The Mutations by Jorge Comensal

Author:Jorge Comensal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

PART II

Illness is not a metaphor, and … the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.

—Susan Sontag

12

The Aldamas arrived at the sumptuous Church of the Immaculate Conception shortly before the ceremony began. They were attending the wedding out of duty to the bride’s father, a pulmonologist who often referred his patients to Joaquín Aldama’s private practice.

The doctor had spared no expense. The church was festooned with ribbons, bows, and floral arrangements. A troupe of bored paparazzi swarmed around snapping pictures of guests in tuxedos and bow ties or evening dresses. Here and there, the occasional renegade clashed with the surroundings in a clownish tie or a provocative miniskirt. The Aldamas adhered strictly to protocol. Joaquín loathed any outfit that didn’t include a white coat, an indispensable piece of armor for his superiority complex. He wasn’t the only uncomfortable one in the church. Tight corsets, ill-fitting rented suits, high heels, minuscule purses, caked-on makeup, professional hairdos, constant sweat, and postprandial drowsiness afflicted the majority of the guests bused in for the occasion. They took their pews according to an invisible gradient of familiarity: the closer their ties to the bride and groom, the closer they sat to the front of the church.

The Aldamas sat in the third row from the back, beneath the choir, where a chamber orchestra massacred Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” as the priest and bridal party processed down the aisle. The quality of their playing led Joaquín to surmise that the musicians belonged to a deaf-mute student symphony.

Once the March had ended and the ceremony began, Joaquín passed the time pondering Ramón’s rhabdomyosarcoma. According to Luis Ramírez’s animist metaphor, the tumor’s cells behaved “like a bunch of fucking socialists,” toiling with rare altruism on behalf of their neighboring cells, arranging themselves into little cavities like alveoli, and secreting chemicals that promoted growth and vascularization. By virtue of this behavior, the rhabdomyoblasts had formed a round and vigorous tumor in the patient’s tongue and were now multiplying into harmonious layers in the petri dishes that hosted them.

“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” the other guests recited, beating their chests unrepentantly.

Aldama stayed silent, lost in thought. Usually, the DNA of a malignant cell contained hundreds of pernicious mutations, but Luis Ramírez believed that the rhabdomyosarcoma was caused not by a large number of disorderly genes, but by the alteration of a decisive few, the minimum necessary to spark a disciplined and at the same time unruly process of cellular reproduction. If the pathologist’s suspicions were confirmed, the genome of those cells would represent a catalog of mutations essential for carcinogenesis. Ramírez’s enthusiasm was justified by the revolutionary consequences of such a discovery: a universal cure for cancer, the Holy Grail of oncology.

“Alleluia! Alleluia!” the least inhibited guests chanted as the priest prepared to read a popular episode from the Gospels.

“And as Jesus passed by,” he began in a reverential drone that transported Joaquín back to his schooldays with the Marist priests, “he saw a man which was blind from his birth.

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