June 12, 2021: There's No Comfort -

I keep saving articles on How the Pandemic Will End (or Won't End), and others on Looking Back, or on Relearning How to Do X, and they are sometimes illuminating, but often slightly unsatisfying.  We seemed to be grasping at a type of closure that we can't yet achieve. But I loved a long, thoughtful piece in the New York Times this week, by Alejandro Zambra, titled, "What Will My Son Remember of This Horrible Year?"  

The author's son is barely three, and the piece often wanders far from the headline, pondering the elusive aspects of memory, especially the memories of early childhood. It's sometimes scientific, and sometimes almost poetic.

I especially loved this section, and found myself enjoying both the son's passing obsession, and the dad's gentle attention to his little boy's ways:

My son’s most frequent act of vandalism used to be seizing control of the toilet paper and carry out a long series of mysterious games that were at times unfathomable, quite abstract, choreographic. I understand most of the children in the world share this penchant — if they were to publish their own magazine, full of searing reviews of uncomfortable diapers and diatribes against weaning, I’m sure they would also dedicate several pages to toilet-paper games, which would be something like their sports section.

“It’s not toilet paper, Dad,” he said one morning, getting out in front of my (shy) scolding. “It’s confort.”

That’s what we Chileans call toilet paper, after the brand Confort, a so-called “generic trademark,” which of course means “comfort.” The desperate cry of “There’s no comfort!” which could sound like a complaint of a social nature or maybe, on the contrary, an almost metaphysical one, has a very precise and urgent meaning when uttered by a Chilean.

My son speaks Mexican, very Mexican, but that time he was using my Chilean word (the “paternal” tongue) with the strategic intention of charming or neutralizing me.

“I know what I’m going to ask for from Viejito Pascuero,” he told me, again using a Chilean reference, the Chilean name for Santa Claus.

“What?”

“A roll of confort,” he replied.

It was August or September, a long time before Christmas, but in the following days I realized it wasn’t a joke; that was his official request, and he made it through various channels. It was the only thing he wanted, a roll of toilet paper of his own so he could play in peace, in perfect and autonomous solitude. By the end of December, however, his passion for toilet paper already formed part of the past.