Severe brain trauma. Glasgow Scale: 3. Diffuse axiomal injury. Coma on the verge of brain death: if you come out, according to medical literature, there is a 10% chance of regaining consciousness. The diagnosis of the Argentine lawyer Conrado Tenaglia It was much more than serious. It happened on August 27, 2019. He was skiing in Bariloche, lost control, fell into a tailspin, rolling “like in cartoons” and, after losing his helmet, hit his head against a large rock. His instructor, who had been an Olympic skier, held him when he fell into a stream and there they remained, praying “that the snow and branches would not give way under their weight until the rescue patrol arrived.” His wife tells all this, Juana Libediskyin Downhilla book that The Equilateral Beast has just published, where it narrates everything that came after: the long hospitalization, the drowned desperation, the uncertainty, the juggling act to not give up.
When they settled in New York, the arrangement had been this: return to Bariloche every August to ski. It was a way of not losing contact with his roots, with Argentina. It was a normal day, within a particular month, of a year like any other, when the flow of time became rarer. Suddenly life generated a parenthesis. She, next to her husband, in the clinic, every day, talking and talking without knowing if he was really listening. Her children knew from the beginning: “The situation was horrible, but there were no secrets.” Against all odds, Conrado recovered little by little: first he moved his eyes under his eyelids, then he opened them, then he moved his hand, raising and lowering his thumb, and little by little he stopped being a mystery. Downhill It is a diary of that process, but also of all the readings that Juana accumulated to understand what was happening and, furthermore, how to escape.
In New York, where he lives, Juana Libedinsky write for The nation and the Uruguayan newspaper The country. He was a New York Observer Fellow at New York University, a Wolfson Press Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and a member of the International Council of Montreal’s Blue Metropolis Literary Festival. He wrote for Vanity Fair from Spain, Vogue from France, Condé Nast Traveler from Spain and GQ from Mexico. She is also a professor in the Master’s Degree in Cultural Journalism at the San Pablo CEU University in Madrid. Her first book was titled English breakfast: British thought todayand was published in 2006. Eighteen years later came the second, Downhillto which Jorge Fernandez Diaz defined as “a chronicle of emotions and readings without the clichés of victimization or sentimentality,” and Jorge Asis as “moving pages that are a literary achievement.” From London, between train trips and tennis matches, he talks to Infobae Culture.
—When did you realize that this story could be a book? What was the writing process like?
—It was when I saw a documentary about the life of Nora Ephron. Ephron was the screenwriter of When Harry met Sally and a ton of great books, most recently about the indignities of growing older. Her husband Carl Bernsteinone of the journalists famous for the Watergate case, left her for another woman when she was seven months pregnant, and she transformed the first episode into a book, Heartburn, and then in a very successful film. His son made a documentary about his life called Everything Is Copy, and when they showed it on TV it was something like a call. “Copy” in this context is not a copy, but a term from the American press that indicates that material is suitable for a story. In that sense, Ephron moved with the maxim that everything that happened to her, no matter how hard or humiliating, could be the basis for articles or fiction. She maintained that when you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But the moment you tell people that you slipped, you are the one who laughs with them. In some way you stop being the victim of the situation, and something always so seductive if you work with the printed word, you become in control of the narrative. A friend of mine, Pamela Druckermanwho writes for The New York Times from Paris and has best sellers, it also encouraged me. She told me that what had happened was horrible, but that if you work as a narrator, you don’t often have a story like that in your hands to tell. So I got to work.
—What was it like to build scenes and characters: did you stick strictly to the facts or did you allow yourself certain fictional licenses?
—On the contrary, I had plenty of stories that, when I told them to my friends, I saw that they became very hooked. I made a selection and when something was an unrelated story, I changed information, unless I mentioned public figures and the information had already appeared in the media.
—It is inevitable to wonder if the reading experience would have been as intense if the story were completely fictional. What do you think about the power of reality in literature?
—I suppose that in this case the fact that we are people who exist can give us some extra attraction. That can show that human beings are so resilient, that flesh and blood friends are so important, that Argentine medicine is so phenomenal. All this concretely today and now and despite everything that happens. However, I do not believe at all that the power of reality is greater than that of fiction in literature.. Emerson, of whom I am a fan, said that “fiction reveals the truth that reality obscures,” and there are countless stories and novels that illuminate more on a given topic than any number of treatises, essays, and doctoral theses ever could. achieve. That said, something surprising and exciting is happening to me. Now that the book has come out, people write to me who went through something very serious, or accompanied someone, and tell me things like that the book made them feel accompanied, that they realized new things that were useful to them, that it did them good. It is a huge and unexpected responsibility, but of course, an honor.
