There are some memes out there, starring a large, muscular dog and a tiny, defenseless dog, sarcastically portraying the attitude of different generations to the same things: music, work, courage.
One of them compares the young people of the year 1212 with those of 2021. In it, the big dog - which represents the young man of the Middle Ages - says: “Goodbye, family, I have to go on a crusade to kill pagans and recover the glory of Jerusalem ”;
next to her, the small dog - representing the young man of this time - says: “Mom, there is a cockroach in my room and it is the kind that flies.
Help me!".
Every afternoon my Syrian grandmother listened to the dead. At that time, the station in the city where we lived was broadcasting the funeral announcements. She held the radio close to her ear, always at a low volume, and when the announcer mentioned the name of someone she knew, she made the sign of the cross and got ready to go to the wake. Going to wakes was one of the few things that made her leave her home (the other was collecting retirement). She put on a black sweater, stuffed a scented handkerchief up her sleeve, and went off to accompany her relatives, hoping, I suppose, that the day her own death was announced on the radio — as it was — her friends would come to hug her. his family, as they did.
A few weeks ago I was in an unfamiliar city, separated from my hotel by seven kilometers of monster highways. I wanted to ask for an Uber to go back. The application was not working. After that it worked, but I was not accepting the payment method. He finally accepted it, but then I lost the connection. It started to rain heavily. There were no taxis or buses. I felt absurd helplessness. And, for no apparent reason, I remembered my grandmother listening to the dead. She had come to Argentina in the first half of the 20th century. Until then he had lived in a village where his family raised silkworms (he described the house of worms with delight: the pearly threads, the noise they made when they ate mulberry leaves). One day, when she returned from mass — she was an Orthodox Catholic — she found her mother and brother dead."Bad air came and took them all away," he said. She was left in charge of her own grandmother until her father, who had left for Argentina years before, sent for her. So, obediently, she got on a boat with a bag and some gold chains, the only bargaining chip she had and which was stolen from her in Tripoli. I was 12 years old. I was traveling alone.
That day a few weeks ago, lost between the highways, dealing with the Uber, I remembered my Syrian grandmother and, to think about something other than my ridiculous situation, I told myself that I would write a text about that time when every death mattered, and this one, in which the dead are just numbers. I also told myself that I would find a way to talk about that world in which my grandmother's children were vaccinated against polio with a vaccine developed by Salk and perfected by Sabin, two scientists who never wanted to patent the discovery, and this one, in the that we protect ourselves from the plague with vaccines manufactured by Mr. Pfizer, Mrs. Moderna or Don Johnson, whose patents, according to Oxfam, made nine people related to the pharmaceutical industry billionaires. Then I remembered a graffiti that I saw a long time ago in Malaga. He said:"Do it. And if it scares you, do it with fear ”. And I understood that I did not want to write about the dead or about patents, but about this stupid 21st-century inhabitant that I am - a woman in a civilized city, equipped with a mobile phone and credit cards and that, nevertheless, she feels unprotected. -, and about that twentieth century inhabitant who, at the age of 12, alone and without a weight, crossed the ocean to meet a father whom she had not seen since she was 5. I understood that she wanted to write about what has obsessed me since months ago: what is, in our time, the relationship we establish with risk and death. That I wanted to write, in short, about the big dog and about the small dog. But I still don't know how.but about this stupid 21st-century inhabitant that I am —a woman in a civilized city, equipped with a mobile phone and credit cards and who, anyway, feels unprotected—, and about that twentieth-century inhabitant who, at 12 years, alone and without a weight, she crossed the ocean to meet a father whom she had not seen since she was 5. I understood that she wanted to write about what has obsessed me for months: what is, in our time, the relationship that we establish with risk and death. That I wanted to write, in short, about the big dog and about the small dog. But I still don't know how.but about this stupid 21st-century inhabitant that I am —a woman in a civilized city, equipped with a mobile phone and credit cards and who, anyway, feels unprotected—, and about that twentieth-century inhabitant who, at 12 years, alone and without a weight, she crossed the ocean to meet a father whom she had not seen since she was 5. I understood that she wanted to write about what has obsessed me for months: what is, in our time, the relationship that we establish with risk and death. That I wanted to write, in short, about the big dog and about the small dog. But I still don't know how.Alone and without a weight, she crossed the ocean to meet a father whom she had not seen since she was 5. I understood that she wanted to write about what has obsessed me for months: what is, in our time, the relationship that we establish with him risk and death. That I wanted to write, in short, about the big dog and about the small dog. But I still don't know how.Alone and without a weight, she crossed the ocean to meet a father whom she had not seen since she was 5. I understood that she wanted to write about what has obsessed me for months: what is, in our time, the relationship that we establish with him risk and death. That I wanted to write, in short, about the big dog and about the small dog. But I still don't know how.