Claudio Bertoni: “I don’t googling a symptom again, even if they torture me”



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To face the pandemic, you have the advantage that living in isolation at home was your routine for decades, but the disadvantage of being a hypochondriac. Which of these two factors has weighed more?

The disadvantage. Because in terms of living scared shit, things have been getting worse for me for a long time. Italian writer Guido Ceronetti, in an absolutely evil book called The silence of the body, he says suddenly: “We are beings of dazzling fragility and smallness.” That dazzling fragility runs through my blood, but it has worsened over time. And the icing on the cake has been this virus issue. The damn paranoia transmitted by television, in the head of a hypochondriac like the one speaking to you, rises to immeasurable heights.

Have you seen movies with symptoms?

I was afraid because of the strange temperatures they gave me, which I don’t want to talk to you about, but which are already healed. And also because of dyspnea, because it is a symptom of the coronavirus and it was one of my main symptoms a couple of years ago, when I was very bad and could not fill my lungs with air. I hope to speak well to you now, because if I am not going to cut you and I am going to stay breathing short perhaps for how long. That time I ended up five times at the Ciudad del Mar Clinic, believing that I had heart attacks. It was for laughter, they already called me “Don Claudio” when I arrived. And there they tried to calm me, but I asked for the electrocardiogram, because it was the only thing that calmed me down. I believe in allopathic science, sorry, it would be wonderful to believe in a machi that burns some herbs, but I can’t. It was tragicomic, I ended up exceeding Fonasa’s monthly limit for electrocardiograms.

And you had nothing?

He had precordial anguish. I had never used Google, but my sister mentioned it to me, I put what was happening to me there, the precordial anguish appeared and knowing that I had that was my salvation. But I had a cave there, because Dr. Google is horrible. Then I went back to using it and a couple of balls came out to boot.

It is always cancer.

Exact! No, I do not go back to Google even if they torture me. It is not for someone who has all these damn bullshit on his head. I wish I had them in my head, but I have them scattered everywhere. I mean, in my head I had to have three scans and two MRIs. One of the resonances was due to a story that was too cold, but I’m not going to tell you. They took me at two in the morning because a very strange thing happened with my memory … Now, let’s get there with that.

For now, in Concón there are only 14 cases of Covid-19.

Yes, that reassures me. But I’m still super paranoid that I don’t want to get close to anyone, because they change your information every day. First they say that to get infected you have to talk to someone less than a meter away and for more than five minutes, but then a wise Finn or a Polish scientist comes out saying “look, if you’re in the supermarket looking for the oil, and another rogue sneezes in the noodle aisle, you get the sprays and you screwed up. ” And the mask, which according to the WHO was totally expendable, now it turns out that you even have to sleep with the roe. No, I chanted the bike with that information. I have a Sony television that a friend gave me and there I watch the CNN news and the I-Sat movies, that’s my entire relationship with the media. I know that newspapers can be seen on the computer, but I believe in papers. And social networks, to be frank, I find that they are like networks in which the roe fall like fish. I am 74 years old and I am really somewhere else.

When you talk about “the old men”, do you take for granted or do you still feel that they are talking about other people?

That’s very weird: I’m obviously an old man, but if I look at the old men I don’t see anything like me. I have young friends who say “oh, these old assholes”, but they refer to people who are not more than 50 years old. What happens is that they are gentlemen like chubby, a little skinned, that they walk around and are like gentlemen. I cannot see myself from outside as a gentleman. One thing that is super sweet and beautiful still happens to me on the street: suddenly people talk to me. And sometimes some ladies talk to me with their husbands who for me are the salt of the earth, some Chilean gentlemen who wear vests and ties, who are very silent and hang out with their lady who is neat and everything. And the ladies tell me: “Don Claudio, I read your books.” I swear to you that I want to apologize for the filthiness I write. For me they are not filthy, but I see those ladies and they are like my mother, although sometimes they are younger than me.

