TE19 Iberian Adventure

Ricardo Menéndez Salmón

a family where illness is the epicenter of being and what must be, of ethics and aesthetics, of the present and the future, it occurs to me that the black hole may be a suitable candidate. The father’s illness was a black hole surrounded by celestial objects who accepted that being devoured by this ineludible presence was their common destiny. Any attempts to break away from such a powerful force inevitably collapsed under the gravity of the cosmic giant. If the disease had struck my father when I was an adult, when I had work and my own responsibilities, I might have managed to escape from the vortex and soar freely in my spirals of affliction and elation, but at eleven years of age I was too weak and too tender to get through it unscathed. My hopes of evading its force were doomed to fail. When I look back on that time, I remember the two bedrooms of the family home. In one of these, forbidden but enticing and which radiatedadarkandmalevolentmagic, myparents spent the night, in a state of constant readiness like a perfectly-disciplined phalanx, with an injured heart hanging over them. My mother, with the phone at her side, was constantly at the point of dialing the necessary number to obtain immediate assistance. My father, surrounded by chemical Eucharists, bearing a wound that was an omnipresent, insatiable organism, slept the child-like dreams of pharmacopoeia. At the end of the corridor, in his own room, a boy of eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, instead of abandoning himself to reading, masturbation, or boredom, took his pulse, felt that a stubborn fever had invaded him, and wore out medical encyclopedias trying to ascertain the most conspicuous, lethal, and unusual manifestations of illness. His destiny, decided by others, had discovered a Mephistophelian vocation. In that perpetual imposture, in search of some symptom or syndrome 120