Planes. Oceans. An island. Sight, the sea. Middle. A mountain.
Suddenly a parenthesis.
( )
(Here is a brutal event. Fear. Soledad.)
A parenthesis that resembles a window cutting out the sky. A window without horizon. A window through which we glimpse the outline of death and disease. There is a simple plant decorating a balcony, standing up with no more metaphysics than a little bit of earth, another little water and some light. Simply. So alive.
A parenthesis that can be a small universe that, far from romanticizing the pandemic, looks at her head on, survives her. Because the poetic does not hide the ugliness, neither does it deform; accompanies her.
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.
That's why we love life narrated: the horizons spoken by others are beautiful. Thus we recover the human that we are losing in the militancy. We hear prayers like stories, we count everyday acts as if they were messages of love.
The words of the others are now ocean.
The words of the others; new lands.
The accents are beautiful architectures and the words that we do not understand the streets of any unknown city.
That's why we write. That's why we read. To try to sublimate all this that happens to us
The ride is a midnight call.
The trip is an unexpected email: "Tell me, how are you".
The journey is now to ask someone who you think you know what was the favorite dish in childhood, and because.
The journey is to run your fingers through the cracks in the table after dinner, as if they were rivers, that's.
Right now we are millions of puzzled souls populating a planet
You have to listen more than ever. You have to pay more attention. Words are trail. Stories are earth when life is suspended.
Because right now we are millions of puzzled souls populating a planet. We name "disease", “soledad”, "what", in unison, in different languages. Some speak of certainty and others claim that all certainty is a lie. That's why we have to keep traveling, so, sideways, so, narrating or listening. Groping in a parenthesis that forces us to notice clumsiness, in the stumbling blocks, in the slight stutter. We live in a fragile moment in which one has to relearn how to inhabit the earth, to avoid being meat exposed to wolves.
That's why these intimate postcards, from different parts of the world, that tell us about the universal of this troubled time.
To travel, perhaps.
Or to make with the fragments of life a constellation of loneliness.
Maybe.
Maybe. Italiano.
"It was spring and I was six years old. I blew out the candles next to mom and dad. Out of desire I asked my father, Italian taxi driver, he did not eat it 2020. Dad used to tell my mother every night: "Lucy, 2020 eat us ”.
That year was that of childhood, let me tell you. The adults were all short of breath, suddenly it seemed that they had forgotten the rules of the game. But then they looked at us, they knelt down and became real playmates. The house was filled with "how" and "why". The "yeses" and the "noes" gave way to the "maybe". Magnificent childhood that.
I remember going down to throw out the garbage and take the opportunity to kick the ball one or two. One day the police came, and believe me, the police for the children of immigrants is the greatest fear. We have grown up hearing true horror stories from police states. The fact is that they stopped us and we were left with the expression of "La Piedad", so, watching excuses die in our arms. A boy said: "We were just playing. Is it wrong to play?”One of the cops hesitated: “Sí, good, in. Maybe. Look guys, go home. " And we went home, stunned that our parents' greatest fear had uttered a perhaps.
We were Sandokans turned into pirates. Enjoying the bits of chaos that fell here and there as the grown-ups tried to hold up the collapsing world.
The world fell. And it made a ghastly noise.
My mother filled the house with pictures of the Virgin of Loreto. Black and beautiful, like her. "I beg your pardon if we have done wrong", juraba. Me, my imagination overheated from so much confinement. Every time I imagined growing up and with a girlfriend, I saw myself with a girl with the face of a virgin. Years later I fell in love with Sarah, as black and as beautiful as Loreto, but as a virgin I had nothing, Thank God.
The smartest of us were the ones who never lost our curiosity, still locked between four walls
The fact is that we were children in a time when hugging, find, doing theater and playing in the street made up the forbidden. We made a holy book of the important in our windows. Going to buy bread was the biggest prize; a short pause between isolations. The light things in life began to fall, like old tiles. It stopped caring who was an immigrant and who was not. "What will they say" stopped caring because the others weren't there to see us. Educational TV shows taught us the most important lesson: learning did not reside in numbers or letters. Learning turned out to be the voice of the teacher, his gray hair, her spotless shoes. Learning was the way to school stepping on puddles. Learning was to hide the discomfort caused by the binge on sweets. The one who memorized the best was not smarter. The smartest of us were the ones who never lost our curiosity, still locked between four walls.
People died. Go if they died. Our childhood was tangled with loss. We asked our parents if tomorrow we could go to the park to play. They said: perhaps.
Maybe.
Notice, tenderness fits in that word. How lucky to grow between maybe and not between absolute truths. Our childhood was a tight hug. Our childhood was the pleasure of seeing our parents say: "Do not know", while holding hands to learn the new world together. "
Foreigners
Foreign. German.
