sopros e assombros

Dementia processes, like fragments and scribbles of a lifetime, unfold between blows and amazements, laughter and crying, delusions and affections, learning and losses. They are tales of horror, drama, thriller, comedy, romance, adventure. Some sci-fi scenes. In the fluctuations of the disease, there is advice: “You have to do what the heart wants”, there are mysteries: “Nature is vodka”; “The river is big-headed” - there are findings: “I'm blank”; “I’ve swallowed a piece of the sentence”; and there are wisdoms: “Brazil does not take care of the poor”; "We are not this nor that, we are a lot of things". If it is in the darkness of the night that the fireflies shine, how do we see flashes and apparitions in the middle of the blur, in the middle of the fog that is Alzheimer's disease?

For these people forget, remember, imagine, write, sing, cry, laugh, embroider, refuse, wish. They invent a life, despite everything - or precisely for that reason. To see them, to hear them, to speak of them is to turn the blur into a drawing, it is to realize that the dissolution of a world can be the creation of other ways of being and living. It is to perceive that language, memory, the person her/himself does not simply disappear, but is transformed, reinvented, overflowed into other dimensions. If a word doesn't come out, the finger points at something, the eye shines, the gesture describes: a hand that holds a blanket, a hand on the waist, a hand on the head, a hand that covers the eyes. As in a treasure hunt, you need to collect the clues, the traces, the remains: the dripping water after a bath, the coffee grounds in a cup, a saved photo, a joke, a walk, a dance, a song, one smile. The face remains with its marks and distortions.

If it is possible to see fireflies amidst fog and darkness, the faces in front of the mirror show us that it is also important to see the blurs - the blurry view, a lost look, a speech that does not come out, a not moving body, the bathroom that is not found, the portrait and the mirror that reveal ghosts, the coffee, the bath, the food that one can no longer make. To see the fireflies and the blurs, in the midst of the losses, is to see the glimpses that show the constellation of an experience, of a narrative, of a memory, even if it is in a disease that erases them, in which the threads are gradually loosened.

Ultimately, it is not a question of denying the terror of the disease, but of seeing it beyond that horizon. It is to see that, in the middle of confusion, João uses humor and makes up words when they seem to have been lost, Maria sings with such joy and ease, Eunice lovingly meets with her mother.

They do forget, but they imagine. They get confused, delirious, but they also create. If we are willing, they teach us to see differently, to move words and things around, to invent with life. The tractor moves like a house. The monkey in the soap opera will invade the room. We will learn, at the end, that not everything needs to make sense, not everything can be explained, and in this incomprehension we can simply let ourselves be, adrift. If it is not possible to reach through words, let us reach through other means: a silence, a touch, a noise, a look. Perhaps the non-word, the non-reason, the non-sense, although painful, might, at last, liberate us.

We can learn to see that it is about another world, a world in reverse, with other coordinates, another reality, where anything is possible. Why, instead of bringing them into our world, which has become alien to them, showing them how wrong, confused, forgotten and repetitive they are, we ourselves do not try to enter their world? There, we will see the rules are different: the slipper changes the TV channel, the food in the refrigerator can attack, the shiny cookie packaging is a butterfly, the detergent is the cooking oil. If you cannot deny the tragic aspect of the situation, it is also possible to see poetry when we open our eyes to see further, to see beyond.