Supporters and Survivors: The People without AIDS

SUPPORTERS AND SURVIVORS: THE PEOPLE WITHOUT AIDS MARILYN R. CHANDLER* Over the past 10 years the AIDS crisis has produced a large volume ofwriting. Much of this is documentary. Dozens of studies ofAIDS from various clinical and political perspectives have been complemented by just as many published diaries, autobiographies, novels, plays, and poems. A few of these works have risen to the surface not only as extraordinarily valuable testimonies to the changes AIDS has wrought in individual and collective life but also asfirst-rate literary works, worth reading because beyond their immediate purposes they articulate with extraordinary lucidity and compassion some deep truths about the human— and the modern—condition. PaulMonette's Borrowed Time is among the most distinctive of those. It speaks not only for the community ofpeople with AIDS and those who support them butfor a generation. In the midst of his powerful, highly nuanced account of his lover's 19-month struggle with AIDS, Borrowed Time, Paul Monette recalls a moment that captures with full poignancy and irony the situation of the caretaker whose role it is to witness and bear with the suffering of a loved one; his partner, Roger, has just received one in a long series of bleak prognoses: he started to cry, and the burst of tears sent one of his contact lenses awry. So instead of holding him I had to cup my hands under his eye while he worked the lens back in, swallowing the scald of tears. That specific helpless moment, the soft disk swimming out onto his cheek, stuck with me like a pivot of agony, [p. 67] Small practical necessities, the unglamorous immediacies of a daily life increasingly complicated with minor rituals of caretaking, embarrassing inconveniences, and awkward moments of physical failure consign the lover/caretaker to a role somewhere between Quixote's and Sancho *Department of English, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Boulevard, Oakland, California 94613.© 1991 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 0031-5982/92/3501-0749$01.00 Perspectives inBiology and Medicine, 35, 1 ¦ Autumn 1991 | 105 Panza's: in the course of the long battle he undertakes everything from fighting windmills to feeding the horses. Monette's chronicle of his lover's sickness and death may in fact best be characterized as an exploration of the evolving role of the supporters and survivors in what he calls simply "the war." The familiar military metaphor acquires a particular aptness in this chronicle, so reminiscent of stories of life in the trenches where soldiers' daily existence lost all reference to the normalities of civilian life. Monette and his lover inhabit a similar "troglodyte world" where the horizon of time is limited by the uncertain parameters of a disease with no known trajectory of development and no known survivors. Although all the precedents and prophecies assure them that death will come, whether by slow atrophy or sudden attack, the heroism called for is to maintain the "supreme fictions" that preserve life in the face of the supreme fact of death. That heroism consists not so much in conspicuous gestures of self-sacrifice as in gradual, incremental adaptations to minor indignities and losses, diminishments of energy and the narrowing circle of possibility; by continuing the play on a darkening stage, going on in the spirit of Beckett's motley heroes, when they can't go on. From the first appearance of Roger's small ambiguous symptoms Borrowed Time describes a widening spiral of hope and dread, where each turning raises the stakes, and the risk of truth telling is measured against the value of shared illusions. As he writes, Monette looks back over the months of treatment, remission, and regression and tries to assess the ad hoc survival strategies that he and his partner, Roger, and the close community of friends and fellow "soldiers" developed in the "trenches," the war language being itself one of those strategies. Hope becomes an increasingly calculated, and therefore an increasingly ironic, commitment , modified by a deepening awareness of denial grown to the proportions of social orthodoxy in the subculture defined by the epidemic. Out of necessity that subculture turns in upon itself—in part for political reasons, but more importantly in...