É listo coma un allo.
Hai certos eventos de carácter anual que procuro celebrar. Non me refiro ás manidas festas institucionalizadas no almanaque, como fin de ano, a noite de San Xoán ou a queima de Ravachol. Falo de encontros senlleiros como a Festa da Poesía do Condado, en Salvaterra de Miño, a Festa do Cineclube de Santiago de Compostela ou o aniversario do Liceo Mutante. Do mesmo modo, tamén no deporte hai certos partidos de fútbol que son sagrados. Durante a tempada xogo en dous equipos de fútbol gaélico: no Fillos de Breogán, masculino, e no Fusquenlha, mixto. Pero teño certa nostalxia do fútbol inglés, especialmente de mandarlle patadóns ao balón cortando a xogada rival. Intento saldar esta adicción tres veces ao ano, polo menos. Dende hai xa uns cantos anos, a mañá do 24 de decembro, día de Noiteboa, vou cos amigos ao Campo Lameiro, ao campo da Chanciña. Alí botamos un 7 contra 7 que sempre senta ben, o xa clásico Furolo di Natale. Os equipos fanse no momento, buscando un equilibrio cordial, e cadaquén leva unha camiseta branca e outra escura para distinguirnos. A ferruxe acumulada logo de 53 semanas fai que haxa algunha lesión entre os menos habituados ao deporte, pero é unha diversión fabulosa. Dende non hai moito procuro tamén ir cada 25 de agosto ao campo de Catro Ventos, na Gudiña. É o tradicional partido de solteiros contra casados o día do patrón, o san Bértol. Un encontro que ten lugar sobre as 18.30 e que convoca numerosas persoas. Un campo da vella escola, que só se usa unha vez ao ano e que se roza dous días antes, e no cal se intúen os toxos bravos. As liñas de cal bótanse á man, e só as imprescindibles para facilitarlle as tarefas ao colexiado, uniformado cun chaleco reflectante e e acompañado dun chifre de man, con batería, para non gastar folgos asubiando. Os solteiros van de branco e os casados distínguense cunha camiseta colorida. Se o balón sae do campo, quen o bota fóra vai por el. É habitual a hidratación con latas de cervexa, e o respectable público agudiza o enxeño cos improperios máis creativos. O resultado é o de menos, claro está, e como en calquera evento que se preste hai unha cea posterior onde comentar as mellores xogadas. E por último, dende o ano pasado teño o privilexio de participar na AngloGalician Cup, defendendo as fuscas cores dos Porcos Bravos. Debutei en outubro de 2025 en Campañó, no campo de Agüeiros. A experiencia foi fabulosa, e axudei a acadar unha nova vitoria que axiña me precipitei a incluír no meu currículo deportivo. As fanáticas das estatísticas poderán facer os seus cálculos, pero coido que a media de dous goles por partido que levo non é cousa menor, ou -parafraseando a Mariano Rajoy- é cousa maior. Cando comecei ao fútbol, lembro tres partidos importantes. En cadetes, co Marcón Atlético, xogámonos o ascenso contra o Vilalonga no campo do Carrasco, e perdemos; foi mágoa. Co San Xurxo de Sacos, polas festas dos santos Xusto e Pastor, xogamos contra os veteranos do Huracán, con ampla asistencia veciñal, e foi fermoso. Co Pasarón acadamos un trofeo de verán en Barro; o equipo organizador contaba con gañar, e anunciara un galo para o equipo vencedor e unha copa para o perdedor, pero vencemos e déronnos a peza metálica para quedaren coa fermosa ave e logo dar conta dela. Case mellor así. En breve chega o outono, e haberá que defender de novo a cor negra. Quixo a fortuna que nese mesmo outono xogue o Celta contra o Bournemouth, equipo que debuta en competición europea. Se o equipo celeste leva como patrocinador unha empresa cervexeira coruñesa, os Porcos Bravos faremos os nosos quecementos con produtos de quilómetro cero, unhas boas Nasa inspiradoras. Comezou a conta atrás. Achégase a vixésima, e este deportista ten ansia de golazos.
124 comentarios:
Y subieron sobre la anchura de la tierra, y circundaron el campo de los santos.
Resistide! Estamos a 5 Sanjenjos, 2 botellines Mahou e 1 polo Lacoste pra que as praias volvan a ser nosas e a cerveza Nasa poida, por fin, fluír libremente.
El verano boquea en la orilla de septiembre, como esos peces saltarines que se quedan varados entre la espuma del Atlántico y buscan desesperadamente menos aire y más agua, y nos vamos despidiendo en los portales, entre maletones y jaulas con caniches, de los últimos turistas, que se van de Coruña un poco más morenos, algo más gordos y mucho más felices, aunque haciéndose los remolones al pensar en la autovía y la oficina. Este agosto pasado, como casi todos los últimos agostos, se puso de moda motejar a esta buena gente como fodechinchos, esa palabra fabricada entre el verbo foder (vamos a suponer que, en su versión light, significa molestar) y el sustantivo chincho, que en el sur de Galicia viene a ser lo que en Coruña llamamos jurel. Al parecer, alguien llegó a la conclusión de que estas familias de más allá de Pedrafita y Padornelo sólo vienen a lo barato, a los chinchos, y tienen extrañas costumbres, como aparcar su coche en las rampas de los puertos con marea baja para descubrir horas más tarde, al volver de la playa o del chiringuito, que el Atlántico no es una piscina y que la marea alta se ha merendado el coche.
Hasta ahí, todo correcto. A mí, así en general, todo lo que sea echar unas risas sin mayor trasfondo, me parece muy bien. Especialmente si uno, antes de reírse de los demás, es capaz de reírse de sí mismo, que es el orden natural de las cosas en el humor y en tantas otras facetas de la vida. Pero cuando los entrañables chascarrillos sobre los turistas, que se gastan en todos los rincones del planeta, degeneran en turismofobia (qué palabra más repulsiva, como todas las que terminan en fobia) y en la cacería tuitera del madrileño de vacaciones, la verdad es que no acabo de verle el mérito -ni mucho menos la gracia- al asunto.
Más que nada porque deberíamos pensar que, a final de cuentas, todos somos los fodechinchos de alguien. Por mucho que la galleguidad de nuestros antepasados se pueda rastrear hasta Prisciliano, cuando los coruñeses -incluso los coruñeses más cool y con más pedigrí- desembarcamos masivamente en el Náutico de San Vicente, no dejamos de ser los fodechinchos de los pacientes vecinos del Grove, a los que vamos a dar la tabarra con nuestros coches mal aparcados y nuestra devoción por Leiva. Y cuando intentamos explicar a los nativos de Vilanova que sabemos más de ellos que ellos mismos, porque hemos leído en profundidad a Valle-Inclán y Camba, estamos elevando el arte de fodechinchear a la categoría del 'cuñadismo'.
Una de estas mañanas de verano, tomando un café en una terraza, escuché sin querer a un par de cuarentones que estaban contándose las vacaciones el uno al otro, propinándose una innecesaria y cruenta paliza de topónimos y fotos en el móvil, cuando capté estas frases al vuelo:
-¿Pero entonces me recomiendas la Costa Amalfitana?
-Mira, está muy bien, pero hay demasiados turistas.
Confieso que tuve que agarrarme a la silla para reprimir las ganas de levantarme y, con humildad franciscana, preguntarle al replicante:
-Disculpe, pero entonces ¿usted no era uno de esos turistas? ¿O es que tiene segunda residencia en la Costa Amalfitana?
Finalmente pude sujetarme y pudieron seguir denostando a los turistas, que por supuesto eran los otros, porque ellos eran viajeros al puro estilo Paul Bowles.
Detrás de este desprecio al turismo de masas, no nos engañemos, lo que hay no es un desprecio al turismo, sino a las masas. Lo que molesta al odiador no son aquellos ultrarricos viajeros de antaño, que se aburrían muchísimo durante varias semanas en un hotelito de la costa y, como no tenían nada mejor que hacer, según nos contó Agatha Christie, se iban matando unos a otros por turnos, pero sin maldad, sólo para pasar el rato. No, lo que desata las iras de los iracundos es la democratización del turismo y que, en lugar de unas refinadas élites de exquisitos millonarios, nos visiten familias normales como la nuestra, sin mucha pasta en la cartera y con sobrinos gorditos de gafas rotas que le pegan collejas a su prima, la de la prótesis dental pagada a plazos.
Será que soy un antiguo y no entiendo bien estos odios colectivos de la modernidad, pero confieso que no tengo nada en contra de los benditos veraneantes, que disponiendo de tantos destinos donde elegir por el mundo adelante, regresan cada año a Coruña porque les encanta. Y además confieso que los comprendo porque, cuando en agosto deambulo durante unos días por el sur de Galicia, también me veo un poco fodechincho y sólo puedo sentir gratitud por los paisanos, que siempre me acogen con tanto cariño, tanto cielo azul y tantas cosas maravillosas para comer, beber y querer.
