¡No te mueras nunca! / Don't you ever die!
¡No te mueras nunca!
En “La muerte y la
muerte de Quincas Berro de Água”, Jorge Amado nos refiere a un borrachín cuyo
corazón no aguantó los excesos de un carnaval más. Sus amigos de la noche
decidieron no aceptarle semejante descortesía y siguieron llevándolo de aquí
para allá como cuando estaba vivo. Es que para ellos estaba vivo. Hasta le
daban de beber a cada rato para que nada cambiara (su apodo Berro –grito-
de Água provenía de que una vez se dispuso a tomar de un vaso
creyendo que contenía cachaça y, horrorizado, gritó ¡es agua!).
He visto hoy en la CNN que Su Santidad Shri Ashutosh Maharaj, fundador de la orden Divya Jyoti Jagrati Sansthan, partió de este mundo a
causa de un paro cardíaco hace cuatro meses en la ciudad india de Jalandhar. Eso dicen los médicos, que
lo consideran muerto. Sin embargo, sus apóstoles sostienen que en
realidad don Shri está meditando con un grado tal de elevación
espiritual que las personas ignorantes confunden con la muerte. Afirman que
el líder volverá al estado de conciencia tan pronto como lo considere necesario
para el bien de la humanidad, y que el fenómeno no tiene nada de
sorprendente, porque antes varias veces el hombre decidió colocarse
en ese estado de gracia, para el que se había entrenado en las alturas del
Himalaya a temperaturas bajo cero. Por eso lo metieron en un congelador de uso
comercial, para no interrumpirlo en su decisión de meditar al fresco hasta
nuevo aviso.
Los que no están del todo de
acuerdo con esa corriente de pensamiento son la mujer y el hijo del gurú que,
hartos de ver adentro del refrigerador al, para ellos, finado, han decidido
pedir a la justicia india que diga si ellos pueden considerarse de
una buena vez viuda y huérfano, respectivamente.
A pesar de la similitud, la
historia del indio presenta una diferencia sutil pero significativa
respecto de la del bahiano. Los compinches de Quincas sólo querían seguir
disfrutando de su compañía y homenajear a la amistad, que entendían
imperecedera, inmune a todo, mágica al extremo de considerarla capaz de vencer
al hecho más inevitable. De su lado, es comprensible que la
familia Ashutosh (o Maharaj, vaya uno a saber cuál es el apellido de esta gente)
quiera dar al difunto las honras fúnebres que éste se merece, pero
acaso también le preocupe el destino de los ciento cuarenta millones de dólares
que el santurrón acumuló durante el ejercicio de su elevada misión en esta
tierra (también en la India se necesita un muerto para heredar, algo para nada
incompatible con las reencarnaciones que suceden por allá). Un portento de
productividad en alguien que sólo estaba, o está, despabilado part-time.
La vida imita al arte.
Pero es una pena que nunca lo imite del todo.
Don’t you ever die!
In “The Two Deaths of
Quincas Berro de Água”, Jorge Amado tells us about a little boozer
whose heart did not withstand the blow of another excessive carnival. His
night-time party friends from the slum decided not to accept such a discourtesy
and kept on taking him bar-hopping just as when he was alive. The thing is that
for them, he was alive. They even gave him something to drink from time
to time so that nothing would change (he had gotten his nickname, Quincas Berro
de Água -water-yell), one day when he took a swig from a glass thinking it
was cachaça and, horrified, yelled: It’s water!)
I
saw on CNN that His Holiness Shri Ashutosh Maharaj, founder of the Divya Jyoti
Jagrati Sansthan order, left this world due to a cardiac arrest four months ago
in the Indian city of Jalandhar. That’s
what the doctors say, for they consider him to be dead. However, his apostles
contend that Mr. Shri is meditating in such a degree of spiritual elevation
that ignorant folks confound that with death. They claim that their leader will
come back to a state of consciousness as soon as he deems it necessary for the
good of mankind, and that there is nothing astonishing about this phenomenon,
given that many times in the past, the man had decided to place himself in such
state of grace, for which he had duly trained in freezing temperatures in the
heights of the Himalaya. That is why they put him in an off-the-shelf freezer,
so that he wouldn’t be interrupted in his decision to meditate al fresco
until further notice.
However, the guru’s wife and son do not seem
to fully agree with that school of thought. Being sick and tired of seeing the
-in their view- decedent in the freezer, they decided to request an opinion
from an Indian court of Justice so that it rules once and for all whether they
can consider themselves widow and orphan, respectively.
In spite of the similarity, the story of
the Indian guru features a subtle but significant difference with that of the
Bahian drunkard. Quincas’ buddies only wanted to continue enjoying his company
and pay tribute to their friendship, a friendship that, from their point of
view, was everlasting, immune to everything, and magical to the point of
considering it capable of overcoming the inevitable.
For
their part, it is understandable that the Ashutosh family (or Maharaj, who
knows which the real last name of these people is) wishes to grant the deceased
the funeral honors he deserves, but they might as well be concerned about the
fate of the one hundred and forty million dollars that the sanctimonious
preacher amassed while fulfilling of his lofty mission on this earth (it so
happens that also in India, in order to inherit, you need a corpse, something
that is nowhere near incompatible with the reincarnations that take place over
there). A miracle of productivity for someone who was (or is) awake only part-time.
Life imitates art. Although it is a shame
that it never does so thoroughly.
Translated from the book “Lo que nadie se llevó” (2019) by the great Mariana Rimoldi-Sevellec (Lyon, France). Mariana improves
what she touches, as Borges’ Pierre Menard, “author” of Don Quixote.
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