Roberto Canessa on Reality, Limits, and the Society of the Snow

This conversation with Roberto Canessa, pediatric cardiologist and one of the sixteen survivors of the Andes, was recorded during the first weeks of the pandemic. It does not address politics: it exposes the substrate that sustains it. Reality accepted without alibi, the internalized limit, life that suffices unto itself. It is published as an edited dialogue. In a second conversation on jikatuTV he left the formula of his equilibrium: “The most human thing in man is the basics.”

The interviewee’s opinions are his own; the Conversations section does not imply doctrinal agreement.

The Passion for Reality

Roberto: I think accepting reality is the best way to progress. That’s what Darwin said: the species that adapt are the ones that survive; the ones that don’t adapt disappear. I have a great passion for reality. I love reality. It doesn’t bother me that reality isn’t good, like this pandemic business. I think I’m going to miss the pandemic, because it has forced me to reprogram myself in a totally different way. To go looking for reality in that moment, to find it and adapt to it. And I love that line of Azucena’s: “Life changed us completely, but it’s the best one, because it’s the one we get.”

The Limits Are Inside

Jimmy: You say you’re an example of nothing. Why do you say that?

Roberto: Because everyone has their own possibilities. I’ve been privileged in the possibilities life gave me; the things I’ve done, I did because the possibilities were there. I can’t be an example for a person in a wheelchair or for a person who lives in destitution. I did what I had to do with what I had. Everyone has to be an example to themselves in the things they have to achieve. But I like to push the limits. I enjoy the vertigo of the limits being outside, because I believe many limits lie within us. When I set out to walk the mountain, the limit was to arrive, and to enjoy moving forward. With the ventilators, what was the limit? To reach a ventilator.

Jimmy: I owe you a criticism: I’m an engineer, and I didn’t feel your time on the ventilators was well invested. It’s a complex, sophisticated machine.

Roberto: I never thought of building the ventilators myself. I always thought of bringing together the people who would build them. What I didn’t want was for the epidemic to explode and for me to have done nothing.

Is the Virus Alive?

Jimmy: In one passage of your book you say we don’t want to become inorganic. And now we have a virus that is genetic information: inside us it can reproduce, outside it’s something intermediate between life and the inorganic. And something like that is bringing all of humanity to its knees.

Roberto: No: the virus is life. The virus is life inside people, just as we couldn’t be life on the mountain, because the inorganic was outside. How do you know the virus doesn’t have grandparents, grandchildren, and parents? How do you know what a virus feels? By what authority do you speak of that?

Jimmy: Perhaps by the definition: on its own it can’t reproduce. It depends on an organism.

Roberto: Those are laws we set ourselves. They’re living systems that coexist. The moment there is organization and structure, I believe there is life, because the difference between the organic and the inorganic is that the organic has a certain percentage guided by an unknown higher force. And in the end, illness is the health of microbes and of doctors: thanks to it, they live.

The Society of the Snow

Jimmy: After almost fifty more years of life, was anything in the society of the plain harder for you than the Society of the Snow?

Roberto: Yes. My brother had a very serious accident and was in a coma, and I learned that far sadder than what happens to you is what happens to a loved one. That was terrible. The motto of the mountain was: maybe tomorrow, and while there’s life there’s hope. We were very unambitious. It’s the same with this pandemic: we have to lower our ambitions. It can’t be that if you can’t change your car, you can’t sleep. This has given us a bath of humility, of humanization. We’d become too materialistic, and I have no doubt that materialism paganizes you: it strips away your spirituality. Fighting materialism is a war I wage and love to wage.

Jimmy: You say the challenge of life is not to die: it’s to live well.

Roberto: To feel happy. And happiness lies in making others happy. Happiness is not inside you.

Jimmy: Reading the book, Numa Turcatti hit me hard. I saw him as one of the greatest fighters. Tell me about him.

Roberto: He loved others more than himself. He put himself last. He weighed sixty kilos and had to get out fast, he couldn’t wait: otherwise you can’t explain how he set out walking the next day in loafers. I’m not as generous as Numa, without a doubt.

Luck Is Trained

Jimmy: I recently interviewed Diego Aguirre, and he uses a phrase a lot: luck is trained. You traversed circumstances where a sprain meant death. It did not happen. How do you see luck?

Roberto: In the cordillera we’d grown very light. I had a chassis built for eighty kilos and I weighed fifty: it was very hard to sprain anything weighing thirty percent less. It was turning a problem into an advantage. And I remember a baseball player who hit eight home runs in one day. They asked him: how lucky you are. And he said: “The harder I practice, the luckier I get.”

Maybe We’ll See Each Other Again

Roberto: In the avalanche I learned that death wasn’t so terrible. I was dying and I’d say: this is dying? And that taught me to accept the death of others, of the patients who die on me. They’re going to die; well, at least we steal a few back.

Jimmy: I don’t know if it’s that one matures, but I have a bit of curiosity about death, about knowing what it’s like. But the disappointment persists that, in the end, everything ceases.

Roberto: Everything that ends is a disappointment. But maybe it doesn’t end. Maybe we’ll see each other again.

Recorded in El Suspiro, Lavalleja, during the first weeks of the pandemic. Edited for reading from the video’s original transcript.