—At one point you talk about the desire to have a normal life. How do you think about that normality today?
—Having a family that is basically healthy right now, friends and work is not something I take for granted. And although I experienced in an extreme way what it is like to be on the other side in terms of health, I don’t think I would have been very different before my husband’s accident. I say in the book that we did not radically change our lives, we did not become more religious or more spiritual, we did not emerge particularly improved versions of who we were, it would not occur to us to give lessons to others on how to cope with something complicated. This goes so against the cliché of what one sees in the movies and the stories about what happens after these types of very serious episodes, that many times we seemed to disappoint when we confessed it. But, returning to comments from readers that I didn’t expect, many told me that after going through some very complicated crisis, they didn’t come out much more enlightened either. The funny thing was that they told it to me as almost a confession, because what is expected is so different. Recovering daily life, however, is often the great privilege.
—You play tennis, you watch tennis, you read tennis, what place did it have during your husband’s recovery and what place does this sport have in your life today?
—There is a book that marked me a lot. Is called The Tennis Partnerand although almost everything by its author, Abraham Verghese, was translated into Spanish because it is a mega best seller, this one for some reason is not. It is a novel, clearly autobiographical, about two doctors going through personal dramas: a heartbreaking divorce in one case, drug addiction in the other. Their lives, like mine then, took place inside the hospital, and the only thing the characters went out for, the only thing they found strength for, was to play tennis. Although their worlds were collapsing, they dedicated themselves to white sports with total seriousness and a competitive spirit. Towards the end of the novel, Verghese explains what tennis gave them, and I found a little of what it gave me then. My fanaticism during my husband’s hospitalization was such that the beloved intensive care nurses lovingly pointed out to me how I always arrived at the hospital with brick dust on my sneakers, and they called me “the queen of the suburbs” because I visited all the soccer fields. the capital and Greater Buenos Aires looking for matches. “In the way we managed to control the movement of a yellow ball in space, we were imposing order in a world that was whimsical and volatile,” says Verghese. Every time we played, this feeling of slowly restoring order, of beginning to dominate uncertainty, remained with us for a couple of days; then it would disappear, and the need to play again would become desperate.” That was me. Tennis gave some order to my world of chaos, and that’s why I needed it. At that time, sport had a very specific use, but it was always something that I really liked. I have lived in New York for decades, and for the first time I was selected to travel with a team of veterans to play a fairly intense interclub against an English team, and on top of that after our own matches they are going to take us to Wimbledon. I’m traveling to London right after presenting my book. I don’t know which of the two projects is killing me more with excitement and anxiety.
—In the book, reading is your oasis. What place do you think literature occupies in society today and what place would you like it to occupy?
—It is my greatest pleasure and I am totally omnivorous. In my family, when I was little, they made fun of me saying that I read in detail the back of the electricity bill, the medicine brochures, the classifieds, whatever was in front of me. I started very, very young and at home no one ever messed with what I did, on top of that (I think), because I was very good. I remember perfectly the summer that I took a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover from my parents’ room. I don’t remember my age, but even I realized that it didn’t seem appropriate for me – I devoured it anyway, obviously. To my surprise, throughout the most traumatic episodes of my life, I continued reading, everything, with the same voracity. I don’t know how I did it, but I wasn’t that original either. There is a lot written about, precisely, how in times of crisis one looks for everything from guidance to escapism, or something that you don’t know exactly what it is, in literature. I wanted to reflect this in my book by sharing my readings throughout the process, thinking that perhaps it would awaken the reader’s interest in other authors, in other topics, in other lives. I like to think that mine is a story that, in addition to what I hope is its own appeal, can be a small window of access to what others, larger ones, wrote. Beyond this, I do not feel qualified to comment on the specific effects of literature on anyone else. One thinks it should make people, at the very least, more empathetic. But, incredibly, the world has always been full of very bad, super-educated people. Let’s just hope the others triumph.
* On Monday, June 24 at 7 p.m. Juana Libedinsky presents “Cuesta Abajo” at the Malba Auditorium (Av. Pres. Figueroa Alcorta 3415, CABA)
