The Free Essence of Recall Shall Not Die
Without Letting Memory Know that I Will Return  

José Luis and I shared every endeavor, clinging to the sensations our skin reflected. In the face of such pain upon your passing, I can only write to linger within this sadness that has cracked my soul.

This sadness is profound, but it fades away

into nostalgia

and leaves us a tear, a prelude, and the

warm melancholy

of the evening suns that drag us

into the shadows.

We were companions in those places where life borders on death, brothers in joy and sorrow, survivors of doubts and memories, of so many shared places where emotion is fearless. Your daily reaching out to each of us, your commitment to those in mourning, your reflections and the refuge you offered to those on the path of knowledge—all of this knew neither pause nor retreat. Your presence had that aura of a magical benefactor.

Your premature farewell still casts flames,

a sacrifice to the gods in uncertain days;

so profuse is the wound that never ceases

in tearing your departure away from existence.

The past, in disguise, takes over its most remote origin. What had been forgotten and fossilized returns from the depths of memory. It is the resurrection of a new season. Imperceptible at first, it cannot escape the gestures and words that are gradually renewed. Once memory resurfaces, it grows in the shadow of its quietest return, from the last pain left by the sunset’s copper. But at some point, it turns into turmoil

and chaos. It casts aside all preconceptions and surges forward. It does not weigh consequences or considerations. It tears down the commemorative plaques that resisted freedom. And the memories that had run away from their representation reappear for a last farewell before illuminating the path with the final trail of light they leave behind.

I want to return with you to the depths

and believe that you are not dead, companion of endeavors, apprentice of the nights

with their dreams.

Memory is an act of atonement. It places us in a state of suffering. Stripped of aggression. It is memory that reveals our condition to its most extreme limit. Man needs it to give birth to his recollection. Thus, he arrives at sadness—the moment when the self can escape its own meaning and contemplate itself from outside it. In this vigil, there are no distractions; he only scrutinizes himself before a mirror, trying to see his inner self. Our entire memory is transformed into a point of extreme sadness, into a convergence that lies beyond pain. It borders on indifference, on the acceptance of our insignificance. These words bear the mark of being there to contemplate absences—of so many stories lived with you, my friend José Luis—that leave me without comfort.

Thus, we remain strangers to our surroundings, floating unassumingly, needing neither space nor time to occupy. I barely keep watch, as the seasons are subject to a hierarchy of complete freedom—the freedom that gives the self its understanding of a reality that is, in fact, circumstantial and random, regardless of destiny. It is the wrenching pain produced when awareness subjugates both sadness and emptiness, the ultimate sources of liberation.

My friend, there was no peace during this time or any time to forget. To detail your extensive medical work in every hospital setting, at the Argentine Society of Cardiology (SAC) and in the Argentine Journal of Cardiology (RAC), would be so extensive that simply saying “José Luis Barisani” is enough for everyone to know of your career of professional and ethical commitment. I also know that this page, in the face of so much life spent in your company, is insufficient, but so is the pain that belongs to the human condition.

Now it is autumn. I can feel the crunch of yellowed, withered leaves under my feet. In my imagination, you have become me. The distances between us have shortened. You no longer wait on the other side of my confession, giving me strength. You walk within me through the mist the gray drizzle shows. Together we have navigated more than a few steps: fears, failures, sufferings. And also the joys of accomplishing so much amid the events imposed on us by the uncertainty of fate.

José Luis, we will only be free when we accept sadness as the essential condition for our selfawareness. Then we can be reborn like the seasons, expecting nothing more than our inevitable twilight. Not out of ignorance, or out of slavery to it, but through our own decision to get rid of our idiosyncrasies through affection—even if that affection comes hand in hand with anguish.

I want to return with you to the depths

and believe that you are not dead, companion

of endeavors, apprentice of the nights

with their dreams.