Pathology

“IT is a good thing that time is a light, because so much of life is mumbling shadows and the future is just silence and darkness.”

It was an odd thing to hold after the recent weeks: a book left for me by a friend who came for a visit and went home again to Peru. I did not expect to come home until my mother fell sick. I did not expect my friend nor his book, which opens with the quoted line.

I realize again how many things happen that we did not expect. Would we use all our powers to avoid something that we know now happened if we had such powers?

For answers, I found myself reading Paul Theroux’s memoir of his friendship with V.S. Naipaul, “Sir Vidia’s Shadow”.

Naipaul is a better writer but I prefer Theroux as a human. Naipaul’s fiction and nonfiction surfaced the alienation of the colonized subject from the native culture. For these “suppressed histories” of colonial displacement, he was awarded the Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Naipaul is difficult to read because while inimitable in the craft, he saw the Global South in terms of the imperialist lens of the “Third World,” a messy soup of maladies and burgeoning catastrophes. On paper and in life, Naipaul was as abusive to women as he was of Third World “victims”.

Theroux is a peripatetic American, writing about ordinary lives in Argentina (“The Old Patagonian Express”) and China (“Riding the Iron Rooster”) without sweeping judgment or fake compassion.

Writers are notoriously quick to give and take offense. So a “literary friendship,” specially when it spans 30 years and five continents, fascinates. As the book blurb goes, “Sir Vidia’s Shadow” is a “double portrait of the writing life” told by Theroux of the “beginning, middle, and end” of that “most fragile of alliances” with Vidia, as Naipaul was called.

Reading the book at my mother’s hospital bedside, I see parallels in the passions moving our lives. Pathology, the study of disease, is rooted in “pathologia,” which for the ancient Greeks meant the “study of passions”.

Achromobacter xylosoxidans. When the infectious disease consultant first pronounced the culprit causing my mother’s infection, I found myself watching her mouth and imagined I was a contestant at a spelling bee. How does one spell a word that one cannot imagine?

I turned to online medical journals but came no closer to understanding this unexpected stranger. And then I opened Theroux’s pathology of friendship: “… you hardly know the oddness of life until you have lived a little. Then you get it. You are older, looking back…

“I see it all clearly. I remember everything.” The path of disease is the path of our passions anger fear regret love.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 29, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”