Luiz Schwarcz - The Absent Moon: A Memoir of a Short Childhood and a Long Depression

Linguagem de sinais

Discurso sobre o capim

Em busca do Thesouro da Juventude

Minha vida de goleiro

The lift let us off at the top of the mountain, a spectacular vista, a white universe, beams of sun casting light and shadow over each notch in the alpine range. Everyone who arrives at that spot for the first time pauses for a few moments to take in the view. It is quite something to breathe in the pristine air, surrounded by snow on all sides, beneath our feet, and atop the farthest mountains. In such a vast space, the sensation that one is within reach of the sky makes each breath more intense.

Readying for the descent had always been a simple matter of taking a gulp of air to fill the lungs and letting a feeling of wholeness with the mountain come over me. But at that moment, for no reason I could understand, I felt nothing.

In fact, I could hardly breathe. I bent over to tighten my boots, to conceal from my instructoror myselfthe anxiety that had stopped my breath and frozen my face. I dragged the ritual out only so I could catch my breath, trying to eliminate the knot that caused my throat to seize at the very moment I was expecting the opposite.

The pure air at that altitude and the speed of the descent had always been good antidotes to the depression I carry with me. I do not ski very often, but when I do, surrendering to the mountains demands all day has a therapeutic effect, synonymous with joy and unwinding. High above it all, my only responsibility is to make the most of nature. The mood is the same whether Im among snow-covered peaks or among other mountains I visit in Brazil, where I surrender myself to the chilly waters of rivers and waterfalls, powerless to correct their course, powerless to edit the details of my surroundings, powerless to assume responsibility for anything beyond my immediate control. The mountains demand humility, demand subservience to something that was not created by human hands. In return, they offer rapture.

But now, instead of rapture, I felt a kind of anguish, particularly ironic given the happiness of the occasion: my wife and I were taking our granddaughters, Zizi and Alice, skiing for the first time. After exploring the faster runs in the mornings, I would be spending the afternoons with the girls, enjoying my front-row seat to their snowy adventures, and the late afternoons in merry conversation, games, and planning for dinner. Time with my granddaughters has long been a certain focus for me, in a life in which I have largely retreated from close friendships and limited my social interactions to people within my professional field, friendships circumscribed by the world of books, living much of my life in the company of family, or in silence.

It came as a shock to arrive at the peak that morning with my lungs seizing up and my breath short, an inexplicable dry knot in my throat, the total opposite of what I had spent months imagining.

It was not the mountain alone that demanded my humility. My depression required much more.

Startled by the effort required to fill my lungs with air, I wasnt thinking, at the beginning of this episode, of the day when I felt the first symptoms of depression. Few of us who are carriers of this illness are able to recall the exact moment when we first noticed its signs, surfacing at the moment we identify something between the throat and the lungs, an obstacle that blocks the airway, that makes the act of breathing difficult. In general, depression erases distant recollections; its own memory is short, exacerbating recent suffering, dismissing nearly all traces of history. It was this that I felt there at the top of the slope, and I never wanted to feel it again.

If I make an effort to recall when my condition first appeared, I am able to piece together some sort of narrative. I think back to my shortness of breath at the peak and suddenly I see the sad green eyes of my father, who never set foot there.

Even before the image of my fathers green irises, the memory of my depression takes the form of a sound. The pulse of my depression is the sound of my fathers feet banging against the bedpost in the room next door as he struggled to fall asleep. My dominant mental image of him, his eyes, green irises contrasting with his damp and reddened sclerawhich filled his lower eyelid with water, the tears poolingcame later. First there was the heavy sound that came through the walls, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang... This thudalmost the opposite of those eyeswas insistent and without rhythm. I cannot remember exactly when I heard his agonizing drumming for the first time, but I know this was the moment when my depression first made its presence felt. It was the first time I felt terror run through me, as I suspected that I would be unable to live up to my duties as an only child. It was the occasion when I realized, even at that tender age, that I would be unable to secure my fathers happiness, and yet I was entirely aware that doing so would always be the most important mission of my life. A mission in which I failed utterly.