“the messenger”

“the messenger” is Elena’s name for dopamine, which she imagines carrying the brain’s instructions to her feet. The expression gives a concrete figure to an invisible process in Parkinson’s disease, while also marking the gap between what Elena understands through lived bodily experience and what she cannot make her body do.

Medical Explanation and Metaphor

When Dr Benegas first explained the disease to Elena and Rita, he described changes to nerve cells that stop producing dopamine. Elena understood the explanation through a simple sequence: her brain orders her feet to move, but the order reaches them only if dopamine carries it there. She thought of dopamine as “the messenger.” The metaphor translates a technical account into an image of a message sent from one part of the body to another, with movement dependent on its delivery.

That image belongs to Elena’s own effort to name what has happened to her. She calls the illness “Herself” and imagines her brain as “the dethroned king,” no longer able to command her feet. The messenger is therefore neither the ruler nor the force that has displaced him: it is the necessary intermediary between a command and an action. Yet Elena’s feet remain unresponsive, making the supposed route of communication felt through its failure.

Repetition, Medication, and Waiting

Elena returns to the expression as part of a private recitation. She silently repeats street names and the figures of her illness, breaking them into pairs: “Herself and the messenger; the messenger and the king, the king and Herself.” The sequence makes language a way to occupy the time while she waits for her feet to move. Its order can be reversed and repeated, unlike the bodily command that still does not take effect.

She adds dopamine and Levodopa to this recitation, noticing that the words share “dopa” but acknowledging that she is only guessing at their relationship. The wordplay does not replace medical knowledge; it shows Elena working with the fragments she can grasp. What matters immediately is that the pill dissolves, moves through her body, and may enable the message to reach her feet. The messenger thus names both a medical mechanism and the hoped-for arrival of movement, while the waiting makes clear that neither naming nor willing can guarantee it.

Memory and Narrative Significance

The image also connects the present journey to an earlier train trip into Buenos Aires, when Rita accompanied Elena to a meeting at the Hospital de Clínicas. Elena remembers that Rita sat beside her and helped her put on her jacket sleeve, then became impatient when Elena struggled to board. Rita pushed her through the train door. In retrospect, Elena’s language of a messenger arriving with Levodopa “in time for every battle” sits beside the memory of Rita’s physical assistance: treatment and companionship both figure as forms of help, but neither makes Elena’s body wholly obedient.

After Rita’s death, Elena repeats “the messenger” among the words she can carry with her, alongside Levodopa, street names, and the figures through which she makes sense of illness. The expression gives her a small, revisable vocabulary for an experience that medical explanation alone has not made intelligible. Its recurrence also binds the practical rhythm of taking medication to memory: the messenger is imagined as moving through the body, while Rita, who once sat beside Elena on the train, is now present only in recollection.