TE19 Iberian Adventure

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

and trapped by the confines of unnamed diseases, every night was a nightmare.

***

After publishing one of his major works, The March, set during the American Civil War, E. L. Doctorow maintained that what was important was not the adjective “historical” that critics had used to qualify his work, but the noun “novel” that determined it. In my experience, however, the adjective “sick” ended up cannibalizing the noun “father.” Not only did it subjugate him, but it also demonstrated a capacity for toxic irradiation, like a chemical element that becomes lethal oncontactwithoxygenand causes a plague. Like in Stalker , my father became “The Zone,” a place where a certain incomprehensible principle had sown the seeds of contamination. Troubled and impotent, absorbed by the contagious power of that bond, we wander around his illness like the protagonists of Tarkovsky’s film do around a space which is secret, elusive, and protean, promising while at the same time terrifying. Except thatwedidn’t haveaguidewhowould protect us from the dangers of The Zone and take us to its center, that point where, as in the eye of the hurricane, one is safe fromdestruction. Theoutcomeof thiswas that I fell intoall the traps and getting lost in each one of the mazes that my father’s illness had projected. There is no more adroit architect than a chronic illness. Not even time is capable of abating its strength. And when, thirty-three years later, I crossed the threshold of the room which guarded the secret, penetrated the sanctuary of tragedy, and was able to look out of that window through which 121