Intimate worlds. Since I was a child, I felt that death was following me. Is it because of a family history full of dangers and goodbyes?

Soledad Vignolo Mansur

12/11/2020 22:00

• Clarín.com

• Society

Updated 12/11/2020 10:00 PM

I was born to young married parents in the rush of death, my grandfather Félix Vignolo suffered from cancer.

He died before my time and caused my first fear.

What if Dad died young like Grandpa?

It was not enough for Félix to emigrate in shorts from Serralunga de Alba, nor the railway struggle;

He had three children, but his wife fell ill after giving birth and gave up everything to raise them.

With that paternal grandmother, Aldina, I understood other ways to die: her mind was crossed by the past and she grew old with dementia.

My mother, on the other hand, spoke of Felix as if he were a saint.

I kept reading

It will come, but time must not pass in vain

Society

On July 1, 1974, Mom celebrated the death of General Perón on the sidewalk - Mom was capable of celebrating deaths - while a kerosene stove was set on fire at home.

In the room with the pink flowers I was, flying with fever and drowning.

I couldn't breathe, the air burned me and for the first time I smelled death

.

Its black perfume would warm me forever.

That time, the neighbor saw the smoke and I had my salvation.

Since then, death and smoke terrify me, suffocate me so much that when they elect Papa and I see white smoke, I feel that God is drowning with me.

Smiles

In the black and white photo, Soledad Vignolo Mansur (right) with her mother and her brothers.

There were happy moments but issues related to death always came up.

Death as a banner had several after-dinner stories that I would never forget: "You were born with three turns of the cord, you almost died," Mom said about my delivery.

"I saved your brother when I called Dr. Quattordio, he was skin and bone," said Aunt Coca.

"When my father died, I ran out of milk, I died with him, that's why your sister cried," Mom said about the death of Grandfather Constantino.

Death was immense, terrible, undisputed.

At nine the sacred word came to me in the voice of Doña María Becerra, grandmother of close friends who lived in front of my house in Coronel Suárez 330. She spoke to me about God,

said that we did not die because Christ saved us

, I attended the rosary every Afternoon holding her hand and that shared prayer continued until I was the one who took her by the arm, keeping us alive and full of beads smelling of Vatican roses.

Doña María died and I, who could not believe her death, wanted Christ to save her;

Christ had to save her at my request because I had done everything that was due: communion, confirmation, nights of kneeling prayers.

My family, a mixture of races and beliefs, included a certain paternal atheism that did not take hold.

The fear and fascination with death raged on me.

I was afraid of him and he attracted me, like when they killed Chuli, our cat, I hugged him stiffly while I buried him in the courtyard with crosses on branches, some festivals and necklaces with colored badges that served as a rosary and there was no way to control myself looking for the culprit to explain the fact to me and, perhaps, what he saw in death, what I did not.

In adolescence, because fear entered me early, I began to beat more, as if the imminent lurked and, although no one noticed, a strange anticipation encompassed me, I dreamed of death, of fire.

And I woke up suffocated.

At that age, my maternal grandmother, Faride, died on Mother's Day.

She no longer wanted to live, and she put death in my face.

I arrived at my aunt's house where they watched her, I saw the drawer in the center of the room, surrounded by electric candles, as if at the back of a dark cave;

As I got closer, the posture of my grandmother, the color of her face, the deformation of those features, everything unbalanced me.

Dad held me, but my legs were shaking, and intimate death smoke choked me.

He wanted to escape, suddenly someone asked if he was okay.

I said yes ... yes, I'm fine,

but I was dead thinking how scary ... she's dead ...

how dead she is ... and the image stayed with me.

That anguish, terror and helplessness were repeated throughout my life, in the face of other deaths.

Three generations.

Soledad Vignolo Mansur (light blue), her mother and her grandmother Faride.

The mother asked to be watched with a white beret because she was radical.

