Quieto

Quiet covers seven years in the life of the author’s son, Lluís -Llullu, who was born with serious brain disease which neurological science has been unable to define. Seven years after his birth, medical terminology has not got beyond ‘brain disease of unknown origin’. Popular language manages with the fairly clear ‘cerebral palsy’ and administrative language sums him up as 85% disabled. At home these labels count for little. Lluís has his own particular needs, but this just means being more aware of his fragility and learning to do things differently, so that the family can do anything they would have done if he had not come into the world with 15% ability. In Quiet the author has searched for a narrative way of explaining the ambivalent emotional state that is caused by having a son who is not progressing adequately. It is a situation often painful, but one in which pleasure and a certain fascination predominate. Scenes put into motion, refulgent memories that compose a mirror with the pieces from this logbook from the dry dyke. As in a reversed version of Dorian Gray, the author’s son and those like him act as mirrors. All of us who look at ourselves closely in them age in a different way. If Dorian Gray had known Llullu he would never have learned how to look instead of wanting to be looked at. Or how to grow old. Very probably he would not have wanted to be the person painted, but the portrait itself.