The world, which is barely what my eyes see, slowly cracks around me, like an Antarctic ice block melting. Aging is not just adding years and discovering gray hairs and wrinkles. Aging is becoming clumsy and slow, distrustful and grumpy. Aging is shrinking, shrinking, becoming irrelevant, almost invisible.
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In my mother’s family, there are elderly people who fall just from being old, who wear diapers, who walk with a walker or cane, who depend on a nurse to bathe. I don’t want to fall from old age, wear diapers, and shower with a nurse. I prefer to leave earlier.
I admire lucid suicides. Not all suicides are lucid. I met one, a man of powerful intelligence and vanity, who preferred to take his life before turning seventy to avoid the indignities of prison, humiliations his father had suffered when he was a child. I met another, a wise writer, who at eighty chose a serene, painless, assisted death to avoid the disastrous consequences of a terminal illness that would have reduced him to a wreck. I also met a talented actor who jumped from the balcony into the darkness of death when he still had many roles to play. I would like to leave when I am a perfect useless person, a burden to my family. I wonder if I am not already.
What saves me from being a perfect useless person is not speaking. I speak certain nights on a television program. It is a waste of time. Very few people waste their time watching me. What I say is dispensable, irrelevant. I speak every afternoon in a video I record at home. About a hundred thousand people watch me every day. The platform that distributes those videos pays me well. I pay my team well. However, the stories I tell generally lose interest after a week. No one needs to watch those videos, no one should watch them, no one will be misinformed if they avoid those reports. I cling to both jobs, speaking to a camera in the studio and another at home, because it is convenient to earn money to cover my family’s expenses. Although they pay me, I feel like a perfect useless person when I am speaking. I begin to notice signs that I am discoursing worse every day: I forget or mispronounce certain words, I have lost the vigor and breath of yesteryear. I suppose it is normal, since I have been speaking to cameras for more than forty years.
What perhaps saves me from being a perfect useless person is writing. Curiously, that job leaves me little money. I do not write for money. I write to not feel like a failure, a burden, dead weight. I write to not be the useless one in the family, the fool of the family. The newspapers that publish my weekly texts do not pay me a cent. I give those stories away for free because they lack value and because it is enough reward that they are published in certain countries where the noble Spanish language is spoken. I am then a silly and aged writer who gives away his writings to not die completely. Then there are the books. I publish a book every two or three years. I could publish one every year, but my editors restrain me, ask for a pause, let the novels mature. I am immensely fortunate that my books are published both in America and Spain. My latest titles have sold quite well. That saves me from feeling like a perfect useless person. Although the money I earn from royalties is less, the writer breathes, dreams, expresses himself, is alive. What then saves me from the ultimate, definitive failure is feeling that the writer is still standing and has two or three books left to publish. No one, except myself, desperately needs those books to be published. That they are works in progress, pending matters, mountains of words to build, gives a purpose to my life. Ironically, the things that matter most to me are then the ones that leave me the least money. That is why I go jumping from book fair to book fair, like a medical visitor, paying for all the trips myself: so that the writer does not die completely.
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The problem that saddens me the most is money. I have money. Some people think I have a lot of money, more than I deserve. That is the problem. I am surrounded by hyenas and jackals, vultures and crows. They come for me, gather to tear pieces of flesh from me. They have no compassion, they do not rest, they harass me, surround me, attack me from behind, gradually devouring me with bites and pecks. The world, which is barely what my eyes see, slowly cracks around me.
My sister asks me for money, a lot of money, two hundred thousand dollars, and when I tell her I will not lend it to her, she writes me a rude email, insulting me. We loved each other as children, it is sad that things end like this, affections corrupted by vile money. A brother of my mother gets sick and is admitted to the clinic, but he has his money invested abroad, in long-term bonds, and so he asks my mother to pay his medical expenses, and of course she, a saint, pays everything without complaining and then hires nurses so he does not keep falling, because he, out of vanity, refuses to use a cane. My maid far away, in the city of dust and fog, takes advantage of the fact that I am silly and distracted and daydreaming, and takes her large family in my truck and takes them on country trips and to the southern beaches without telling me or asking permission, and I come to discover it when visiting that city and noticing that the truck has traveled thousands of kilometers that do not correspond to the infrequent use my wife and I have given it. A friend from newspaper days, whom I have not seen for more than forty years, asks me to send him money, six thousand dollars, because he does not have a dollar to survive. A friend from university days asks me to transfer money, ten thousand dollars, because he has nowhere to sleep or eat, then I find out he is addicted to cocaine. A former employee of the television channel waits for me at night, outside the studio, in the parking lot, and tells me crying that he has no job, that he is a father of three small children, that his black luxury truck has been confiscated because he has not made the monthly payments to the dealership, and asks me for money, seven thousand dollars, to support his family while looking for work. A waiter at a restaurant asks me for money, three thousand dollars, for his son’s graduation party. My housekeeper asks me for money, eight thousand dollars, to buy a truck that her sister will use as school transportation to earn a living. A real estate agent, who is not my friend, asks me for money, twelve thousand dollars, to move, and tells me that if I do not help her, she will be left on the street and will have to sleep in the back seat of her car. I do not exaggerate then if I say that every day some scoundrel, some beggar, some extortionist asks me for money, and if not me, my mother, and if I do not fall into the trap, surely she will.
That promiscuous traffic of affections and money leaves me sad, disheartened. Often, sunk in discouragement and defeat, I give money to beggars, knowing I will not recover it, and on rare occasions I am brave and refuse to sign the check or approve the transfer. When I lend or give money, I then feel like an idiot, a weak, timid guy, afraid to say I don’t want to give you money because I know I will lose it, don’t abuse me, I am not an ATM. When I refuse to help a tortured soul who asks me for financial aid, I then get depressed, feel like a bad person, a selfish, insensitive subject who has money and is not willing to share it with the needy, destitute, and helpless. In any case, I lose out, I feel bad.
I find myself alone, surrounded, harassed, unable to escape. Vultures and crows fly over me, hyenas and jackals are tempted to see me old, badly hurt, without the reflexes of before. I want to live a little longer, but they, hungry, thirsty, invade my territory, cut my freedoms, surround me and want to eat me in pieces. No one warns you when you dream of being rich: first comes the money and then come the vultures and crows, the hyenas and jackals, and they will kill you slowly to take everything you have.
