The year that is ending has been very good for me. He has been kind to me because he has spared my life, he has saved my life. It could not be like that, I could get sick from the virus and die. I saw two close friends die of the virus, both younger than me. One was the channel's sales manager, a man full of vitality, energy, optimism, who seemed invulnerable to the plague. He was generous with me, he congratulated me when the numbers were good, he was happy when he got new sponsors for the program. He earned well, was a successful man, had an adoring family, traveled frequently, drove luxury cars. Suddenly he got sick when the vaccines were not yet available and in a few days his defenses disintegrated, his resistance collapsed and he died intubated, without being able to say goodbye to his family. Nobody in the channel could believe that the sales manager had died on us like that, so suddenly. I was shocked. I understood that if I got sick with the virus, I would lose my life, just like my friend did. A short time later, a doctor who came to the canal every night to give advice on not catching the plague also fell ill. He was also a successful man, of fortune, owner of a clinic, in his early fifties. In addition, he was an athlete, a mountaineer, he had climbed the highest mountains. Being the doctor who gave advice not to get infected, he was unsuspected of infecting himself. He, well, he got sick and died, such was his fate, and in the canal we were once again invaded by a deep anguish and a poorly concealed fear of dying.
I got a big scare when one of my daughters, who lives in New York, got infected. Luckily she was already vaccinated. She spent two excruciating weeks, decimated by the forces of evil, but she breathed freely again, prevailed, defeated the invading army. My brothers were terrified that our mother, now in her eighties, would catch it. She didn't take too much care of herself. She left the house without a mask, she said that this pandemic thing was a tall tale, she put her health and the circumstances of her death in the hands of God, she affirmed that God took care of her better than any mask or any vaccine. She was not afraid. She continued to lead, under the circumstances, a normal life. My brothers forbade him to travel by plane. That is why I have not been able to see her this year that she ends. She wanted to come visit us, but her children would not give her permission to travel, they took her passport, they hid it from her, because they discovered that she was plotting a secret trip, hidden from them. Frustrated by not being able to travel, she consoled herself by walking to the parish church to hear mass every morning, to the supermarket, where she chatted with the clerks and cashiers, and to the houses of her friends for tea. God protects me, God takes care of me, if God wants me to go to heaven, I will go fulfilling his will, and if he wants me to continue living, then I will not go, so I am not afraid of anything, my mother used to say. And she was not infected. And she didn't die. And it was not easy for my brothers to convince her to get vaccinated, but in the end she gave in and condescended to be inoculated with a vaccine, some vaccines, of which she maliciously suspected, in which she did not fully believe. In that sense, the year that is ending, having been very good, could have been better, because right now I miss my mother and I wonder if I should have traveled to spend the Christmas holidays with her and with our large family.
We did not want to travel to spend Christmas with our families because we are afraid to travel, she has assaulted us again with the fear of traveling. We had lost it after getting vaccinated, and we allowed ourselves several happy trips during the summer, taking advantage of our daughter's school vacations, but now that the pandemic has intensified and travel restrictions have tightened, it seems unwise to get on a plane, not not only because of the possibility of getting infected, but also because of the sum of inconveniences, annoyances and regrets that are inevitable when you fly to another country: exams here before flying, exams there when you arrive, exams there before returning home, plus the threat or the danger that the gentlemen who occupy the government in our country of origin resolve overnight to close the airport, a frightening trance that my eldest daughters had to endure, at the worst moment of the pandemic: wanting to leave that country of madmen, an open-air asylum, and not being able to do it, and then staying there for weeks, months, not knowing when you will be able to escape from that hell of idiotic politicians and bureaucrats. Foolish ocrats whose first instinct is to confiscate individual liberties and decide for oneself, as if they know how to take care of our health better than we do.
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Thus, we have stayed at home, on this quiet island where we live, enjoying the good weather, this winter that seems like a joke, while our daughter, on vacation at school, studies with tutors in the morning and at in the afternoon, preparing for a very arduous exam that he will have to take in the first days of the new year, an exam that, with luck, will allow him to enter a private school, since until now he has studied the five years of primary school in the public school of the island, not for reasons of greed or austerity on the part of us, their parents, but because said school is three blocks from home, and I have always believed that the best school is the one closest to your house. Poor girl, overwhelmed with studies, helped by tutors, tortured by math and reading, what a beating. When my wife has shown me the things that our ten-year-old daughter studies, I have been traumatized, because they all seem complex, very difficult, indecipherable, they all escape my understanding, they overwhelm the tiny size of my intelligence and they seem much more arduous than the questions that, forty years ago, I had to overcome to enter a university that boasted of being Catholic, when I boasted of not being Catholic anymore, a university in which I wanted to study law, only to understand very soon that the laws in my country were a leaden and boring fiction, and that, if I had to dedicate myself to fiction, I would better write novels: that is to say that I could be a lawyer, a Catholic lawyer, but that path, that of honor, that of pride that perhaps my parents would have felt for me, it seemed to me that it led to the abyss of misery, to the precipice of living the wrong life, and so I chose to be a talker and a writer, or a talker and a writer, or a charlatan and a writer. pen, and it didn't go so badly for me, here we are still, forty years later, speaking and writing, which are two ways of feeling alive, of resisting death.
This year that ends we will not go to the party in a nearby hotel, which we attended the last few years, thinking that we would have fun. Well no: I keep the worst memories of those parties. Everything seemed frightening, deplorable, horrendous to me: the smug, jeweled people, dressed with regal airs, made up and perfumed, flaunting their watches, their bags, their shoes, as if in a tawdry competition, in bad taste, to see who would win. he had put more money on top, all of them ridiculous and puffed up, all of them hideous and boastful; the consistently shrill, cacophonous music that insisted on playing an orchestra of morons who thought they were virtuous, the ugly, noisy, quarrelsome, brothel songs, as if they were playing in the courtyard of a prison or a reformatory for piranha delinquents; and the food served on tables of tables of tables, an obscene amount of food, of all foods, which were attacked by people who were no longer hungry but persevered in the ignoble habit of swallowing, of eating until they burst; and the dancers weighed down by inexperience, bungling, bungling, who, however, did pirouettes, zigzags, acrobatics and contortions, as if they were in a dance contest on television. Everything seemed deplorable to us at those New Year's parties and that is why we have promised ourselves not to return this year. We'll stay home, have a drink or two, and cuddle our cat and dog when they get spooked by the midnight din.
Next year I ask a few things, if it's not too much to ask, if it's not abuse: that no one in the family get infected, get seriously ill, for which it will be necessary to cancel more trips and persist in wearing the mask, to risk of appearing paranoid; that my mother and I can meet here and not there, because my enemies in the government are there and I prefer not to even visit; that our daughter enters a good private school; that the channel does not fire me or continue to cut my salary; that the novel in which I have encrypted great illusions ends well and comes to life when it is read by the handful of noble readers who have not yet abandoned me; that we can travel to London at the beginning of the summer and Frankfurt at the end of that season, because we don't have the guts to go to Europe in winter and because my wife speaks German but has never been to Germany, where I was forty years ago, as a reporter of a newspaper; and that, when we get to December, we can say, as we say now, we are all alive, all well, loving each other very much, in good health, without money problems, that is to say that we are happy, very happy, although it is better if we say this out loud low, conspiratorial, as if hiding the secret, let's not summon the insidious goblins of disgruntled chance, that regiment of bad dwarfs, bastards, who sooner or later will come to take our lives: not for now, pygmies of evil, no! for now!
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