Leonardo Berneri
06/11/2021 10:01 PM
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 06/11/2021 10:01 PM
The last time I saw her was in the hospital.
Lying in that bed on which she had spent the past four months, she seemed, despite everything, more vital than ever.
I had brought him as a gift a mini edition of "Punk Girl", by Rodolfo Fogwill.
She leafed through it enthusiastically, turned the pages one by one, and pretended to read at an impressive speed.
"Great, great," it said.
Thanks to his attitude, it was not difficult to abstract himself from everything: from the devices, from the serum, from the smell of the hospital, even from his own almost defeated body.
He talked about his plans to study piano, singing, or ukulele.
She showed me pictures of when they let her put on makeup.
I kept reading
Sanity and cowardice
Society
It was the first time I was going to see her in the hospital.
I suppose that during the time of the illness, from the beginning of the weakness and the pain until the hospitalization and, even, with the news of the need for the transplant, I had somehow managed to convince myself that it was all a great misunderstanding and that From one moment to the next, she would go home.
He hadn't even gone for his twenty-first birthday.
I just sent him a drawing by mail.
He drew.
She was hospitalized for her birthday.
Leonardo Berneri, with some excuse to hide his pain, did not visit her but sent her this drawing.
I got off the bus in La Plata, that city stopped in time (it was 2012 but it could have been 1985), I crossed diagonals and squares, streets with numbers by name - a fantasy of order taken to the absurd -: a landscape already familiar from so many visits to over the years. In my head I was going over phrases that I had prepared to say to him. He imagined an impossible, painful, unbearable conversation.
I was eating the guilt: I had left it abandoned.
I took a deep breath before entering the hospital. For the first time everything was real to me. I forced myself to go into the room and hold out for at least ten minutes: if she was able to put up with everything that was happening to her, what right had I not to be up to the slightest talk in person.
With a smile of pure teeth when he saw me enter, he erased all the uneasiness. What was that comedy? Me, like an egocentric asshole, overwhelmed by my fears; she, the sick, the generous, giving me peace of mind; he made things easy and the ten minutes was two hours, the allowed time.
The skin of her face, webbed by invisible veins, stretched out again in that huge smile when she proudly showed me her outstretched hands: long fingers whose pallor was interrupted by the dark ocean blue of the nail polish.
Just a few inches above you could see, just before the three-quarter sleeves of the nightgown began, the old scars, white and insensitive, drawing a random pattern: traces of a time that now seemed abysmally remote in the past, the only surface of its skin, at this point, unable to feel pain.
Eternal innocence.
The hardcore band that Leonardo Berneri and his friend had gone to listen to together when she was still well.
"Yesterday the nurses let me paint myself
,
" she
said, shaping her nails, changing the pose of her hands in front of a non-existent camera. That was the kind of joys that had allowed him to endure; This is how he built the force of waiting.
One of the first things she told me when I met her was that she could travel through time. He said "by time" and not "in time." We were sitting on a veranda in the schoolyard during recess. We were just starting high school and none of us had made friends yet. With the excuse that we were the only ones in the class who had “cool” backpacks (I had put a homemade Fun People patch on mine and hers was stuffed with pins) she came over to talk to me. "I can travel through time," he said. I obviously took it as a joke, but I asked him to explain. He said that in his dreams he visited moments in his life, not only in the past but also in the future. She looked like a girl, reading in bed alone or in a patio playing, for example, or she looked old in a nursing home with her sisters, older than her,sitting side by side; she said that once she saw herself as an adult in an argument with her mother and did not speak to her for a whole month.
Since that day we have not stopped talking and I have almost no memories of that time in which she is not present in some way. Despite my skepticism, she insisted on the dreams. I laughed, but inside I took note of each memory (that's what she called them) and listened carefully, waiting for the moment when I appeared, to see if she gave me any clues about my future. He once told me that many years from now,
when we grew up, we would be dating but that it would be for a short time
, that we would realize that it was not what we needed and that we would end up being good friends for life. Was that his way of
sending
me to the
friendzone
?
With the move everything changed. We were about to start fifth year. There was no begging, kicking or crying to prevent it: the father had found a job in La Plata and the whole family would go there. At first, she was angry, saying that she would look for a job and would be left alone in San Lorenzo. That night he ran away and came home. It was not the first time he had stayed the night; By then I had settled for being friends and I felt good in my role. The next morning my father made us breakfast and let us miss school. She talked up to her elbows and laughed as if nothing was wrong. Then my old man took her home. I accompanied her in the back seat. On the way he did not speak. She wasn't laughing anymore but she wasn't angry either.
I have a diffuse and rarefied version of his years in La Plata. We kept in touch, we spoke every week and I traveled several times to see her, but the distance imposes a veil that is becoming more and more opaque, independent of wills and affections. By then, he was no longer talking about his dreams.
