One of my earliest childhood memories is marked by the battle with insomnia. On those long nights, my mother, patient and resigned, would prepare me a cup of hot milk that she would baptize with a splash of wine. The remedy worked like the chorus of a Julio Iglesias song: sometimes yes, sometimes no. Then it was time to count sheep. There were many, identical, jumping the same fence until they formed a herd that went nowhere.
Years later, adolescence and the first years of youth revealed to me a catalogue of reasons for losing the ability to sleep: exams, frustrated loves, intense emotions, vocational doubts and a very long etcetera. Diagnoses multiplied and, with them, treatments. They all promised relief and worked, at best, half-heartedly.
Then, I discovered that insomnia is a mysterious country. A territory to which some of us belong, beyond the will. Each insomniac lives the vigil in his own way and seeks his teachers. I had mine.
One day, Muy Interesante magazine revealed to me the story of a Vietnamese peasant who had lost the ability to sleep. He had been awake for more than sixty years. If I ever make a pilgrimage, it will not be to Santiago de Compostela or Jerusalem, but to the village of that prodigious insomniac. I cannot imagine a wiser teacher than one who has learned to live without surrendering to the laws of fatigue.
Among my gurus, El Pollo occupies an important place: a Mexican who could go up to three weeks without sleep. I met him when we were studying film in Barcelona. We became friends, not only because we shared a passion for music and movies, but because we were united by that silent, almost mystical knowledge of what permanent vigilance means.
With El Pollo I discovered that the nights could be perfect laboratories to go for a walk in the streets without people, listen to jazz or imagine impossible projects. I understood that the extra hours that insomnia offered us could be a precious gift.
I write these memories right now because it’s two o’clock in the morning and, for the third night in a row, I can’t sleep. A few minutes ago I went downstairs trying not to trip over the cats, turned on the computer and started writing this eulogy as an incantation.
There is something in the nocturnal world that transforms for those who inhabit it without sleep. The shadows acquire a different density and the minimal sounds become the protagonists. At that time, the drop in the sink rings like a bell and the light in the refrigerator is a midday sun.
But the real metamorphosis happens after two or three sleepless nights: the colors vibrate, the corners become sharp, and the faces reveal details we don’t suspect.
Surely that is what Mexicans mean by the expression “andar en vivo”: that way of being exposed, vulnerable, and lucid at the same time, as if every gesture in the world were passing through us.
In a couple of days, when this eulogy is published, I will complete my fifth day of insomnia. That morning, I will have breakfast with the colleagues of “Letra Libre”, and it will be enough to bring the orange juice to my lips for the surface of the liquid to open like a threshold, and I will fall into the interior of a drop.
There, suspended in that citrus universe, I will witness the microscopic dance of particles and the story of the seed that was a tree and the tree that was a fruit. When I come back – because you always come back – someone will have told a joke or asked me to pass you the sugar.
Something similar will happen with cheese, gallo pinto, and the steam that rises from the cup of coffee. Food contains a genealogy that the insomniac can go through as if each bite were a door, and each sip, a map.
Perhaps therein lies the secret dignity of insomnia: in that ability to open cracks in reality, to stop where we would pass by and discover that the world, even in its most everyday form, is made up of layers that we rarely manage to perceive.
Maybe that’s why I keep writing this eulogy at two in the morning. Because in insomnia, there is also a form of knowledge. A fragile but intensely alive lucidity. And even if tomorrow I pay the price in the form of tiredness, these nights have given me something that rest could never fully offer me: the suspicion that reality, seen from the edge of sleep, is vaster, stranger, and, in the end, closer.