Every cloud has a silver lining. After a dental curettage, on Monday the 22nd, I arrived at the apartment like a piece of meat when they rescued her from the chimney: desmechadita, inflated, anesthetized, sore. Immediately, ice, Dolex, antibiotic and to the bed without guilt complex, following orders of complete rest.
Literary banquet: Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus fresh out of the oven, again. Simone’s adoptive daughter rescues a short novel that its author never wanted to publish: The inseparable, where he narrates that first friendship, at age nine, with a schoolmate; friendship that lasted until the death of her friend; Beauvoir never forgave himself for having survived her. Beautiful text, with photographs and letters.
At first reading, one more little book, from the beginning of the last century, but which takes on a unique importance, because it gave way to Memoirs of a formal young woman, The second sex Y The broken woman, books that managed to awaken and open the eyes of women in the 1960s and, for the first time in our lives, make us question that abnormally religious education, full of taboos, prohibitions, guilt, sins and fears of eternal damnation that we receive in the schools of nuns; to realize the concentrated machismo that surrounded us and to begin to debate so many things, to doubt, to look us in the face, to feel that wild desire to free ourselves from oppressive chains and dare to seek new horizons.
Simone de Beauvoir marked a before and after in my generation. He uncovered the pot and the rules of the game began to change, both in relationships, in universities and in the workplace. Women stopped being animals with short ideas and long hair and there was rebellion on the farms. The seed bore fruit. The stars came together: the Beatles, Woodstock, hippies, weed, open relationships, the miniskirt, Che, Camus, Gide, Aznavour, Boris Vian, the cat glasses, the lace heel and the tray neckline. And also the forbidden books under the mattress: Freud, Jung, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Wilde, Françoise Sagan, Sartre and his nausea, existentialism … all the tsunami of ideas that overflowed into art, literature, music …
Camus with Abroad, that short novel that takes your breath away and reveals the monster we become if we allow apathy and emotional indifference to enter our lives. It made me shudder again after many years of reading it, because I feel that we have all become strangers to ourselves; otherwise, we would be scrambled and demanding explanations for those thousands of people killed in cold blood with the so-called “false positives”, which were actually genocide. We are, as a country, emotionally mutilated. How painful!
Posdata. Thanks to the molars, I received a heartbreaking emotional curettage. I will never allow myself emotional anesthesia, so nothing changes in this country of blood and lies. Orion, Buenaventura, the massacres, corruption … We have to react or we are all accomplices. There is no valid apology or justification. Just as Beauvoir awakened women, Camus has to awaken us emotionally. Books do change lives! For this reason, in dictatorial regimes they forbid them. Remember Ordóñez, the arsonist, or have we already forgotten?
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