“There is a little poetry of mine that says:” Wherever I am – sitting or standing – if I neglect: I cry. “That has always happened to me and it happens more and more.

Another effect of the confinement is that handling on the Internet became almost mandatory. Have you felt discriminated against for that?

Not discriminated, but yes with fright, because I am totally left out. Put yourself on, to get money from the Rut Account I have to go to the bank in person, I don’t know how to do it on the computer. And if I shit physically, that I’m going to shit more and more, I just won’t have a way to do it. I think about it every time I feel bad and I think I won’t be able to move. Also, since I live off the money left by the books, they ask me to send a ballot through the computer, but I don’t know how to do it either, I depend on someone to come and help me. And as you say, this corona virus thing made it much more evident, I feel more than ever a little hurt by that distance. I recently had to buy a new computer and I can no longer use the pendrive. In the old machine it was super simple, but in the new one you press a button and rectangles with three options start to appear, and I shit there. I had the cave that, when it was the social outbreak, I thought they were going to shit the banks and I went to take out a wad of orange bills of 20 lucas. I spend very little, with that I have been able to survive now. If not, I would have to be eating roots, because with this pandemic I don’t dare to take buses or take Uber or get on any damn roe next to anyone.

And how do you manage to buy food?

There is a greengrocer in the corner that is the discount, because you ask them by phone. And suddenly I hit a mask with a mask at a supermarket back there. There I buy still mineral water, matches, water biscuits and a bottle of wine that lasts for a month and a half. That is not drama, I have always lived like this. The only bad thing is that I can’t walk much and for me walking is like praying, a great thing. All my life I have walked an hour or two hours a day and that has kept me well. But, before the virus, I have been physically tired, I don’t understand why. I have had tests, I saw the thyroid, everything, but it is not a normal fatigue. It is not the rich tiredness of the rogue who did his job: you go out, you walk your sheep on the hill, you arrive tired at night, you kiss and hug your wife and you sleep like a log. This is something else, it’s weird. But look, yesterday I was a little better and today too, because I spoke to a doctor and he calmed me down a lot about what was happening to my breathing and the temperature.

Other than your head, do you have any real illnesses that are dangerous if caught by the virus?

No, I am super healthy. But in a head that doesn’t stop, reason works the other way around. They always tell you: planes don’t crash. But if they fall, some fall! And the Kino nobody takes it off, but someone takes it off. That’s the problem. I have read his rest, but the wisest and most definitive thing I have heard is not from a philosopher, it is from Tribilín: You never know, you never know. If a Martian came down to Earth, opened a saucer and said “hey, what’s going on here?”, I would throw that pure phrase at him: You never know. That is the diamond of my thought. I mean, I read Spinoza and I believe him, I read Heidegger and I swallow him, I love Schopenhauer, but they all tell you different things. So who is the only one who is right? Tribillin: you never know, you really are screwed. And if you have that conscience in your blood, you are shit. I do not recommend it for when you are scared.

It can be a relief for a hypochondriac to be exposed to a particular danger. I know of some who, when worrying about the coronavirus, stopped imagining other problems, because it is always one at a time.

Ah, without a doubt, that for me is mathematical: I have the fox in my chest, they reassure me with the electrocardiograms, a few days pass and suddenly I feel a burning in the urethra. It is as if the head said: “It no longer works there, I can no longer fuck this ball there, I go there.”

Then it was the stomach. I started to lose weight and I said “cancer to the wadding”. Luckily I met a very cold doctor, I had a scanner and logically I had nothing. If I were Bill Gates, I would have a gastroenterologist in the back, a cardiologist in the front, an otolaryngologist on the right, and a pichulologist on the left. Any roe comes to mind, I press a button and the rogue comes immediately and scans me. That would reassure me. But I am the antithesis of that, living in a cabin where I haven’t cleaned for two years. This disorder is a great enemy, it is a horrible defect of mine and, frankly, it is already a hygiene problem. There is all the dust on the floor, the bus tickets, the purchase tickets, in the chair I am looking at there is a hill of a meter and a half of clothes: vests, underpants, winter coats … I know it is funny, but it’s bad. Luckily I have humor, which has helped me a lot. Shall I tell you a short story about humor? Or can you?

