You have to listen more than ever. You have to pay more attention. Words are trail. Stories are earth when life is suspended.
And in that survival we manufacture trips through words. That's why we write. That's why we read. To try to sublimate all this that happens to us, that sometimes we are not even able to name.
Me
Peace. World. Russian
Bum. Bum. Bum. A young woman's heart is racing in space.
Someone says: "They will forget about us."
Someone says: "And if the pandemic ends life on earth ..."
Someone says: "And,and,and, we will be the first cannibals of the International Space Station ".
Katia knows how to pretend calm, like a good cosmonaut, but suddenly he imagines bitch Laika, suddenly you feel a kind of ... They say there is no feeling that the Russian language cannot express, but how to name this end of the world, this helplessness of not being able to do anything while down there humanity collapses. Down there life in buried reliquaries: that toothache. A stain in the sink. Who gets to wash the dishes. The first binge. I want the divorce. Not. I will love you forever. Not. Fart. The purity of the end.
They say there is no feeling that the Russian language cannot express, but how to name this end of the world
Bum. Bum. Bum. From above you cannot see the deaths. Just the globe.
Bum. Bum. Bum. If mom and dad die, their absence will not alter the speed of this orbit. Bum. Bum. Bum. Our eyes are shaped like black holes.
Bum. Bum. Bum. So is God; absent and theoretical. In the heights watching and unable to affect. His hands do not reach. Our hands do not reach. Here everything is beautiful because we do not understand anything. Bum. Bum. Bum. Now they no longer look up to the sky, they have cut our umbilical cord.
Bum. Bum. Bum. The universe is limitless, the earth too, also organisms, every longing, all fleeting.
Bum. Bum. Bum. The increasingly blue earth. More and more empty. Suddenly there are no screams. And up, forgotten, the sentinels of death, running out of voice on the radio.
But the world no longer listens, nature takes its space.
Bum. Bum. Bum. Absolute peace is deafening.
Basant spring
Spring (Hindi)
Don Andrés says that in life you have to fall in love well. The rest can be made regular, even bad. But love is loved with desire and courage, or better not do it at all. Don Andrés spent his life on the high seas; captain, nomadic, seagull or cloud.
When the ship docked in port, the crew of drunks and drunks fussed with bars and bodies, they swore eternal love to the flesh and the dry land, but they always went to sea again. But, Don Andrés, He was looking for the fastest way to be able to send a telegram or a letter to his wife, to the love of his life.
Then he would quickly return to his cabin, felt comfortable in small spaces, only his eyes needed the immensity.
He wrote letters taking care of his penmanship: in the distance love is made in ink. I avoided calls; the interference made him dizzy.
He met his wife in an Indian port. She was the nurse who relieved his indigestion, and was surprised to read his last name. He explained that "Basanta" meant "spring" in Hindi.. He joked that this was a sign that the captain had missed something in those lands..
Before you leave, the woman stopped to caress the back of the crew bitch. Said a docile dog has a soul that aspires to save itself. So he wished the animal a successful reincarnation. They got married a week.
Widower, on land and isolated in full state of alarm, I spent hours looking out the window
His wife was a kind of beginning and end in one body. Everything made sense when I looked at her. And she understood her journey as luck; I looked forward to seeing him again to hear the descriptions of the people, the talk and the smells of other parts of the world. Don Andrés, I barely set foot off the deck of the ship, wonderful events were invented for her, full of lights and mysteries.
Decades later, widower, on land and isolated in full state of alarm, I spent hours looking out the window. The streets only walked dogs with melancholic owners who looked at the sun and took a breath as if they had forgotten to breathe. Don Andrés mentally separated the docile dogs from the more mischievous, and imagined their possible reincarnations. I also watched spring. Basant. India. Add.
Spring. India. The ocean. The woman of his life. All the memories mixed in a body affected by high tides. I no longer played the television; it was full of voices that did not know how to speak of loneliness without impostures, and made reality a grotesque and deafening spectacle.
He also did not like to lie down; from the bed I could only see a bedside table, with a glass of water, a tissue and pills like stars. I didn't want to die lying there. I did not want that to be the final landscape of a traveler.
He preferred to live on his ghost ship. He preferred to live in his pilgrim mind, full of salt. I preferred a surprise shipwreck. He did not care when. The love of his life, Before die, said he would reincarnate in the sea, to accompany you. The quarantine had trapped Don Andrés in an inland city, So I would turn on the kitchen faucet and kiss the water, knowing that it would reach the ocean, that would get to her.
The captain dies alone, onshore. The captain dies alone and loving well.
Wah
Go (Nootka, indigenous language of Canada)
David was the youngest of a large family. He was born in a Francoist Spain chiseled in the image and likeness of an enraged God. "The little one is for the
Church", his mother repeated. At twelve they took him, with his v-neck sweater and a new suitcase, to the seminary in Vigo. The mother crossed herself and murmured I don't know what about Christ and the maternal sacrifice as she turned her back on him and left.
At 14, David, decided that he could not waste his life trying to understand the consecration of bread. David wanted to eat the bread. I wanted to make the bread. He escaped from the seminary and embarked for America on a freighter.
In America, learned the most important thing in life: how to clean, how to fix and how to love. At 18 met anna, Jewish and free. The girl was crying in a pizzeria because some bastard had crushed her heart. David swore not to swear anything to him. And so began the journey together; without fear of losing or getting lost.
In America, learned the most important thing in life: how to clean, how to fix and how to love
In Israel they had children. And the art came. Anna ,made jewelry. David, carved. They lived with the children in a large warehouse that held materials, light, air and friends. When violence and fear closed doors and windows, they decided it was time to go.
