It’s a contradiction for an agnostic and rational person to use so many religious analogies to describe their life; but it’s unavoidable to measure by symbols that link the measure of humanity with death and the dimension of the human condition. I begin this story with the title of a Christian film. And it’s not in vain that religion has used the power of symbolism to coerce the freedom of the human spirit.
2019, twenty-nineteen. For more than ten years, I’ve been seeing the numerological power of the current year. To have a vision for 2020, one must have overcome the obfuscation that comes with facing death. And to put my experience firsthand, I’m writing this story to share and hope it touches the hearts of readers, who, in essence, are me in the future. This year has been for me a direct confrontation with death, in contrast to appreciating life.
I begin by telling you that my mother passed away on August 3rd after suffering from a painful neurodegenerative disease called “Pick’s disease,” in which the absence of a protein in the brain’s synapses ceases, leaving a body without a mind. Uncomfortable and inconvenient. Real. Cruel and real. This event led me to become her assistant or nurse. My wife and my father and I accompanied Gladys on her journey to the transcendence of the body and to linguistic existence in the memories of those who knew her. I leave here the farewell speech with which we honored her funeral:
“It is an honor to be here, accompanying us on this journey that life holds. The poet Elizabeth Bishop once wrote, “The art of losing is not so hard to master.” Many things seem to fail with the attempt at loss, but loss is not a disaster…
I’m not a poet; I’m Gladys’s son, living with the certainty of appropriating in my genes the failure that took my mother; and like that person, I’ve found myself learning the art of losing, every day. Losing my belongings, losing objects, losing sleep, losing friends and family, but mostly losing memories. I think I’ll try to forget that this ever happened. All my life, I’ve accumulated memories; they’ve become, in a way, my most prized possession. The night I met Edna, the first time I held a textbook in my hands. Waiting for my daughter, making friends, traveling the world. Everything I’ve accumulated in life, everything I worked for, has now been ripped away from me. As you can imagine, or as you know, this is hell. But it gets worse.
Who would take us seriously, when we’re so far removed from what we once were? Our strangers behaviors, our hesitations, changing perceptions of ourselves. We become ridiculous, incapable, comical, but this is not who we are. This is our illness, and like any illness, it has a cause, it has a progression, and it might have a cure. My greatest wish is that my daughter, our children, the next generation, don’t face what I’m facing.
But for now, I’m still alive. I know I’m alive. I have people I love dearly, I have things I want to do in my life. Fighting against myself for not being able to remember things. But I still have moments in the day of pure happiness and joy. And please don’t think I’m suffering. I’m not suffering; I’m fighting. Fighting like her. Fighting to be a part of things, to stay connected to who I once was. Connected to my roots and the legacy of my ancestors. Living in the moment is what I tell myself; it’s really all I can do. Living in the moment and not pushing myself too hard to master the art of losing. One thing What I will try to remember is the memory of the speech I gave today, while the music that lulled my mother’s spirit plays.
She will be gone, I know she will, perhaps tomorrow, but it means so much to speak here today, like my mother, who was fascinated by communication and emotions that transcend human experience. Thank you for this opportunity; it means the world to me. Therefore, I bid farewell to your memory, without forgetting that I am the living voice of who you were and that in Celeste your gestures will be reborn. Insinuations of the past that will keep you with us forever. Fly away, Mom, I love you, and I hope to join you soon on this journey.
With these borrowed words, we bid farewell to Gladys, sowing her ashes in the wilderness, where they will become wind, water, and life. It is also a resigned declaration of my own genetic condition and an experience of where my mind is headed. But this event was not only a transcendental moment in the lives of men, with the death of my mother; it was also a speculation about who I am. A specular mirror, which speaks to my own mental condition.
This situation opened my 2019, and it was only the beginning. With my great friend Alejandro Ramírez’s 50th birthday, I complacently saw the beauty of fatherhood and, for the first time, wished it for myself. In a single moment of watching a father share with his son, I understood that, as Borges said, having a child is one of the things you must do before you die. And by the way, the thing about the tree and the book. So, it was time to create and procreate, and with the right stellar arrangement, Celeste congealed 39 weeks ago. It was time for birth, and to make the journey of gestation more difficult, as a father, destiny had a journey of its own for me.
Having taken the leap into the void, with the red and blue moon guiding the night, I surrender my spirit to the creative act of procreation. A little over 5 weeks later, Mr. Rojas was absent, and the pain in my wife’s breasts announced with morning sickness what was coming. She knows her body, and yet after three weeks of waiting, the brilliant Dr. Jackson from the IPS tells us without raising his eyes from the keyboard that Edna suffers from early menopause and that blood tests are not necessary. With his 23 years of life and a bureaucratic experience worthy of a call center, he sends us home with some pills that still adorn the top drawer of the medicine cabinet. That Friday was strange, but little did I know it was the beginning of a crazy weekend. On Saturday, March 23, with a bit of uncertainty because after taking a home pro-familial test that came back negative, I went with Edna to the lab and paid for a Beta test that they would give us at 5 pm that day.
