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©2003 |
Red summer
We were near a harbor, it was hot, we were walking arm in arm as people tend to walk in small towns; the shadow from our bodies marked the proximity of noon, its vegetal slowness. Between that mother and the daughter I then was, everything
seemed too close. The opposite of “We have nothing to say”,
which drove Mersault to place his mother in an asylum eighty kilometers
from Algiers. Later, I went to another city, and then another one and
years passed but not my love for that woman. She knew the value of parody and at the same time was an expert in the intimate. Hearth of epitaphs. By a miracle, nothing cynical possessed
her. Thanks to a clear naive style, she was devoted to the science
which cannot be domesticated. As if she had watched shuddering, until
she could see that marriage was deceit, celibacy desolation; to be a
woman was a time bomb, to prostitute oneself, absurd, to depend on
schedules, obscene. Let us return to that birthday: between the pier and the water
there were few meters of distance. I still perceive the sound of the
surf hitting the haunches May be the sun is the title of the song -whose lyric
I hardly remember having written- that one of my boyfriends added to
the blues repertory of his band. Memory as palimpsest. For a long time I thought, that one of
the two of us had deviated from the objective that morning, but I never
knew whom. With three or four phrases of some poets, Nietzsche as a spiritual guide and a fur coat, I went to study in a city a hundred times bigger than the city where I had been born. Creature of flesh. A few months later, initiated into the times, when there were still no legacies of that nature, drunk with the sky, I felt that I was the daughter of a hippie. Blessed by an apocryphal freedom, oscillating between the ideological universe of permanent revolution and magic veils of mescaline, my vision of the events was surreal. Useless to add anecdotes: what others believed to be exotic, seemed inevitable to me. When speaking, my tongue clipped events as scissors do, introducing minutiae into the bronchial tree, so that what was said became unsaid, stuffed or bitten, leaving the story in suspense, unfinished like The Thousand and One Nights, but I only claimed to tell one night, in the same way that today I return to the misunderstanding of May be the Sun, faithful to the rhythm, the confusion, the mistakes. Facing the difficulty of detaching myself from the fog --oneiric, diaphanous, fluent and obstinate logic-- I chose to measure its nature intercalating the cultural slivers. I should have placed myself before the evidence of my raving to convert the paradoxical into the intelligible. Slowly, like someone with two languages, one raw and the other cooked, the raw at high flame became my fictional flesh. Meager flesh lacking wings. Brine in the syntax. Blake said: “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.” Words that once turned to the pier, condemns such avoidance. As if there were non-retrospective torments. As if the sleeping desires had the density of a remora, a barnacle, preventing our advance through the night, through the pestilence, to nurture its crusts and to make the mixture of grief and kickshaws vibrate in the bunker. That morning, another topic must have attracted our attention
because we left the harbor to go in search of my gift and a record by
Kurt Weill. Having always loved felines, even if it were summer, I
chose without hesitation. I did not want fragments. I had to see the
piece with which they would make my coat. The fur jacket, reaching the waist, covered just the chest and
the back. He promised to give me the paws and the tail. For What? The furrier began to admonish me about my eccentric taste. Soon you will regret it! and after his stubborn insistence in measuring the armhole, in the end he agreed to sell me a mannequin. When two weeks later I went to the furrier’s, she could not come with me because she was in the waiting room of a specialist in undiagnosable illnesses. That type of doctor whose expertise relies on the patient’s openness. Too many words and uncertain schedules. Perhaps she did not know, and neither did I, but we both should have suspected that this man was mesmerizing her with his conjectures. I think my liking of psychoanalysis comes from that guru, a mixture of an archaeologist and a detective of the soul. With scarce spatial experience I wandered past seven o’clock in the evening. Fixed camera. Fading of the melodrama. Pure optical situation.
Time image. Vast exterior shots. Empty, sparse, neutral spaces. A
montage of simple cuts. A Japanese movie was being shown in which a man was despised by his children. --We are obliged to go to school. Thanks to a touching tolerance, after several outrages, the harmony of the family was restored. Samsara, roulette of the malaise for the sake of well-being. The harbor, the furrier’s, the cinema and the waiting
room --to which I returned with fear because the film had lasted much
longer than expected-- were one hour away from the town in which we
lived. When I arrived at the doctor’s office, he was still seeing
patients. The glass door was opened onto the garden, giving an illusion
of freshness. Lateness is acquitted. A shy schoolgirl lifting her arm.
