Enzo Codaro
09/18/2020 - 22:00
Clarín.com
Society
Maybe it started with the tennis tournament.
I was a ten-year-old boy who wanted to dedicate himself to that, even though since I was a child I knew that this was an environment that did not belong to me.
I kept reading
The reasons we give ourselves for not being happy
Society
The point is that I expected that tournament as if it were life or death, but Dad, one day when I was working, took me with him and told me that he could not take me to the tournament, that I would have to wait for the next one.
I got very angry, but I remember seeing in his face, that in general it could transform for the worse, relax his features and then take a long sigh.
He would not know until much later that the refusal was due to an admission.
Yours.
One day like any other, my old man turned up naked at home.
I'm not going to deny it: from the outset, it was all laughter.
With my older brother we started to fuck him
, we touched his skin, we hung on top of him.
Just imagine: he always wore long hair.
The house, full of photos of him with hair type "hippie" that raised criticism from anyone who came and looked at the photos there, at the entrance.
Seeing him with nothing on his head was very rare.
Before that day, during that same year, several doctors came home often, more than the friends who used to crowd the living room, the grill and the pool on weekends.
The doctors went in and stayed in his room for several hours.
What was going on in there?
Noises, voices, screams of pain, but no certain conclusion.
Every so often I would stick my head out and see him, lying on the bed, with a smile, looking at me with the doctors on top, while they told me that my dad was very strong.
Result: bone cancer.
But everything had started long before.
I remember being in line at school, with a tired body, cold feet, praying as we should every morning, and suddenly hearing the principal say "Let's pray for Santiago and Enzo Codaro's father who is sick". My dad? sick?
But if I saw him smile at home.
The other classmates and teachers approached, as if wanting to tell me something, overflowing with gestures of kindness and pity.
I did not understand anything.
My dad sick?
Later that morning, when I got home from school, I asked my mom if Dad was sick.
She said yes, but that she was fine.
On other occasions, she had told me and my brother that Dad had to take care of himself, but never the word disease.
I went to my room and locked myself in and thought about that.
When my mother wanted to open the door, I asked her to leave and, I know, it broke her heart a little, which I would regret for many years.
But I had realized something: they had been hidden from us.
For what?
So that we are not bad, so that we do not worry and what do I know how many more reasons.
But it affected me negatively.
And so I stayed, alone in the room for almost a whole day.
And of course, after that day a bit of the adult world entered me.
It would seem that, at that age, death is something totally fantastic, as if it were only experienced in books or movies.
Just a symbol.
This time things happened and it was not a movie, but real life
.
The life that one would sometimes hear on the radios while going to school or on TV when having a snack, the life where bad things happen, without much explanation or return to the matter, and nobody is responsible.
At school they had told us about God.
And for a moment I thought that it was best to ask him for something, but as a child I understood that God had nothing to do with this, because if God existed, He did it in the movies, and real life was something else.
The tumor, we learned, was located in the sacrum.
For a year the doctors did not locate him.
My old man began to feel "stabs" in the testicles.
The pains were momentary;
There were days that I felt them, others that I didn't.
However, as the months passed, these increased in frequency, until it became impossible for him to sit normally in a chair.
It took dozens of studies to locate the problem.
All the doctors said the same thing to my old woman: "Her husband has nothing."
According to my mother, when my old man was in bed, lying down due to the pain, he injected morphine syringes several times because he could not bear the pain.
Thus, for a whole year, almost always at home, until she contacted one who gave a bit of guidance.
From there, everything focused on the need to find a solution.
Enzo (left) playing with his father and brother.
At first they believed that the tumor was benign, and to top it all, in
the first operation the surgeon argued that he could not remove it because the area it was in was very delicate
.
Anguish took a house that passed it with the volume of the drawings to the maximum to pass into a deathly silence.
For several weeks my father believed that he had to live his whole life with it there, in his body, along with treatments that would lessen the pain.
Fortunately, they did not give up, they continued to trust to find a solution.
Back, studies and more studies, until they got new news.
The tumor could be removed, but it was malignant, and it was growing.
In my teens I wondered if what my parents had done had been right;
there was discussion about whether the concealment had been beneficial rather than harmful.
We know that children are like sponges.
They absorb everything around it.
The good and bad.
Before this question, the restlessness to revisit the memories increased.
How did I experience this entire stage?
What was the figure of my father back then?
How do you transmit to a son that his father has a disease of this magnitude?
I had gotten used to seeing my old man at specific times.
He worked a lot and my old woman was the one who ran the house.
During the year that he was in pain, before I knew he was sick, different family members came to take care of us.
Sometimes my aunt, sometimes my grandparents.
