Reading Notes on "La salud de los enfermos" ("The Health of the Sick")
this isn't exactly reading notes, but rather Chapter 87 of my book ms. Living Invention, or, The Way of Julio Cortazar. But it does offer my reading of "La salud de los enfermos" ("The Health of the Sick")
87. Inventing "The Health of the Sick"
There shouldn't be anything strange about Rosa breaking into tears as she opens a letter from her brother Alejandro. After all, their mother has just died and Rosa's thinking of how she'll break the news to her brother. But there is something strange because Alejandro himself has been dead for more than a year. Strange, but not fantastic. Alejandro died in an accident. However, his siblings, concerned about their mother's already fragile health, conspire to conceal the death from her. They contrive an imaginary trip to Brazil for Alejandro, and from there an imaginary job opportunity. The whole time, they have a family friend write letters from Recife, Brazil, as if he were Alejandro. It is one of these letters that Rosa has opened when the story ends. The letter Rosa has opened is a lie. But it is a lie - an invention - which sets off the same effects as if it were the truth, as if Alejandro were alive and had written the letter. Moreover, like all invention in Julio's universe, it is contagious [ Ù 8, 67]. Perhaps the invention was conceived to make Alejandro alive and real for their mother, but by the end of the story we see that to the siblings as well, for all practical purposes, the ruse has become reality.
We never know for sure whether Mamá really believes these lies or not. Many times she asks questions or makes requests that force the family to push the lie to ever more elaborate extremes, to provide ever greater detail and evidence that Alejandro is alive. But she never explicitly questions the story they are telling her. Rather it is as though, with her testing inquiries, she conspires secretly with her children to refine the invention, to make it more effective and infectious. Is this "The Health of the Sick" of the story's title? Does the health of the sick lie in the capacity to reshape one's reality through invention? The boy in "Los venenos" can run as if he were flying through his invention. Julio can write as if he weren't exiled through his invention [ Ù 58]. If we think of sickness as any kind of deficiency in power relative to some limit (the mad, the young, the very old, the exile, the artist, the poor), then perhaps the health of the sick lies in refusing both the given limitations of their circumstances and paralyzing transcendental fantasies, and instead elaborating inventions that effectively dissolve those limitations. If we think of sickness this way, who among us is not at least a little sick, at least sometimes [ Ù 32]? Who among us does not sometimes need the elixir of invention?
Julio Cortázar, "The Health of the Sick," All Fires the Fire , Trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (New York: Pantheon, 1973), pp. 30-48. In Spanish: "La salud de los enfermos," Todos los fuegos el fuego [1966] Cuentos Completos/1 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994), pp. 524-536.