I tried to imagine the studio but I could not. Any representation is a
clot. It is better not to think. Let us see, let us see, some distraction. The reversible myth of grace. Here are some magazines . . . The majority of the articles stressed the grief of the president. Masses, statues, homages. Christmas without Evita, sadness in those who travel to Chapadmalal, Bariloche, Río Tercero, caravans of orphans, national mourning. --These magazines are two years old. Do you not have any new ones?--I asked the secretary. Just then she told me that my mother had left. It was late at night, embracing the mannequin, and with the
enormous box unwrapped, I began to walk toward the furrier’s
knowing that it would surely be closed. Color evolves in darkness. I
tried to reject the ideas that invaded me one by one. I had a dialogue
with those missiles, I deactivated them. To each attack I responded
with a defense until they multiplied and I decided to stop fighting. He did it as though he were measuring. The centimeter as an excuse. Eyes above eyes. As serious as a judge. Loose phrases. I, like a grape on his lips, tasting sweet. --These schoolgirls believe they are so important. Your mother is much more beautiful than you. I crossed the street in case the furrier was at the entrance of his shop. With regret he found that the garment did not require any alteration. The neon sign was lit. The shops and the stores in the neighborhood had closed. No movement. Few people. Big cities have stricter customs, you walk along sidewalks or the coast. Suddenly I experienced a special pleasure. I had the feeling that my life until then had been an endless string of mostly expected events, a stiff ribbon, where time was anchored. That night carrying the only objects that I wanted to have, I had broken the circuit. I knew the dimensions of myself, as loose as ever but now free of the deceit of company. Some day I am going to travel far, very far. A lyric moment
suddenly crushed by the harassment of my body. Garnet hibiscus flower.
Malaise of survival. I returned alone on the final bus of the night. At last I reached the station, where I should have gone when the secretary told me that my mother was no longer there. Mountains of obligations? No, a flake, a snowflake. Vain and unavoidable vanity. Longing to grow up. Wisdom of dependence. Snow on the bars of your cage: Felis Pardalis. The time to depart will come. Tragic light. The birds began to celebrate the grief. Only in the absence of blood ties, facing a time out of time, the engine that feeds and poisons will bite its pulleys until captivity is shredded. The station was full of young soldiers tanned by the rigor of the sun. Alert expression, absurd to the core. The station was full of young soldiers who would later be characters. Anatomy of destiny, steel and honey, subtle transitions. A story for each character: Juan Cruz digging a grave and dying with the passing luck that is called voluptuousness. Thirsty and unkempt. Exhausted, clumsy and confused. Without any erotic experience or gendered cunning. Given the charm of a face that looked one in the eyes, but not for a moment the victim of kinship nor the vices of social class, I reached the ticket box and waited. Someone understood that I was lost, someone paid for my ticket. An act without strategy: to sleep. Not on the lips of a poet but on the chest of a soldier who had crab lice in his eyebrows. I swear that the contact of genitalia with genitalia is another puritan invention. It is the angels who contaminate. My savior woke me a little before arriving. He lived near the
road with his peasant family. He took the mannequin down and put it on
the seat. Chivalry is not improvised. A useful warning. Years later the soldier became Leopold: the son of a farmer and an idiot. Leopold will use the coat as a pretext for the recounting of a duel. Dressed in white pistols, godfathers. Two grave faces at twelve meters away. It matters little that lovers enter a kind of future. I crossed the square deciding not to give explanations. The belfry was mute. She had tried to avoid it, she walked along the streets
looking for me. She went to the station, to the furrier’s, to
hell. She could not believe it: she was alone, threatened. Instead of
waiting she preferred to fill out a report. She spoke with my father,
she said I had run away. Sad cunning. In a similar situation I would
not have done the same. I received that which she did not dare ask of
me, disloyalty: she wanted my excuses, my lies. What is the argument
that justifies an accusation? With this thought my hand remembered the gesture of crumpling the movie program. I did not want to prove anything. Elemental verbs. The image of The Children of Tokyo came to my mind. In those times I had not yet learned to grasp the great effects of small acts. Text published in Women and Power in Argentine Literature by Gwendolyn Díaz, University of Texas Press, 2007. |