"Behold, the beauty of life is this swing ", David explained to his children. "The world is vast and there is always room for the space that a body occupies".
They came to Canada, with corduroy pants, because of the cold. But that icy wind was unknown.
-"Let's see how many years we need to make shivering a habit"- David proposed.
Decades passed. They found success in their careers. David turned to indigenous history to ferment his ideas. Anna treated minerals as guardians of all the wisdom in the world. The children grew up and left. Corduroy pants were still intact. Love smoothed winters and harmonized summers.
Death was the most radical way of leaving. Suddenly the disease gave new meanings to the whole life
Suddenly the whole world started to get sick. After to die. Anna fell ill with cancer amid the pandemic. For the first time they could not leave; one plays for eternity until the body cracks. Cancer, the virus; two extraordinary overlapping and lucid events, speeding up the end.
Some indigenous myths imagined their gods under the sea, not in heaven. The Skaay people claimed that the gods refer to humans as "xhaaydla xhitiit", useless surface birds. "We are useless surface birds that dedicate their entire lives starting", David said.
Death was the most radical way of leaving. Suddenly the disease gave new meanings to the whole life.
Isolation and they loving each other; perennial bodies that leave. Withered bodies surrounded by precious stones, unfinished sculptures, and those corduroy pants folded on the dresser.
He
Finnish pronoun for equality.
I've been in and out of jail for thirty years. I think that one gets used to restrictions more easily than to freedom. Freedom terrifies me. I believe that man invented God so as not to have to deal with the responsibility of being and already. I don't have god, but I have the possibility of going back to prison when I no longer know which way to go. The fat mess and they lock me up again. And so, confined, like a mouse in its cage, I sleep great.
You become addicted to quarantines, eye. Not being able to run around all day, the impossibility of fleeing, hooks up. Suddenly you have time to think and, damn it, you think. And then everything starts to rebuild from within. Clear, that here in jail they feed you, there are people out there losing everything, and on an empty stomach there is no introspection worth it.
Suddenly you have time to think and, damn it, you think. And then everything starts to rebuild from within
The first time I stepped foot in this hole I was the most macho of all. But i was cured. I was cured thanks to philosophy, to meat and love. And it is that I spent years with the Finn as a cellmate; a boy who had ruined his life for a fool, a kid with the look of a pony and trembling muscles.
One night, watching a movie in the screening room, the image of two guys kissing came out. Kissing no, eating their snouts like someone who eats a mango without a knife. I got up and left. I was so grossed out.
That night, the Finn commented that it was funny how big men could hold up images of stacked corpses, bodies jumping through the air, viscera, feces and death, but nevertheless a kiss between two men disarmed the most macho of males. I told him to shut up, but he insisted that all this had to do with the threat of identity, and that perhaps the human being did not deserve to limit himself to gender categories. I wanted to strangle him and make love to him at the same time.
I started studying philosophy at a distance, because over time you have to do more than cut tomatoes and clean toilets, that's what the center's therapist said. The more I studied the less I knew who I was. Suddenly the lack of freedom also freed me from the need to define myself. I realized that the only element that really made me identify as a man was not my male anatomy, but the privilege. The delight of the body could be the same in a man as in a woman, but nevertheless being a man I faced less dangers, less discrimination than women.
The Finn told me that in their language they had a pronoun that referred to equality: He. He sounded so nice to me that I had sex with him and then I fell in love and then I forgot that we were both men. I let go of the self-imposed obligation to order and categorize the natural. Love and sex became slippery concepts that fled from any attempt at territoriality.
In confinement I'm just a neutral pronoun that does and undo, that occupies a space but does not judge
In prison, in confinement, premium what gives pleasure. In confinement I'm just a neutral pronoun that does and undo, that occupies a space but does not judge, that lets nature be.
On freedom, I hold on until someone screams: "Fagot, that you are a fag!Then I know I don't belong in the open world. Because there is so much freedom that everyone is half crazy, thinking they are little gods. The immensity that lives believing that the world is what one travels is so terrifying, when in reality the world is just the little bit of space we occupy. And nothing more.
Coffee
Coffee break. (With people you love.) Swedish.
-"Go, which is like a snack but in Swedish "- laughed Pili.
-”No, no”- Wilma protested between laughs.
-"We'll see, coffee and company. God's Lifetime Snack, Wilma, she is. ”
Spoon noise. A laugh. The steam from the coffee fogging up the glasses.
-”No, in; it is a break to share a coffee with your loved ones. "
-"And you hate me or what. Most holy god, what a mania with differences " – protesta Pili.
-"That in the end every neighbor's son does the same; a little cheese around here, a cookie over there, coffee and cake and everyone get together making us very fat. "
-”Vale, voucher, Second, snack, coffee, what difference does it make. Pass me a little bit of cream cake. "
A cough.
Three weeks later, the environment in the Nursing Home where Pili and Wilma lived had radically changed.. There were no snacks. No coffees. No laughs.
A nurse protected with gloves and a mask enters Pili's room to leave her some medicines.
-"How is Wilma?Pili asks.
-"Not well"- the nurse answers.
-"Tell him I miss our fikas" -asks Pili, writing the term on a napkin.
-And that always, always, the important thing was the company. "
-"I don't think I hear it."
-"Please, tell him. Let fika listen, let that word stay in your mind. "
Then silence. Just a teaspoon stirring the coffee.
The important thing was always the meeting. In all the languages of the world.
