Part Six: The Doctor
He was perhaps eighty. Perhaps older — it was the kind of face that becomes difficult to age at a certain point because it has achieved a quality of having been shaped by time for so long that the shaping is complete and further time changes little.
He looked at Rodrigo first. He looked at him with the specific, unhurried assessment of someone who is not taking an inventory but is reading something.
Then he looked at Claudia. Then at Camila.
“You’re looking for miracles,” he said. Not unkindly. With the directness of someone who has had this conversation many times and has learned that the preamble is not useful.
“We’re not looking for miracles,” Claudia said. “We’re looking for a chance.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
“Come inside,” he said.
The house was what the garden had suggested: the space of someone who has organized their life around what is useful and has found, in that organization, its own form of beauty. The kitchen contained things growing in pots on the windowsill. The shelves held jars of things that were dried or preserved or prepared. The room smelled of something herbal and something warm.
He examined Camila with great care and with the specific quality of someone who is not confirming a diagnosis but is beginning one — looking at the child as though he is reading something that has not been read before, with the patience of someone for whom rushing the reading would mean missing something essential.
He was quiet for a long time after the examination.
Then he said: “Her illness is severe. But not impossible.”
Rodrigo leaned forward. “Can you —”
“What I can do,” the old man said, “depends on what you can do.”
“Anything,” Rodrigo said. “I’ll pay —”
“I said what you can do,” the old man said. He said it without sharpness but with a clarity that stopped the sentence. “Money is not the currency here. What is the currency is something harder.”
He looked at Rodrigo.
“Your daughter needs treatment,” he said. “Treatment for her body — I can provide that, and it is not magic, it is specific and it is demanding and it requires your complete cooperation in applying it. Natural substances, precise nutrition, the removal of every stressor from her environment.” He paused. “But she also needs something that you have not been giving her. Not because you don’t love her — I can see that you love her. But because something has been in the way.”
Rodrigo said: “What do you mean?”
“What secrets are you carrying?” the old man said. “Not secrets from the world — from her. From yourself.” He looked at Camila, who was lying quietly against Claudia’s chest with her eyes closed. “Children feel the things adults don’t say. They live inside the emotional environment that the adults around them create. Your daughter has been living inside something heavy. What is it?”
The room was very quiet.
Rodrigo sat with the question.
He sat with it for longer than people usually sit with questions in conversation, because the question had landed somewhere that questions did not usually reach, and the reaching required time.
“I am afraid,” he said.
“Of what?”
“Of losing her,” he said. “And of—” He stopped. He was not a man who completed sentences like this easily. The muscles required for it had not been exercised. “Of being the kind of father she deserved and not being able to — I have not always been present. I have been here but not present. The business. The phone. I told myself I was building it for her, for her future, and that was true, but it was also—” He stopped again. “I was more comfortable in the business than I was here. With her. Because with her I felt inadequate in a way that the business did not make me feel.”
The old man nodded.
“That is the secret,” he said.
