Recordando la bomba.

"Dr Shigeto takes me to visit some of the patients. One is an old man with rough, dry, darkened skin, peeling in flakes that resemble shreds of twisted paper. He lies limply and greets the doctor in a hoarse voice. He seems annoyed because he tried to smile easily but could not do so. When, suddenly, I think that this old man might have tried to wave to yesterday’s peace marchers, it wrenches my heart. The doctor himself has been filled with bitter grief at parting patients more seriously ill than this old man - old people with cancer or leukaemia, for example, who could do nothing but despair. Even so, such elderly patients must have waved to the peace marchers yesterday. Even so, such elderly patients must have waved to the peace marchers yesterday. If so, how could the marchers have avoided feeling that they were taking advantage of such old people? At the corner of the corridor stands an old woman who, surprised and breathing heavily, greets a doctor with sobbing. She is weeping for joy, for she just walked ten meters for the first time since entering the hospital. ‘Oh, sir, I’m so happy!’ She speaks brokenly, through tears. I shall never forget Dr Shigeto’s gloomy but gentle look, his eyes like an ox’s, upon hearing her greeting. If leukaemia attacks, a patient may live six months or a year. Medical therapy can give temporary respite, but not for long. When the leukocytes increase, it is fatal. The doctor questions present uses of chemotherapy for the unsolved riddle of leukaemia; for, though the leukocyte increase can be arrested, it eventually returns to a fatal rate. The deep sorrow and anxiety in Dr Shigeto’s eyes as he chats with leukaemia patients is unforgettable. The doctor himself is an A-bomb victim; he, too, witnessed that hell. He is a typical Hiroshima man who keeps up the fight against the A-bomb after-effects that even now remain deep in the human bodies."

******

"The ‘Testimonies of Hiroshima’ also tell about a most defiant man, quite different from the old man who drowned himself by jumping off the ferry boat and from the mad old man who talked incessantly to his dead grandson. This defiant man tries to commit ritual suicide by disembowelling himself in front of the Memorial Cenotaph - not from despair but from the thought that ‘if I, who am old and disabled, sacrifice myself, then the sensation may help to prevent nuclear testing.’ But the small knife, which he had gone to the trouble of obtaining, would not cut through the skin of his abdomen. The old man exclaimed, ‘I don’t want to live a life of shame,’ and tried to slit his throat. But, again, he was unable to end his life, For he was already too weakened by an A-bomb disease caused by residual radiation. H had an unusual keen sense of shame and, while lying abed in the A-bomb hospital, repeated over and over that he had exposed himself to ridicule. In was in the gloomy September of 1961, when Krushchev had announced the resumption of nuclear testing and the Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs had lacked the courage to protest Kruschev¡s statement, that the old man had made up his mind to kill himself. People whom I met in Hiroshima this summer had no recent information on this stubborn and solitary old man who was never interested in talking to other patients on his ward. That is, no one knew whether he was even alive, or whether he is still burdened with a sense of humiliation for having ‘exposed himself to ridicule’, and with pent-up anger at the resumption of nuclear testing. The only clear information is that the nine letters of protest which the old man had prepared at the time of his suicide attempt have been ignored by the Soviet and American embassies and all other places to which he sent them."

Kenzamburo Oe; Hiroshima Notes; pag. 48-49; 90-91. (Este libro se basa en las notas y reportajes de Oe durante dos años que paso en Hiroshima veinte años después de que la bomba nuclear estalló cien metros sobre el centro de la ciudad.)


(La primera foto la tomé cuando estuve en Hiroshima, es de un edificio que sufrió la explosión y no fué demolido para dejar prueba y recuerdo de los hechos. La segunda se supone que fué tomada desde el Little Boy -avión que soltó la bomba- poco después de la detonación.)