When the future is buried under the past, something is wrong. If the past is annihilated, the individual loses what makes him unique. Vasili Grossman argued that when someone dies, the unique and unrepeatable world they built collapses with them: a universe with its own oceans, mountains, and sky. Some diseases, by devouring memories and words, cause a devastating effect similar to the one described by the Ukrainian.
F. comes to pick me up in a small town in La Segarra to take me to the airport. As he rolls down the window, he reflects: “Memory is like water in the field. Too much rain damages the roots; without it, nothing grows”. She asked him for news about her mother. Two years ago, when she was diagnosed with aphasia and, shortly after, Alzheimer's, F. moved in with her.
Fortunately, you can work from home, but you juggle like the best tightrope walker to get it all together. In a certain sense, he lives disconnected from the world and accompanying me to the airport today is a luxury he savors. With greedy eyes, I see him swallowing the landscape while he drives, enjoying those few hours of freedom.
"It's funny," he tells me, "I spend the day working with words: I read, I write, I translate... Meanwhile, my mother slips into absolute silence, beyond language, and that terrifies me." To visualize it , resorts to metaphors such as drought, with its dry rivers, and the land cracked by thirst that evokes withered areas of the brain.
Passing through Montserrat, he confesses: “This is the most difficult translation I have ever done: its silences. I complete her ellipsis, trying not to make her feel bad. Now I am your dictionary and your map, your agenda and your guide. I am the prompter who blows the script so that the function does not stop and the silence is not uncomfortable ”. He recommends that I read Juan Mayorga's speech on silence in the RAE and quotes me a passage from one of his works: "The language is in pieces and it is only love that speaks"
A few days ago F. sent me the interview of La Contra to Carme Elías, and added to the link: "My mother has a Bruce Willis, frontotemporal and aphasia." He does not understand why it is necessary to resort to actors known as bait to remind society of a disabling disease, the most common form of dementia, which affects more than 800,000 people in Spain alone. This figure corresponds to diagnosed cases, which are usually detected in medium or advanced stages. Sometimes the disease incubates, silently, for a decade before showing its claws.
As he joins C-31, he asks me if I am familiar with the term anosognosia, which he found in a neurologist's book. Since I don't say anything, he explains that it comes from the Greek words nosos, “disease”, and gnosis, “knowledge”, added to the prefix -a (deprivation), and refers to the inability to recognize illness in oneself. “It's a defense mechanism, I imagine, experienced also by amputees or those who are paralyzed after a stroke. A way to avoid panic: the tranquility of ignorance.
F. talks about degenerative dementias, but I draw a parallel with the public debate, to which the term is not that well painted. Every two or three days “a debate opens” –today surrogate motherhood, yesterday the renewal of the judiciary, tomorrow access to housing–, but it seems that no conclusions are reached, like the finger that slides in infinite scroll across the screen.
For example, the anosognosia of the desertification of the Peninsula: is it preferable to deny the obvious instead of looking for long-term solutions? In today's politics, as for the Alzheimer's patient, the past vanishes and the future does not exist, only a perpetual present remains.
F. comments that in consultations and centers they repeat the same thing: "We are few, the just ones not to close this." The psychiatrist at the public hospital, the therapists at the day center, the geriatrician confirm this. With her, her mother spends an annual visit, like the ITV of an old car. F. describes the perfect storm: “By 2030, twice as many people are expected to be affected, a shortage of specialists, an overload in primary care and a titanic struggle between families and patients”.
When you get to the departures area, park and take out my luggage. “I'm sure you left something behind,” she jokes, even though I know she finds me a disaster in the art of packing. I hug him and tell him I'm proud of what he does. “When you come back from Uzbekistan – she smiles – I'll be here. No, I won't forget."
