Читать книгу Medical Autobiography - Damián Tabarovsky - Страница 3

Chapter 1

It was a windy afternoon, very windy. Not a molecule of air was moving. Suddenly, a line from John Donne: “variable, and therefore miserable condition of man; this minute I was well, and am ill, this minute.” Where had that phrase come from? Who knows. Certainly not from Dami’s mind. Dami had never heard of John Donne, poetry mattered little to him, and, above all, he was in excellent health. He was a bull. A stallion. A Man with a capital M. He was a stranger to unforeseen changes, unacquainted with cyclothymia, sudden illness, the bodily humors. For Dami, neurosis was something that happened only in Palermo Viejo (he couldn’t know it yet, but years later he would end up in therapy in an office on Charcas Street overlooking Plaza Freud). Meanwhile, the wind finished its job: the Donne phrase had flown from his mind, from a mind in which it had never been; it had flown like umbrellas from the beach at dusk, a little bit spastically, stumblingly, staggeringly, like a mild ridiculosity; but at the same time definitively, irreversibly, conclusively (one could also say the phrase had disappeared, but that word in Argentina has connotations it’d be better not to go into). Dami was walking with the wind, the wind of that afternoon, of any afternoon, of all afternoons. He walked to the Fiat 1. He opens the door of the Fiat, gets in, sits down, takes the key from the back pocket of his pants, starts the car. Dami is going to an important event: getting his driver’s license. Dami had actually been driving since he was fourteen, his father taught him while they were on vacation in San Clemente, in sandy streets, muddy ditches, and four-wheeler tracks. But he’d never gone through the procedure, he’d never taken the exam. Therefore, the situation presented the following paradox: since he knew how to drive, he was driving his own car to get his license. But since he didn’t have a license, he was committing a traffic violation. So: in order to comply with the law, he first had to break it (really, the situation was more like a syllogism than a paradox, a simple rule of three, the inexorable order of natural logic, the most positivist reasoning; the ultimate truth of the social bond). Dami arrives for the exam. The exam consists of three parts. First, the driving test itself. Second, a 45-minute class on the great truths of traffic. And third, a simple eye exam, a routine checkup. Dami passes the first part without difficulty. Then he listens attentively to the second. Finally he goes to the optometrist. The optometrist is about forty-five, has gray hair, wears glasses (it seems ironic, but really isn’t). He asks Dami to look at a chart with letters and read them aloud, Dami does this without a problem. “Okay, you can go now, everything’s fine.” “Thanks, doctor,” Dami says, while wondering “are optometrists medical doctors or is it a separate profession?” and while he’s thinking about that, the optometrist adds: “Oh, I forgot; there’s one more test, it’ll only take a minute.” He couldn’t possibly know it (obviously: Dami was a sociologist, not an optometrist) but he was about to find himself face-to-face with the Ishihara Test. The Ishihara Test is a method involving numbers or geometric figures made up of small, different-colored dots, and it’s used to detect anomalies, in particular, various forms of colorblindness. The Test is highly reliable, far superior to others such as the Farnsworth Test, pseudochromatic cards, or the anomalascope. The Test bears the name of its inventor, an extraordinary Japanese scientist, now somewhat forgotten. As usually happens with great works, often they succeed so overwhelmingly that they send their creator into oblivion. Who’s the composer of Ave Maria, the most celestial religious music? Who said: “The heart has its reasons which reason itself does not know”? And who invented hydraulic steering? It doesn’t really matter, only the product endures, that remainder of eternal transcendence. At any rate, Ishihara, in his day (1879-1963) was chair of the Ophthalmology Department at the Imperial University of Tokyo (in 1940 he was named professor emeritus) and author of more than a hundred first-class academic works, among them the Test that bears his name. The Test: easy as pie. Easy for most people, that is, but would it be easy for Dami? Suddenly time became eternal, millions of microseconds floated in the air in slow motion, like some kind of atomized idling; the clocks stopped marking time, history stopped happening, no time interval began; everything was happening as if the calendar had expired—the western calendar, the Judeo-Christian calendar, the Russian Orthodox calendar, and also the ancient calendars, the Mayan, the Aztec, the Inca, the Chinese, the sundial of the Egyptian pyramids. “What number do you see?” Dami hesitates and ventures: “. . . a . . . two?” “Aha . . .” Aha, that was all the eye doctor said. Again, silence. Time stops moving, etc., etc., etc. “Aha, what?” Dami asked. “Well, it’s actually not a two, but a five.” “Aha” (it’s incredible, but in a matter of seconds the linguistic roles had been reversed). “The Ishihara Test is infallible in the identification of vision anomalies. You have a disorder called dichromacy, a mild type of colorblindness.” “. . . ?” “It’s very simple: on this slide, normal people see the correct number, five, while