Believe me. I have it on very good authority, the best, because she told me herself. Three times, to be sure — not that she told me three times, but rather that her heart stopped three times. Yes, indeed, although the second and third times she was resuscitated by a machine, a machine that’s like a flask inserted under her skin designed to give her a shot, though not of what you’re thinking. This experience makes her a full-fledged Jesus Christ Superstar, although the original only came back to life once, or so we are told, and who am I to contradict those who tell the tale. Besides, three is a magical number in many religions, a number that goes from magical to divine if the said religion is the true one.
Well, let’s say the second and third times she resurrected by cheating, but we must admit that the first time, although after a few days in a coma and with the help of modern medicine, she revived on her own. I wonder if prayers with the kind of faith that can move mountains or Reiki energy would have worked such a wonder, or the energy of the universe channeled by the guru on duty. As far as I know, gurus work wonders when it comes to poisoning their followers (which bothers me quite a bit) and themselves (which is just plain stupid) to send them en masse to paradise. Maybe acupuncture? I’m not too sure about this either.
On the other hand, my dear friend told us the anecdote (the anecdotes, if we count the two records achieved through doping) with a laughter, and rightly so. We spent an amazing afternoon with these and other anecdotes from the past few years, more than five or six (years; anecdotes, many more), since we hadn’t seen each other, from another continent. As we were four old friends, there were anecdotes for every taste, but none as entertaining and certainly none that made us happier.
Incredible, what you have to endure just to be able to laugh at it…
Today yet another dissident has fallen under the boot of his feudal lord, of course elected in absolutely free elections and with the maximum guarantees of freedom and transparency dictated by his own laws. I won’t mention the name of the activist, who would deserve it, nor that of the dictator, who doesn’t, so that this microstory can be applied to other heroes and other villains down the line.
I can hear the opinions of pundits who claim that this death only highlights the dictator’s manifest weakness, who cannot admit even the slightest surge in peaceful resistance, opinions that speak of the insecurity of dictators, unable to sleep peacefully due to their paranoia. Others mention that this abject behavior is due to their need to maintain with an iron fist a house of cards that could collapse overnight should the winds change. Such lame analyses! While these opinions dream of divine justice on this earth in the form of feelings of guilt and the unsuccessful suppression of traumas and paranoia, it seems to me that they are delusional: everything indicates that this subhuman beast sleeps like a baby, eats like a king and does not lack anything, apart from a conscience, plus is in robust health. To make matters worse, he is surrounded by an army of sycophants and the admiration of females attracted to alpha males of good standing.
I would like to continue by honoring the memory of all the peaceful dissidents on whose shoulders we have been able to build our more or less democratic and free societies, where the worst that can happen to us is the annoyance caused by the thorn of corruption on a limited scale. They are brave, as well as crazy dreamers. And they are many — but not nearly enough. They go all up in flames, while we only get close to the stake to warm up our mess of pottage or to witness the execution from a safe distance.
Let’s go back to our dissident, this particular dissident, the one who gave his life, in this case being fully aware of it, since he had already been killed once — although poorly. This guy had a courage that couldn’t even be attributed to some type of derangement. What he had was a dream and, like Martin Luther King, he gave his life, not to a bullet but much more bravely, little by little, night by night, cell by cell. He left his skin in the game and his bones in a prison he chose to go back to almost voluntarily after he was killed, as we said poorly, the first time around.
It didn’t even make headlines in some prestigious news outlets. It was known in advance, expected, only a matter of time, and we are not at all surprised. We are not happy about it, nor are we indifferent, but it happened far away, in the lands of dictators, which are not our own.
We are different, we think. That couldn’t happen here... except that it has happened, more than once and more than twice. Beware, because that’s the natural state of things. Democracy is not the natural state of humans, nor of any society of those species that most resemble ours. Democracy is a stone that must be constantly maintained in an unstable balance on top of the mountain and that easily tips over. And when this happens, the rock turns into an unstoppable red snowball.
