TE19 Iberian Adventure

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

I thinkabout thisdecline that has beenfillingmewith resentment for thepastmonth, I gauge its dimensions, I amawareof its lackof originality, and I reflect on the anguish that my father must have experienced in his situation. I wonder how he felt in the corner of the ring to which he had been confined. Like sparring with life, cornered in by blows, protected from the decisive knockout, postponed indefinitely in his case, yet exposed to a daily beating: prohibitions, pills, more prohibitions. A man with a kind of permanent backache, whose illness eventually rendered him, to all practical purposes, an unwanted guest in life’s pleasures and a phenomenal exponent of illness as a virtue, a pedestrian on a Calvary to which he ascended not occasionally, as I do while my back pain lasts, but during each and every day of the last thirty- three years of his life. And three hundred and sixty-five days for thirty-three years add up to more than twelve thousand Calvaries to go through, lap after lap on the trail of suffering, and countless worn-out shoes. I pull thatgolden thread thatmakesahorse limp. I do itwithall my strength. I look formy father over the years, I see himchange and, at the same time, I see him remain static in his chrysalis of pain, like an insect frozen in amber, screaming: its mouth open, a pure O of anger, with no room for sarcasm, no pretext for laughter or pleasure. And yet therewere. There had to be. Howelse could one go on for three decades resisting feeling diminished, decreased, dwarfed by the world and the rest of humanity? It’s painful to look at that image of my father as a decrepit man. I 123 ***