dichromats see a two. It’s infallible.” “. . . ?” “I’m going to give you a license good for only two years.” “. . . ?” It hardly needs to be clarified, but Dami had fallen speechless. He thought: “Dichromacy, what is dichromacy?” Dichromacy is anomalous color vision, in which any color might be equal to the mix of two primary colors. The spectrum is seen as two colors separated by a colorless band (neutral point). Whoever wants to dig deeper into the topic will see (what an obvious joke!) that there are three types of dichromacy: protanopia, tritanopia, and deuteranopia. Dami was afflicted with the latter variety. It’s a case of dichromacy with a relative spectral luminosity very similar to that of normal vision, except that red and green are confused. In the spectrum, the deuteranope sees only two primary colors. The long wavelengths (green, yellow, orange, red) appear as yellow, and the short wavelengths (blue and violet) appear as blue. These tonalities become weaker from the extremes to the center until they arrive at a neutral point, which is colorless. A deep depression shook Dami’s face. He drove away in the Fiat 1, license in hand (for two years instead of ten) and everything seemed confused, odd, strange: as if the trees weren’t green, the red light wasn’t red, the white of his teeth was no longer white. He was exaggerating, of course, but that’s how the depressed behave (frankly, depressives are insufferable). Dichromacy could be treated as an insignificant thing, a minor detail, a funny situation; the very telling of the facts had all the elements of an anecdote; just imagine a good joke teller, a storyteller, a Juan Verdaguer, a Víctor Hugo Morales, a Juan Perón, narrating what just happened: they would have a picnic; everything was wide open to hyperbole, to the absurd, the showing-off kind of storytelling, the “You’ll never guess what happened to me . . . !” But not Dami. None of that occurred to him. Illness, even the slightest symptom, brought him down irreversibly, threw him into the dark zones of neurosis, to the grimace of the dead smile. He began to feel nervous. His left eye was twitching slightly, and he had to go to the bathroom. Badly. He stops the car, goes into a bar, pees, leaves, gets in the car, takes off. Two blocks later he has to go to the bathroom again. The scene repeats itself. That’s how neurosis functions: one scene repeated, repeated, repeated (it’s curious, the opposite of neurosis is digression, though few realize it). He had to calm down. He decided to go through a mental exercise that always worked: making a list. The listing of things (the ten best goals he’d seen in his life, ten songs that start with A, the ten girls he’d like to sleep with—that list often split off into: including foreign actresses and models, only Argentines, from the ’70s, from the ’80s, from the ’90s, etc.) was an activity that emptied his mind, that helped him get a grip. He thought, thought, thought, and settled on: “ten jobs that a dichromat can’t do.” There’s no doubt, this time the neurosis was seriously getting the better of him. “Air traffic controller, merchant marine, customs inspector, firefighter, photographer, cartographer, chemist, police officer, bus driver, royal court painter.” He finishes the list and at that moment the light turns red, that is to say, green. He accelerates. Suddenly, unexpectedly, the topic disappears from his mind, from his worries. The abrupt mood change did, however, make some sense. What did Dami have to worry about? A police officer was the last thing in the world he wanted to be. Bus driver, next to last. The other eight didn’t have much appeal either; court painter, perhaps, but Dami was never good at visual arts. No, there was nothing there that might interest him. He brakes again at another traffic light (it’s incredible how well the traffic lights work ever since Ibarra was in office). He accelerates again and, at that moment, the thoughts come back to him. Now in a minor key: “What does it matter that I’ve never had any of those jobs, that I’ve never wanted to be any of those things? Dichromacy blocks that possibility, prevents my thinking in hypothetical terms. Why resign myself to be what I am? Why not believe that I can have an endless horizon of opportunities?” Dami was entering a melancholic phase, the phase of loss; neither loss of the present, the now, the instant; nor loss of the future, of interrupted probabilities, of uncertain circumstances; but instead, loss understood as a condition of possibility, loss of what could have been but wasn’t; of what could have been without his even being aware of it (maybe he was on the verge of becoming a customs officer and never knew it), of what could have happened but didn’t. There’s an issue of the French magazine Lignes on the topic of “desire for revolution.” More than thirty essayists respond, including Virilio, Enzo Traverso, Roudinesco, Balibar; all of them offer their point of view on the possibility and meaning of revolution today (the magazine is from 2001); but one of the people interviewed, Jean-Luc Nancy, inverts the topic. After making a brilliant argument (one that doesn’t enter into the discussion for now), he concludes: “And so it can be deduced that ‘revolution’ is not really the problem in question, but rather ‘desire.’” Dami was experiencing something similar: an inversion of terms. Not a sense of unease due to an unfortunate