La ley de delito de odio (pena de prisión de uno a cuatro años y multa de seis a doce meses) es delito de odio. Contra la libertad individual, naturalmente.
El centro de las cosas sería su destino.
Cuando Main decidió crear al hombre, ordenó a todos sus ángeles que bajaran la vista. Todos lo hicieron excepto uno, quien vio, para su propio horror, la tarea del creador. Le Main decidió no eliminarlo y esta fue su condena: «vagarás entre los hombres tratando de contarles la verdad, por ello te llamarán Satán y jamás creerán en tu palabra».
I have always feared knives. They are the most intimate of murder weapons. The knife cuts us away from our mothers when we enter this world…as easily as it spills our blood when we leave it. It is intimate… but it does not care
O amor non é un milagre, é unha construción social.
O amor romántico é como a coca-cola:
un invento que nos ensinaron a desexar de cativos,
do que nos intoxicamos na adolescencia
e que na etapa adulta combinamos con outros líquidos.
Sabemos que nos fai mal,
mais non somos quen de eliminalo das nosas vidas.
O amor é complicidade. O amor é complicidade.
Sentes envexa do amor,
cada domingo pola tarde paseando por Benito Corbal,
vendo parellas collidas da man que ven escaparates.
Sentes envexa do amor
con cada canción pop, con cada anuncio de televisión,
coas amigas que van de lúa de mel.
Sentes envexa do amor, cres no milagre do amor.
Cres na certeza do amor, cres na posibilidade do amor.
Sentes envexa do amor, pero non queres sentilo.
Montaches un grupo só para ligar, polos morreos da rockstar.
Canta impostura autoimposta, canta máscara gratuíta
para non recoñecer que existe a empatía involuntaria.
Empatía involuntaria
O amor non é un milagre
O amor é inoxidable
O amor non é un milagre, é unha construción social.
Presidente Gabriel Rufián!
Cómo sería o mundo se o presidente fose Gabriel Rufián?
Qué alegría cando vin na tele que o novo presidente era Gabriel Rufián!
Qué alegría cando lin na prensa que o novo presidente era Gabriel Rufián!
Azote de sátrapas, Gabriel Rufián
Látego de hooligans, Gabriel Rufián
Sálvame, súmame, contrátame
Na túa ETT, Gabriel Rufián.
Ensíname o hemiciclo
Fálame mal de cada ministro
Dime quen é o teu barbeiro
Para facerlle un monumento
Espíame co teu pegasus
Ensíname o teu dicionario
Faime una entrevista, Rufián.
Presidente da comunidade de veciños (bandido grrr)
Presidente do equipo de bádminton (ñam ñam ñam)
Presidente de Xibraltar (hmm)
Sacerdote na miña boda
Préstame a tú impresora
Porque és impresionante
Azote de sátrapas, Gabriel Rufián
Látego de hooligans, Gabriel Rufián
Ladrón, bandido, tesme cautivado
Contrátame en ERC, Gabriel Rufián
Chamada do presidente:
-SÍ? Aló? Quen é?
+Soy el presidente. ¡Tenéis que detener esta locura! ¡Os encomiendo inmediatamente a que deis marcha atrás a esta absurda idea de independizar Mollabao!
-Ja! Non coñecían a Gabriel Rufián...Gabriel Rufián non da marcha atrás ante nada!
+Gabriel, os estoy avisando. ¡Las consecuencias serán gravísimas! Me veré obligado a utilizar mi arma más poderosa...
155 en Mollabao
155 no Liceo
155 no Mutante
155 en Pontevedra
155 en Mollabao
155 na Acéfala
155 na Cambalhota
155 en Caroi
155
GABRIEL RUFIÁN NON DEIXARÍA QUE O LICEO MUTANTE PECHASE
GABRIEL RUFIÁN NON DEIXARÍA QUE O LICEO MUTANTE PECHASE
Queremos facer unha canción pop.
A canción que escoitaches máis de seiscentas veces.
Queremos facer a mesma canción que segues a bailar.
Queremos facer unha canción pop.
Queremos facer unha canción que funcione en Radio 3.
Unha canción pra que a toque unha banda tributo.
Queremos facer a mesma canción, basiquísima de estrofa e retrouso.
Queremos facer unha canción pop.
Unha canción sinxela e resultona,
fácil como cociñar unha tortilla de patacas.
Canción pra poñer no perfil do Tinder, unha canción para ligar.
Non temos que xustificarnos, facemos pop porque nos gusta.
Queremos facer unha canción que non mude nada.
O himno de Gatopardo en Lampedusa.
A canción pra que todo siga igual,
a que tararea Heráclito cando se baña no río.
Queremos facer unha canción pop.
Ou se cadra o que queremos é ser subliminais
e baixo este disfrace colarche un discurso.
A propia canción pode ser un discurso.
A propia canción pode ser a moralexa.
A propia canción pode querer adoutrinarte.
Non temos que xustificarnos, facemos pop porque nos gusta.
Unha canción sinxela e resultona,
fácil como cociñar unha tortilla de patacas.
Canción pra poñer no perfil do Tinder, unha canción para ligar.
Non temos que xustificarnos, facemos pop porque nos gusta.
Groria do porco, frol da invernía; sona da casa, lapa de carne.
Pra ti frolecen os soutos vellos, medran as hortas, madura o nabo.
Coallo dos froitos todos da terra, labio fresqueiro, mantenza antiga.
Xamón!
Papa das carnes, cardealicio, arquimandrita da limpa mesa.
Febra xugosa, rica canteira onde se curtan limpos poliedros.
Rei da lareira, carne petrucia, da raza esgrevia gardas o zume.
Xamón!
De rica alquimia summa suprema (fariña, poma, landra, castaña).
Sol do fumeiro, na noite negra. Do viño en xerra irmao doado.
Criado con calma, mimo, coidado. Da esencia do agro síntese rara.
Xamón!
Tentación dura pra o anacoreta, cor de meixela, carne de lume.
Sono adoecido do triste abstemio farto de verzas, todo augachirle.
Densidade ilustre da cena sabia, graza e potencia, rosa do pote.
Xamón!
Para gabarte cantou Homero, brillas no hexámetro, manxar heroico.
Liturxias vellas impós ós fieis. Aristocrática, feudal mantenza.
Do chan galego tes a dozura se a medias coces con fachas secas.
Xamón!
Do norte xiado veu pra buscarte o loiro suevo fillo da guerra.
Da xente aria vella mantenza, na túa presenza trema o semita.
Triste xudeu farto de ovella morre de envexa pola túa groria.
Xamón!
Beneditina fartura ilustre de Oseira e Samos, coartel famoso.
Tes en Caldelas forte crianza na neve xiada das cumes outas.
Dacón por ti goza de sona de ser Porcópole, Chicago noso.
Xamón!
Coma o pescado roxo e saboroso amoleciches ó funcionario.
Mentres o fígado come o escolante, ríllate ancioso o forte abade.
Pai da artrite, da esclerose, fidalgas doenzas do pazo antergo.
Xamón!
Homildemente a ti chegamos os pelingrinos, fartos de légoas.
No teu gosto fresco e potente teñen consolo as nosas fames.
Rei da mantenza, sol do fumeiro, que sempre agardes a nosa chegada!
Xamón!
Cada año el curso comienza con la misma noticia alarmante: Expaña cae, según los estudios de la OCDE con el peor resultado de su historia en lengua, matemáticas y ciencias... Entre el uso del móvil, la LOMLOE, el aumento de la inmigración y el impacto de los ultra procesados, el nivel educativo en nuestro país se desploma a pasos agigantados, lo cual no debería de extrañar a nadie porque forma parte de un plan de dominio sobre una masa cada vez más analfabeta. Los estímulos "culturales" que actualmente ofrece nuestra sociedad no contribuyen precisamente a elevar ese nivel intelectual de nuestros jóvenes, y ahí tenemos el ejemplo de todo un presidente del gobierno, dedicado a promocionar mientras tanto el rap y el reguetón desde sus redes sociales...
They're a bunch of whinge-bags
Todo tenía ese clima de fiesta intelectual, abominable.
Miércoles, 23 de septiembre de 2026
¿Cómo están ustedes?
Supongo que con los nervios típicos de cada previa de la anglogaliciacup.
Y es que, en nada, menos de 20 días, nos encontraremos con la XX.
Yo, lo cierto es que estoy muy tranquilo. El grado que te da ser veterano es este chorromoco, hace que me tome las cosas con más calma.
Si antes necesitaba meses de dura preparación física y mental, ahora que ya tengo mi lugar establecido en el management de La Causa (MAIN así me lo permita), la preparación va enfocada en lo que yo pueda aportar.
En el terreno de juego, clase a raudales y, cuando la chavalada haga su papel de imponerse físicamente y vayamos ganando por más de cinco, salir y poner ese poso de tranquilidad y pausa en el juego, siempre intentando no sufrir una rotura importante o incluso un infarto.
