Having reached an age, it seems that life does not give for more. Many memories, debts, longings and few goals. The prospect of dementia may then seem like an existentially provoked procedure rather than a physiological or neuronal deterioration. Or perhaps it is these, our neurons that end up providing their last great service and end up blurring everything, like a hard drive formatting.
But sometimes there are dysfunctions in this degenerative process of self-destruction towards the recovery of the ultimate happiness, childhood ignorance. It may be the case of the protagonist of this story, a centennial patient of a psychiatric hospital who wants to continue remembering and who sketches on the walls the drawings of his uncontrollable flash back about what he was.
The reader soon understands that the erasure of the information in this case is attentive to a transforming truth or an interesting schizophrenia. Who knows? the personal history of each one has its subterfuges, tunnels traced by memory to justify what we have been or where we have arrived. The best analogy is that of a snake that never senses in the straight path the best path to its intentions.
That our protagonist was a kind of wet back arrived in the United States and that he had known of certain vicissitudes of the exiled Trotsky and persecuted until his assassination could be accidental. That life would eventually lead him to the Soviet Union to work in a manufacturing plant that sought to implode the Cold War with the transfer of information from a disenchanted Henry Ford.
They are his memories, they are a hundred years of life. Wisdom is presupposed by an old man who lived his apotheosis in the middle of the XNUMXth century and who has had the fortitude to reach the XNUMXst with the desire to relate his life in his sketches of ancestral man. Sometimes a centenarian man sinks into his dark well and at other times his eyes shine again when he meets a truth lifted from the depths of his memory.
Alberto Ruy Sanchez he uses this character to narrate his own historical essay. The snake of thoughts and dreams, with its zigzagging progress, accompanies the passing of the story from a personal perspective. History can be determined to justify and motivate everything, the unreason, the most contradictory drives and the spirits of pride are in charge of writing the reality behind the official truth.
History tries to bear witness to the changes, its writers and interpreters pretend to make science of the process. The serpent knows that the road must always be winding, in the face of man's determination for the straight line as the shortest way.
You can now buy the novel The serpent's dreams, the new book by Alberto Ruy Sánchez, here:
