My grandfather was there, and I was showing him, of all things, how to use Google Maps. He was wearing one of his suits, a brown suit, and his eyeglasses of carey frame. He was sympathetic and alert to my explanations. However his eyes were a little strange, but now I think it was just the effect of the thick lenses he used for his myopia and increasing cataracts. He said he was going to check the news in the newspaper stall at the end of the street, a few meters away and he disappeared. Under the cold light of winter, I thought it was strange, and I told so to my mother, saying: I think he is not gonna come back.
Everything starts with Johari's window: the way others perceive us and who we are in certain aspects, are by definition beyond us, but that nevertheless is part of who we are as a whole. Then, if that is so, grief is sorrow but also the pain of dismemberment and loss. The nearer the person the more information they have about that non-knowable self of us. When they die, they take those parts of us with them. The very memory of us seen from a second/third person view is gone, forever. We, intuitively know this, and the pain is almost physical.
Know thyself might be interpreted in the same way. Not only knowing yourself from your point of view but knowing yourself in the others' perception. The same goes for the dictum to care for the other as you would care for yourself. As they say, I have neither evidence nor doubts about this.
Some months ago my mother sent me the photos of these photos, photos that I couldn't bring with me because they are in the family album she keeps at home. She doesn't remember, but when I tried to bring it with me she said to me:-Why? These are the photos of MY parents. Or something along that line, it was a spontaneous gesture. So spontaneous she doesn't remember it now. She was right.
What I brought with me were the other pictures, the ones from people we barely know, but whose resemblance, kept in those images, was important to my grandfather. I already posted those photos on social media. One of him seated at his desk at the Ministry of Interior. Some profile pictures taken over the years. One reason why I posted on social media was to prevent the image from getting lost in the vast sea of inescapable oblivion. Perhaps if he read these lines he would be upset. I hope not. On one occasion, he helped me write some assignments in my small notebook, of lined pages, khaki paper cover and slightly yellowish creamy paper that they bought me in the bookstore to use in school, like that little note about the war between Iran and Iraq, which was on television and that I knew so little about.
From his collection of books, I fed myself in childhood, from the Peruvian Traditions of Ricardo Palma in five or six volumes, the Thousand Nights and One Night translated by J.C. Mardrus in four volumes and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo to Three Sad Tigers by Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Psychopathology of Daily Life by Sigmund Freud and the Art of Living by Lin Yu Tang. Over there I also saw a book by Lombroso, although I didn't read it. There was a collection of Latin American authors, from Sebastian Salazar Bondy to Jorge Icaza, Vargas Vila, Lopez Albujar, Alejo Carpentier and Romulo Vargas. During the funeral services, I contemplated it and found him similar to a photo in black and white on plain paper, of General Petain on his deathbed as it was in another of the books he had about famous trials in history.
He didn't know then- how could he? why should he? - that he will die one night, in another era, in another world, postcolonial and postmodern, deconstructed, in the summer of 1993 in Lima, then a multi-formed, multicultural, noisy and dusty city, coming back from a visit to the doctor in front of all of us. I remember many things about that day. It doesn't matter. Because, should we, given the imaginary opportunity, know about our deaths? Should we know about our future? As horoscope and tarot readers now, that would be cruel. Ignorance is sometimes bliss. What we should know rather, if anything, is how our dear ones will fare in the future when we are not here. That would make up for our transient and ephemeral stay in this world if such a thing is possible, I guess.
Notes
https://www.gartner.com/en/human-resources/glossary/johari-window
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