dissabte, 24 d’agost del 2013

Butterflies


They say it brings bad luck to look at your hands, but I don´t think so. I look at mine with my usual joy for breaking the rules, and I trace with my fingers each and every one of their spots, scars and veins that paint the landscape of my life. This one I've had since the day he sauntered into the beauty shop, full of middle-aged women with shampooed hair, and, without any embarrassment whatsoever, kissed me on the lips and gave me a bag of mini-croissants, my favorites, saying, "You did not have breakfast today, my love." Then, just as abruptly as he entered, he turned around and left, nonchalantly strolling past the row of gasping mouths and gawking eyes, soaked with envy and desire.

And this vein, this one was badly swollen that morning when, at the beach, I cried and cried, bent, heartbroken and determined to forget him, while holding my knees with furiously clenched fists. Then he appeared without a word, with five, not one, not two, not three, but five plates of calamari from the restaurant I liked so much, where he had to state his order repeatedly because the waiters could not understand that he wanted to take his order of not one, not two, not three, but five plates of calamari to the beach, where the sand persisted in getting into our mouths as we ate and laughed and talked and cried and kissed and reconciled.

Oh, look at this light scar I got when I slipped on a rock that evening when we sneaked passed the watchman of the most beautiful cove in the world and we swam with the last rays of a sun that embraced us in gold and happiness. I remember the brown bear that, luckily, without paying us much notice, walked just a few meters behind us by the spot where we had decided to stop to take photographs of wild animals, and where we ended up with the most dangerous and passionate kiss we could've ever imagined. I remember the night we did not sleep a single second, trying to purge from our aching hearts all our past and all our sadness and all our dead hopes. In the morning you gave me the one object you had had with you all your life, and you said, "I only have this to give you." And I knew that, beyond the past hurt we had inflicted on each other and we still would, your ring would remain wrought to my hand forever and ever.

"Your hands are nice," you keep telling me, and I blush, like a young girl of sixteen on her first date. You are dozing at the other end of the bench, your left hand resting on my feet, relaxed and happy on your lap, under the fluttering of the butterflies that revive my memories, just like every other August evening for the last fifty years . 
Translated by Lina Strenio

dijous, 22 d’agost del 2013

So few words


Who has the camera to photograph feelings? Where are the CDs to record sensations?
Why do I have so few words to communicate happiness? Peace, laughter, togetherness, love, caresses, forest, music. Why do I have so many words to exorcise unhappiness? Loneliness, old age, sickness, death, cold, darkness, rain, tears, war, shame, neglect, indifference, accident, madness, wryness, rage, fear... Enough. I do not want to remember them. I will not let them play a role again in my eyes and my hands. I do not want them to possess me any longer. I want to be free. For once, I want to be free of my old words, memories, times, life.
I want to strip myself of fear and words, of past and uncertainties. I want to abandon the heavy layers that I carry every day and every night on my shoulders: questions, anguish, desires, doubts, fear, fear, fear. Today I will unload everything I've been carrying and let it fall to the ground, the tons of dirty realism, and I will submerg myself in the refreshing waters of the waterfall at the end of the world. I will swim until my arms tell me to stop and my skin opens to  each atom of oxygen, feeling it, savoring it, assimilating it.
Then, clean, I will surge from the stream where I will have left all fears and I will lie beside you, my beloved, ethereal and full as you've never seen me before. I will bring my body next to yours and I will be the breeze you've always dreamed of. I will put my leg on yours and I will be the caress you've always wanted. I will leave my hand on your chest, light like a dream. I will touch your arm with my lips and I will drink, without haste, without wounds, the warm life that runs under your skin. I will remain so, still, clinging to you as Hedera helix, until I forget all the words and all the images. And when our bodies do not know any longer where one ends and the other begins, when our electrons follow the path around us, more and more united, more and more alike, contradicting the universal tendency to expand, then --with a last effort before I fuse with eternity-- I will grab my entire world, I will enfold it with my eyes and I will deliver it to you, so you, my beloved, refashion it and make it new.

What few and poor words to grasp the things that truly matter. How difficult to photograph plenitude. How many layers of reality to scrape until we arrive to the rightful meaning of our life.

Translated by Lina Strenio