I have a cousin. I mean, I had a cousin. She’s no longer. In fact, she hasn’t been for over twenty years. Twenty-three to be precise.
My cousin Alexia died of a devastating cancer in December 1985 at age 14, having been diagnosed with a malignant tumor at 13 and suffered through ten months of pain and surgeries. Through all of it, she remained an optimist child, always smiling, resilient.
Young cancer victims are, sadly, not a rarity. Entire hospital wards are filled with them. So what was with Alexia? How can a teenager be accepting of a brutal disease that ruthlessly kills you before you’ve set out to discover the world? Alexia had strong religious beliefs, firm and highly uncommon for a kid her age. This supposedly made her ordeal sweeter and is certainly facilitating her beatification by the Pope, a move long pushed by her immediate family.
I say supposedly because I don’t have religious beliefs and find it hard to believe that a 14-year-old can be comforted by Jesus or whoever during a painful and fatal disease instead of crying and going crazy. But Alexia did. She died a happy kid because she was going to meet Jesus. Go figure.
Her endurance and mature acceptance of illness and death put my cousin on her way to sainthood. Her beatification cause is under way, and so one day she’ll be the first ever Saint Alexia and I’ll be proud. Or something.
(My aunt married her first cousin and had seven kids. Two of them died before Alexia, and then it was her turn. Love is the most powerful feeling a human can gather and cannot be stopped, but marrying your cousin means that genetic problems will most likely ensue.)
My relationship with Alexia has seen its ups and downs. I’ve been proud, indifferent, critical, skeptical, even mocking (for this I feel mighty bad)… I’ve felt close to her and far apart because of the peculiarities of my family, including my own father who –as a long-time priest- baptized Alexia but is routinely left out of biographies and stories on her because he left the Catholic Church, married my mother and had me.
I visited Alexia, along with my parents and siblings, at the hospital where she was dying. I was five or six years old. I remember her vividly, and that memory still surprises me and kind of haunts me today, for I am a guy with no memory and no childhood yet I can recall being there, in that room, looking at my cousin Alexia sitting in bed, her body adorned with a strange metal piece on top of her shaved and bald head, her arm in a sling. What a mess, but she was smiling. That’s what has always stuck with me, her smile. I mean, my mind has consciously or unconsciously let most of my life slip away with no recollections, yet there it is that image recorded in my brain, never to leave me.
Despite my lack of faith, I was always close to my aunt, Alexia’s mother. I’d have good conversations with her and my uncle about the existence of god, no less. I never saw her as an extremist. She knew of my interest in Alexia’s cause so she would periodically send me the newsletters, and I was the only one in my immediate family to be invited to the latest chapter of Alexia’s cause for sainthood. My aunt would tell me, and I never forgot, that Alexia prayed for me and my siblings to be baptized and converted to Catholicism.
She failed.
When I married and moved to America I lost touch with everyone but my close friends and family. I barely heard about Alexia. My aunt died not too long ago after a long, painful death and was buried in the family mausoleum in Northern Spain, in the same little town where I had conversed so much with her about religion, god and Alexia. I was living in New York, far from everything. Here, Opus Dei and Alexia meant almost nothing.
About my only contact with Spain is the occasional newspaper clips my father sends me. They’re usually about contemporary art or Spanish visions of New York, but the latest batch was different. It had a color spread on a movie about to open in Spain- a movie about my cousin Alexia. When I saw it and read it, I was floored. But calm. I guess being far away from everything brings a different perspective. Yet I couldn’t hide my amazement.
My cousin, my aunt, my family in the movies.
I read the article. The director says everything in the movie is “respectful and objective”. Yet the journalist calls my aunt a “religious fanatic” and my uncle a lost man grappling with the devastating loss of a child. Then I saw the trailer and my aunt was there, saying “I am thankful every day for our daughter’s illness”. I couldn’t help shedding a tear. Is that respectful and objective? Did they know my aunt? Did they talk to my family before making the movie? When I read about my aunt in one of the most important newspapers in the world, Spain’s El País, described as a “religious fanatic”, is that respectful and objective?
Sure, Alexia was not an easy kid. Her catchphrase before dying was “Jesus, may I always do what you want me to do”, and she celebrated her first communion in Rome with Paul John Paul II, to whom he gave a letter in which she addressed her desire to be a saint. My aunt devoted her life after her daughter’s passing to remembering her and, in a way, making her a sort of household name for Spanish Catholics. Both actions are difficult for me to deal with.
Zealousness or pure devotion and faith? Perhaps both?
And yet, despite my not being religious, I loved my aunt and remember and respect my cousin. I am already not feeling comfortable about this movie, billed as “inspired in a real story” but having obviously more than just plain “inspiration”. The actress portraying my aunt looks so very much like her, and so does the rest of the cast. The movie, titled not “Alexia” but “Camino”, which is a fairly common female name in Spain but also means “path”, seems to focus on Alexia’s love story with an unnamed young boy, something that’s only mentioned in passing in the books written about Alexia. Many other aspects are literally copied. I know. Why didn’t they consult the family? There is this scene, shown in the movie trailer, where my cousin approaches a handyman working on a broken washing machine at the house and asks him whether he thinks that by fixing machines you can get to be a saint (!). According to my aunt, this occurred for real, only the handyman was working on a broken TV.
Don’t they have to ask for permission to reproduce this?
The problem with the movie and the sour disagreements it will generate is not strictly due to my late cousin but to Opus Dei, the religious organization she belonged to, and that –upfront- it looks like the director has constructed a quite critical view of the group, despite his claims of objectivity. Opus Dei is indeed a highly controversial entity. Officially sanctioned by the Pope and the Catholic Church, which recently canonized its founder, Spanish priest José María Escrivá de Balaguer, Opus Dei is viewed by many as a sect or cult- not unlike the Mormons in the United States.
Although a minor, almost unknown group in America, Opus Dei is a big deal in Spain, for obvious reasons. It was founded there and there it grew into a complex behemoth with political, economical and social ramifications. Many of dictator Francisco Franco –ruthless military ruler of Spain for almost forty years-‘s ministers belonged to Opus Dei, and the wealth –both financial and political- of the organization has long been a subject of discussion in Spain. Recently, writer Dan Brown turned Opus Dei into one of the key players of his bestseller “The Da Vinci Code”, reviving the controversy and throwing some light on it for unbeknownst Americans.
The movie is already –before it even opens- creating a stir in Spain, where no discussion about the issue is civilized. The mere announcement of the production has had Spanish newspapers and blogs flooded with readers’ comments pro- and anti- Opus Dei. Because Alexia died comforted by religion, people are calling her a brainwashed mess of a manipulated kid. Believers strike back, calling atheists and agnostics all sorts of non-pretty things.
All because of my cousin, who died twenty-three years ago.
3600 miles away, in a place where virtually no one knows about Alexia, Opus Dei or will ever see this movie that’s already dividing Spain, I am –ever agnostic and respectful- feeling sad, perplexed and quite nostalgic.
(I knew Alexia)