I then began to apply an attempt at a solution: avoid everything relative saying: I refuse to talk about death ... I don't want to know what comes after ... when the time comes I will die, period.

In 1981, while I was studying architecture in Buenos Aires, it was a time of change.

An attack on Juan Pablo II distracted me from the survey of Plaza Olleros, I lived in a religious boarding school in Belgrano where sin and death were similar.

Fear was already a dart in my soul, and everything got worse in 82 when my friends went to war, then young death embraced me.

It left on my skin the perverse sensation of an unanswered letter, and the screams of Juan's mother when she died.

I didn't go to war, but I walked on his feet.

Extinction encompassed us all in the eighties: there was talk of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union,

we knew the monster of AIDS and at the same time we were reborn with the first CP

, we howled with Michael Jackson and we put an end to the dictatorship.

Everything changed, except me, with that enormous fear on my back, like a sharp tongue that questioned life: are we born to die?

I had left architecture for graphic design, perhaps looking for the brand that would define me.

At home, after Grandma left, Mom said we had less air, so I remember staying awake guarding her breathing.

Then he began to tell us about his death, he would be fifty years old.

That he wanted a radical white beret for his funeral, and that it was our obligation to deliver.

Although we laughed with my brothers, years later

we found ourselves running to buy it in front of its end

.

Mom and her deaths, the announced ones and the real ones, were the subject of therapy.

I also carried hers in my body and the fear of substantive death, the one that I perceived in childbirth, the one that I palpitated while my whole being trembled.

In July 1992, I was returning from Salta with Chacho, my compadre, his wife Linda, their two children and Marcelo, my love.

I was six months pregnant.

It was a chosen trip and I enjoyed the sunny afternoons in the Cathedral, the empanaditas de la recova, the meals in Cafayate and the colorful history of that pre-Andean province.

Sitting in the back seat with the children and my friend, we talked about my baby's name.

Arriving in Tucumán, a cargo truck was in front, the Renault 18 had more power and Chacho stuck his nose out to pass it.

It was a second.

It opened, I saw a gray 505 speeding down, I watched the desperate face of the man at the wheel.

No one screamed, we held our breath, my instinct made me grab one of the boys and protect him.

I didn't think about my belly or myself.

I closed my eyes, heard brakes and a final drag.

When there was stillness, I looked around.

Stuck in the middle of the road, the vehicles passed us without stopping.

Chacho said: we are saved.

Marcelo turned and whispered are you okay?

I did not answer.

The boys were crying.

We got out of the car, stunned.

Some truckers dragged the Renault to the side of the road and called the tollbooth.

We were still silent.

Cracked like the axle axle of the right wheel that broke against the truck that ignored our luck and continued.

The tollbooths were looking for the dead.

There was not.

But the feeling of life that my pregnancy gave me had been altered.

I realized again, with horror, that life and death were very close.

The fear of dying marked my forehead.

The story remained as an anecdote to overcome the sinister,

however my pregnancy remained intact despite the accident.

A few years later, I got pregnant again;

it was going to be a boy, Alejo.

One winter noon, Mom, who lived across from my rented chorizo ​​house, had cooked squash stuffed with meat and rice for me.

Marcelo was in the field.

Sitting in the living room, the pinewood floor mixed its rancid aroma with that of hot food;

She was smiling placidly, and after talking for a while, Mom left, the afternoon of another July was happening.

Suddenly I felt a stitch, my insides screamed and the moisture running down my legs defined the risk.

I waited static and silent, there were no mobiles, I remember the concise abyss that preceded each palpitation.

When Marcelo arrived we went to the guard.

While they were accommodating me in a room I began to give birth to a dead child.

I didn't want to see it, it was enough to have smelled it, but I wanted to die with it.

I was healed in the operating room of the old Junior Sanatorium and I was happy to wake up alive.

The loss nested in my mind more than in my body, which healed quickly and young to recreate and give me a new son, Nicolás, synonymous with prayer, light and deep love.