present, or a dark future; but rather the unhappiness stemming from a past that could have been and wasn’t, because the past was one way and not another, this precise way and not any of the many other possibilities; the past as a previous future (I might as well say in passing, the analogy with Nancy’s philosophy is something of a stretch, but taking into account that all this was occurring to him while he was driving a Fiat 1 that was getting stopped by every traffic light, one shouldn’t expect much). It’s odd, but between one thought and another, between one traffic light and another, the weight of melancholic thoughts had evaporated, the neurosis was diminishing to the point that it was no longer present. It was gone. What had happened? He had realized something simple: he was a sociologist, not a chemist or an air traffic controller. The fact that he’d gotten to his age without being anything other than a sociologist implied that he’d never had the desire or the will to become a cartographer or a firefighter. Instead, here he was, on his way to work; an insignificant destination, but at the same time, as the saying goes, that’s all there is. All there is: a sociologist with the MG consulting firm, specializing in mass media. That’s Dami, an account analyst for a consulting firm with offices on Viamonte, facing the Teatro Colón. The consulting firm worked on various items: speech analysis and discursive strategies for companies, corporations, or politicians; media redesign, image consulting, quantitative and qualitative market research, briefs for publicity campaigns, internal communications for large companies (including the writing and production of house organs), plus a new project in the preparatory stage: an Observatory of Medium-Term Sociocultural Trends. It wasn’t a bad idea; in fact, it was highly successful in countries such as France, Italy, and the United States. It would begin with choosing a topic, such as personal fitness. With that precise selection, a series of quantitative (questionnaires) and qualitative (focus group) studies would be initiated, with the aim of describing the various social imaginaries surrounding the topic: what keeping in shape means according to different socioeconomic classes, or according to age and sex; what relationships exist among the body, health, and well-being; the explosion of “lite” food products; the connection between the natural body and plastic surgery; the topic of physical recreation; the relationship between the body and clothing (the body as a hanger for displaying fashion vs. the body as a machine that uses clothes). With all those data, MG would be poised to sell that information (complete or segmented) to different clients: from yogurt companies to clothing brands, from five-star hotels to TV channels. Throughout the year, the Observatory would work on two or three projects, and it should have, in order to be profitable, about four or five clients, which is possible in the medium term. But it wasn’t time yet. The project was still in an embryonic stage, its launch was anticipated within the year. Dami had placed high hopes on the Observatory, he secretly felt that he might eventually direct it, or at least be the number two. It could end up being his big break, the road to progress. Meanwhile he worked at MG for a modest salary, though with some minor benefits: he arrived at noon, and above all, he didn’t have to wear a jacket and tie. Dami detests jackets and ties and, more than anything, shoes; to him, shoes in any form (moccasins, shoes with laces, ankle boots, shoes with buckles) embodied the very image of failure in life; those people who ride the subway day after day, gray linen pants with brown shoes, inevitably black socks, and starched cotton shirts; the people who check the weather forecast, the real people; Dami avoided those people like the plague. But where did he run to? He didn’t wear real shoes, only Nike sneakers, a pair of Nike Cortez, Levi’s 501s, a graphic tee (that day he had on a Kiss T-shirt); he usually didn’t comb his hair, shaved only once in a while, and smoked black cigarettes. Did that make him so different? You only need to scratch the surface to see that everything in him was mere imposture, there was nothing deeper. Even his famous intelligence (his first memory is of a Kindergarten teacher telling him “You’re so smart!”) was nothing more than a rare form of hypervelocity adaptation. He wasn’t intelligent, he was fast, so fast that he seemed intelligent. He had the ability to arrive at a conclusion in minimal time, he understood the end of an argument when the speaker was only halfway through, he always came up with a good answer off the top of his head. Did that make him intelligent? In any case, you could say he was intuitive. His intelligence: fast-motion intuition. If the art of intelligence manifested itself in him in any form, it was that of converting flaws into virtues. For example: he was an insomniac, it took hours and hours for him to fall asleep, but instead of suffering from the situation, he flipped it around, inverted it, and turned insomnia into a philosophy. Blanchot: “To sleep badly is precisely to be unable to find one’s position. People who sleep badly always appear more or less guilty. What do they do? They make the night present.” Little phrases like these, and others, brought him swiftly to the ravine of the binary: on one side, Dami