ABSTRACT
When my doctor, faced with my test results in which figures and ratios indicated that the rules of the biological games played by OKT4 and OKT8 had been broken, pronounced for the first time (and very carefully) the letters AZT as a prescription for my case, I reacted with depression. At first I resisted. After all, I was so well, feeling so secure since I had overcome the first infections…. I was not willing to go through the rite of passage that the beginning of the AZT phase represents (or represented to me)…. Before the first oblong pill, dressed in its dark blue strip, I made a toast. I was alone in the kitchen, and I said to myself: this is the beginning of the end. And I thought, in my arena, a fatalist gladiator, morituri salutant…. And, what do you know, everything happened as if I had taken a pill, a pill of any medicinal drug. Nothing creaked, the celestial orbits did not inflect, the floor kept its indifferent rigidity. For some days I kept on taking the drug as if I had been absorbing the Grail that Our Father had compassionately tried to keep from me. Then I realized that I was not taking AZT. I was swallowing, pill after pill, the disturbed metaphors of the medicine; I was swallowing a unique ideology crystallized in the abbreviation and in the news that had been announced about it, rather than in the chemical formula that, a priori, should be restricting the devastating action of HIV on my cells.
