Between Art & Science

What has no name. A side effect

Piedad Bonett, Colombian author, narrates in Lo que no tiene nombre the story of Daniel, a young artist who threw himself from the fifth floor of a building in New York, on Saturday, May 14, 2011, at one and ten in the afternoon. Daniel was twenty-eight years old and had been studying for a master’s degree at Columbia University for ten months. His first surname was Segura and the second was Bonett.

Like the words “cancer” or “HIV” in Susan Sontag’s works, Bonett isn’t afraid to call the death of his own son suicide. As a poet, Bonett understands the relevance of the sensory: “Life is physical,” he says, as if avoiding metaphysical verbiage that fails to fill the void left by the death of a loved one. The author concludes that “in the face of the pain of the death of a son, all literary mystifications are meaningless.”

In the face of loss, the author, regardless of this literary metaphysics, focuses on the material: “true life is physical, and what death takes away is an unrepeatable body and face: the soul that is the body.” It crosses that terrain where idealism vanishes and flesh arises: “language refers us to a reality that the mind cannot comprehend.” The author passes through the sieve of paper that reality that, so atrocious, seems fiction. Bonett writes to bring his son back from dreams to carnal reality. Susan Sontag in Disease as a Metaphor reflects on the vocabulary of war used to express the conditions in which people with cancer live, words like “struggle” or “combat” are nothing more than euphemisms that lead the patient to experience isolation.

Piedad Bonett writes from the experience of the condolences offered: “to say that he has already rested would be to incur a crude commonplace and a naivety that does not conform to reality. This one is much crueler: Daniel does not rest because he is not.”

If she writes only once about Daniel’s mental condition, it’s not out of fear. Daniel’s schizoaffective disorder is not Daniel. One is not their illness, for “there are no diseases but patients.” However, the author cannot get away from that war vocabulary that involves a Daniel who wanted to resist, who “carried for eight years a terrifying mental illness that turned his days into a painful and relentless battle.”

Daniel, his mother says, took acne pills for a while. After the suicide, Piedad Bonett researched about side effects. And yet, he does not blame the doctor or the treatment: “There is no point in rebuking anyone, there is no point in writing that letter that I have reviewed so many times mentally: my son has already died, with his skin intact.” b

But it cannot forbid itself to elaborate a hypothesis. At the age of nineteen, late acne appeared on Daniel’s face before which he was recommended “a highly dangerous drug, which puts the liver at risk and therefore forced him to periodic examinations.” And this is where there is finally a villain: the side effect.

Piedad Bonett’s research is terrifying: “That acne me-dication was already known about in 2001 but no one was careful to tell us that ‘cases of depression, psychotic symptoms and rarely suicide attempts have been reported.’” An exceptional case for medicine can be the entire life of a human being.

While it’s a possibility, Bonett isn’t sure: “I wonder what this could have been in Daniel’s case, and my intuition tells me, over and over again, that it was acne medication.” However, she is clear in respecting the fact as a decision of her son: two months after the suicide, the forensic analysis revealed that the boy had decided to stop psychiatric treatment for schizophrenia. It is her own research and the knowledge she has about her son that leads her to these reflections, not conclusions, because we are facing a chronicle about the suicide of a young artist and in turn, an essay on this that Camus highlighted as the only truly serious problem in philosophy.

Bonett turns to a confession: “memory always lies” and that is why we are not properly facing a chronicle in real time, but facing the meditations that produced his own mourning. “The fact of having lived something, whatever it is, gives the imprescriptible right to write about it,” argues the Colombian. And I couldn’t write a fiction about her pain. He leaves us a beautiful phrase by way of apology: “The world has always laughed at the crazy. Of Don Quixote, although with a background of tenderness. Of Hamlet, not without some admiration. How could I, now, laugh at madness?” What has no name” is nothing more than an exercise to name.

Piedad Bonett delivers a creation that continues her son’s legacy along a special path, different from the path on which we group Shakespeare’s characters. “The pain seems, perhaps by compensatory law, to grant us rights,” says the author, for her and for us.

Orígenes Romero Porras

Degree in History from the University of Guadalajara. Former Paralympic athlete (20062017). Interested in the relationship between art and history. Literary analyst.