The message that pushed me to go see her at the hospital, always postponed visit, had reached me the day before: "I'm first on the list," it said, and put emoticons of celebration. It was like a blow: something in me clicked. I stopped what I was doing and ran to get a Rosario-La Plata ticket for the next day. Being first on a waiting list for a heart transplant can mean only one thing: that no one, in the entire country, is at higher risk. She, the same, celebrated. After months of uncertainty, pain and confinement, I suppose, hope is stronger than fear.
In the hospital room he looked at her and it was as if all her features had been extreme to the point of absurdity
, or as if her body, just when it should have the capacity to be flexible and to admit a change - that transplant that was now imminent. He would strive as never before to be himself more, and where before there was pallor, there was now transparency;
where there was fragility, now there were scrawny and useless arms, unable to hold firmly even a cell phone or a cup;
and there were only bones where previously simple thinness was shown.
It was enough for him to talk, however, or laugh at some nonsense that I told him, for all that to disappear.
At school we had discovered a cyberpunk manga called GUNNM: Battle Angel Alita. Now it is more or less known because Robert Rodríguez made a movie. As we did not have money to buy it, we downloaded it from the internet, printed it and read it at recess. Alita was a cyborg that an engineer found almost dead and torn to pieces in a garbage dump. With recycled parts, the engineer created a new body for her and brought her back to life. Instinctively, Alita, who did not know everything about her own past,
discovered that she knew how to fight and took advantage of her skills to work as a mercenary
and buy new parts to improve herself with the rewards.
Thus, she was rebuilding her memory and her old warrior body.
Mechanical and indefatigable, Alita overcame every situation and grew stronger and stronger.
Lying on the bed, skinny as she was now, her eyes resembled Alita's, disproportionately large.
"Now that you are going to be a cyborg ...", I told her, and we imagined impossible abilities, super human powers, futures that even she had not dreamed of.
It was my only visit in the four months of hospitalization, but she did not reproach me for anything.
I promised to return the following week.
But the following week I found an excuse not to go.
Also the other.
And the other.
Can you be late for a death? Can you not be late for a death? I found out from a Facebook post announcing the ceremony. The body had rejected the transplant, family and friends fired her, the remains would be scattered in that square ... It was a publication of six days ago. There was no point going anywhere anymore.
Everything must have been fast: they are not things that can be anticipated. Suddenly, someone dies who has expressed his will to be a donor and whose heart, by chance, whim, or divine design, remains healthy. In the national waiting list, telephones begin to ring, compatibility calculations are drawn, data are crossed, times and distances are analyzed, a whole mathematics of the remains of a life, an urgent bioprobabilistics that ends up being solved in the woman who will receive the grace of the gift. But the act of receiving escapes all science and
a body can, despite all expectations and wishes, all calculations and prayers, simply say no.
One last memory so that the last is not the end: We went together to a recital in La Plata, in the first year that she lived there. It was from “Eterna Inocencia, a hardcore band” of which we were fans and one of the few that I can still listen to today for pure pleasure and not for nostalgia. I was attracted by his anarchist and self-managed spirit, his political lyrics and the fact that he had revealed Rafael Barrett's texts to me. She liked it because of one album in particular, “The words and the rivers”, which had a much more intimate and melancholic tone than the others.
We were happy again. We looked at each other and grinned in silence as the band played their first songs. Between pushes and jumps, something in the air seemed to speak and told us that we could be sure that life would only get better. (His body would not take long to give the first signs a few weeks later: at first it seemed the typical weakness that opens a cold but the weakness did not go away and
the slightest touch of his body against something began to translate into pain
to the point where it It was making it difficult for him to walk, dress or get out of bed. The hospitalization came before the diagnosis. But at the recital he still had strength and we were comfortable in the swell of bodies).
While one of our favorite songs was playing, the singer came up to us, who were glued to the stage, and offered the microphone to her.
Standing a little on the fence and another little held against me, he took it with both hands and shouted, happy with rage, the lyrics of the song:
"In this land there is so much, so much to create!"
.
Someone should have captured that moment.
That you remain so eternalized.
It would be your last wonder.
Stay forever young and strong.
We would see you stopped in that instant.
A whole life in an instant: just you, who had already seen your future and your past in dreams, who knew everything that would happen to you and remembered everything, you would be, now, pure present.
There you stayed. Almost ten years ago, stainless and invincible like Alita. While the rest of us rush into adult life and escape from the crowds at recitals or get bored with bands that you didn't get to know and juggle to put up with two jobs or project houses and children, you are forever an adolescent, giving life to the candid years.
------------------
Leonardo Berneri was
born in 1991 in San Lorenzo, Santa Fe, where he still lives, in the middle of a landscape made of factories and the river. He is a teacher of Language and Literature and a librarian. The quarantine turned his love of video games, particularly first-person shooters, into a mania. So when work and play allow it, write or try. It has articles and critical reviews published in national and international academic journals. His story “En Vela” was the winner of the first fiction contest of Fundación La Balandra in 2020. He wrote his master's thesis on the fictionalization of reading in Manuel Puig and is currently writing his doctoral thesis on one of his favorite authors: Elvio E. Gandolfo.