Fuera de la cancha, celebrar la victoria, acabando con toda la cerveza que se interponga en mi camino y dándole banano a todas esas groupies y satélites que se acerquen a la fiesta posterior a la victoria, y quieran ser agraciadas con los cariños de sus héroes de negro. Siempre y cuando la juventud deje algo libre claro.
Resumiendo, que una vez tuve claro que entrenar a futbol no me hace falta, porque pueden pasar años y años, pero la calidad no se pierde y aprovechando que a principios de septiembre me hice unas analíticas, y el médico me dijo:
-porquiño- tienes más estrellas rojas que un desfile de la victoria de Corea del Norte, o haces algo de cardio y fuerza o el colesterol te va a salir por todos los poros de tu piel.
Así que, aprovechando la típica promoción de después del verano, me apunte en un gimnasio.
40 pavos por hacer lo mismo que si fuese a la vendimia o a cavar patacas, pero bueno, entre el acojone que me metió el médico y que quería pillar algo de fuerza para la XX, allá que me anoté.
Primer día. Menudo lío de lugar, máquinas rarísimas llenas de poleas, pantallas con luces, cosas que en mi vida había visto. Yo que lo último que recordaba era el banco de ejercicios y el potro del colegio.
Bueno y todo chavalada joven, ellos con más bíceps que ideas. Y ellas, que parecían todas sacadas de un catálogo de moda. Ni una sola faneca, todo peixe bueno.
Y camaradas, sobre todo una morenocha, vaya pieza, que bellezón, una diosa.
Estaba haciendo unos inventos raros con una polea que daba gusto verla, para arriba, para bajo, para un lado para otro….
Y claro, que me dije, esta hoy prueba salchichón gallego. Va saber lo que es un Porco y Bravo. Voy a romper el cabecero de la cama, pero todo sea por la Causa.
Y allí fui yo, que mi última actividad física consistía en levantar el mando a distancia de la tele para buscar el futbol, a ponerme a su lado en la máquina más grande que había.
Una que tenía un cable y unas pesas de hierro.
Y mirando a la beldad de reojo, pensando mira cómo te voy a levantar hoy nena, saqué el pasador de hierro que estaba en la primera pesa y lo puse al final de todo, no en el nivel máximo, si no en uno siguiente que ponía nivel “terminator”
Amigos, la máquina ni se movió, intenté un poco más. Cara más roja que un tomate en una licuadora, los ojos que me salían de la cara cómo cuando don cangrejo veía un billete de cien.
Dos segundos más y………….
La física es física, que le vamos a hacer. La presión por algún tenía que salir.
PUUUMMM!!!!
Un trueno, una explosión nuclear, una declaración de guerra. Posiblemente en un radio que alcanzaba hasta la frontera portuguesa, todos los vecinos levantaron la vista al cielo pensando que venía treboada.
La música cesó de golpe, el monitor mirando preocupado por si había reventado alguna tubería de gas.
Y lo peor no fue el ruido, no.
Aquello venía con regalo.
Dejó en la sala un cheiro tan bravo, que parecía que alguien había olvidado un caldero al sol lleno de sardinas, desde las fiestas de Santiaguiño do Burgo.
Un aroma de verdad…enxebre… de los que curan un catarro.
Me levanté con toda la dignidad que me quedaba, que lógicamente no era ninguna y abandoné el gimnasio para siempre.
Menos mal que no llevaba la camiseta negra.
Así que compañeros, os dejo el entrenamiento a vosotros.
Y una última cosa
¡ FELIZ CUMPLEAÑOS PORCOBRAVADA ¡
El cielo ha explotado y las estrellas llueven sobre mí. Sé que no es verdad, pero es la Verdad
El poeta nombra las estrellas; el filósofo, el cielo; el teólogo, a sus dioses; el científico, las galaxias. Todos miran hacia
arriba, pero ninguno de ellos hace otra cosa que señalarse a
sí mismo.
Es difícil saber por dónde empezar y terminar con eso. Hicieron trampa y han sido declarados culpables. Ahora tienen que asumir las consecuencias. Es un shock ser declarado culpable de 114 cargos.
El fútbol gaélico es un deporte de origen irlandés que se juega entre dos equipos y cuyo objetivo es introducir el balón en la portería rival.
Las porterías recuerdan a una mezcla entre fútbol y rugby: tienen una portería tradicional en la parte inferior y dos postes elevados en forma de “H”. Si el balón entra bajo el larguero se consiguen tres puntos y si pasa entre los postes superiores suma un punto.
Una de las principales particularidades del fútbol gaélico es que los jugadores pueden utilizar tanto las manos como los pies para avanzar por el campo.
Sin embargo, existen reglas específicas para evitar que un jugador recorra todo el terreno sin soltar el balón. Cada pocos pasos debe botarlo, golpearlo ligeramente con el pie o pasarlo a un compañero.
Fuerte esta noche sopla el viento en los montes y en la ciudad
Firme la voz por el juramento: ¡Valor, mañana se marchará!
Miles de hermanos responden a coro, en los ojos ninguna piedad.
Ante Main un solo grito esta noche: ¡Mañana se combatirá!
¡No parar hasta conquistar!
¡No parar hasta conquistar!
¡No parar hasta conquistar!
¡NO PARAR HASTA CONQUISTAR!
Arde el roble y el laurel, y el canto se hace más fuerte
En el pueblo, cegado por el oro, resuena, y despierta a la ciudad
Nuestro desafío llevado por el viento, rompe la tranquilidad
¡Hombrecillo, escucha la voz de quienes juran lealtad!
¡No parar hasta conquistar!
¡No parar hasta conquistar!
¡No parar hasta conquistar!
¡NO PARA HASTA CONQUISTAR!
I've heard everyone else go down every single rabbit hole, every single wormhole, every single discussion
La Realidad al oído del Bautista: no eres increíble – eres mentira. Como la plata de este plato. Como el pez dibujado en la arena con la punta de un cuchillo. Como todos y cada uno de los símiles por los que las razas de hombres intentan pronunciar a Elohim. Como las siete cabezas con sus cuernos que no conoces. Como las cinco de la tarde en la poesía española desde el siglo XX que no conoces. Como la enfermedad mental del uno ante muchos. Como la razón del número y la precisión del adjetivo. Como el cero ocho de pureza de esta línea. Como el 0 antes de los árabes que no conoces. Como el Comunismo. Como todas las faltas que te llevarán a la tumba. Como la muerte. Todo mentira. No hay polvo et nihil. No hay doblez de tiempo en la materia. Como la diferencia entre fantasma y vivo. Como el jilguero que abre el nuevo día. Como el placer de la disolución dentro de otro. Como tu Submarinismo de seis parpadeos para Elohim. Como el Hijo. Como la Pájara. Como el Padre. Los Tres Tristes Tigres. Como las hijas de Lear que no conoces. Como la montaña y el profeta de los dos libros. Como el cubo con el que se vacía el orinal de la noche. Como el perro que pintará Goya que no conoces. Como España que no conoces. La letanía no la oye nadie. Nadie es mentira. Como el río de Heráclito que no conoces. Como el olivo y el pájaro que vuelve con una rama en el pico. Como la deuda que crees que haces saldar. Como tu cuerpo. Como mi voz. Como la sangre que te llena la boca. Como la esperanza de que termine algo alguna vez. Como Daniel y Baltasar. Como Isaías. Como las visitas en la casa de Lot. Como la serpiente que escuchas envenenarte con símiles. Como los cientos de cuerdas vocales que a polea elevan la Gran Música. Como la Gran Música. Como decirte que la has escuchado y que no la vas a escuchar más. Como decirte que llegaremos al fin de alguna forma. Como el número de lanzadas que le dieron al hijo del cornudo del carpintero que odiaba a las palomas. Como el objetivo y el consuelo que te han traído hasta el plato. Como todo el amor que hay en el fondo del hondo corazón de los mansos. Como la diferencia entre un kilo de plumas y un kilo de almas en la boca. Como el tiempo antes del reloj del árbol del conocimiento. Como el pronombre que se multiplica cuando se conjuga en un verbo. Como el dolor de muelas que se duerme. Como el perdón de cien años por robar a un ladrón. Como la posesión conjugada cual eco de la presencia de Elohim. Como el Oído de Elohim. Como la Boca de Elohim. Padre, Hijo, Pájara: ¡oh la resolución a la conjetura de las tres monas calvas! Como decir no es negar. Como contar ovejas para encontrar el sueño. Porque el sueño es el lobo en el lobo de unos ojos que en todo habitan y que son los que ven a Elohim y por eso todo tiende a Él y por eso el hombre lo busca como el que tiene hambre de un alimento que no conoce pero que es el único que le puede saciar. Como todos los caminos que llevan a Roma – la Bestia de otro Juan, quien, desde una cueva (te lo he mencionado antes), pronunciaba el impronunciable nombre de Elohim –. Como el reino de los cielos ha estado aquí sin pagarte los derechos de autor. Como todos los profetas. Como todos los Mensajeros. Como todos los Despertadores. Como todos y cada uno de los Avisadores que dentro de cinco palabras se llamarán Warnings. Como el futuro.
