Close your duel with a flourish

The recent publication of Mónica Lavín, Last days of my parents (Planeta, 2022), a book that was presented at Casa Lamm last Wednesday, June 8 with a full house, accompanied by Rosa Beltrán and Ricardo Raphael, has been a surprise.

It turns out that in this chronicle Mónica does not deviate from the central theme and, if she does, it is to get some air, before going back to describe the life of those days when Charo and Miguel Ángel were dying, each one by his side. , with a difference of one year. When Monica had the energy to remember those days, she began to write the last days of her parents.

“When in the peaceful and silent meditation I dedicate myself to looking for lost time, I sigh when I remember so many things longed for with those old pains”, said the Bardo, as I imagined that it could have happened to Monica while she was working on this book, now that she dominates the art of writing to gallop for a long time, sure of her craft and her passion for life.

Monica’s job is patent and these chronicles flow in such a way that one cannot stop reading them in two sittings, like the parts in which she divided her book: the first, with the last days of her father and, the second, the of Charito, his mother. By 2018, Mónica, María José and Pedro were orphans.

Charo and Miguel Ángel were an important part of my other life since I met them, thanks to Jaime Muñoz de Baena when I arrived in Mexico City in 1964. For this reason, the reading I have done is different, since I got to know them well since then. and then when we met at his house in Coyoacán on Sundays. We thought we were at the height of life and, for this reason, we fired rockets long before picking up the slack, when everything changed and the debacle of couples took place, changes in life and profession, separations, new loves and, during all that time, savior psychoanalysis.

Reading this book allowed me to remember some of those moments that Monica mentions, when she gets some fresh air before returning to the fatigue and pain of death foretold. In the midst of these dalliances, she hesitated for a moment to title this book The Fortunate Daughter, as she has been.

“When nothing survives from an ancient past, when beings have died and things have collapsed, alone, more fragile, more alive, more immaterial, more persistent and more faithful than ever, the smell and taste last much longer, and they remember, and wait, and wait, on the ruins of everything…”, Proust wrote and I imagine what happened to Mónica with the Chanel Black that Charito used.

He was able to recount in detail the last fifteen days of his father’s life, who had already reached the age of 90, and the last of Charito at 86, when “that strange and memorable story ends, the second childhood, pure oblivion, without teeth, without eyes, without taste, without anything” as Jacques said, which hurts us so much when we witness the grand finale.

Joan Didion avoided the sudden death of her husband and her daughter in the same year. She later wrote The Year of Magical Thinking. Monica, at times tried to avoid them, trying to travel wherever she went to present her books, talk about literature and breathe other airs, instead of the suffocating smell of hospitals. She did not know, perhaps, that “the dying would never suspect to what extent everything we produce here is mere pretext”, as Rilke said.

This book that Monica wrote seems to me to be a cathartic exercise, a therapy and a way to close her mourning with a flourish, to continue walking with a firm footing, just as she has done since she found her own path and lives her own life. .

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