“They told me I’m going to die. It’s silly: I shouldn’t need to be told that. But it’s one thing to know that you’re going to die sometime—to insist on forgetting that you’re ever going to die—and quite another to say there is a deadline and it’s not even long.
Martín Caparrós should not have written First of all (Random House), but the illness was anticipated, pending the minute hand.
ALS. He confessed it the other day in an interview in La Vanguardia. The traveling chronicler, the teacher of journalists, also the ambitious fiction writer, suffered from an ailment that had left him confined to a wheelchair and condemned his body to gradually become dull.
That is why, first of all, he has written his memoirs, where he dedicates a string of chapters to The Disease. That’s why he continues to write compulsively, with several unpublished books already in the drawer. After all, it’s what he’s always done, but almost the only thing he can do now.
It all started with a fall on a bicycle in Paris, three years ago, and a big toe that didn’t obey since then. It wasn’t a severed tendon or anything like that: a fatigue that started in his legs and spread indicated that he was suffering from a serious and rare illness.
He learned this after passing through the hands of several doctors. “So in the end they had to surrender to the evidence: he was condemned,” writes Martín Caparrós, who alternates in his book memories of childhood and adolescence, rebellious youth, and maturity of long-term journalism. All prose, sometimes verse.
“It’s strange that they tell you that you’re damned. Maybe it was less strange because they told me, unintentionally, little by little: every time a benevolent hypothesis failed, the most brutal one grew just as much. But there was always the possibility of the next one, of another, something other than that. Until that day when they tell you clearly, look, what you have is so sorry.
Caparrós does not lose his humor or spare his irony. Nor does he want to talk only about the disease, because these memories are much more, although they are also the door through which ALS has come out of the closet, where he announces what he has and warns that he is not seeking consolation.
“I am the one who knows that he can do nothing—and that he cannot do nothing. I am the one who I am not, at least the one who was. I am the condemned one.”
There was death in many of his books, but never so close.
“It’s okay: they just tell you that you’re going to die badly much sooner than you would have wanted—much sooner than you could have expected. And you don’t know what to do with it. The tingling, the lump in your throat, the weight on your the brain. I don’t know what to do with that.”
He has been prescribed antidepressants and anxiolytics to cope with the shadow. And he has self-medicated with his extra doses of writing, now that he can’t travel, but he can still do what he knows best.
“And this stupid urge—this obviousness—that I now had to write a memoir. I never believed it was worth writing about myself. Why now? I suppose the arrival of death justifies many things,” reflects the author of Lacrónica or Ñamérica, who embroiders accurate phrases: “We are, in general, a waste of memory, a history waiting to be forgotten.”
Death, but also love. In Before anything he talks about his wives and his current partner, Marta Nebot, who has written in Public a heartfelt column (“We just wanted and want to continue doing what we do among the living”) in which he describes these “essential” memoirs as “the history of journalism.”
“In them he recounts his present and past life, interspersing his today with his milestones, his references and his contingents. From his current life, he describes like no one else what happens to him and how he digests it and how he hates it and how he embraces it,” analyzes the journalist, who reveals that they have recently become a de facto couple because “we do not want any doctor to separate us at crucial moments because we are not registered.”
“They told me I’m going to die.” Thus begins a book without an end and thus continues to vibrate a work that has made him the most renowned chronicler of Latin America, which is the same as saying in Spanish.
Although there is much left to write, this timely look back explains so many things… “I decide to turn to my past when they tell me that I have no future.” His writings, however, will be eternal.
Martín Caparrós, present: “I don’t want those who love me to see me with sadness. I don’t want them to see me dead. As long as I’m alive I want to stay alive.”
Alive and writing.
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