Como algo antes o algo después. Como el gato vivo y muerto en la caja que no conoces. Como el mundo por el tamaño. Como la muerte del animal divino a manos de la microbiología que no conoces. Como el Deuteronomio y el recitado de los ríos de España – de la que ya te he hablado antes –. Como escribir que esto no es una pipa. Como el frío que has pasado esperando el tacto de la manta de Elohim. Así de mentira es todo. Como «todo son símbolos, ¡todo símbolos!», que escribirá un borrachín lisboeta que no conoces y en el que cabrán cientos en un baúl. Como la escritura que se va haciendo sin pensarse porque lo de pensarse pasa en otro lado todo el rato – pase lo que pase – por obra y gracia de gentuza como tú hablando en nombre de Elohim. Hablando a saber. Escrito estás por ciento y la madre y ellos son los que dicen que dices. Como Simone Weil – a quien no conoces – escribiendo que quien tú dices saber está en No Está. Como pedirte que entiendas eso. Como pedirle paso al cojo o follar un coño.
INTROITO BIOGRÁFICO
Antes de conocer el flamenco como tradición o como lenguaje artístico, me llego como canal primigenio de comunicación umbilical. Mi madre podría haber sido cantaora, su padre – una de las figuras paternas que formó mi crianza – la llamaba Gitana, Hilario, que así se llamaba, era amanter de Mairena, Farina y Antonio Molina. El cante – según me cuenta mi madre – fue lo que ella me daba cuando estaba gestándome – y el cante, ya nacido prematuramente – fue mi nana. Mi madre me acunaba Lole y Manuel, Camarón, Enrique Morente y La Niña de la Puebla. Ese es mi primer conocimiento y recuerdo, no ya del flamenco, sino de la música junto al latido umbilical que une el cuerpo dentro del cuerpo de madre e hijo.
Un cuento para mi niño, de Lole y Manuel, me devuelve con especial fuerza el hilo que me conecta a mi madre y a una tristeza pre nomen: ella debía salir de casa muy temprano para trabajar en la residencia de ancianos y yo quedaba al cuidado de mi abuela, que vivía a unos cincuenta metros de nuestra primera casa, allá a finales de los 70 españoles. Si he de fiarme de Nemo sin olvidar a Neme, el frío del trayecto entre las casas, las mantas con que mi abuela me envolvía y la agitación los llantos ahogados de madre e hija y los pasos por el suelo empedrado de la cuesta del castillo, son parte también de mi memoria sensorial, hecha principalmente de oído y piel. En esa memoria conviven el amor y la separación, incomprensible para el niño que yo era, entre el olor y las voces de mis dos primeras madres.
Nací prematuramente el 8 de febrero de 1978, pero debí haber nacido en abril, el mes del nacimiento de mi madre. Pesé – o eso cuenta mi cartilla de natalidad – alrededor de un kilo, aunque bajé a 790 gramos y pasé mis dos primeros meses de existencia en una incubadora. Según Nemo – por más que Neme lo niegue – poseo un recuerdo de su luz. Al imaginarlo, asocio el blanco de la incubadora con una sensación de frío y desamparo. Esa asociación personal participa en la imagen del corazón hueco: un corazón blanco, expuesto y abierto, en el que las cosas entran y permanecen. No ilustra un episodio clínico; da una forma visible a lo que el texto oye y siente.
LA RESPIRACIÓN DE GACELA DEL CORAZÓN HUECO
Llamo prosa fonética a una prosa continua cuya forma no está medida por la sílaba de la literatura, sino por la respiración fisiológica del cante iletrado. El signo ⊢ ∞ ⊣ que encabeza la pieza abre su espacio de emisión: sitúa lo que va a sonar entre dos umbrales y deja el infinito en medio. Las barras cumplen otra función: / marca una toma breve de aire y // una pausa larga desde la que la voz vuelve a empezar. No distribuyen versos ni fijan una métrica: la frase avanza según el latido mental del cante.
Esta SIMILA II GACELA DEL CORAZÓN HUECO nace como una toná: una voz sola, libre de compás fijo, que va abriendo huecos en la corriente de palabras. Cuando aparece por primera vez «Y quieres borrar», la corriente se rompe, con esa rotura entra la seguiriya junto al soporte del coro greco-flamenco de un mínimo de cuatro voces. La seguiriya no está sometida aquí a un compás cerrado, sino reconocible en el peso de cada regreso, en la insistencia del quejío y en las frases que se acortan al final de la pieza hasta acabar en el Y quieres. La respiración sostiene primero el texto y después muestra cómo se va quedando sin aire.
La referencial germinal y sin tapujos aquí es la Gacela de la muerte oscura de Federico García Lorca, tal como la cantó Carlos Cano en su Diván del Tamarit. De allí procede el nombre de la pieza y el impulso del final: el deseo lorquiano de dormir durante un instante o un siglo se transforma en el deseo de borrar un año – un decenio – un siglo. Esa voz que insiste mientras pierde palabras es la primera semilla de la obra de prosa fonética y liturgia negativa que luego creé, LA MISA MENTAL FLAMENCA.
Porque un corazón hueco es / como un río: / toda cosa le entra / todo el tiempo. / Toda cosa se arrastra y / no hay olvido: / los verbos se conjugan / en las casas / cuando el objeto dice / por lo vivo. / El milímetro en lucha / de las plantas. / Lo que siente y empuja / sin sentido. / El no sueño y no ojo / de una ansia / que no tiene negocio / ni camino. / El secreto del gato / que no existe. / El gorrión que tiembla / y cae del pino. / El geco en la fachada / de ladrillos / que miras mientras fumas / y se tensa / dentro de ti la cuerda / del berrido / sin código ni especie / que lo entienda / porque en un hueco cabe / lo que un río. // Y en el flujo el cansancio / no halla sueño. / No halla reloj ni regla / ni motivo. // Y quieres borrar un año / un decenio / un siglo. // Que saquen ya la flecha / de tu pecho. // Y quieres borrar un año / un decenio / un siglo. // Que saquen ya la flecha. // Y quieres borrar un año / un decenio / un siglo. // Y quieres borrar un año // Y quieres borrar. // Y quieres.
Las heridas de Despierta y de Sueña no valen nada ante el mirlo posado en la repisa del borde de la terraza frente a ti. Te mira – escribes que te mira – con el gesto rápido de las aves que tiene más que ver con los dinosaurios que contigo; luego vuela. Eso es todo lo que tiene que pasar para seguir; desollado, pero seguir. Medir el tiempo en mirlos que escribes que te miran. Hay peores cosas por las que seguir. Todos los que sabemos que seguimos – lo sabemos. ¡Y qué cosa ésta de saberlo! Como una superioridad ante un maniquí o ante una camarera en patines. El trabajo os hará libres. El conocimiento os hará saber de la vida y la muerte y conjugaréis y enjugaréis lágrimas que contengan medicina y veneno. Y al final de todo llanto sólo habrá veneno: el sabor puede ser amargo, dulce u óxido, pero en el primer llanto ya vienen las heces de todos los que vendrán después – o que no vendrán y se quedarán en los quicios haciendo de todo lo que sostengas una plateadora –. El tiempo en mirlos no es más que hacer un chiste sobre la aceptación de la trampa: acepta todo y todo dentro suyo cabe, pues dentro todo suyo es. Por eso es que no hay que ir. Para eso hay que dejar de amar al mirlo, ser la hache en un texto escuchado, el puñal debajo del agua, el silencio de las piedras limpias de runa; el no a este texto. Y no puedes. El mirlo se ha posado, te ha mirado y se ha ido porque lo escribes. Yo quería ser Lucifer o Cristo, pero sólo puedo ser Dios, pues muerto sueña. Y realmente es eso: morí en febrero de mil novecientos setenta y ocho en una incubadora, pero nadie se atreve a decírmelo porque yo soy el amor a este mundo y a todos les da cosa apagarme: quiero dormir un rato / un minuto / un siglo / pero que todos sepan / que no he muerto. Abuela decía muchas veces: que a mi entierro vaya el pueblo entero. Yo he sido hijo único del mundo pero no sé cuánto llevo en este espejo que sé que lo es aunque no puedo probarlo, ya que, digáis lo que digáis, no existís porque no sobreviví tras mi parto en febrero de mil novecientos setenta y ocho pero nadie lo ha dicho. Eso es el amor: quiero dormir un rato, un minuto, un siglo; pero que el mirlo sepa que ya he muerto
EN EL FRÍO de arder
Ininteligibles,
Vamos
De habitación en habitación
Bobinando silencios,
Correspondiendo máscaras,
Rictus que observan
Cada movimiento del otro
Esperando la injuria,
La falta,
Cebadores
Del sacrilegio de nada,
Tensando el arco de palabra
En la boca murmuradora vamos
Como ciegos de ver.
