TE19 Iberian Adventure

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

How could I overcome this obstacle given that it is, in a way, implicit in my job description? As a writer, am I not supposed to have the insight, the knowledge, and the talent to metabolize reality and turn it into prose, that curious entity which gives new form to the raw material from which life is made? How to apply this almost alchemic formula to my father without turning him into a creation, a fictitious precipitate of who he was? These were not rhetorical questions, mere qualms of a writer, but urgent practical matters that manifested themselves to me in all of their ominous and undeniable gravity. And this was because I accepted that, in order to write about my father, about my own father , I had to first unlearn and forget what I had read about other fathers , that immense literary heritage on the subject of this primordial connection. To disregard other fathers so as to dialogue exclusively with my own. To discriminate between what I had learnt from books and what I had lived; between what belonged to others and what was mine. To avoid projecting the discoveries anddisastersof othersontomyownpersonal fantasies and failures. To all this I must add another problem, an even bigger one, if that’s possible. I had to be honest . And that’s a word which stings and spells torment. Writing is usually at odds with honesty. I know this from experience. When I’ve written about myself, or about significant people in my life, I’ve done so while wearing corrective lenses so I can avoid presenting the landscape as it actually is. The fact that these lenses have varied in thickness isn’t the point. What’s important is that the lenses have always existed . In response to the death of my father in that room in the palliative care unit of the Gijon Red Cross hospital, I imposed a 113