No, go ahead.

It is one of these typical Chinese or Japanese stories that are so wise. It snows, it snows hard, hard, on the stiff branch of a pine. You know that the pines are very hard. And it snows so much on that branch that it breaks it, due to the weight. But that same snow falls on a willow, and the willow branch bends, bends, and bends. And when it stops snowing, because it can’t snow forever, the sun rises, the snow melts and the willow branch lives again, to life forever. That is humor for me. It has saved my life and many people. I think that without humor we would not have lasted here for ten minutes.

Frugality, living with little, eating the right thing, has also been an important guide in your life.

Absolutely, for me frugality is a great word. If I were the Minister of Health and could give lectures, I would say “that is the way of life”. But that is also taking me away from the world, because I see that everyone is spending their time and their head searching for the exact opposite. What do they talk about all day? Of food, shops and garbage that collect on the phone. Also, everyone wants to have a project, and I find the projects to be an egg with legs, an absolute mistake. There is an ancient Chinese poem, anonymous, that says: “I sweep the patio and draw water from the well. What a miracle”. For me that is the potato. Being prime minister is a blunder. George Steiner, in a very beautiful book called Ten possible reasons for the sadness of thought, concludes that today we are further from the truth than the pre-Socratic ones were, thousands of years ago, when there was no radio and the philosophers were shitting behind the bushes. If you look at the beings that live around you, could you tell me that this digital world is making them wiser and happier? Another thing Steiner says is that there is finally only one way, and I know this with all my heart: the way of tears. I am very crybaby. There is a little poem of mine that says: “Wherever I am – sitting or standing – if I neglect: I cry.” That has always happened to me and it happens to me more and more. Old men seem to be crying.

THE ONLY GOD

If you had the guarantee that the coronavirus would not kill you, would you still panic to go through the disease?

No, but I do want to know about the discomfort, the amount of pain. Because that is for me the only God and the only horror that exists: pain. When you talk about real pain, everything else, even death, is pure leaps and bounds. If death does not exist, what exists is the waiting for death. But the amount of pain and injustice that exists on earth is absolutely unacceptable, far greater than the amount of well-being and no pain. And my problem is that I have an exacerbated, absolute, intolerable empathy against the pain of other beings. When I see those children who have cystic fibrosis, like that little girl who sent President Bachelet a letter to be let to die, I can’t stand it. That is why he could never have had children. Humboldt, the scientist, said that to beget is to throw those poor creatures into the possibility of being random victims of horrible things. That’s him feeling that I have. In the five years of heavy therapy I had with my doctor, my wall was that I came to pain and held my head against it, I couldn’t go any further. And when I am very prone to crying, I see people suffering or I just imagine beings and I start to run, to flee, because I want to stay alive and I do not have an armor against that.

And with that omnipresence of pain, why do you still like living more than not living?

Look, Cioran is the typical rogue who doesn’t even love his grandmother and has entire books recommending suicide, but he also laughs a lot and wrote letters that saved many people’s lives. And he says a very true question: you have to think about what it costs to give up any vice, and life is the worst vice of all. There are loads of heroin addicts who would cut their arms for giving up heroin, but they can’t. With life the same thing happens, it is a vice too strong, that’s why it costs so much to leave it. And another reason to continue living is knowing that there are people who love me, although I am also afraid that one damn Alzheimer’s will appear one day and become a burden to someone. What bothers me most about my illness is that I don’t want to disturb anyone. My greatest terror is not to die, it is to be a vegetable and to be plugged in. Burroughs, in the Yonki, it has a phrase that I am going to use as an epigraph for a book that I have not finished: “A man can die simply because he cannot resist the idea of ​​remaining inside his body.” That’s what I feel when I’m sick. And it’s not that I want to kill myself, but one of my biggest fears – I confess it here, I shouldn’t say it – is that, if necessary, I don’t know how to kill myself.