El rechinar, el
Crujir, Imprecan;
Nos preceden
Las alargadas sombras del
Matiz, de la inquina.
OVILLADA en un silencio de entrecejo,
Mecida,
Apretando quijadas,
Sé que rezas por los daguerrotipos,
Ésos de mi fábula,
De mi nombre al contraluz
De mis actos.
Cae
Cenicienta
La extenuada cabeza de cigarrillo,
Mientras endurece
La repetición de hoces interrogativas
Datando el dolor, leyendo
Lo imperecedero de hiel,
Mientras hablas
Como si masticases,
Sin dejar escapar una palabra, cubriendo
Con un velo, tornando
Con la declamatoria escueta de lo nimio
Lo que sé que veo,
Haciéndome leer
En el trazo de tu palma,
Solamente “mentira”.
PERO LLEGO A SABER tu milimetría
De dolor, lo que escarbas en mi nombre. Esa forma
De dolerte de los años.
Sin imagen
Contemplo los pecios de biografía,
El humedal que exudan los enseres,
La involución
De la calma a la angustia,
La brea
De lo inexistente
Como una enfermedad,
Una pira en silencio, de fiebre
Que tú sabes
Y yo sé
Y nadie dice.
EMPECINADO en duelo,
escribo alimañas
Alimañas:
A –
– li
– ma
– ñas,
Venteo con garfios de falanges
Sombras, aire filamentado
Por el restallar de imprecaciones,
Dúctil a la torsión de la rabia
Hiero
Tajo
Hundo,
Hasta lo inescrutable del berrido.
Tú estás allí descreyéndome.
Tú sabes lo que yo no puedo,
Sabes lo que yo no quiero,
Nombre del lugar
En que seguiré existiendo.
VAS
Y VIENES, sangre,
Alucinándonos,
Azorando flujos, revertiendo
Mugidos En protestas.
Asiendo el silencio en umbrías
Coagulándolas, hasta que el verbo,
De tal hambre, mastica tiempo, anegándonos.
Pero es más largo el cansancio,
Más dura la piedra que nos urde; finalmente
Entramos en la deriva de silencio,
Frente a frente,
En el frío y solitario
Aleluya.
SACRO
SANTO
Despeta-
Lear: tres
Veces
Cambias
De
Sentido
El sí.
EN EL FILO de mística silábica,
Pendido, balbucir un corazón
Que se atenúa, se inverna,
Deja el tenue rastro hilado,
Desaparece en el lejos, al nunca.
Tú has ido madejando,
Sin que ninguno te haya visto.
Has ido recorriendo, recogiéndome.
Entonces en el siempre,
En el siemPre, Repites
Yo repito.
(De un blanco sedal de miedo,
Cuelga uno solo).
ENCINTADA LA SANGRE
Por la sílaba,
En mi corazón,
Duele mi voz
La lluvia, de
Clavos hasta ti
Y el corazón
Boqueando
Que por qué,
Contemplando
Hoza
Su autoría;
Degradado
En lenta
Extenuación azul.
LA PUERTA,
Monosílaba.
El tacón,
Bisílabo.
Rueda
Conciso, el qué:
Un cilindro
De metal, una terquedad
Oscura.
SITUACIÓN CAMBIANTE, retrocede.
Inmóviles
Nosotros,
En la coordenada
Del estupor
Miramos
Lo que hace
De ese nosotros
Sucesos, tomando
Nuestros nombres,
Quebradero de sonido
En el antes.
Apresados en el devenir,
Inermes,
Masticamos
Con duelo
La palabra
Nunca, candorosa.
Sentimos
El crujir del
Tallo en la oquedad
Del silencio.
Aprehendemos vida,
Para siempre.
ASISTE
Contra la maravilla,
La risa.
La descarnada.
Reducidos a simios,
Rezamos
A la inversa
Con la sierpe.
(¡La fealdad
Entonces,
El menosprecio!)
ESTA COMBA,
Jugada
Con cuchillos:
Repetir
Mi nombre
Con tu boca
Mientras grito
Que en las escupideras hay luz,
Gargajitos de luz,
Las sílabas lanzadas
De tú contra
Mi nombre; y que
A la vez yo en tu boca
Yo en mi boca; y que
Tú en la boca de la boca
En esta velocidad
Festiva
Contra todo
Que hoza
Indecorosa
Nuestras runas.
EVISCERADO,
Este silencio de ser
Afinaciones, donde
No las palabras,
En el vaciado de la flor
Sin conjetura.
Nada, acaso
La corriente, arpegiando
La diagonal de vello
Hacia la sombra.
Un pequeño hender, nada.
HAY
UN REZAR
Sin dios,
Involución de
Cuerpos
Abrazados,
Cayendo
El uno
En otro
Como semilla
En cristal,
Tan ciegamente.
Hay un flotar
En légamo
De unos,
Un hundirse
Hacia el fondo
De ese cero.
En la oquedad
Que deja
El corazón vaciado.
En silencio
Nosotros,
Comprendidos.
Una de las características del territorio anónimo del horror -tanto del interno como del externo que vivo de manera habitual- es que no cuenta con una escenografía adecuada para que, al menos, se tenga la mínima sospecha de que de manera intempestiva se estará inmerso en una situación que va más allá de lo imaginable. Los engranajes sociales están construidos de manera tan sutil, tal delicada, que los quiebres insignificantes, sobre todo para quien los desconoce, desatan de un momento a otro, una realidad contenida y llevada delante de esa manera durante siglos.
Sin zapatos, con garras de pájaro, con el cuerpo cubierto de plumas, con los testículos colgándole como si de un camello viejo se tratara, con una erección presente como cuando introducía las uñas destruidas en el cuerpo de sus amantes, con los pies embalsamados como les corresponde a todos los padres del planeta e incluso con un pájaro mudo acurrucado junto a su cabeza.
Muchas veces cuando uno dice que tal o cual persona es inteligente se refiere más a que es ocurrente, que tiene algo que decir de un tema inmediatamente. Esa persona puede no ser inteligente. La inteligencia puede ser lenta.
First, there’s the history. France’s republic was born of insurrection and has never forgotten it. French pupils learn that protest, uprising and rioting are the origin story of their freedoms, so these methods are championed in promoting change. We grew up in school with the idea that if you don’t like something, you have the power to change it. The language of rights, citizenship and collective power is woven into French education. The French Revolution appears in the curriculum twice, for pupils aged 12 and then again at 16; the student protests of 1968 are taught at age 14 and again at 17. Debating is encouraged in schools from as early as collège, or at about 11 years old. Young people are expected to have an opinion and not be afraid to defend it.
Even I, at 11, started to feel patriotic during our moral and civic education classes, despite not having a French passport. Protesting is taught as a legally framed fundamental right and a civic responsibility. Of course, with lycéens not yet being old enough to vote, protest is the next best thing.
In the final year of lycée, pupils study Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social (The Social Contract), which argues that citizens should only surrender their unrestricted natural liberty in exchange for civil and moral freedoms. You give up your individual interests for the volonté générale (general will) – put simply, you pay heavy taxes and in return you expect the country to work. That bargain is how the French understand their relationship with the state. When the government raises the retirement age, lets electricity bills soar or cuts school budgets, that is seen as a breach of the social contract. Protest is the automatic response.
Britons, on the other hand, are subjects of the UK and are characterised more by an American-style individualism and a desire to live and let live. There is less collective spirit. Britain has an extraordinary history of protest, spanning Peterloo, the Chartists, the suffragettes and the poll tax riots, but there is arguably a different cultural relationship to these events. They can be remembered as stand-alone episodes and interruptions to the national story rather than as the story itself. The Thatcher era also did permanent damage to unions, contributing to the British public being a grumbling but compliant one, lacking in organising power.
Miércoles, 14 de octubre de 2026
198.687
487
397
7-2
9
0
0
Los ganadores tienen métodos, los perdedores excusas.
Y los métodos del MAIN son infalibles. Los resultados así lo refrendan.
Increíblemente los Porcos no se sacian de cerveza, pero tampoco de victorias.
A falta de que se confirme el dato con la publicación de la única acta verdadera, la crónica irrefutable, puedo presumir de llevar desde el 2017, casi una década, invicto.
Imaginaros lo que significa esto a corto plazo. Fama, reconocimiento, saludos de los hinchas, y lo más importante, toda la bichería intentando acercarse a catar el banano.
Ahh, nunca me cansaré de esta sensación ni de esta vida de Porcobravo.
Poco puedo comentar de un magnifico fin de semana que la peña a estas alturas ya no conozca.
