TE19 Iberian Adventure

Ricardo Menéndez Salmón

irrevocably permeate my life, with the force of a tornado and as palpable as a plague, at the point where his health deteriorates, his stability shatters, and his existence starts to constitute a protracted shipwreck which will not arrive at death’s open waters for another 33 years.

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Certain diseases are overbearing wet-nurses. Not only do they shape the sufferer’s life, degrading and diminishing it, but they also reverberate in the lives of those around them. My father’s illness, his heart condition which was so severe for someone so young, resulted in our lives being governed by the constellation of suffering, nursing, and dependency. Being a patient became my father’s vocation; my mother was transformed into a full-time carer; I endured the hardships of a house which fear had made its home. A fear that translated into a kind of repudiation of life, of fear of acts once considered commonplace but which suddenly came to feel like excesses. Convertsmakethemostradical,uncompromisingbelievers,aswell as the most obstinate evangelists. My father took this theological maxim and applied it to the specter of health. Consequently, life became a minefield. Our environment was populated with the names of drugs and dietary supplements fromthe esoteric empire of medicine and those who practiced it. We lived under the aura of illness, in its solemn interregnum, and anyone who attempted to disturb that atmosphere of suspicion and distrust became an unwanted presence. The sick person soon comes to appreciate that their condition 116