My cousin ÁlvaroDaniela Saetta: "At the age of 17 I had no will to live".Mariano Ugarte: "The illness of a child affects many people".Álvaro was a troublemaker. He always was, even before he was ill. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) robbed him of his movement, but not of his ability - to paraphrase Pope Francis - to "make a mess". Tell that to Don Enrico! To record the videos of his weekly homilies - entitled "The Gospel to the sick" - with the help of his friends Mariano and Marco, he would prepare the best "location" and the whole set for the staging, without taking into account that later the parish priest would go crazy looking for the image of the Madonna that had been moved or the blue chasuble without which he could not celebrate Mass.
He was determined to redecorate the hall attached to the church where he spent most of the day receiving people and asked a friend to give him a painting. You had to see the faces of the other priests when the lady showed up with Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss". On another occasion, when a kind parishioner offered to bring her something from southern Italy, she did not think of anything better than asking for "sanguinaccio", thinking it would be similar to Spanish blood sausage, without suspecting that the good woman would have to deal in the black market because the sale of this macabre pork product has been forbidden since 1992.
I can't forget when I went to see him in the middle of the Roman "ferragosto" and, when I asked him what he wanted me to bring as a snack, he asked me for some olives stuffed with anchovies. The illness, as we can see, did not spoil his appetite.
Hands up whoever went to visit him and found that he had given an appointment at the same time to two other people. Or whoever was left wandering the aisles of the church because an unexpected friend had arrived for a confession or a consoling chat.
Last November 1st I went to the hospital where he was admitted for a medical operation and he asked me to give him a ride pushing the chair on the terrace. It was forbidden, but we both had fun with that little prank. He was then able to contemplate the green meadows surrounding that hospital and the horizon line, while the sunlight and the breeze hit his face.
When he couldn't enjoy them in nature, he used to watch videos on YouTube of Turkish shepherds walking through the mountains with their flocks, or drone shots of Noja, the village on the Cantabrian coast where he spent the summers of his childhood.
Alvaro was in love with life. In the homily he preached to his family on his 57th birthday, in 2021, he told us: "Love is the center of Christianity. We must love. We must love life. It was a preaching made flesh. And not just any flesh, but patient, which adds even more merit to his capacity for enjoyment. At times it was not easy.
The last season, when ALS was already affecting his speech and breathing capacity, he had a harder time smiling. He even had his dark night. But he did not give up. He told his sister, who went to visit him in Rome from Madrid, fourteen days before he died: "I am tempted to let myself die, but I ask God for the grace to cling to life to give Him glory with my illness as long as He wants".
Surely the most monumental tangle was to ask his brothers to bring his mother, ill with Parkinson's disease and recently convalescent, to the Eternal City last July, to say goodbye to her. He asked if there would be an 1% chance of making that trip happen, and to that 1% they "hung on". The ability to raise a ruckus either comes from the cradle or becomes contagious.
Don Santiago, who has devoted himself body and soul to caring for him in recent months, in a message to the family written last Christmas, said that "as Alvaro has dedicated himself to making life difficult and giving himself to others, he is now reaping, in the affection of the people, a little of the fruits of what he has sown".
The cabin of the Marx Brothers
Mariano, who in addition to being a "filmmaker" of Alvaro's homilies is also a cardiovascular surgeon, commented that as a doctor it was difficult for him to accept the fact that his friend's illness had no cure. So he set out to make him smile, as the best alternative therapy. He and Marco more than achieved this goal the last time I saw Alvaro. The parish hall that morning was the closest thing to the Marx Brothers' stateroom: first Angelina, a nurse, arrived, accompanied by a podiatrist to give him a pedicure and manicure.
Alessandro, another nurse, came to start the IV, improvising an IV drip with an upside-down hanger attached to a cassock hanger. Veronique, a new caregiver, who was on duty, tried to help by moving the oxygen cylinder.
Another parishioner and friend, Giuliana, kept her company while recording the scene with her cell phone. Then Mariano and Marco arrived with the fixed idea of cutting her hair. Marco handed him the clippers while Mariano held the respirator. In the background we could hear The Barber of Seville. Giovanni, the sacristan, burst in with a mirror and placed it in front of Álvaro so he could see how it was looking. There we found his sister with her husband and cousin, not believing our eyes.
Anyone who had seen us from the outside would have thought we were crazy. But that day we robbed God of a piece of heaven, of that heaven in which Álvaro would enter -through the big door- just two weeks later. From there he will continue doing what he did best here on earth: a big mess. Surely Don Enrico has some advice to pass on to St. Peter. By the way, we got a Monet landscape to replace the Klimt.
