Saving obsessions

The impulse to make a list of personal tastes is a periodic and natural necessity. Its effectiveness may be superior to that of a medical treatment of any kind. No one loves life as a whole (what an abstraction), but some of us treasure certain experiences forever . It is what reminds us, near the end of Manhattan , Isaac David, played by Woody Allen, when he picks up a tape recorder and lists the experiences for which it is worth living . There appear for him Groucho Marx, Flaubert's sentimental education , the amazing pears and apples of Cézanne, Frank Sinatra and the Jupiter symphony of Mozart, among other reasons. It also appears by the way the face of his beloved Tracy towards which he will run shortly after.

A story by Adolfo Bioy Casares performs a similar operation. In Paulina's Memory it begins with a definition of the identity of the protagonist based on her «likes»: «I like blue, I like grapes, I like ice, I like roses, I like white horses» , Paulina says in front of the narrator who then proclaims: "I understood that my happiness had begun, because in those preferences I could identify myself with Paulina." In Just Great Things , the play by the British Duncan MacMillan, the character, whose mother has committed suicide, reminds the public of the experiences worth living for. One of them is "seeing the cat that wakes us up in the morning."

Everyone will have their own list that will of course change. In some interview and in one of his books Jorge Semprún said that when he was imprisoned in a concentration camp, he recited some poems by heart to feel that he was far from there.

This confession was the first thing I had in mind just over two years ago, after a back surgery that did not go as expected. I had entered the operating room with normal and measured optimism, but when I woke up, five days later, someone told me that I had had two cardiac arrests, which explained my long unconscious season in the intensive care ward . At that time I was with my hands tied to the bed and I would stay like this while the doctors suspected that I was able to take off the oxygen mask that covered my face. Visits were forbidden and in the extreme solitude of that room, along with other people who debated like me between life and death, I remember having the company of a clock on the wall that marked the three. Seeing it, I didn't know if it was three in the afternoon or three in the morning but I considered the watch a natural company that reminded me at least of the existence of the outside world from that white confinement, with signs of eternity in which I I found.

I thought then that the only way to escape from that situation was to seek the company of all the best that had happened to me. I began to recite in silence the great poems of my life, verses from Vallejo, Eguren, Quevedo, Garcilaso's eclogues, some piece of Calderón and Cervantes . He also told me passages from El Aleph , the first paragraph of Conversation in La Catedral and the end of Las Boston and El abroad and also memorable moments of Wuthering Heights , such as when Heathcliff goes to Catherine's deathbed and fills her with oprobios and reproaches, a final sample of his love. Mahler's adagietto , the Brahms Violin Concerto , Checid Manina by Puccini and other fragments of personal treasures also appeared on my lips to make me feel that it was still worth being on this side. My children and my wife always returned to the beginning and end of the list. If I lost my mind, I imagined again the Vienna orchestra playing the 'Radetzky March' in the new year of 1987, directed by the vibrant and smiling (odd thing in it) Herbert von Karajan.

However, time suddenly turned out to be longer than memory and I finally ran out of everything I remembered. Then I decided to repeat the entire list again. Then I fell silent, without resources. In that emptiness, with a smell of hospital, while many slept and I wanted to untie myself, having already exhausted my repertoire, suddenly something happened. A new wave of memories began to appear. One after another then appeared poems and melodies that I had forgotten . The songs of Count Olinos that my mother sang to me, the romance of La jura de Santa Gadea , the challenge to the zamoranos of Diego Ordóñez and the response of Arias Gonzalo that we listened to in the living room of my house, all that came to my aid . It was as if he had always had a group of hidden phrases, for emergencies like this. It didn't seem casual to me that in relieving the memory of that moment, a nurse came to give me a glass of water.

Obsessions form a protection system and are widely recommended for anyone who is passing through, as we always are.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• culture
• literature
• Woody Allen
• movie theater

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