5 pm. Beta at 10,000. Uncertainty and certainty flooded our judgment. Happiness accompanied by fear, and an emotional spectrum I hadn’t felt awakened within me. The hormones had spoken, and the certainty of fatherhood now cast over me a state of being that can only be described as the nature of a natural mammal and the political constitution of a home. Family, the first institution of social order, and a first-person act of faith. I no longer wander the world looking for answers if I don’t enter answer mode. My 90 kg weight and I made a decision. Fit. To be in Captain Fantastic mode and be the food provider. Whether hunter or gatherer, my nature was barely emerging, and the first thing I did was go out first thing Sunday morning to train my body for what lay ahead. Again, the little I knew was what lay ahead. The plans a man makes, God changes in an instant. When I went jogging with Yoyo for my first conscious training session as a father, I encountered invisibility and hunger on the road. Three Venezuelan teenagers, immunized by living in segregated rooms and accustomed to the CLAPs (a type of food that was guaranteed to give them three frozen chickens a week), brought with them the harsh apathy of the stranger. Of the foreigner. Of the unfamiliar. And with their beautiful plains-type faces, they saw in a chubby man jogging with his lapdog easy prey to objectify, and they attacked me without warning. From behind. Ragpickers. Ignorant and hungry, they attacked my humanity with such savagery that after thirty seconds of blows, stabbings, and making me eat dirt, I was left lying on the ground with nine cuts on my body. Wounds on my face, chest, and back. A fractured jaw and lost teeth. A stab wound to the back that pierced a lung and grazed my heart. I lost two fingers on my left hand. With that, I was right-handed and on the ground, under the astonished gaze of the Parkway pedestrians who were on the bike path at that time. (See report*)
Without really knowing what had happened, I stood up in a rush of adrenaline, and I saw the Parkway CAI motorcycle telling me to get up and follow us. Two young men ran toward Brazil Park, while the third decided to kick a teenager who was riding a bicycle and, after taking it off, went off in the opposite direction toward 26th and 30th Streets. The police followed the two running men, and I, bleeding and not understanding, watched as, with my stride heavy with the blood soaking my torn clothes, I had to walk without a cell phone to call anyone, following a motorcycle that I saw disappearing in the distance. After ten blocks I find a police officer in the middle of a traffic incident on 19th and 42nd, to whom, covered in blood, I ask and he says: “Go to Teusaquillo Park, they captured you at the CAI.” I politely thanked him and continued my zombie journey to arrive at the España house where I met two of my victimizers from whom they seized a murder weapon, said a rusty kitchen knife and my cell phone. After recognizing them as my victimizers in front of Figueredo and Hernández, the police officers who captured them, the CAI lieutenant politely asks me to go to the CAI on the parkway so they can take me to the nearest hospital since the Mitsubishi parked at the CAI could have its upholstery stained with my blood. The judicial authorities proceed to the URI, and I, still without a cell phone, have to walk back like a walk of fame, bleeding out, back to the parkway where I finally ran out of adrenaline and began to feel dizzy from the blood and the exertion. (See statement*)
On March 24th, while my mother was suffering from the pneumonia that would end her life; I was learning I was going to be a father, and in this metaphysical journey through life and death, three hungry foreign boys decided to end my life. But if a 45-year-old man was out jogging with a lapdog on a Sunday morning, why did three teenagers with kitchen knives have to stab someone in the back? Their response after their capture was, “They discriminate against us based on our accent, and our law is to pick up from the dead.” Incredible indifference with which they objectified me, and it was only the beginning of an absurd journey through the war and the reality of this country. Pause to remember Alfredo Molano, who left this world, leaving much to be learned; and in this sense, the war stopped being in the media and part of the government’s news agenda and began to gently touch me in the form of a stab in the back. It was my first day as a father and the world screams at me about how aggressive it is. Transcending life and re-symbolizing death. A Heavenly Message. The measure of the cruelty of reality was transformed into Gothic poetry, and I distanced myself from this world. The poem is ready, let’s continue.
Literally, I rose from death (*see Medical History) to live as a father. Celeste announced her path of teaching me what Gladys was sharing in her last lesson: Empathy. With the infant, the mourner, and the migrant. Empathy with the stranger, the crazy, the different. Empathy with the Indigenous and the Afro-Colombian. With the peasant and the humble. Having the capacity to be another, to understand pain and, in a very profound sense, to share their experience. But, well, the story that follows, of lawyers, judges, and courts, is not at all funny, and all I can say is that the one who treated me best in the process was the perpetrator. The prosecutor’s office is indolent, reeking of cyanide, the attorney general’s office with no regard for my well-being, the victim support center is a disgrace, and I only hope for November 21st, so I can stand in solidarity with what the people are already saying during election days. Change and transformation are time to fly!
