The door closes. The street is silent. Sundays are slow days. The cherry trees are blossoming. We walk and laugh. We walk and laugh again. Up that hill they are flying kites. “I want to get one” I whisper to her ear. It is windy and I can see the carcases of my words go away. They are floating around us, threaded to our kissing mouths only by the silence that lingers between us. The hill is steep and the city shines beyond the park.
The table is empty.
The window is open. There is a patch of blue.
An open book lies besides a glass of wine on a side shelf.
A golden light pours out from a door. A candle burns in another room.
The air is clean. The sails inflate and deflate with the breathing of the breeze.
The sea is cold, and its waters shine clean and blue under the sail boats.
Her body sits, straight on the chair. She wears a white hat and a blue dress. Her lips are half open as if a smile had just flown away from her mouth.
A seagull cuts the air with its silvery wings. It flies away slowly, and its distant cries fade as its wings take it far away.
I jumped into the river and swam to the other shore.
When I left the water a pair of fins had emerged on my back.
The pedestrians looked at me with fear. I didn’t know where to go, where to walk. I fainted. ‘
When I woke up, there was a light on top of me, and I could see nothing but its bright rays of white.
I touched my back with my left arm. There was a long scar running down my spine.
The hospital sheets where white, but the room had blue curtains dividing me from the others.
I went by the water. The wind was calm, and the river flowed down its course with a steady stream of green liquid.
I jumped.
Why do I write? The act of writing, is that of leaving a mark of ink on the page. The page that glitters, white and empty, gets filled with the images, the emotions, the colours, the ideas that populate my imagination and give shape to the landscapes of my inside.
I write to forget, to empty the vessel of my soul of the ghosts of its memories. I write because I feel. And I feel. I write, I shout, I feel. There are lips and sights, and eyes that looked at me with a smile and those who looked at me with a faraway glance. And I write to capture them all, to lock them on the white of the blank page. And when I succeed, when the letters carve a prison of words, I am free. I am free.
The dirt. The grass that moves, in tiny inflections of its shape with the soft movement of the breeze. The landscape is wide. A few trees scattered in the distance move from one side to the other. Their colour is dark green, and they form a circle of deeper greens that surrounds the fields.
I call my name. The sound bounces on the walls of the grotto and bounces again and again on the walls of the cave. I hear my name repeated, magnified, amplified and finally scattered into pieces reaching back to me. The water is cold. The cold permeates through my skin.
The dirt falls on my head. I have been lying in this coffin for a few days, and the leakage lets pass a constant flow of sand into my box. I can’t move. The sand doesn’t let me move my head. I try to shout, but my throat says nothing, and my lungs, dead, cannot pump the little air that stands between me and the ceiling of my crypt.
A spade breaks the seal. I cannot move. The sand has covered with a thin layer of silica the enamel of my bones.
“I am sleeping with a man that looks like you.” she replied.
They killed him.
The bullet pierced his forehead and he fell from the podium and into the mass of people that cheered below.
There was a silence. The crowd kept quiet.
And the TV monitors spat, to the dense air of a summer evening, the news of the assassination.
An acid cry escaped my throat. The TV shop was cluttered with people revolving around the few monitors that were turned on. I believed in him. I believed in his words and his speech. I believed, I cried, and someone pat my back.
He was a man. For his forehead bled, and his lungs stopped breathing. I thought, while walking out of the store; I thought he would bring change, and from thinking about it again and again, I thought he was change itself. I thought many things. I realized everyone thought many things. Then I remembered the bullet, the improbable bullet that pierced Keneddy’s skull in Dallas, and I felt scared. How was it possible that HE was killed. How could it be possible?
We all felt cold. We felt a big wave of chilled wind flow through the city. The next morning they brought the newspaper and his face was there, bleeding on the asphalt. He died instantaneously. I looked at the picture for a scarce second. “They caught one of the assassins” read the footnote. I felt my stomach turn around. The morning was bright outside. The street was full of the sound of cars moving slowly through the congested avenue. I took my briefcase and left for work.
Why do I write? The act of writing, is that of leaving a mark of ink on the page. The page that glitters, white and empty, gets filled with the images, the emotions, the colours, the ideas that populate my imagination and give shape to the landscapes of my inside.
I write to forget, to empty the vessel of my soul of the ghosts of its memories. I write because I feel. And I feel. I write, I shout, I feel. There are lips and sights, and eyes that looked at me with a smile and those who looked at me with a faraway glance. And I write to capture them all, to lock them on the white of the blank page. And when I succeed, when the letters carve a prison of words, I am free. I am free.