R.I.P. and thank you, Alexei
Writers, elders, our parents… it seems like everyone and their dog tells us that life is hard, that it’s all uphill from one mountain to the next, except for, and only occasionally, childhood:
What a living nightmare!
But don’t despair, because those prophets of doom are completely mistaken — life is actually one descent after another and in the end it even comes with a cherry on top, as I will show you so that you will agree with me unreservedly.
The first descent is rather an exit — the expulsion from the Womb of Eden, although it’s a purely ideal and metaphorical descent, real only in biological terms. Indeed, no one remembers it either as suffering or pleasure. The only remarkable thing here is that, according to the professionals, we come out of the oven with Eve’s poisoned apple in our mouth, like pigs in old cartoons. Not a great start from this point of view, but don’t let this detail dampen your spirits, because there are more descents, many more, waiting for you just around the corner.
The second descent is from the pedestal, from the status of the only god of our own Olympus. This one takes a bit longer to get used to. During our terrible twos we kick and scream for everything and anything, demanding constant attention from our parents, who sometimes get it right and sometimes don’t, which causes more and more howls, more and more thunder from desperate gods. Thank god, obviously another god, everything goes away in life, also this stage, in which, unfailingly, we all end up dismounted from our high horse and de-deified.
The descent that usually follows is the humiliation of not being first at almost anything — there’s always someone smarter, someone faster, someone stronger, someone more abusive (in the case of bullies), someone with better grades, someone more skilled. As if that weren’t enough, we don’t have the empathy of our elders, who insist that we should “improve,” implying that not only are we not the first, but also that we’re not good enough, that something is wrong within us. The good thing is that, sooner or later, the slide down this playground or school slide ends, and we move on to more interesting games.
In matters of love and heartbreaks, ouch, what can I say, if just remembering makes me shiver. I imagine that for most of us average people, those who didn’t reach the automatic status of object of desire because of their physical beauty, this is a game of musical chairs, where just when one wishes to sit down and settle, someone else comes along and takes the desired chair from us at the last second, not always playing fair, and one has to keep dancing to the beat of someone else’s drum. This descent is unlike the previous ones. It is a full-fledged descent to Dante’s hell and back, or even lower if there is such a thing, with repeated representations of the same tragedy in the theater of our life.
Finally, one just about stumbles onto the plateau of marriage, children, work, and Sunday strolls; baptisms, first communions, and (first?) weddings. We’ve climbed the usual steps, with the usual falls, and we imagine that in theory the wind will be at our back, that from now on everything will be easy as pie, a bed of roses. On a plateau, by definition, there should be no ups and downs. What we find, and many, are bumps, slopes, hills, and stumbling over a few rocks. The point seems to be not to get bored, I guess.
But don’t worry, because we must continue descending without delay. Downhill, of course.
As we progress toward the setting sun, supposedly still some distance away, one day our blood pressure drops or we notice a lump, and we are forced to make a pit stop at the doctor’s office, who, emboldened and seeking revenge for our having skipped the required check-ups for far too long, inspects us and uncovers Aristotelian defects of both substance and form — our mirrors had detected the latter but we had not the slightest idea about the former. The report is a bitter pill to swallow — worrying drop in levels of such and such vitamin, hormone, or enzyme, which entails a corresponding mandatory decrease in the intake of this or that substance, always pleasurable, followed by having to quit tobacco and alcohol, which never fails even if one doesn’t smoke and is a teetotaler, and ending in a mandatory increase in physical exercise — always, even if what they detected is cataracts. We proceed to swallow the report together many other pills from that moment on.
Finally, finally!, like the lone ranger riding into the sunset at the end of the movie, we get to the last descent, the best of them all, or at least the easiest, because this time, as we are the stars of the movie, we don’t have to lift a finger and everything is done for us. Besides, it’s a very short descent, about six feet… under.
And they all lived happily ever after.