and those like him, those who see insomnia as a form of not finding their place in the world, that is, those who become intransigent toward the world, the world understood as the place of power, of the abuse of power, of dehumanized technology, of savage capitalism; in a world like that, not finding one’s place is a good thing, a reason for praise, an ethical characteristic; and on the other side, the rest, those who sleep at night, the conventional people, the accomplices of the world. The distress of insomnia is transformed into a kind of resistance (there are many other examples of this type of mechanism, but they’re beside the point). Suddenly, a thought: “Nobody has to know about my disease.” What disease? Dichromacy, of course. But what was dichromacy? A disease? An injury? A defect? All three at once? A disease that’s also a defect? An injury that’s also a disease? A defective injury? It didn’t matter much to him, the important thing was that nobody find out what was going on. He had to keep it secret. He remembered an old joke from childhood: “Where do you hide an elephant on Florida Street? In a crowd of a hundred other elephants.” Something similar happened with dichromacy and other forms—severe or mild—of colorblindness: it’s estimated that eight out of a hundred men, and fewer than one out of a hundred women, have some difficulty with color vision. He could be one of them, of that multitude, and nobody would notice a problem. But he gave that up quickly: eight percent wasn’t a very high number; in fact, nobody at the consulting firm had dichromacy or any other kind of pathological vision. So he returned to the original plan, to make sure nobody finds out. Especially nobody at the consulting firm. One thing was clear: Dami had plans of making a career in the world of market sociology—in particular at MG—and in an environment as competitive as that, any little problem could get in his way. There were several things at MG that, at the beginning, got his attention. For example, the General Manager (the highest post, besides the Owner) never provided precise information about the dates of his vacations. When they asked him about it, he gave vague responses, rarely consistent, such as “It could be a week or so in February, or I might take a few days in January.” For a while Dami thought it was a strategy, a rather basic one, to control the staff. The General Manager could return at any moment, without notice, by surprise, and with that tactic, have the whole company on permanent alert, in a state of eternal uncertainty (“Does he get back today or tomorrow?”); a simple way of reaffirming his authority (“When I get back from vacation I want everyone here.” “But when’s your vacation?”). With time, Dami realized that things were more complex, or rather: still just as basic, but more complex (that’s how modern life works; making the basic complex and the complex basic, reinscribing the one on the other, until everything becomes complex, that is, basic). Now, Dami understood that the uncertainty surrounding the General Manager’s vacations wasn’t just a subtle way of sowing terror among the employees (though it was that too), it wasn’t just a way of reaffirming his authority; even less so was it a case of absentmindedness, inattentiveness, or artlessness (a General Manager is not an airhead), nor was it a minor omission; Dami fully understood that the uncertainty surrounding the General Manager’s vacations was plainly and simply a piece of information. A key piece of information: at MG and at any other consulting firm, having information is always key. In a company, information is a material as rare and valuable as toilet paper in a public restroom (now in some shopping malls they’re putting changing tables in the men’s restrooms, they’re not as machista as before, they seem to have realized that the mall is full of fathers, divorced or not, that they go shopping with their small children; but this really doesn’t have much to do with toilet paper). Décio Pignatari: “The idea of information is always tied to the idea of selection and choice. Information, here, refers to ‘how much information.’ There can only be information where there is doubt, and doubt implies the existence of alternatives.” In an instant, or less, in a nanoinstant, Dami understood that dichromacy was not a disease, it was just information. That is: for him it was a disease, but for everyone else it was a piece of information, a detail, pure exchange value. “Nobody has to know anything,” he thought. Keeping silent about his disorder would guarantee his continuation at MG. On the other hand, if that information were to leak, it could certainly be used against him. Sooner or later, but definitely against him. Suddenly, Dami remembered a bit of popular wisdom: “A healthy body keeps quiet.” Otherwise, the body speaks, it expresses itself. One must keep in mind that the true measure of health is not the utopian absence of all illness, but the capacity to function effectively in a given environment. In fact, from time to time the organism adapts to variable habitats in such a way that it’s hardly perceptible to the individual. Sudden cold, for example, sets in motion all sorts of internal mechanisms for neutralizing its effects and maintaining the body in constant equilibrium. In order to prevent a drop in body temperature, the entire system undergoes certain changes with the object of