Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Ricardo Menéndez Salmón
"An elegiac work, which leads its creator through family memories to understand himself through the virtues and obscurities of his father." Que Leer
"'Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night,' that has brought reflective lucidity to a head. ...] It oozes that strange form of wisdom belonging to those who succeed in exploring, like no one else, the images of a pain (love) that we thought was unspeakable." ABC Cultural
"An ethic of writing and family heritage [...] The story of a personal emancipation full of tears, moments of pain and misunderstandings. [...] We leave behind the chronicle of a father's life marked by illness, which resonates in the life and aesthetic of his son, in his idea of literature as a mutant body." El Cultural
Do Note Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Ricardo Menéndez Salmón
Seix Barral, 2020
Published in Trafika Europe 19 - Iberian Adventure
Trafika Europe website
For permissions, contact: Sonsales Alfaro Prado, salfaro@planeta.es
“My father died in the palliative care unit of the Red Cross hospital in Gijon on the afternoon of June 12th, 2015. He had celebrated his 72nd birthday the day before. I wasn’t with him. I had left his bedside just after noon, when my mother arrived to take over from me in tending to his dying moments.
When I recall the last time that I saw my father alive, the image which I have is that of a man making a repeated but enigmatic gesture, placing both of his hands on his chest as if making an admission of guilt or trying to find the beat of his heart. His gaze is fixed on the room’s sole window. That gaze contemplates something insignificant, a landscape unrelated to any epiphany afforded during his final breaths. Here, death is a prosaic affair.
I know this because I have peered out of this opening and are there is nothing beyond it which warrants a second glance. Roofs. Ariels. A silly patch of sky.
***
After my father’s death, I felt that a taboo had been lifted. I could finally write about him, about his life, about his achievements and his failures. I’d always wanted to do so, but a stubborn reticence, or perhaps a discomfort at the thought that my father might have read what I wrote, repeatedly made me put it off. And yet, even in death, my father was able to impose a fresh moratorium.
What I had believed would be possible after my father’s death only started to take shape two years later, when, after discovering the anecdote about the painter Han Gan, there now seemed to be a sense of urgency.
Writing is a mystery, capable of connecting what is most distant with what is most intimate, hooves of fictitious horses with the breath of a dying father.
***
The first challenge I faced when writing about my father was resisting the temptation of making him into a literary character. How could I overcome this obstacle given that it is, in a way, implicit in my job description? As a writer, am I not supposed to have the insight, the knowledge, and the talent to metabolize reality and turn it into prose, that curious entity which gives new form to the raw material from which life is made? How to apply this almost alchemic formula to my father without turning him into a creation, a fictitious precipitate of who he was?These were not rhetorical questions, mere qualms of a writer, but urgent practical matters that manifested themselves to me in all of their ominous and undeniable gravity. And this was because I accepted that, in order to write about my father, about my own father, I had to first unlearn and forget what I had read about other fathers, that immense literary heritage on the subject of this primordial connection. To disregard other fathers so as to dialogue exclusively with my own. To discriminate between what I had learnt from books and what I had lived; between what belonged to others and what was mine. To avoid projecting the discoveries and disasters of others onto my own personal fantasies and failures.
To all this I must add another problem, an even bigger one, if that’s possible. I had to be honest. And that’s a word which stings and spells torment. Writing is usually at odds with honesty. I know this from experience. When I’ve written about myself, or about significant people in my life, I’ve done so while wearing corrective lenses so I can avoid presenting the landscape as it actually is. The fact that these lenses have varied in thickness isn’t the point. What’s important is that the lenses have always existed. In response to the death of my father in that room in the palliative care unit of the Gijon Red Cross hospital, I imposed a radical honesty on myself. If the taboo had expired and the veil was lifted, all that was possible were transparency, the scalpel, and unadorned objectivity. So, not only was it a case of discarding what had been learnt, it was also a case of unlearning literary devices. To speak about my own father, it wasn’t enough to aspire to the truth about lies: instead, I had to court the truth about truths. Merely finding a way of distinguishing my father from those others which literature had composed over the course of millennia was insufficient; instead, I had to portray that father without being restricted by the limitations dictated by decency, tradition, or piety, those elements which all fathers impose on a child who decides to write about him. This involves being able to operate on two levels, which is a very complex, perhaps impossible proposition. On the one hand, it means throwing overboard all that has been learnt about a cardinal relationship and disregarding anything not relevant to me and my father; on the other, contemplating my father in a dispassionate way, scientifically and forensically, exactly as if my father were not my father.”