The dirt. The grass that moves, in tiny inflections of its shape with the soft movement of the breeze. The landscape is wide. A few trees scattered in the distance move from one side to the other. Their colour is dark green, and they form a circle of deeper greens that surrounds the fields.
I call my name. The sound bounces on the walls of the grotto and bounces again and again on the walls of the cave. I hear my name repeated, magnified, amplified and finally scattered into pieces reaching back to me. The water is cold. The cold permeates through my skin.
The dirt falls on my head. I have been lying in this coffin for a few days, and the leakage lets pass a constant flow of sand into my box. I can’t move. The sand doesn’t let me move my head. I try to shout, but my throat says nothing, and my lungs, dead, cannot pump the little air that stands between me and the ceiling of my crypt.
A spade breaks the seal. I cannot move. The sand has covered with a thin layer of silica the enamel of my bones.
A mi hermana le decían que era muy bonita. Tenía los ojos azules y una piel blanca, lechosa y transparente. Yo nunca fui lindo ni guapo. Yo soy y era feo. Feo como una piedra. ¡Qué Chula es su hija señora!. Y yo sonreía, intentando acaparar la atención de su interlocutor con muecas y brincos. Nunca funcionaba.
Los fines de semana y los veranos en mi pueblo eran momentos mágicos. Cuando no había sesión en el colegio, jugábamos en la alberca del club del fraccionamiento. Echados como lagartijas al sol, o nadando como renacuajos nos quemábamos bajo un sol inclemente. Nunca usamos bloqueador porque esas cosas son para gringos pedorros de pieles sensibles.
Al cabo de muchos días de asoleado constante, notaba que la marca del calzón quedaba impresa como un pedazo de carne traslúcido y pálido en el área de mi piel que no había visto el sol. Decidí que ese color pálido del área que rodeaba mis genitales era el tono verdadero de mi piel y que la marca oscura que corría de mis manos a mi espalda baja era un artefacto apócrifo resultado del sol quemante de nuestras latitudes.
Así fué que comencé a ponerme bloqueador. Escurría una capa enorme de la crema blanca que mi mamá guardaba en el botiquín de la casa y que ostentaba, indicado en un cuadro naranja, de una protección de 75. Tal vez así el sol no me quemaría más y luego de un tiempo el color de mi toda mi piel sería como el color de mis nalgas.
Ese día le dije a mi mamá que saldría a caminar por el campo. Ella dijo que sí y yo salí a caminar por entre matorrales, zarzas y piedras. Me puse tanto bloqueador sobre la cara que el sudor le hizo caer a mis ojos y regresé a casa, a lavarme con un corredero de agua intentando deshacerme del exceso de crema que había caído sobre mis ojos.
Tenía miedo de parecer indio. Era un sentir injustificado. Al parecer mi piel no era tan oscura como para ser excluido del grupo de los blancos. Tal vez era eso, o tal vez crecí suficientemente alto, o tal vez mi apellido era una palabra en italiano, y no el común Pérez. En todo caso, yo no era suficientemente indio. No era tan indio como Pedro de la Cruz o José Ramón y nunca tuve problema alguno. Las niñas eran más inclementes. Las morenitas se juntaban en un lado del jardín, y las blanquitas al otro. Entre los niños, las consecuencias de ser indio se reducían a ser el último elegido para jugar futbol y uno que otro apodo haciendo referencia a Moctezuma o sus súbditos.
Los sábados por la mañana mi mamá y mi hermana prendían el televisor. Yo veía los infomerciales. De vez en vez anunciaban una crema milagrosa que rebajaría el color de mi piel en al menos dos tonos. Me fascinaba esa crema que luego de un mes de uso, podría volver mi piel del tono de una hoja en blanco. Aunque pensé seriamente en comprar un tubo del producto, nunca me armé del valor suficiente para hablar a la línea de teléfono que anunciaban. 01800 …
No poco después llegué a EUA y noté que mi piel se hacía pálida al cabo de unos meses de estar lejos de nuestro sol. Regresé a mi pueblo intentando ocultarme del ojo quemante de nuestro siempre presente astro, tratando de preservar la nueva palidez que había llegado a mi piel. Fracasé. Para las siguientes vacaciones no me escondí de nuevo. En gringolandia aprendí que a las güeritas les gustan los morenitos, y que el bronceado es más atractivo en estas latitudes de lo que uno podría sospechar.
Mis manos aún son negras. Las veo posándose sobre mi pecho y las encuentro quemadas y oscuras como un pedazo de carbón. Cuando las entrelazo entre esas manos blancas o las hago recorrer su cabellera rubia, exclamo. “Look. I am black” y ella sonríe y mueve su cabeza de lado a lado. “No, you are not black”