You have written more than one column in favor of euthanasia.

I find that a country without euthanasia is a country of troglodytes. You should have that right even if you don’t have a terminal illness. If I go out into the garden, I look to the side and I don’t like which side the neighbor split, I go into the house and kill myself, my problem. It’s my life, I don’t owe it to anyone.

“My north is to befriend death,” you said five years ago. Do you think that this friendship happens by thinking about it or by stopping it?

Come to think of it. There is a saying that says: “He who flees death pursues it.” That’s true. And the stupidity and ignorance of this age are largely due to the fact that human beings do not want to realize what they are. When you are born, when you come out from between your mother’s sweet thighs, you know nothing about anything, except one thing: that you are going to die. And today the rogues live on the run from it. Look West, the only answer we have for death is noise and light. When the power goes out the fox is left, after three hours they are already walking on the roof. No, the worst thing you can do in the face of death is to start. Because even if you are Mick Jagger and you have all the mines and all the cars you want, you cannot be an idiot all the time, it is impossible. After a few years you are bored having all the mines and you want to throw yourself at the sheep, and then you start eating poop, because you don’t want to realize that you are going to die, that Heidegger is right: you are a being for death. Maybe it sucks, but I’m sorry, existing is that.

When I transcribe what you are saying, it will sound much more terrible than it sounds to hear you.

Yes, there are people who imagine that I am an ogre, an asshole who, if you ring the bell, will send you to hell, because my vision of the universe is simply horrible. But I am a jovial, affable person. I was not a surly child, I loved to dance, I spent my time playing pichangas on the street, I walked with friends breaking vials, stealing cakes, it was totally normal. But obviously my heart and my brain are – and that this does not sound so grandiose – in the absolutely unfathomable and monstrous enigma of having consciousness and having appeared here, and in the absolute certainty that I will end up saying the words of Tribilín: You never know. That said, he would never say a single word to a human being to stop believing in what relieves him, even if his shoelaces are. For me you believe in all the virgins and saints and fish heads that relieve your pain, which is the only roe there is and it is intolerable.

“I find that a country without euthanasia is a country of troglodytes. You should have that right even if you do not have a terminal illness,” says the poet.

Does someone who believes in pain so much stop being a skeptic?

The most bastard mystics can get to that, but I’m a thousand steps down, I got to Tribilín. Simone Weil, a Franco-Jewish mystic who says incredible things, lists all the horrors on earth, physical and psychic, and says “that’s the love of God.” And you think “this huevona is crazy”, but you also have Catherine of Genoa, who says: “If a drop of what I feel at this moment, a single drop, fell into hell, I would immediately transform it into paradise” . When you read something of that size, you have to understand that they are not fooling around there. The problem is you cannot assimilate it, because you have no idea. So I find that the only possible entrance to God is negative theology.

As well?

The Dionysus Areopagite, for example, to make you feel what God is, makes a list of everything that God is not: God is not pretty, ugly, or big, neither tall, nor stinking, nor good person, nor conchesumadre, he is not a genius, he is not a murderer … so you go there. And there is a Lutheran theologian, Tersteegen, who says “God is the absolutely unintelligible.” The same thing that Lao Tsé says in the Tao: the true Tao cannot be named. That is a visceral knowledge that I have of reality: we do not have the apparatus to catch what it is really about. In fact, if I had two electron microscopes instead of eyes, all I would see is a buzz of yellows, pinks, and celestial. I mean, we really only know what’s going on in our heads. That is where the famous phrase by Macbeth comes from: life is a story told by an idiot, full of noise and fury, which makes no sense. But it is one thing to understand this intellectually, like a teacher who tells his students and then has a quiet lunch with his wife, and another thing to know it with all his soul. When you know or intuit these things with all your soul, your life is different and you have to defend yourself.