Muchos reencuentros con viejos camaradas de aquí y allá. Muchísima cerveza. Una deliciosa comida en el Milano. Un concierto de mucho nivel.en La Rula.
Y futbol, futbol de calidad y muchos kilates en la XX.
Ahora necesito un tiempo para recomponer mi cuerpo tras los muchos excesos.
Y a partir de ahí, a preparar la XXI
198.687 son los litros de cerveza bebidos por mi el largo fin de semana
487 los peloteos al MAIN para lograr el L.B o por lo menos un ascenso a delfín
397 exaltaciones de la amistad, canticos varios, recuerdos de viejas historias…
7-2 mi particular balance en la AGC, desde mi difícil debut en el 2015, el año del 6-1. Cuanta culpa me eché pensando que era todo por mi culpa.
9 son los años que llevo sin saber lo que es una derrota. Nueve años de victorias y alegrías
0 los goles marcados, asistencias u ocasiones generadas. Lo mío es trabajar para el equipo
0 las veces que pude frotar el banano. No desespero. Quizás los peixes buenos no hayan escuchado la radio ni leído las crónicas pertinentes y aún no sepan que hay un triunfador suelto por la ciudad. Quizás la AGC tenga que hacerse una cuenta en tik-tok. O quizás tenga que pasarme por la Luna, donde tendré más mercado.
LA LOGICA PRO (de sicarios y PROstitutas -llevada a la enésima potencia por l@s influencers-)
Lo importante no son las preguntas.
Lo importante es lo bien que me vaya a mí (¿en el día a día?: mejor en el minuto a minuto).
s mediodía y el vendedor de estrellas fugaces pregona a los cuatro vientos el otoño
de nuestros párpados
Los pájaros se extravían por las costuras del cielo
Deshilachados vuelan hacia un paraíso inexistente
Un viandante anuncia el apocalipsis
Subido a una boca de riego
No huyáis y confiad en el gurú de cola de cocodrilo
Alimentaos con sus patrañas
Es mejor así evitaréis el eclipse de vuestros cuerpos embalsamados con tinta de tabloide
Cenáculos de ratas leen entrelíneas a una puta
Bajo la luz sifilítica de lamparillas de suntuosos lobbies
Calculan la extensión de sus planes de supresión de todas las utopías
Y cuadriculan los vuelos de las golondrinas
Las páginas de sucesos de los diarios vespertinos vociferan
Con las manos chorreantes de sangre
Luchan pobres contra pobres en un ring como una caja de cerillas
Miríadas de cucarachas aplauden
Mecánicamente
Cerrado por vacaciones
El túnel ya no muestra luz al final de unos pasos de baile
Allí el vendedor de sogas hace su agosto
Hay corbatas de alambre de espino para toda edad y condición
Más ofertas en el interior de la celda de castigo
Las vacas sangradas pastan en prados multicolor
Bajo la cacofonía de la metralla suburbana
Donde los tranvías impactan en la diana del sol poniente
Alguien recita la Biblia del caos
El mundo se cubrirá de zarzas fosforescentes
Y los escarabajos peloteros coparán las tribunas de los parlamentos
Mientras el mar bailará entre las lápidas de los cementerios
Como un forajido buscado en cinco países
Hasta morir de frío
Los traficantes del marfil de los sueños se disputan cuatro esquinas
De un cielo en construcción
De las fuentes manan alas de ángeles dopados
Contra todo pronóstico la voz del poeta se alza
En medio del paroxismo que precede al descarrilamiento de los planetas
Sucesor, cuando yo ya no esté aquí, me encontrarás en el país de la narración, en El Noveno País. Narrador que estás en tu cabaña cubierta de hierbas, en el campo, tú que tienes sentido de la orientación, puedes enmudecer tranquila-mente, puedes callar tal vez a lo largo de los siglos, pero luego, rey, niño, concentra tus fuerzas, yérguete, apóyate sobre los codos, sonríe a lo que hay a tu alrededor, inspira profundamente y empieza de nuevo con aquella palabra que dirime todo conflicto, con tu: "Y..."
There Paul was honoured; there our faith proclaimed
There true believers first were Christians named.
Who has not seen how Mother Church can press
Each vain tradition to her purposes,
And from the cradle to the grave supply
Proofs sacred of infallibility?
Would you be damned? a text conveys her curse;
Or rise again? you have it in a verse.
Her rites as means of revenue are prized:
For mammon's sake our infants are baptized.
With golden offerings marriages are made;
Woe to the union where no fee is paid.
Who weds or fornicates, no matter which,
Children begets, and makes the altar rich;
But, where no offerings to the surplice fall,
The taste forthwith is anti-physical.
Hell-fire can hardly expiate the guilt
Of that damned sin-the church's rubric bilked.
The tree we plant will, when its boughs are grown,
Produce no other blossoms than its own;
And thus in man some inborn passions reign
Which, spite of careful pruning, sprout again.
Then, say, was I or nature in the wrong,
If, yet a boy, one inclination, strong
In wayward fancies, domineered my soul,
And bade complete defiance to control?
What, though my youthful instincts, forced to brood
Within my bosom seemed awhile subdued?
What, though, by early education taught,
The charms of women first my homage caught?
What, though my verse in Mary's praises flowed?
And flowers poetic round her footsteps strewed,
Yet, when her ears would list not to my strain,
And every sigh was answered with disdain,
Pride turned, not stopped, the course of my desires,
Extinguished these, and lighted other fires.
And as the pimple which cosmetic art
Repels from one, invades another part,
My bubbling passions found another vent,
The object changed, but not the sentiment.
And, eter my years could task my reason why,
Sex caused no qualms where beauty lured the eye.
Such were my notions ere my teens began,
And such their progress till I grew a man.
With thee, dear Margaret, whose tender looks
Made me forgt my task, my play, my books,
Young though we were, our union soared above
The frigid systems of Platonic love.
Untutored how to kiss, how oft I hung,
Upon thy neck, whilst from my burning tongue
Between thy lips the kindling glow was sent,
And nature fanned the new-born sentimentl
How oft, beneath the arbour's mystic shade,
My boyish vows of constancy were made!
There on the grass as we recumbent lay,
Not coy wast thou, nor I averse to play;
And in that hour thy virtue's sole defence
Was not thy coldness, but my innocence.
Among the yeomen's sons on my estate
A gentle boy would at my mansion wait:
And now that time has almost blanched my hair,
And with the past the present I compare,
Full well I know, though decency forbad
The same caresses to a rustic lad;
Love, love it was, that made my eyes delight
To have his person ever in my sight.
Yes, Rushton, though to unobserving eyes,
My favours but as lordly gifts were prized;
Yet something then would inwardly presag
The predilections of my riper age.
Why did I give the gauds to deck thy form?
Why for a menial did my entrails warm?
Why? but from secret longings to pursue
Those inspirations, which, if books speak true,
Have led e'en priest and sags to embrace
Those charms, which female blandishments efface.
Thus passed my boyhood: and though proofs were none
What path my future course of life would run
Like sympathetic ink, if then unclear,
The test applied soon made the trace appear.
I bade adieu to school and tyro's sports,
And Cam received me in his gothic courts.
Freed from the pedagogue's tyrannic sway,
In mirth and revels I consumed the day.
No more my truant muse her vigils kept;
No more she soothed my slumbers as I slept;
But, idling now, she oft recalled the time
When to her reed I tuned my feeble rhyme.
She knew how those 'midst song and mirth grow dull
Whose tender bosoms soft emotions lull.
As manhood came, my feelings, more intense,
Sighed for some kindred mind, where confidence,
Tuned in just unison, might meet return,
And whilst it warmed my breast, in his might burn.
Oft, when the evening bell to vespers rung,
When the full choir the solemn anthem sung,
And lips, o'er which no youthful down had grown,
Hymned their soft-praises to Jehovah's throne,
The pathos of the strain would soothe my soul,
And call me willing from the drunkard's bowl.
Who, that has heard the chapel's evening song,
When peals divine the lengthened note prolong,
But must have felt religious thoughts arise,
And speed their way melodious to the skies.
Among the choir a youth my notice won,
Of pleasing lineaments named Eddleston.
With gifts well suited to a stripling's mood,
His friendship and his tenderness I wooed.
Oh! how I loved to press his cheek to mine;
How fondly would my arms his waist entwine!
Another feeling borrowed friendship's name,
And took its mantle to conceal my shame.
Another feelingl Oh! 'tis hard to trace
The line where love usurps tame friendship's place.
Friendship's the chrysalis, which seems to die,
But throws its coil to give love wing to fly.
Both are the same, but in another state;
This formed to soar, and that to vegetate.
Of humble birth was he-patrician I.
And yet this youth was my idolatry.
Strong was my passion, past all inward cure
And could it be so violent, yet pure? '
Twas like a philter poured into my veins-
And as the chemist, when some vase contains
An unknown mixture, each component tries
With proper tests, the draught to analyze;
So questioned I myself: What light this fire?
