative of my family, as it were, a man nobody mentioned out loud, let alone in front of my mum. Despite being filled with curiosity at that moment, I didn’t dare stick my head into the room lest he recognize me. An absurd fear, really, since as far as I knew we’d never met.

I stayed there for a good while, not knowing what to do, concentrating on my heartbeat, which only grew faster and faster, until the door opened and two women dressed in white emerged from the room. One of them was holding a breakfast tray with dirty plates on it.

‘That man eats more than a St. Bernard. Who would have thought it in his state?’

It amused me to find out that the nurses joked about their patients, as did the possibility that my uncle was an imaginary invalid like Molière’s, whom we were reading in my drama class.

On the bus on the way back to the university, I told Verónica about my discovery. I also told her everything I knew about Frank. A good student from primary school up until the final year of exams, he had obtained an impeccable reputation at school, as well as the admiration of all his teachers. He was always able to count on my grandmother’s collusion for this – as I once heard my mother say – because she would provide excuses for his absences from class, as well as his antics at home. After completing one year of an engineering degree, he quit to devote himself to photography, and then later on to wandering the globe. My relatives spoke too about his vices and addictions, but I never heard anyone specify exactly what sort these were. He was never present for the big events in my family, my brother’s graduation or my fifteenth birthday, occasions where gaggles of relatives would sprout as if by spontaneous generation and to whom I had to introduce myself several times over. All of my uncles would be there, apart from Frank. On occasion I would hear old friends of my parents ask after him with morbid curiosity, as you might ask after someone when you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that there will be some sort of hilarious new titbit. It was impossible, at least for me, not to notice how uncomfortable my mother was when answering questions about her brother’s whereabouts. I know he’s in Asia, she would say, or, He’s still with his girlfriend, the sculptor. The things I knew about him I had heard in passing, as in those instances, but at the time, Frank’s life didn’t interest me a great deal.

The following day I asked Verónica if she would let me accompany her to the hospital. This time we missed a linguistics and phonology class, the most boring of all. We got to the hospital at around midday. Once my friend had gone into her mother’s room, I waited a few minutes and then, after making sure there were no nurses in Frank’s room, I knocked at the door and went in. It was the first time I stood before his bed, a place I would return to many times. My uncle was a robust-looking man with a shock of grey hair who did not, in effect, have the appearance of a sick man. What he did have was a combination of features very like my own. His expression, unlike the other patients, such as Verónica’s mother, was lucid, and he was conscious of everything happening around him. His left arm was connected via a catheter to a drip containing all sorts of medicines, but aside from this, and from a slight paralysis down the left-hand side of his face, he seemed ready to leap out of bed.

‘We don’t know each other,’ I said. ‘I’m Antonia, your niece.’

For a second or two I felt as if, rather than being a pleasant surprise, my presence had frightened him. It was a fleeting sensation, the brief flash caused by intuition, but as unmistakable to me as the shock I had felt the previous day when standing outside his door. Before replying, a seductive smile crossed his face, the same one he would offer me every time I went to visit him.

I’ve always thought it strange the familiarity we establish with someone unknown as soon as we find out they are related to us. I’m sure this has nothing to do with an immediate affinity, but rather with something artificial, such as culture, a conventional allegiance to the clan or, as some say, a surname. This, however, was not what took place between my uncle and me that morning. I don’t know if it was because of the irreverent reputation he enjoyed among my relatives, or the disobedience implied by having anything to do with him; the fact is, I felt an admiration similar to that evoked by characters from legend.

He asked me how I had found him and requested that I didn’t tell anyone. There was no way he wanted to get back in touch with my family. To reassure him, I explained that it had been by accident. I told him about Verónica and her mother, and assured him that he could count on my silence.

(…)