And how do you defend yourself, at least to get through the day?

Well, there is always music and reading. And to cross the day? Well, I get up, today I made some bread with avocado, which helps; I go out, luckily there was sun, I breathe, I read a little if I can, I put a chair in the door of my cabin and I just sit down and look at the garden. My garden is a piece of sand, some pitósporos in the fence and a pile of grass to my left that grows because it is above my septic tank.

I am glad that this brings grass out of the ground instead of going to dirty the sea. And when nothing hurts and I can breathe well, I sit there for hours, looking ahead and feeling, I would say, fine. That is enough for me, because my well-being is to get away from pain and because I am lucky that what I like most in the world is doing absolutely nothing. When you can do nothing and feel good, that is paradise here on earth. Nāgārjuna, the greatest of the Buddhist philosophers, says: “Nirvana is Samsara and Samsara is Nirvana.” Nirvana is the best for them – not Heaven, because I do not want Christian shadows involved in this – and Samsara is this conversation, they are my shoes, it is the immediate present. And I believe in that: if I go in the Viña bus, looking at a dog through the window, watching a lady go by, that’s Nirvana, the most that can happen to me here.

Despite all the above, you have just published the book Violet (Overalls Editions), much closer to love charm than to any intolerable suffering.

Ah, that book is a strange mixture of readings that I’m not going to tell you what they are. But they are texts from old, idiosyncratic magazines, from a popular funky half cultural stratum. I really like the poem that came from there, I find it beautiful. It is a love poem as fun, but it is about love, love with three Rs. Here I have it. I am going to read you three things: “Love is not a commodity that is offered to the first one that is presented.” “A heart loves, when it loves”. “How is it possible to promise the heart?” And the whole book is like this. And also in Overalls, this year there will be another book called Look at him, which is very curious but I will not tell you what it is about.

In addition, in Editions UDP they will reissue your two newspaper books (Quick before crying and Who we kill now) and they are preparing your Poetry gathered, a big book.

That makes me super good, because I have made pure imperfect books, with dented, poorly made poems, and for that volume of Poetry gathered –That will have all my books– I had the pleasure of taking out a lot of poems that I should never have published. Finally there will be a book with which I will be more or less happy. In addition, it will be in the Ibero-American poetry collection, where Gabriela Mistral, Enrique Lihn and César Vallejo are, the poet, perhaps, who I love the most. His poem “Voy a habla de esperanza” is the most profound, trustworthy and moving I have ever read.

And the poems you left out, did they seem good to you before or didn’t you dare throw them away?

He doubted, did not know what to do with them. And since I’m so irresolute, now I think that maybe I deleted my Hamlet without realizing it. Maybe I said, “What is this egg of to be or not to be? I’m pure reading, I erase it ”. But I will never know that, because I doubt and doubt. I am not a Buddhist, I am a dudist. To be frank, this morning I was about to tell you that I was not going to give the interview, because I slept like roe, at night I woke up three times in a homelessness more or less. But I’m glad I didn’t care, because my tongue hasn’t stopped and the only thing I’ve talked about is what I thought I wasn’t going to talk about: what I really feel, how I am. That for me, in the end, the only egg is being able to breathe, that nothing hurts, eat frugally, that there is light and that others do not have such a bad time. I am like that, I can’t help it, I have a very scrubbed vision of reality. And if I feel that of existence, I have to pick myself up, take refuge in Simone Weil, in Charlie Parker, in Parmenides, there are like spiritual lines in history that you follow. That’s what touched me and that’s what I hold on with teeth and nails. I am not a Teresa of Calcutta, because she has God behind me, but I embrace an asshole and I am an anchor, we both sank. That is my situation. I was born, I don’t want to die, it seems that I am in good health, I am scared to death, what do you want me to say?



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