Sònia Hernández - Prosopagnosia

Perhaps I started writing all this down because I wanted to show myself that I am, in fact, capable of behaving the way one is supposed to behave. By extension, at some point I will also be able to lose those extra twenty kilos, the main thing standing between the world and my true appearance. At times, I’m not the person I seem to be.

In any case, one afternoon I turned up at the studio belonging to the artist who had helped my daughter. The first thing I noticed was the prevailing sense of order and cleanliness. The place was so clean that it was difficult to believe it could be anyone’s workspace. I had seen photos of painters’ studios, with half-squeezed tubes of paint, crumpled papers, and scraps of dirty canvas strewn across the floor, amongst the rest of the mess.

The man was exquisitely friendly. At the time I didn’t think I’d ever met someone so polite. He spoke softly, so softly that I had to strain to hear him. His corduroy trousers were impeccable, along with his woollen V-neck jumper and the shirt he wore beneath it. At first, he seemed much shorter than I was, but that must have been because of how fragile he looked. I began to doubt whether this man really could have held up my daughter after she fainted, but the expressiveness of his hands dismissed any doubts. His fingers were long and sturdy, and his fingernails perfectly manicured. You could trust him simply from the way he moved his hands.

He asked me how Berta was, and it was hard for me to answer. Any old platitude would have sufficed: a polite expression that would satisfy his interest and keep him at the correct distance that good manners require. However, I hesitated in my answer, which meant that all the conflicts, worries, and insecurities surrounding mine and my daughter’s relationship over the past few months rose quite naturally to the surface. He listened while I wove together a tale that was so jumbled, contradictory, and full of doubt that even I was irritated by it. Every time I felt I was falling into an uncomfortable spiral, I tried to cut off the conversation and finish off with the only two words I had come to say: thank you . But then I’d start blathering on again, and things got even more complicated. All the while he listened to me, and the greater my despair, the calmer he seemed. It was not lost on me that he was trying to impart some kind of lesson with his silence and his friendliness. I managed to move the centre of attention, to distance it from myself. I thanked him for the painting, and in order to avoid him asking what Berta thought of it, I asked him about his work. I was surprised that there were no paintings on display in his workshop, but it didn’t seem polite to ask about it. Despite my rambling, I did manage to find out that he had recently returned to Spain after living abroad for many years, and that he practically lived in hiding in his studio. Although he had very precise manners, he paradoxically gave off a sense of great vitality. I supposed that, as an artist, all of the disquiet of his nature was concentrated in his mind or his soul, or wherever creativity came from. From the few words he spoke, I gleaned that his world was much deeper than I was capable of imagining. He showed me some catalogues from his shows while making observations here and there about his work, pointing out little details that ought not go unnoticed. He had spent almost his entire career in Mexico, where he was a very famous artist.

I was unsettled when I left his studio. To a certain degree, I was ashamed of the way I had behaved with him. But the most powerful feeling was one of admiration. I was in awe of the wider world I had been able to glimpse in just the few words the painter had addressed to me about what he was searching for in his work, and how different artistic expressions connected the essence of the human being. At one point he said that his intention was to unsettle the people who view his work. Of course, he’d managed to unsettle me. I had been so excited by his paintings that I felt privileged and lucky to have stumbled across some kind of treasure that, without a doubt, was going to enrich me.

When you feel good, you don’t need to seek out short cuts, or hiding places to shy away from dissatisfaction. But when I got home, I wanted to celebrate this discovery with a nice meal at a bar I knew. It doesn’t escape me that eating a huge meal is the exact opposite of what I ought to have done: go home quickly and take out a fancy notebook to write about how art brings balance, drawing us away from the sort of unhappiness that causes us to engage in compulsive and self-sabotaging behaviour. The excitement I felt from our meeting was over the top, and it had dazzled me to the point that I could barely recall what had actually happened. On the face of it, I was unsettled when I left the artist’s studio because the existence of a person capable of transmitting such a sense of peace seemed like a great discovery. I’m naturally distrustful of people, which is why encounters like that unsettle me and distance me from the rational explanations I have found for the way of the world. My normal behaviour is at polar opposites from the sort of behaviour that transmits peace, I’m well aware of that. And the problem has grown worse since I’ve been carrying around twenty or twenty-five extra kilos. I’m not a good-natured person. Once, while watching a Turkish film, I heard a proverb that went something along the lines that the only purpose of human life is to make it better for others. I’d be delighted just to be able to believe that. The fact is, that artist seemed to me like one of those people who is concerned with the wellbeing of others.

On the other hand, my euphoria upon leaving the studio was also due to my conviction that I’d just lived through a defining moment of my life, one of those moments that have a special relevance because they change things that happen afterwards. The sort of moments people refer to when they want to mark the beginning of something important in their own life story. I believed that my conversation with the artist, despite the fact that I had done much more talking than he had, had introduced something new in my life, in my capacity to understand and, at the same time, to describe the way of the world.

I had been drawn closer to Beauty, not just to a hazy sense of peace. I had managed to comprehend the search the painter was immersed in constantly, and which drove him forward, even at his age. Perhaps we’re all searching for the same thing, without knowing it. Through his work, that afternoon I became capable of understanding why Beauty is so important: it connects us with something very deep in ourselves, something difficult to explain, like pleasure, a kind of communion with invisible materials that takes us back to our original essence.

In moments like these, it’s easy to think that the only thing that can bring meaning to life is the search for Beauty. We are all searching for something beautiful because it calms us, it makes us think that order holds sway and nothing bad could possibly happen. My particular epiphany didn’t last long, just until the moment I remembered my daughter’s obsession with ugliness and imperfection. Perhaps that’s why I needed to go into a bar and eat a huge meal, to face up to the notion that I had a daughter who made herself pass out by interrupting her breathing while waiting for the moment when she could no longer recognise her own reflection in the mirror. Stuffing myself in a bar in the middle of the afternoon was meant to function as a good transition between the world of people searching for the essence of Beauty, and my world, the world where a girl who might have been adorable made sure that everything in her life was ugly.

My excitement lasted long enough for me to call the newspaper and try to convince them to publish an interview with the artist. A long time had passed since I had tried to pitch an article. The last pitches I had sent had been declined, but I tried to convince myself that this time would be different. I even listened to the musicality of the brilliant sentences forming in my mind, which I would write based on the gentle intonation of the artist’s responses. The melody of that man’s voice would be sustained in stunning prose: my prose.