Maids and not boys are wont to move desire;
Else 'twere illicit love. OhE sad mishap!
But what prompts nature then to set the trap?
Why night and day does his sweet image float
Before my eyes? or wherefore do I doat
On that dear face with ardour so intense?
Why truckles reason to concupiscence?
Though law cries "holdl" yet passion onward draws;
But nature gave us passions, man gave laws,
Whence spring these inclinations, rank and strong?
And harming no one, wherefore call them wrong?
What's virtue's touchstone? Unto others do,
As you would wish that others did to you.
Then tell me not of sex, if to one key
The chords, when struck, vibrate in harmony.
No virgin I deflower, nor, lurking, creep,
With steps adulttrous, on a husband's sleep.
I plough no field in other men's domain;
And where I delve no seed shall spring again.
Thus with myself I reasoned; then I read,
And counsel asked from volumes of the dead.
Oh! flowery path, thus hand in hand to walk
With Plato and enjoy his honeyed talk.
Beneath umbrageous planes to sit at ease,
And drink from wisdom's cup with Socrates.
Now stray with Bion through the shady grove;
Midst deeds of glory, now with Plutarch rove.
And oft I turned me to the Mantuan's page,
To hold discourse with shepherds of his age;
Or mixed with Horace in the gay delights
Of courtly revels, theatres, and sights;
And Thou, whose soft seductive lines comprise
The code of love, thou hadst my sympathies;
But still, where'er I turned, in verse or prose,
Whateter I read, some fresh dilemma rose,
And reason, that should pilot me along,
Belied her name, or else she led me wrong.
I love a youth; but Horoace did the same;
If he's absolv'd, say, why am I to blame?
When young Alexis claimed a Virgil's sigh,
He told the world his choice; and may not I?
Shall every schoolman's pen his verse extol,
And, sin in me, in him a weakness call?
Then why was Socrates surnamed the sage,
Not only in his own, but every age,
If lips, whose accents strewed the path of truth,
Could print their kisses on some favoured youth?
Or why should Plato, in his Commonwealth
Score tenets up which I must note by stealth?
Say, why, when great Epaminondas died,
Was Cephidorus buried by his side?
Or why should Plutarch with eulogiums cite
That chieftain's love for his young catamite,
And we be forced his doctrine to decry,
Or drink the bitter cup of infamy?
But these, thought I, are samples musty grown;
Turn we from early ages to our own.
No heathen's lust is matter of surprise;
He only aped his Pagan deities;
But when a Saviour had redeemed the world,
And all false idols from Olympus hurled,
A purer code the Christian law revealed,
And what was venial once as guilt was sealed.
With zeal unwearied I resumed again
My search, and read whate'er the layman's pen
In annals grave or chronicles had writ;
But can I own with any benefit?
'Tis true, mankind had cast the pagan skin,
But all the carnal part remained within
Unchang'd, and nature, breaking through the fence
Still vindicated her omnipotence.
Look, how infected with rank desease
Were those, who held St. Peter's holy keys,
And pious men to whom the people bowed,
And kings, who churches to the saints endowed;
All these were Christians of the highest stamp-
How many scholars, wasting oter their lamp,
How many jurists, versed in legal rules,
How many poets, honoured in the schools,
How many captains, famed for deeds of arms,
Have found their solace in a minion's arms!
Nay, e'en our bard, Dame Nature's darling child,
Felt the strange impulse, and his hours beguiled
In penning sonnets to a stripling's praise,
Such as would damn a poet now-a-days.
To this conclusion we must come at last:
Wise men have lived in generations past,
Whose deeds and sayings history records,
To whom the palm of virtue she awards,
Who, tempted, ate of that forbidden tree,
Which prejudice denies to you and me.
Then be consistent; and, at once confess,
If man's pursuit through life is happiness,
The great, the wise, the pious, and the good,
Have what they sought not rightly understood;
Or deem not else that aberration crime,
Which reigns in every caste and every clime.
Olvidar, desasirse hasta de la propia memoria, soltarse de sí mismo, es cosa que no comprendo que se desee.
Iré qué importa
Caballo sea la noche.
La inteligencia artificial es ya una de las cinco o seis grandes tecnologías de la historia de la humanidad, o está llamada a serlo. El manejo del fuego, la escritura, la rueda, la máquina de vapor; en esa liga de tecnocampeones juega. Es un gamechanger, una de esas invenciones capaces de derrumbar una era e iniciar otra; de revolucionar la economía y, de resultas de ello, también la sociedad, la política, nuestra misma antropología. No fuimos los mismos seres humanos después de que se inventaran y se popularizaran el tren o el teléfono, posibilitando viajes de ida y vuelta en el día a ciudades lejanas o conversar con gente a la que no tuviéramos delante; y tampoco lo seremos si la IA se consolida y se extiende. Eliminará puestos de trabajo, creará otros, generará tensiones y quizás guerras mientras destapa nuevas y asombrosas posibilidades del ingenio humano. Su megamente enjámbrica y febril ya hace cosas como resolver la conjetura de Erdős —un reto matemático planteado en 1946—, optimizar compuestos existentes para crear antibióticos más potentes o diseñar radiofármacos más eficaces contra el cáncer. Pero la misma capacidad inconmensurable puede ponerse al servicio de un bombardeo o de un genocidio.
Frente a una tecnología así, hay tres posiciones posibles. La primera es el entusiasmo pánfilo, acrítico, novólatra (si es nuevo, es bueno), de los incapaces de levantar las alfombras del marketing, para ver qué porquería pueden tener escondida. Nadie les estropeará nunca la fiesta de pedirle a la IA que los envejezca o rejuvenezca o los vista de chándal de táctel de los ochenta. La segunda posición es el negativo de esta: un huraño miedo al cambio profundo como tal y la posición política que se deriva de él; un férreo tradicionalismo que pueda ser de derechas o de izquierdas, pero detrás del cual esté siempre el mito de la Torre de Babel. El pánico a ofender a Dios y moverlo a castigar formidablemente nuestra osadía de buscar maneras de darle esquinazo a la condena del Génesis; de ganarnos el pan con una frente que sude menos. Es comprensible, el miedo ese, pero no debiera hacernos correr a renunciar a los superantibióticos y las curas del cáncer. Hay una tercera posición posible, que es preguntarse de la tecnología en primer lugar, no su qué, sino su quién; no lo que hace, sino quién ostenta los medios de producción, y al servicio de qué los pone. Ser luditas inteligentes. Los de principios del siglo XIX no rompían telares porque odiasen la mecanización, sino porque aquellos telares no eran suyos, ni funcionaban a favor suyo: la máquina que podía significar menos horas de trabajo significaba, en manos de un patrón, el mismo jornal por más piezas y el despido del compañero. No era la máquina la que degradaba al obrero, sino su dueño. Y lo que querían los luditas no era coser y cantar, sino que cosiese la máquina, y ellos tuviesen, entonces, tiempo para cantar.
Tener algo que hacer también nos gusta, pero algo menos: hay que sudar más y tener la capacidad —de la que no vamos servidos— de aceptar con serenidad los resultados mediocres, vivir sin melancolía en los cincuentas por ciento, saber ver medio llenos los vasos no vacíos, pero no llenos del todo. El decir, el hablar, el mundo de las ideas y las interpretaciones, no paga esos peajes. Es gratis y carece de restricciones. Así que, impotentes muchas veces para el hacer, decimos cosas, corremos a decirlas, hablamos por los codos. Encontramos allá disfrutes compensatorios: ya que no podemos crear, al menos analizar lo creado; si no logramos ser transformadores del mundo, sí seremos al menos sus mejores analistas, los más listos. En el fondo también pensamos —cristianos sin Cristo que somos tantas veces— que el Verbo crea, y a verbalizar nos lanzamos. Si en medio de la noche decimos el suficiente número de veces que se haga la luz, la luz se hará, pensamos; y ver volar la más tenue luciérnaga nos bastará para ilusionarnos con que la Gran Iluminación es posible, y hasta segura.
El peligro esencial es que el mundo digital, por primera vez en la historia, pretende la creación de una nueva naturaleza. En ella, la tecnología alcanza una capacidad anticipativa de nuestras propias decisiones. De algún modo, conoce antes de nosotros lo que queremos hacer. Nos dirige. Nos engaña. Nos exige sustituir o suicidar nuestra intimidad por la identidad digital. Y quedamos en sus manos, ofrecemos nuestro nombre oculto, aquel que nadie debería conocer.
En cualquier caso, no creo que nos encontremos simplemente ante una utopía o ante una distopía científica avanzada que recoge los sedimentos de la imaginación desbordante de la sociedad postindustrial. Si así fuera podría ser relativamente fácil de combatir. El problema de la Singularidad Tecnológica es mucho mayor por su apego a una realidad cambiante que acoge esta forma de evolución dirigida y empieza a entenderla como una víspera trascendental, de la que parece no podremos escapar en el futuro. No se trata de un avance más, sino de la creación de una neo natura que escapará muy pronto, si no lo ha hecho ya, de nuestro control.
