Medical Autobiography. Damián Tabarovsky
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of resistance (there are many other examples of this type of mechanism, but they’re beside the point). Suddenly, a thought: “Nobody has to know about my disease.” What disease? Dichromacy, of course. But what was dichromacy? A disease? An injury? A defect? All three at once? A disease that’s also a defect? An injury that’s also a disease? A defective injury? It didn’t matter much to him, the important thing was that nobody find out what was going on. He had to keep it secret. He remembered an old joke from childhood: “Where do you hide an elephant on Florida Street? In a crowd of a hundred other elephants.” Something similar happened with dichromacy and other forms—severe or mild—of colorblindness: it’s estimated that eight out of a hundred men, and fewer than one out of a hundred women, have some difficulty with color vision. He could be one of them, of that multitude, and nobody would notice a problem. But he gave that up quickly: eight percent wasn’t a very high number; in fact, nobody at the consulting firm had dichromacy or any other kind of pathological vision. So he returned to the original plan, to make sure nobody finds out. Especially nobody at the consulting firm. One thing was clear: Dami had plans of making a career in the world of market sociology—in particular at MG—and in an environment as competitive as that, any little problem could get in his way. There were several things at MG that, at the beginning, got his attention. For example, the General Manager (the highest post, besides the Owner) never provided precise information about the dates of his vacations. When they asked him about it, he gave vague responses, rarely consistent, such as “It could be a week or so in February, or I might take a few days in January.” For a while Dami thought it was a strategy, a rather basic one, to control the staff. The General Manager could return at any moment, without notice, by surprise, and with that tactic, have the whole company on permanent alert, in a state of eternal uncertainty (“Does he get back today or tomorrow?”); a simple way of reaffirming his authority (“When I get back from vacation I want everyone here.” “But when’s your vacation?”). With time, Dami realized that things were more complex, or rather: still just as basic, but more complex (that’s how modern life works; making the basic complex and the complex basic, reinscribing the one on the other, until everything becomes complex, that is, basic). Now, Dami understood that the uncertainty surrounding the General Manager’s vacations wasn’t just a subtle way of sowing terror among the employees (though it was that too), it wasn’t just a way of reaffirming his authority; even less so was it a case of absentmindedness, inattentiveness, or artlessness (a General Manager is not an airhead), nor was it a minor omission; Dami fully understood that the uncertainty surrounding the General Manager’s vacations was plainly and simply a piece of information. A key piece of information: at MG and at any other consulting firm, having information is always key. In a company, information is a material as rare and valuable as toilet paper in a public restroom (now in some shopping malls they’re putting changing tables in the men’s restrooms, they’re not as machista as before, they seem to have realized that the mall is full of fathers, divorced or not, that they go shopping with their small children; but this really doesn’t have much to do with toilet paper). Décio Pignatari: “The idea of information is always tied to the idea of selection and choice. Information, here, refers to ‘how much information.’ There can only be information where there is doubt, and doubt implies the existence of alternatives.” In an instant, or less, in a nanoinstant, Dami understood that dichromacy was not a disease, it was just information. That is: for him it was a disease, but for everyone else it was a piece of information, a detail, pure exchange value. “Nobody has to know anything,” he thought. Keeping silent about his disorder would guarantee his continuation at MG. On the other hand, if that information were to leak, it could certainly be used against him. Sooner or later, but definitely against him. Suddenly, Dami remembered a bit of popular wisdom: “A healthy body keeps quiet.” Otherwise, the body speaks, it expresses itself. One must keep in mind that the true measure of health is not the utopian absence of all illness, but the capacity to function effectively in a given environment. In fact, from time to time the organism adapts to variable habitats in such a way that it’s hardly perceptible to the individual. Sudden cold, for example, sets in motion all sorts of internal mechanisms for neutralizing its effects and maintaining the body in constant equilibrium. In order to prevent a drop in body temperature, the entire system undergoes certain changes with the object of avoiding loss of heat through the skin. Nearly all respiration stops. The surface blood vessels contract, diminishing the flow of blood from the internal regions, so that less blood travels to the surface and gets cold. Another reaction, goose bumps, has little practical value today, but it must come from the early days of the species, when the human animal had a covering of thick skin that provided a protective layer of warmer air when standing up in bumps. If all the mechanisms of the organism can’t prevent a drop in temperature, two others kick in: the adrenal glands secrete more adrenaline, and the person shivers; both serve to produce more warmth. “Or you can just put on a jacket and you’re good to go,” thought Dami in a display of pragmatism. The fact is that dichromacy doesn’t speak, it’s silent, it doesn’t emit signals. Vision is mute. Can a person be silently ill? Vision is normally understood to be the dominant sense of the modern era, which is variously described as the height of Cartesian perspectivalism, the era of illustrating the world, and the society of spectacle or of surveillance. What happens when a person loses this dominant sense? The blind develop their other senses, like touch and hearing. “But I’m not blind,” thought Dami in a fit of lucidity. “Just a couple of colors get mixed up, that’s all.” He was right, in a way. But wrong, in another. If vision is associated with control, including control of the senses (“what the eyes don’t see, the heart can’t grieve”), a defect in vision also implied an inability to control, to exercise power, to scale the career ladder at MG. Dami didn’t know it yet, but this sort of treatise came very close—if not too close—to a certain Jewish tradition: the tradition that prefers word over image, listener over icon, silence over vision. That is to say: the importance of the biblical prohibition of graven images (it’s worth noting that one of the justifications for hostility toward the Jews, set out by French anti-Semitic intellectuals like Maurice Bardeche and Robert Brasillach, was precisely the atomizing effect of this taboo that, according to their argument, undermined the beneficial power of cinematic images to create a popular community). This Jewish tradition continues to the present, or to the immediate past, and it is key in authors such as Levinas, Blanchot, Lyotard, and Derrida. To a certain extent, the work of these authors can be understood as a hermeneutic commentary on the famous passage in Exodus 33, where Jehovah says to Moses: “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live” and later, he repeats: “Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.” The most a Jew can hope to see is God’s back, never his face. This is how Blanchot, to return to him, can be understood in works like La folie du jour, where he writes that noon, the time of greatest visibility, is also the time of greatest danger, the moment when looking at the sun causes blindness. All French philosophy revolves around the prohibition of images and the search for a hermeneutics of the listener: a central void that can never be filled, and which can only be approached in the form of endless interpretation, displacement, digression, or a narrative of absence. Edmond Jabès: “We will never count the steps of absence / and yet, we hear them / clearly.” Dami was thinking about all this while driving the Fiat 1, and in the middle of traffic, he thought: “There can be blind Jews, but never deaf ones.” He smiled and his teeth were reflected in the rearview mirror. Obvious jokes, sidesteps, were his thing, he was an expert in changing the subject, tossing the ball out-of-bounds. Total absence of depth. Absence of cavities, too, for another thing. When he saw his teeth reflected in the mirror, he noticed how good they looked. Only one premolar had a filling, the rest were in good shape, excellent shape. The traffic light changes color, the light turns green, yellow, red, every color. The whole rainbow right in front of him. “What a lovely sunset,” he thinks, while the afternoon fills up with storm clouds. The traffic moves along Libertad, he turns onto Viamonte. He parks the car in the underground garage below the Teatro Colón. Over his head, ballet dancers are rehearsing, an opera is about to open, the theater director argues with the unionists: they’re threatening to strike, they’re always threatening to strike; in the waiting room of the director’s office waits a consultant from the Ministry of Culture: he’s concerned because the theater has, in the press and in society, an image of too much autonomy, as if it weren’t integrating the cultural politics of the City Council (“What sense is there in investing