Medical Autobiography by Damián Tabarovsky

Author:Damián Tabarovsky [Taborovsky, Damian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1-978-940953-31-1
Publisher: Open Letter
Published: 2017-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Dami goes outside, walks for a bit. Without knowing why, he starts singing an old song: “Money has no voice / This I won’t deny / I heard it speak once / It told me goodbye.” The truth is he did know why he was singing that song: he’d just been left jobless (unemployment is a circular experience). And yet, he was not afraid of the potential lack of money, of impoverishment, of the future; nor was he overwhelmed by that state of anxiety that takes hold of people who have too much free time, that feeling that every day is forty-eight hours long, that it will never end; much less did he feel any sort of self-pity, that secret sense of pathos and desolation; no, none of these things took root in his mind. The doubt that was eating away at him was one of terrifying pragmatism, he kept going back to one question: “What am I going to do?” Dami had been a consultant all his life, what could that knowledge possibly do for him in his state of ruin? The consulting profession had become a non-profession: outside the sphere of implementation, it was good for nothing, it was nothing, it made nothing possible for him. A carpenter, for example, is a carpenter in good times and in bad, in Buenos Aires and in Moscow, employed or jobless. His profession is a useful, noble, and reputable one. What’s a consultant outside the office and the companies, away from the secretaries and the charts, the presentations and the market research, drafting briefs and reading survey data? The answer’s so obvious that it’s not even worth hinting at. Dami sighs. He lights a cigarette. He swallows the smoke, the pit of his stomach still hurts, and so does his back. He suddenly realizes something: his body hurts. This thought might seem extremely stupid, frivolous, and even absurd, but Dami had never noticed it. His body hurt. His body. His body . . . He was just figuring out that he had a body. That is, he knew it already, but he had forgotten. He had forgotten it for good. In an instant, Dami realized that his body had been nothing more than a source of problems, a burden, a weight, a 300-ton boulder like the one in Tandil. His body had been working fine when it was deaf, blind, and mute, when it didn’t call attention to itself, when it went unnoticed. It didn’t so much as appear or say “Hello, here I am!” unless something bad was about to happen, or it had something up its sleeve, or some misfortune was near. “I hate my body,” Dami thought, the way someone might say “I hate capitalism,” that is, everything and its opposite, the most general generalization and absolute singularity; the impossible relationship between the whole and the part, between the example and the theory, between fragment and continuity, the voyage and the sojourn, desire and its possession. Dami was thinking about all this, and at the same time he was thinking about nothing.

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