TE19 Iberian Adventure

Ricardo Menéndez Salmón

health of others, enslaved by a vade mecum of warnings about being alive, I completed my childhood, overcame adolescence, journeyed through my youth, and entered adulthood escorted by a crippling hypochondria and a ferocious obsession with the vicissitudes of my health. Illness has beenmy destiny. My country. My flag. It hasdamagedmedeeply. And notonlyme, butquitea fewothers, especially women, who have had to endure the critical condition of living with someone driven to exasperation by their vigilance of their body. That has been my sentence and my penance: to be unable to forget about my body, to have my day-to-day life turned into a stabbing reflection, equally naïve and clinical, on the risks of inhabiting a body. My father’s illness has operated remotely, like occult magic. The witchdoctor spits a curse on a pebble and a villager suffers a puncture to his abdomen. Living in a climate of fear has conditioned my relationshipwith my body in a fundamental way. It is as if all my father’s ailments, by virtue of their mere existence, were lying in wait for me, ready to pounce on their next prey, my obtainable flesh. As if my sole purpose for existing was to be the renewed host for my father’s illness. When I think of the psychological operation that this legacy implies, the perversity of it dazzles me. How atrocious it was to impress upon a son the conviction that his father’s illness, which was the effect (or so he was led to believe) of his father’s unhealthy lifestyle, hung like a sword of Damocles over his heir. If the father’s alcohol abuse had caused him liver damage, the son was to spend the rest of his life in the shadowcast by the prospect of suffering fromcirrhosis if he drank. A severe and ceaseless tobacco-addiction (my father was 118