Life is a moving shadow, an illusion, a tragedy
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
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Josep Jané (60) sways and loses balance as he walks the corridors of Club Natació Barcelona.
The man stumbles, hesitates, thinks before going through a door, be careful with the steps. When we approach the outdoor pool area, he stops and asks us:
–Do we also have to go through there?
We nod: we have to go through there too.
Resigned, Josep Jané smiles and asks for help:
–Can you take my arm?
I catch him.
Arm in arm, oblivious to the gazes of the curious, we advance to the changing rooms, and there the man undresses, puts on his swimsuit, hangs the towel over his shoulder, puts on glasses and a hat and, finally, enters the water. .
And then…
–May I make the comparison? –I ask him–. Can I write that you are a sea lion, clumsy on land and wonderful when entering the water?
–You can do it, of course, write it down –he answers me.
And start laughing.
(Well, come on, here I write it: Josep Jané is a sea lion).
(…)
“Now I have shaken off many prejudices, but it wasn’t like that before,” Josep Jané tells me, straight away, after his masterful swimming lesson. In other times, at the end of a meal or dinner with other people, I would not get up from my chair until everyone had left…
-And so?
–It hurt me to think that someone thought I was drunk. Now, when they make these jokes to me, I laugh. And then my wife, Esther, scolds me: ‘Don’t laugh, man, because you’ll give them more reasons to say that you’re drunk.’
(…)
Josep Jané was thirty years old when he began to suffer random falls, for no apparent reason.
He got bored walking.
He would spend ten minutes falling through the snow while skiing, and then he would stop falling. He had to quit tennis because, suddenly, he couldn’t hit it right.
–At first, I didn’t give importance to those things. Everything was very gradual. But in the end, doctors found the reason: ataxia.
Ataxia is a rare neurodegenerative disease of the nervous system: it is an atrophy in the cerebellum. It causes problems of lack of coordination and imbalances. It also hinders speech.
–And how did you accept the news?
–In the first years it affected me little. The decline was very gradual. I could do activities, although I did them worse and worse. In the end, I had to leave them all. At 42 years old, I stopped working.
(He has been a civil servant: he led the personnel hiring and internal regime department in the social services area of ??the Generalitat).
–And you started to be treated?
-Treat me…? There is no treatment or medicine for ataxia. The only thing that helps me is the support of my wife, and also a positive attitude and sports, being as active as possible, maintaining good muscle tone.
–Hence swimming?
–When I was young, I swam. And he played water polo. I did it at my school, Pare Manyanet. Although I never considered becoming a professional, eh? It wasn’t enough for that. I stopped swimming when I was 18, around the time of going out and having fun. And I returned at fifty, already with the disability, when I went to the beach and forced myself to reach the buoys.
-And now?
-A group of friends (Marc Capdevila, Sergi Roura, Dani Serra and los Peixets del Golfet) joined me at the Radikal Swim club. That’s how I met Gerard (Gerard Alemany, director of the Radikal Ocean52, which is celebrated today and tomorrow in Llafranc and Calella de Palafrugell), and now I swim three or four days a week, almost always in Vic (where he lives), but also in the Mediterranean Club.
(He does it on Wednesdays: he takes advantage of the trip to visit his mother, who is in a residence in Barcelona).
“In the water I feel free,” he tells me. If they took the sea away from me, I would die…
When he swims, Josep Jané practices 4,000 m sessions. Today it is put to the test: our sea lion will compete in the 7 km of the Radikal Ocean52.
