Sweating, motionless, I began to develop images of myself out of the cabin; I imagined that the elevator would start working at that precise moment and my waist would be trapped in a casual guillotine, breaking my body in two. I was paralyzed.
Since my father has a farm in Piura, I grew up watching the chickens running a few seconds without their heads, and the frogs in the pan moving their legs to the rhythm of a crackling foxtrot. I knew that dying would actually happen after being damaged by the wound that kills you. I knew that there were always some seconds where the system fails (being a frog, a chicken, or a human), in which blood keeps flowing and lets you act one final time.
And thanks to that I had the lucidity of the condemned: I thought that when the elevator would cut me in half, I would be a half-man capable of understanding the universe. And I thought I’d have time to make one last joke before bleeding to death. “My foot is itchy, can you go to the ground and scratch it for me?” I'd say to the doorman. Or anything that would make clear that Cristobal died, yes, but never stopped being a comedian.
That decision, of dying faking a final sense of joy, was what won the war with my paralysis. Greater was my desire of being legendary than my fear of being crushed by an elevator.
And I crawled out. And nothing happened. I left the cabin and didn’t tell anyone, until today, what pushed me to crawl out. Since then, I started to think carefully on my last words. And so my second phobia was born: to die saying nothing.
I always had great respect to the men who prepared, with dedication, their final sentence. I pity those who encounter death by surprise, and even having those thoughtful words can’t say them because of time.
Martin Luther King, responding to a friend who recommended him to use a jacket, said: “Okay, I’ll put something on”, and was shot dead with that idiocy in his mouth. Or the poor Einstein, who perhaps said something wonderful, sublime, revealing, but was unaware that the nurse who was taking care of him didn’t know how to speak German.
Those who leave us resigned words give me a bit of disgust. Being able to say something powerful and victorious, they stay in the selfishness of their sadness. Like Bolivar, with his plaintive "I have plowed the sea" or Gorki, who left us with a ridiculous "There will be wars, get ready." Or even Winston Churchill, always so pessimistic, with his "Everything bores me."
Jose Hernandez and Camilo Jose Cela died calling the name of their towns (“Buenos Aires… Buenos Aires…", whispered the Argentinian; “Long live Iria Flavia!” harangued the Galician). Da Vinci, knowing that he was the most important man of his time, left with an unusual gesture of fake modesty: “I have offended God and humanity because my work didn’t have the quality that it should’ve had”. In the other hand, Galileo, headstrong and stubborn, repeated his everlasting theory: “No matter what they say, Earth revolves around the sun”.
Marie Antoinette did a joke just like me: “Excuse me, I walked over your foot” said to the executioner who would decapitate him seconds later in the guillotine. But the funniest of all, in my opinion, was that of Balzac, and with his last words I conclude this blog of dead bodies.
Balzac, knowing that he was probably the most prolific writer in history, the one that filled the most papers with ink, looked at his watch before leaving forever, and complained:
- “Eight hours with fever! I had time to write a book!”