I followed the normal life I had, I spent it at the club training and on weekends with my friends on the courts.
It was scattered, it was in another.
It was rare for me to see other family members other than my parents more times than usual.
I remember not really understanding the reason for the visits.
I thought we were all going to live in the same house and I told them that he wanted to kill me (fucking).
When he was undergoing chemotherapy, we went to Brazil, to the house of my aunt, his sister.
It was the first time that I took dimension of the breadth of the sea.
One so small before the immensity of the water.
A sensation similar to when you play with your father, who with just two fingers flicks you around, and you can do nothing but fly through the air and try not to hurt yourself.
Well, the same with the waves, so beautiful and so dangerous at the same time.
Some days we went to the beach together, others he stayed at the house.
This seemed normal to me.
He didn't ask many questions.
He played water polo as my grandfather had done, one of the best players in the world, today and forever.
Until then, I was given
a drawing of a giant and I immediately thought that my father, who was one, a real one
, would destroy it if he crossed it, or at least I imagined the other giant running in terror in the presence of my old man.
Grandpa would survive to almost ninety years old and Dad couldn't be less.
That's why, on that trip, we somehow did the strangest thing we could do as children: we filled it with life.
How?
We don't leave him alone.
We cling to it at the slightest opportunity, waiting for it to fly us through the air.
We rolled together in the waves on the beach like the water polo players we saw in him and my grandfather.
Or like when we returned to Buenos Aires, and the cold arrived, and any cap that covered the baldness was constantly removed by the children who somehow imposed themselves against that thing that dad had inside.
We gave him the vital boost he needed to get ahead.
Some time later.
The author with his dad, already hairless from chemotherapy.
For recovery, my old man went into automatic mode: comply with what the doctors told him and be with his family.
Now without pain, chemotherapy and rest were passing.
"When I found out I had cancer, the first thing I asked is if once the tumor was removed the pain would go away, it was the only thing that mattered to me."
And so it was, the pains disappeared.
The return to normalcy was long and tedious.
After a year of complete uncertainty, finding a horizon and a protocol was what saved him from being lost in so much fog.
Little by little the house was reorganized, especially for them, who for a year and a half lived one of the hardest stages of their lives.
For me and my brother the change was in the little things, seeing him again with long hair, playing sports or being able to bring friends home.
By then, we celebrated my mother's 40th birthday.
According to him, it was a real party: everyone dancing in the living room of the house along with karaoke.
"That day with your mother we realized the love we had for the people around us, it was emotional
because I found myself with a life that I had not lived for a long time."
"I was kind of blocked," my old woman told me.
“I concentrated on putting my chest on and acting, we couldn't waste time thinking that Dad was going to die, it wasn't a possible option for us;
I don't remember that stage as a tragedy, but as a family union ”.
By saying those words to me, I was able to clarify various things in my head.
How is it that humans bond when things go wrong?
And of course, it seems obvious to say it, but it is difficult to realize it, and much more to put it into practice, that is the difficult thing.
What I could have lived as a traumatic experience I remember as one of the best stages of my childhood.
Sounds weird, but it is.
I look back and although the memories are diffuse, the tone of those images refers me to a stage of well-being.
I think what they were trying to tell us was: you are not going to stop being children because of what is happening.
Now my old man has a slim chance of getting the same cancer.
Every so often we go running to Saavedra Park to lower our bellies.
He tells me that if the quarantine doesn't stop, he will start rolling down the stairs.
I screw him up and motivate him to go for a run
, but the reality is that his habitat is water.
He can't wait for the club's doors to open to get back to the pool.
Today I am twenty-one years old.
One grows, the deaths of relatives and close people begin to be a fact, one's responsibilities as a person who lives in society are increasingly strict.
That childhood, which one tries to maintain on a day-to-day basis, is increasingly diffuse, it gets lost among the routine things.
The fact that I wrote this helped me to reconstruct something that would otherwise have been buried in the layers of the past.
The experience of revisiting those images of my childhood, of being able to look at them with the distance of the years and of talking about them with relatives who were there when everything happened meant it as the value of this note.
Tomorrow, when I am the age of my old man, I will do the same with the memories of now.
I wonder what it is that makes death so present.
I wonder if death is there to give value to our days.
-----------
Enzo Codaro
.
Student in his last year in the career of Director of Photography at Universidad el Cine.
Lives in Capital.
Since he was a boy he always had the inclination to do everything.
Today, he is determined to make a movie and write a storybook.
In his spare time, in addition to reading and hanging out with the kids, he compulsively plays chess.
He loves to travel, but he knows he is a city bug.
His best ideas come to him walking through the center going to the facu or the subway.
With his friends he hopes to take over the world before the world takes over them.