Generation X is already fifty years old. He has grown older. And the prospect of decline looms. Also that of the disease. A panorama that leads Luiz, one of the protagonists of the new novel by Ray Loriga (Madrid, 1967), to think about euthanasia despite finding himself in a good moment. Especially for that. So as not to leave life in the midst of pain. On the other hand, the other protagonist of Any summer is an end (Alfaguara), Yorick, a friend in love with him or, perhaps, the other side of the coin, has already suffered that pain. And keep going. Yorick – the jester whose skull Hamlet rears in his being or not being his – has suffered a huge tumor on his head. That, after an operation in which he was dead for a couple of minutes before being resurrected, he lost an eye and an ear... just as it really happened to Loriga, who will speak tomorrow at the BCNegra festival, dedicated double, at the Aribau cinema (18 hours).
“There has not been in this novel – says the author of Heroes – a planning or a need to take stock. Youth was long gone for both these characters and me. Without much pain, really. I have not considered it a primary element in my existence. Yes, literature, and that is what I have dedicated myself to. The protagonists could be seen as two guys at the end of one path or the beginning of another who don't know where it leads them. Two aging gentlemen. One prematurely, due to illness. And the other wants to finish prematurely, without any disease”.
To those who suffer from the disease, he says, he has lent his own, a vestibular schwannoma, because “if you don't put something of yours into the characters, they stay flat, breathless. To make them seem alive you have to pull more or less truly felt emotions. But in general, I never write to drive out demons, exorcise myself, help myself, motivate myself, or anything that ends up arming myself. I guess I put it in the novel because I find it a pretty interesting experience and because I spent a lot of time in hospitals, recoveries, speech therapists. And it seemed to me that if I did field work at the same time, I was taking advantage of the time instead of just suffering or getting bored. I was divided into one who had a bad time and another who took notes. I imagine that it happens like a photographer in a war: with the camera there is something in the middle between the horror and you”.
Was your experience horrible? “It was like it happens to everyone that he is sick. I suffered from terrible headaches until they started treating me and then they operated on me, quite quickly all because the tumor was very large and had to be removed. But in a hospital, unfortunately, you see misfortunes worse than yours every time you turn around. Mine was a level seven horror. I saw nines and tens." In that sense, he assures, the experience has not transformed him, "although the scene of being dead for a couple of minutes is true, I was." "When they tell you that the operation is delicate and there are these options, you think: 'What if the other one comes out...?' Well, if it comes out, it comes out. I feel that the death of others is something unassumable but that one's own, inside, is understood quite placidly. It is the death of one more. A banal matter at bottom. On the other hand, that of a loved one I see as unassumable. It is what happens to the protagonist”. And he jokes that after the operation he has not had any enlightenment: “I had a dream that it would happen to me like Homer Simpson when he has a stroke and goes to the doctor, who discovers that he had put seven wax crayons up his nose as a child, they are taken away, and he who is an idiot becomes a genius. He knows quantum physics. In the end, he gets a couple of waxes again to go back to being who he was, he was so comfortable... I had that dream, 'now I'm going to become an enlightened guy', and no, the same idiot who entered the operating room is the one that came out.” By the way, Yorick, did you want to live? “I don't know, you live a bit by inertia and I imagine Yorick too. He did not have a huge desire to die, if that is a desire to live ... ”.
Instead Luiz wants to die voluntarily. “We are far from what exists in countries like Switzerland and Canada where euthanasia is free will, something quite surprising for Western societies, in non-Western ones you can die any day and in any way and nobody gives a damn. Here we take exquisite care when one decides to die, ”he jokes. And he says that "there are people who have a faith and I think it's great, I envy him, but the beliefs of some should not make the decisions that correspond to others." And he believes that these decisions are scary because "there is a feeling as a community that it costs so much effort to live, economic, work, family, so many misfortunes and difficulties, that we have to overcome a kind of motivational consensus that we all have to go together with great enthusiasm to bear all this weight. Anyone who makes the decision not to be interested in that titanic struggle is a deserter. “I – he concludes – can perfectly understand someone who is writing the novel of his own life and wants to end with a happy ending, which is very difficult. Unfortunately, life does not usually let us choose that happy ending.