The fear of death walked in me as if from a procrastinated hell that discomfort with life pursued me, it was then that

I began to suffer from a severe anxiety disorder

.

They called it stress, although I knew it was anguish, because death was looking for me and I would face it.

I was haunted by finitude, that panic.

In 2013 I attended my first Book Fair as a writer.

It was no longer okay.

Suspicion kept him from visiting the doctor, and a gynecological tumor had turned into a throbbing ball of fear.

With extreme pallor I faced the basement of the Rural parking lot;

the columns were on top of me, the ceilings were very low, everything cost;

Pilar, my daughter, held my shudders.

Marcelo was waiting.

I barely managed to attend the signing of copies and in less than an hour I fled.

All the time I felt like dying.

The next day I had clinical consultations, and doubted between hegemonic doctors or from the interior.

After a few months, on one of those July days that define my life, I was at home terrified of losses and decided to drive dizzy to the sanatorium.

They didn't let me go back.

Without red blood cells or hemoglobin, the doctor literally told me: they are not values ​​of a living person.

That phrase still reverberates.

I had surgery after fifteen transfusions and I woke up in intensive care.

When I saw my children I spoke to them of love, but I was brooding death.

That edge was a milestone, I was able to find new favors to overcome apprehensions, but I have inscribed the fact that I came to this world with death.

And I know that I created two lives and one death

.

Destructive and survival tricks made me understand life with intensity, but they did not remove that trembling that has inhabited my body since I was a child.

It is like a transcendental emptiness that burns, like that fire of a Peronist anniversary.

Perhaps because of all this, when Mom died I organized her courtship, I fulfilled her wishes and, together with my brothers, we said goodbye to her in private.

Everything at the wake worked, but I wasn't there.

I spent night and day in front of the door of the mortuary room ... in my flat.

I heard my sister say to my aunt: leave her, she's better there.

I also did not attend his funeral.

It is likely that some guilt has hung on his final sigh.

In this 2020 death paralyzed me every day of the week.

People die.

As usual.

But now we count it.

We count death.

And it is difficult when in a period of quarantine, fears materialize, it happens to the same and dear memories die with them.

They were not in the 1992 accident, they did not suffer my fatal birth, nor did they embrace me in my losses.

What do I do with their deaths?

How do I understand them without letting the shaking pass?

I control my heart rate, my blood pressure, my oxygenation, the probable symptoms, as if I reached the certainty of the obvious.

We are going to die.

But with these daily deaths, I knew that mine would not be dire.

A month ago I cut geraniums from the garden, bought another white beret and walked through the bars of the Parque Cementerio.

In the background, after the abelias, is the mother's name in black letters on granite, I lay down on the wet grass, I put my beret on the letter C of Catalina, Catalina Mansur, and for the first time since July 7, 2011 , when he died, I felt peace.

The guacho dogs will take the beret, and tomorrow's parker will wear the geraniums with the green, but enough will remain in the air.

And thank God, Dona Maria would say, it won't be death.

-------------

Soledad Vignolo Mansur

is a writer and cultural manager.

She lives in Junín, Buenos Aires, has been with the same love for thirty years and is the mother of two children.

He has been writing and reading since he was twelve, when he realized that life could be counted.

Although he is afraid, he breaks all the barriers he can, especially those that he creates.

He admires Roberto Bolaño and Alice Munro.

He works his style daily because it is considered under construction.

He published three books, “Angles”, the novel “Sandalias Santas” with which he participated in the 2018 Miami International Book Fair and “Una más Una” presented at the Buenos Aires Book Fair.

He had national short story and poetry awards.

Coordinates literary workshops at the National University of the Northwest of the Province of Buenos Aires and Libraries.

He participates in reading clubs, is a lecturer and enjoys promoting literary encounters in schools.

She feels that the field and the sea understand her, and dwell on her;

he dreams all the time, although he claims that he falls short.