There is a scene from The Aviator, the Martin Scorsese film, where Leonardo di Caprio maniacally washes his hands until he draws blood. In these times of pandemic that image is memorable, because following the directions for good and effective hand washing to the letter after we have touched something that may contaminate us, money, credit card, newspaper, is no longer known. Say someone else's hands, you can go through something comparable to an obsession.
Do not touch your face, mouth, or eyes either; wear a mask, wear gloves to touch exposed items in the supermarket, disinfect bags and packaging when we return home, and also disinfect the surface where we put them to disinfect them. Change our shoes when we cross the threshold, use separate plates and cutlery, clean the door handles. The horror of closeness.
The aseptic rules of life of Howard Robard Hughes, the eccentric and mysterious billionaire, the character Scorsese seeks to portray in The Aviator , were not very different, only that he suffered from an obsessive compulsive disorder called microphobia, the pathological aversion to everything. that threatens us, but we cannot see, bacilli, germs, microbes, viruses: the infinite kinship of covid-19 that in so few months has so radically disrupted our stock.
Hughes, pilot, designer and builder of airplanes, film producer, owner of airlines and casinos in Las Vegas, financial speculator, and tax evader persecuted by the United States justice, according to his biographers he inherited this mental illness from his mother, that not only did she protect herself from everything that could contaminate her, but she forced her son to follow the same rules to face the legion of invisible enemies that stalked her day and night in the air, in the saliva, in the sneezes, in the sweat on the skin of others.
Other biographers say that his dementia was not hereditary, but came from syphilis. Anyway, it went beyond the horror of getting contaminated, since, sitting at the table, he classified the peas by size before eating them.
Harassed by the Government of the Bahamas where he had sought refuge, and under the watchful eye of his country's tax inspectors, against whom President Nixon was unable to influence as he wished to leave his friend alone, Hughes was forced to seek the protection of the dictator Anastasio Somoza, and thus landed in Managua in February 1972, where he would stay, locked for the rest of the year on the top floor of the Intercontinental hotel.
Somoza thought that Hughes had found an excellent partner to install a chain of casinos on the Caribbean coast, multiply his airline's fleet, which only had one plane, and seduce him to finance the construction of an oil pipeline, and, of course , the interoceanic canal, which, as is known, is a recurring hobby of the dictators of Nicaragua.
They were only interviewed once, at midnight, aboard Hughes' Gulf Stream jet on the Managua airport runway. Unique witness to that fruitless encounter was Nixon's ambassador, Turner B. Shelton, a former Hughes employee in Las Vegas.
Hughes's only deference to his host was to have his nails trimmed, which grew like hooks, and his beard and hair, which formed a shaggy tangle. Had Somoza's hand in a latex glove been extended, or had he refrained from the greeting?
No one could ever see him while he lived in the hotel seclusion, a truncated pyramid built next to the Somoza bunker on the Tiscapa hill, surrounded by his Mormon guard, all teetotalers by rule, and all faithful of the Church of Jesus Christ of Saints. of the Last Days, who were in charge of cleaning it, and carried it in their arms when it had to be transported. And they were also in charge of accounting for the conglomerate companies under the umbrella of the Hughes Tool Company.
He only fed on cans of Campbell's soup and Hershey chocolate bars. He had an air purification system installed in the rooms, and the cleaning staff collected dozens of discarded masks and gloves every day, while the maids had to leave the sheets and towels at the door of the suite. But some of them managed to catch a glimpse of a hospital bed, and a nurse moving around the bed.
He was watching the movie Goldfinger , the third in the James Bond series, at midnight on December 22 when the building began to shake violently. It was the first announcement of the earthquake that would devastate the city in a few seconds. Mormon guards hastily lowered him onto a railing, using the service stairs, and he was taken to the Somoza residence, but refused to get out of the vehicle. And since the lights of the airport runway were out of use, he waited until dawn to board the Gulf Stream that took him forever from Nicaragua, while the smoke from the fires rose below.
Sergio Ramírez is a writer and Cervantes Award 2017.
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