Novela con Twitter, y testamento vital

No es que tenga mucho Twitter, pero es la primera vez que veo mencionada esta red social o herramienta en una novela. Es en Started Early, Took My Dog de Kate Atkinson (2010), bastante recomendable por lo general, casi más por los sentimientos y percepciones sobre la experiencia diaria, que por el conjunto de tramas convergentes.  Va sobre personajes desengañados de la vida que se van agarrando a lo que hay (un perro, una niña maltratada), y contrastando lo que las cosas eran con lo que son ahora. Por ejemplo, los musulmanes: "Antes los infieles eran ellos. Ahora somos nosotros."

Twitter, reciente ahora, más en 2010. Uno de los personajes, Tilly, vieja actriz con principio de Alzheimer, está fuera de contacto con sus colegas y con su mundo. Una del reparto pasa sus fotos por Twitter:

"Showed it to everyone Twittering on about it. Twitter! Her phone was never out of her hand. She twittered, she said. 'Do you?' Showed Tilly on her phone. A technological step too far. Tilly didn't even know how to turn a computer on, wrong generation, of course. Twittering just seemed to be people telling other people what they were doing—getting in the shower, making coffee. Who on earth wanted to know these things?
    'Tweets,' Saskia said. Well exactly. Babble and twitter. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. People couln't cope with empty space any more, they had to fill it up with anything that came to hand. There was a time when people kept their thoughts to themselves. Tilly liked that time. They had a blue budgerigar when she was small. Tweety-pie. It was hard to be fond of a budgerigar. Her father accidentally stood on it. Her mother said she didn't see how you could stand on a budgerigar. Too late now to get to the bottom of what had really happened. Tilly wanted to bury it but Father put it on the fire. A pyre. She could still see its little body, the feathers flaring. She hadn't particularly liked the bird but she had felt sorry for it and gave some time over to crying for it. Shame. Tilly didn't want to be cremated. Thrown on the fire. She should write that down somewhere, make a will, make it clear." (193).

Podría escribirse en Twitter, el testamento funerario—o el testamento vital, ya puestos. A mí por mi parte prefiero que me cremen a que me entierren (aunque en realidad me da más o menos parecido). Un asado de media hora, como Aquiles, mejor que siglos de slow decay. Y que nadie guarde ni las cenizas ni el bote de las cenizas, por favor, la identidad tiene una curiosa manera de transferirse de un objeto a otro virtualmente. Para identidad, ya dejamos bastantes rastros detrás, sin necesidad de dejar un cadáver. Libros, escritos, blogs, tweets Mientras duren—los tweets tienen la ventaja de ser efímeros, una vez se cierra el garito pour de bon.

Y por terminarlo de especificar brevemente, que no me mantengan con animación suspendida en el limbo del Innombrable, si me da el colapso súbito, o el entubado terminal. Bastante vida posthumana, y animación suspendida, y posts póstumos, dejamos ya en los escritos, para entretenimiento de la breve posteridad.

De todas formas con el personaje que más me identifico en la novela—y la autora también tiene una debilidad por él—es con Jackson Brodie. No es de extrañar, está en mi quinta:

"He climbed back in the Saab and caught a glimpse of himself in the rear-view mirror. Someone slightly feral looked back. He hadn't shaved for several days and his hair flopped dirtily in his eyes. There was a lean and hungry look about him that he didn't recognize. At least he still had his own hair. Every guy you saw these days had shaved away his male-pattern baldness in a futile attempt to look hard rather than merely hairless. Jackson had recently turned fifty, a fact he still handn't entirely come to terms with. The golden years. (Yeah, right). 'A milestone,' Josie laughed as if it were a huge joke. He had avoided the birthday altogether, spending the weekend miserably on his own in Prague, side-stepping drunken English stag and hen parties. On his return he had set off on this journey.
    His definition of elderly had changed as he himself had moved nearer to the event horizon of death. When he was twenty, old people were forty. Now he was over the hill of his half-century the definition began to stretch towards something more yielding, but nonetheless once you hit fifty there was no escaping the fact that you had a one-way ticket on a non-stop service to the terminus.
    He drove off, aware that the barbecuing family were watching him all the way down the drive. He understood, he would have been wary of himself as well."

_____


—Metafísico estáis.
—Como se me han aparecido muchos fantasmas esta noche...

To Keep Our Metaphysics Warm

 

—oOo—