avoiding loss of heat through the skin. Nearly all respiration stops. The surface blood vessels contract, diminishing the flow of blood from the internal regions, so that less blood travels to the surface and gets cold. Another reaction, goose bumps, has little practical value today, but it must come from the early days of the species, when the human animal had a covering of thick skin that provided a protective layer of warmer air when standing up in bumps. If all the mechanisms of the organism can’t prevent a drop in temperature, two others kick in: the adrenal glands secrete more adrenaline, and the person shivers; both serve to produce more warmth. “Or you can just put on a jacket and you’re good to go,” thought Dami in a display of pragmatism. The fact is that dichromacy doesn’t speak, it’s silent, it doesn’t emit signals. Vision is mute. Can a person be silently ill? Vision is normally understood to be the dominant sense of the modern era, which is variously described as the height of Cartesian perspectivalism, the era of illustrating the world, and the society of spectacle or of surveillance. What happens when a person loses this dominant sense? The blind develop their other senses, like touch and hearing. “But I’m not blind,” thought Dami in a fit of lucidity. “Just a couple of colors get mixed up, that’s all.” He was right, in a way. But wrong, in another. If vision is associated with control, including control of the senses (“what the eyes don’t see, the heart can’t grieve”), a defect in vision also implied an inability to control, to exercise power, to scale the career ladder at MG. Dami didn’t know it yet, but this sort of treatise came very close—if not too close—to a certain Jewish tradition: the tradition that prefers word over image, listener over icon, silence over vision. That is to say: the importance of the biblical prohibition of graven images (it’s worth noting that one of the justifications for hostility toward the Jews, set out by French anti-Semitic intellectuals like Maurice Bardeche and Robert Brasillach, was precisely the atomizing effect of this taboo that, according to their argument, undermined the beneficial power of cinematic images to create a popular community). This Jewish tradition continues to the present, or to the immediate past, and it is key in authors such as Levinas, Blanchot, Lyotard, and Derrida. To a certain extent, the work of these authors can be understood as a hermeneutic commentary on the famous passage in Exodus 33, where Jehovah says to Moses: “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live” and later, he repeats: “Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.” The most a Jew can hope to see is God’s back, never his face. This is how Blanchot, to return to him, can be understood in works like La folie du jour, where he writes that noon, the time of greatest visibility, is also the time of greatest danger, the moment when looking at the sun causes blindness. All French philosophy revolves around the prohibition of images and the search for a hermeneutics of the listener: a central void that can never be filled, and which can only be approached in the form of endless interpretation, displacement, digression, or a narrative of absence. Edmond Jabès: “We will never count the steps of absence / and yet, we hear them / clearly.” Dami was thinking about all this while driving the Fiat 1, and in the middle of traffic, he thought: “There can be blind Jews, but never deaf ones.” He smiled and his teeth were reflected in the rearview mirror. Obvious jokes, sidesteps, were his thing, he was an expert in changing the subject, tossing the ball out-of-bounds. Total absence of depth. Absence of cavities, too, for another thing. When he saw his teeth reflected in the mirror, he noticed how good they looked. Only one premolar had a filling, the rest were in good shape, excellent shape. The traffic light changes color, the light turns green, yellow, red, every color. The whole rainbow right in front of him. “What a lovely sunset,” he thinks, while the afternoon fills up with storm clouds. The traffic moves along Libertad, he turns onto Viamonte. He parks the car in the underground garage below the Teatro Colón. Over his head, ballet dancers are rehearsing, an opera is about to open, the theater director argues with the unionists: they’re threatening to strike, they’re always threatening to strike; in the waiting room of the director’s office waits a consultant from the Ministry of Culture: he’s concerned because the theater has, in the press and in society, an image of too much autonomy, as if it weren’t integrating the cultural politics of the City Council (“What sense is there in investing twenty million pesos, if the return is just going to you and not to the government”). He gets out of the car. Climbs the stairs to the street. Crosses at the intersection. He enters the MG building. Goes up to the ninth floor. Leaves the elevator. Goes into MG. He runs into a secretary: “How did it go? Did they give you your license?” He gets to his office, or rather: his cubicle. The phone rings. It’s the General Manager, he wants to see him immediately. Dami walks to the General Manager’s office. He enters the General Manager’s office. They chat for a while. He leaves the General Manager’s office. MG is finally going to set up the Observatory of Sociocultural Trends, and Dami is going to be the Assistant Director.