Category: Literature

A portrait of the distance

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.

My fins

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.

Some note

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.

Public death

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.

Some note

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 heart of storm

The sound of a rapid buzz of bug wings left his ear and dissipated in the distance. Its chaotic flight moved in a drunken wave from petal to petal until its body disappeared among the many other bees that feasted on the nectar of the garden roses.
 
She kissed his forehead with a quick movement of her lips. Up there, the arms of the tree barely moved and its leaves reacted with lazy yawns to the morning breeze. It was a fine day of summer. The sky was clear and the burning eye of the sun poured its cold heat over them.
 
“Karol” he whispered to her ear, and she looked back at him with watery eyes and an open mouth. The kiss was soft, like an engulfing embrace of warm water after a winter day. What did he feel inside his chest? There was a song, a distant song that grew progressively louder and louder and with it the shout of a pulsating, throbbing rage that permeated through his body, slowly taking over the undulating movements of his tongue, fogging his brain and escaping with the hunger of his kiss.
 
The minarets’ reflection wavered on the still water of the lake and the light breeze of a chilly London day carried on its wings the clicking sounds of their play. There was something irremediably elusive of a kiss, and an embrace, and the feeling of that thirst burning with such rage, so far, so many miles away.
 
“Away”. He murmured. “Away” he sighed. Why can’t we fly away, to an undying sea of nothingness and calm. Why can’t we fly and forget, and live, and not live, and be and not be, and sing and be quiet, feeling our feet burn in the sand, and float in the salt, cold and warm, warm and sweet.
 
There was a burst that night, and little Karol woke up, feeling the pulsating sting of a lightning jolt crawling through her spine. As the bombs fell and the sky raged, and the stink of fear and smoke filled the city’s streets, the night dissolved and the murmur of her tears, fatigued, and broken sank her into a fragile sleep. It was a train, or a bus, or a car, or the trunk of a van, which pierced through the back of the forest on her way north.
 
Her eyes were closed, and her lips shut. Sleepy, sleepy twigs of hair fell on her forehead in the depth of a peaceful sleep. He bent to murmur sweet syllables of air and stroke the threads of her dyed hair.
 
“You fell asleep.”
 
That morning the hums of the monitor filled the room. There was a shot, and another, and then silence reigned as a pair of men covered in black masks walked up the stairs. Marco stood there, watching up in awe to the frame of light until the sight of a flag, and a multitude of black took over the roof and the view from the helicopter drifted away, and away, to the mountains, and the news studio, and the concerned face of a reporter that burst in a diatribe of unintelligible words and explanations. The camera blinked and there was a shout again, and a shot, and the TV showed the dismembered bodies of men, young men drying under the sun, with their old fusils laying bare in their tombs of bone and flesh. He blinked again and he was there, in front of the water and under the minarets.
 
“I didn’t know how to speak in German until I was ten” and she laughed. “I went to school and didn’t know anything. I don’t know what they thought. They probably thought many things” and she laughed again as he threw the folded arch of a leaf of grass into the water. It sprang back into its original shape and turned and turned like a broken clock.
 
“I liked the cuckoo clock we had in my house. The little bird would go out and chirp every hour and every quarter hour. When the hour hit, it would chirp a few times, depending on the time. It would only go out once every quarter hour. You had to turn it off at night unless you wanted to listen it singing and singing when everything went still. It is so silent up there you can hear the earth breath. It is a storm of quietness, so thick that it is made of glass.”

Film critics

My neighbour calls his dog “sea salt”. Bullshit. Utter Bullshit. As if calling a dog with a “poetic” name was a thing. He is one of the growing herd of ever more common gigantic posers. All of them big fat egos with an empty and ignorant little self. They nauseate me. They are sad and disgusting. And the worst of all is they are all going to watch our film. Rob, Marla, … God help us all.
We filmed it using a home camera. The result was utterly disgusting. Rob’s face was there smiling, his legs spread over the floor in front of his chair. There was something luminous and ethereal about the room that this piece of crappy shitty camera couldn’t get. And I told Rob. I told him That was the best asset of our shit movie. And he just laughed and said, quiet Marco. And I kept quiet of course while inside something was boiling and shouting Fuck it and fuck you. Things Rob didn’t hear of course.
Our film looks like a family video. It is a family video. My god! What a shame. What an utter and complete shame! And yes, I can see all those pompous bastards loving it, praising it for being so raw and intimate and many other idiotic reasons they will repeat ad nauseam while eating salmon and drinking champagne and glorifying our poverty. Our Fucking poverty! And I am tired. Tired as fuck!
Alright, alright. I told Rob it won’t work. It just won’t work. Not with me. This is shit. Caca. Mierda. And it infuriates me. It just makes me fume how it is they will be holding a vegetarian caviar cracker or some other crazy engender of a dish on one hand while grabbing our balls and our future with the other.
For fuck’s sake!

Public Reading

They like it that way. The members of the crowd listen attentively to the voice that speaks in a modulated tone in front of them. The voice says one thing, then the next, and one head bows in a slight gesture, another one flashes a smile and one more looks up to the ceiling and traces a circle through the room until her eyes look down to the floor. The voice talks and talks. And then another one takes over and keeps talking and talking. Their stories form a confused soup inside my head. They have the same feel, the same flavor, they give us the same intricate glimpse into the lives of the decadent breed that inhabits the narrative edges of the urban landscape.
 
There isn’t silence in that world. Silence is dead and in its place there is a continuum of action that keeps moving somewhere, somewhere, and is trying to construct an image of our humanity by focusing on the urban and the decadent.
 
It suffers from the fundamental weakness of being predictable in its unpredictability. It tries to address big questions and big themes by merely throwing nihilism at them, making use of the archetypal character of this world, one that in some unconscious level is extremely self aware of her mortality but isn’t scared about it.
 
The works then reduce to the mere action of constructing a big negation. As the crowd listens, the voices read stories that necessarily fall on the the expected unexpected themes of their tradition: the never ending questioning of sexual taboos and a duel with mortality led by a heroic character that just doesn’t give a fuck. And so I wonder why do they all sound the same. Why do they keep imitating each other? The right theme is there. “There isn’t much more to the human experience than death” Unfortunately the vehicle isn’t new. Fifty years ago similar words written on a single roll of paper in a methamphetamine ecstasy would’ve broken something, would’ve brought to life the big question mark that they are trying to raise, but their encasing is becoming old, and the feverish excitement of that trip is slowly fading away. Their question marks have become a timid self referential affirmation. Their voices are one. They write what is expected from them. They say what they are supposed to say.