Second day of quarantine in a small German town. Fiory mash fermented sorghum to prepare injera. The kitchen smells of his native Eritrea; a bag with dried chili peppers reminds him of his childhood. Suddenly, his son Lamek bursts in full of energy and asks him if they can go to school today.
Not. No. Today we also stay at home.
The child picks up a spoon and tastes the legume puree that is chilled on the counter. He lets out a laugh and leaves before his mother can reprimand him..
Quarantine in the promised land. Fiory can't help but remember that three years ago she was imprisoned with her two children in an Islamic State jail, in libya. Remember you raised your two year old son in a cell. He remembers that he gave birth to his daughter in the dark and squatting and in silence, to not disturb.
Now the stillness sounds different. Fresh air comes in through the window; smells like a mixture of wet asphalt and hot bread. Try to hollow out the bad memory and cut it together with the garlic; so, minced, minced, smaller. But it doesn't go away. He only gets his hands stained. Just make the walls smell.
This time isolation saves. This time the isolation is gentle and sweet, of full stomachs
Remember to cradle your baby while singing songs in Tigrinya to the eldest son. What was the one that his son repeated without stopping? Ah, yes:
“Semira, semira hija de Asmara.
Closed the house door. Where was?
I went looking for her and I couldn't find her.
Then I saw her in the woods by the lake.
Adieu, goodbye, goodbye, I leave you.
Adieu, goodbye, goodbye, I leave you.
Adieu, goodbye, goodbye, I leave you.
Someone more fortunate than me will have you. "
They survived playing. They survived singing. He fought the density of fear with his ancestral language, which was sorcery, that it was half sentence half pastime.
He recognizes the quarantine as his lineage. Fiory knows about confinements. He goes to the entrance, dodging children's toys. That pleasure. That pleasure of reaching the door and standing. Caress the lock. Open and close. That calm that the escape offers.
When children get bored they read pony books and pretend they are firefighters. They drink apple juice. They sing in german. They have forgotten those two years of darkness, suffocation.
This time isolation saves. This time the isolation is gentle and sweet, of full stomachs. This time she owns time. She is the one who closes the door. Cauterizing evil. Relieved that her children cry from boredom, and not from fear.
Beauty Meirong
Beauty. Mandarin Chinese.
Ingredients
-A cup of sushi rice. I always use the same, the one with the broken edge. The one that breaks my lips. The one that hurts like a waning moon. -A cup and a quarter of water. Measuring is actually a hoax. 3245 deaths from coronavirus in China. Maybe more, but deception works because small numbers alleviate. The fewer the dead the farther seems the possibility of it happening to us.
-Four onions, halved. You left me for being chinese. You left me because you didn't believe in interracial relationships. Suddenly my slanted eyes scare people. The name of my country scares people. All the weight of my ancestry frees me from fools.
-300 grams of broccoli chopped. At the borders there are thistles that cannot be pulled out. This love badly cut by the stem.
-Four tablespoons of oil. They said something about “damn chinese”, and you let yourself be impregnated.
-200 grams of tofu cut into cubes. Love is a kind of unity. You don't cut it to pieces to follow the rules. Love should be dissent.
-Four tablespoons of soy sauce. What do you know about china, anyway. Beyond labels and rice grains. What will you know about beauty and centuries. What will you know about gastronomy or Tao.
-A pinch of ginger. The abomination of raciality stinging in the throat.
Preparation
1. Rinse the rice until the water runs clear. Drain it and place it in a pot with water. The Jing turns cloudy when mixed with the Wei, that's what my grandmother used to say. Even though it never left the factory. Despite dedicating his entire life to the shrimp head business. My grandmother couldn't buy her freedom, but he spoke of rivers to calm the spirit. Brave. Nice.
2. Cook covered and over high heat. When it comes to a boil, lower the heat to a minimum and cook for 12 minutes without uncovering. Reservation. I have enough provisions for this confinement. Rice grains fall on the counter sounding like good rain. I'm afraid of dying. Fortify the city. The common good is barbarism. It is a simulation of not being. Outside haze and wind. Outside the quail pairs and sharp bamboo poles. Outside life celebrating our absence.
Purity is dead weight in the ocean. In the end every grave is common
3. Sauté the onions and broccoli in the oil, over high heat. Add the tofu, ginger and soy sauce. Serve over rice. We are good dead in times of famine. So upright. So clean. The great banquets will return. We will remember that there was a time when we all took on the mask. And inside we were rotting.
To survive you have to mix. This is how science works, the kitchen, the blood and the seed.
You don't believe in interracial relationships, you say.
China gives us panic, you say.
Purity is dead weight in the ocean.
In the end every grave is common.
