Logbook of an HIV-Positive Voyage

Abstract

I will begin with a well-known fact: every epidemic crosses multiple boundaries. Ruled by an expansionist mandate, it breaches the protective barriers of the organism that involuntarily serves as its host. From there, it travels to other bodies near and far, from the known community to the imagined one.¹ In its clandestine compulsion to travel, this unfortunate companion in any geographic journey rapidly spreads across the vast territories of the planet. The impenitent nomadism of disease is seen again and again throughout history. Leprosy in the eleventh century was carried by humans over hundreds of years to every corner of the known world. The black plague, perhaps the worst epidemic in history, traveled the Orient in rodents that accompanied merchants traveling by sea and on foot and, in frequent and regular outbreaks, devastated fourteenth-century Europe.² Many of the old continent’s diseases, such as smallpox, yellow fever, and syphilis, benefited from the invasive movement of the European colonizers and decimated the indigenous populations of the Americas and Africa; in the opposite direction, like a furtive form of vengeance, cholera spread destructively across Europe in the nineteenth century through British colonists who brought the disease from India. In the next century, the great viral onslaught came from the so-called Spanish flu, which was neither originally nor exclusively from Iberia but from Europe and the United States.

Yo he pasado lo que llaman una vida errante, que consiste en no vegetar en una sola de las dependencias de esta posesión nuestra que viene a ser el mundo.

[I have lived what they call a wandering life, which means refusing to stagnate in place in this possession of ours that becomes the world.]

Augusto D’Halmar, El hermano errante (The wandering brother)