El acto del amor es lo más parecido
a un asesinato.
En la cama en su terror gozoso, se trata de borrar
el alma del que está,
hombre o mujer,
debajo.
Por eso no miramos.
Eyacular es ensuciar el cuerpo
y penetrar es humillar con la
verga la
erección de otro yo.
Borrar o ser borrados, tanto da, pero
en un instante, irse
dejarlo
una vez más
entre tus labios.
Esa desconfianza era propia de su carácter, de su temperamento, pero también, en gran porción, era alimentada por un pequeño grupo que, no de mala fe, sino por ineptitud y estrechez mental, aconsejaban sus precauciones.
Deberíamos volver a hacernos cargo de las palabras. Y a analizar lo que dicen, y no lo que quieren decir. Volver a los textos y ver qué pone ahí.
Le digo a mi madre
que acabo de ganar el Premio Nobel.
¿De nuevo?, dice.
¿En qué categoría esta vez?
Es un pequeño juego
al que jugamos: yo finjo
que soy alguien; ella
finge que no está muerta.
Decía Lacan que «l’inconsciente c’est le discours de l’Autre avec un grand A», y este por cuanto el «Otro», en la sociedad capitalista occidental, es tan solo una oscuridad o una sospecha, una sombra kafkiana o paranoica, y el «Otro», única evidencia, es una evidencia indecible. Y si el sexo se plantea aquí como una agresión es por cuanto siendo aquel, como dijera Marx, la relación natural entre hombre y hombre, al faltar el espejo, él solo puede manifestarse como una violencia ciega.
Ahora bien, la burguesía, que acabó con la religión para deshacerse del derecho divino de la nobleza, que la privaba arbitrariamente de sus riquezas, y al inventar lo que Hegel llamara el «cristianismo ateo», un cristianismo esquizofrénico o, mejor dicho, hipócrita, en que no se cree en lo que se dice, la burguesía, digo, creó así una sociedad infernal y paranoica donde la única evidencia o situación es la lucha, y en donde al que se le llama «loco», y se le castiga y tortura en el manicomio, para vengarnos aún más de su fracaso.
Porque, como dijera el antipsiquiatra inglés Edwin Lemert, existe una suerte de «tasa social sobre el fracaso», y en esa sociedad al que cae no lo levanta ni dios: «Te suelen soltar la mano si ven que hacia abajo vas», como dijera en palabras terribles y poéticas Julio Iglesias.
Es así que aquí, a la inversa de un cristianismo al que encima se pretende reclamar, el despojo, el desgraciado, no sólo no son objeto de caridad cristiana alguna, sino que se hacen objetos de la persecución más implacable, y de la juerga flamenca más tenebrosa, que ni siquiera encuentra su término entre los muros del manicomio, donde el castigo sigue y no cesa jamás, y encuentra sólo su límite en el estupor catatónico, o en la muerte, único término y final de la más terrible de las conspiraciones, que no tiene otro sentido que el misterio terrible de la maldad humana: «cuán bestial es el topetazo de la injusticia absoluta», como dijera Dámaso Alonso; y cuando digo aquí «absoluta» lo digo bien, por cuanto se trata de una injusticia universal, colectiva y sin salida, como no sea la dinamita con que acaba El proceso de Franz Kafka, única salida posible para un mal que está ahí pero que no se dice, y que es efecto de una moral del desconocimiento, de la que la mejor descripción es la de la película de Michelangelo Antonioni Blow-Up, la descripción de un crimen que a nadie interesa, y de una pistola en las tinieblas.
Y es que si hay alguna realidad de la noción de pecado, ésta es ese «tú», semejante o prójimo -que significa «cercano»- que falta al capitalismo, sistema basado en la competencia desleal más salvaje y en la mas ciega de las luchas porque a aquélla le falta incluso la moral del guerrero, la moral de la Valhöll, donde las espadas nos dan al fin su luz.
«Y al faltar el tú, o la situación, estamos para siempre en la merienda de los locos de Carroll, donde siempre es a las seis, siempre es la misma luna y la misma mañana, el mismo veneno y la misma CIA, el mismo manicomio y la misma muerte, lejos de la verdad, de nuestra única y posible verdad, que son los carruajes vacíos en el crepúsculo, moviéndose en dirección al Salón de los espejos»
Puesto que el artista no cuenta ya, a causa de esta desintregración del sistema, con un lector, con una crítica «viva», ya que la única respuesta con la que cabe contar es con la de una crítica «muerta», que opera con códigos arcaicos que ya no tienen vigencia ni en el escritor ni en el improbable lector (por consiguiente, la función de esta crítica es policial: se trata sobre todo de «juzgar», el presente no ya por el pasado sino por el resentimiento que originó el fallecimiento de este; se trata no ya de analizar sino de prohibir o elogiar lo que aún se atenga al principio de identidad, lo que a pesar de todo persevere en los pobres y secos mitos de la división del trabajo); puesto que su producción es en suma, en este sistema, improductiva, inexistente, inútil: o bien el artista hace suya esta situación, dando así lugar al «esteticismo», en el que se celebra el absurdo -por supuesto previo al esteticismo- del «arte por el arte» (pese a lo cual el esteticista se afana en publicar, en lugar de autosatisfacerse con sus propias obra, que sería lo consecuente y en algunos casos lo más provechoso para el lector: me refiero por ejemplo al segundo Carnero, El sueño de Escipión, y al tercer y cuarto Gimferrer); o bien rechaza -vanamente, impolíticamente- este no-código capitalista mediante códigos fenecidos, mediante nociones silvestres como «inspiración» o «genio» al mismo tiempo que se refugia en un público, en un lector inexistente: la posteridad.
Todo ello en lugar de la única actitud valerosa, que sería, no ya acomodarse al presente -esteticismo- o tratar de resucitar desesperadamente el pasado, sino ir aún más lejos en esa -para el espíritu pequeñoburgués- espantosa descodificación, ir aún más lejos de lo que el capitalismo ha ido en la muerte del arte, de la escritura: hacer ver, por ejemplo, que si el arte, la escritura, han muerto no ha sido sólo por causas externas, sino también internas: el arte, la escritura han muerto por una sola causa: por cuanto eran fruto de la división social del trabajo, de la división entre el trabajo manual y el trabajo intelectual, y de la división del hombre entre lenguaje y energía, entre significado y sentido: así nos correspondería inaugurar un nuevo arte total, hecho por todos, fusión de sentido y significado. Esto es lo que, fundamentalmente, quieren decir Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Artaud: no habrá ya entonces necesidad de «crítica», por cuanto, de ahora en adelante, esta radicará en el mismo arte: se acabó el arte «inspirado», ateórico (y por consiguiente ideológico) y acrítico; y la crítica, si aún quiere ser, habrá de ser artística, tan total como el arte que pretende criticar. Ejemplos de este arte total, en España, sería imposible encontrarlos en la escritura: el único que me viene a la memoria pertenece a otro género y es Darío Villalba, quien con sus obras he hecho morir el «cuadro», ha abolido -o tratado, al menos, desesperadamente de abolir- la separación existente entre público y «autor». El arte entonces ya no se «consume», por cuanto producción y consumición vienen a ser uno y lo mismo: la producción se consume a sí misma, la consumición es ahora capaz de, consumiendo, producir.
La verdad es siempre un abismo. La falta de verdad es una ascensión, un arriba, sólo la falta de verdad no es la muerte, como la verdad es la muerte, sólo la falta de verdad no es un abismo
Cuando la herida es demasiado profunda, no queda más remedio que confiarse al tiempo y pensar que cada día que pasa es una victoria. Transcurridos varios meses, empiezas a vislumbrar un atisbo de cura.
¿Por qué será, pensó, que por mucho fervor y convicción que tengo a solas, todo se derrite en presencia de otros? Me miran como si fuera su jefe, y las palabras de mando no salen de mi boca. Sonrío y digo lo que resulta más grato; no por cobardía, sino por sensación de futilidad.
El nuevo capitalismo, el del siglo 21, no solo ofrece productos de consumo para sentir a través de ellos un estatus o una ensoñación, eso está ya superado, lo que hace es crear una auténtica realidad paralela que se erige en única a través de los medios de comunicación. Así que más que nunca la común Realidad imita a lo artificial, al Arte.
Battle commences
The Russian commander, General Pavel Liprandi, started the battle by launching an assault to the north-east of Balaklava.
His forces seized a series of Turkish positions on the heights overlooking the road between Balaklava and the Allied siege lines at Sevastopol. At the same time, they took several British naval guns positioned on the high ground.
In response, the British commander, Field Marshal Lord Raglan, ordered some of the troops attacking Sevastopol to leave their lines and support the outnumbered defenders.
The Thin Red Line
The Russian cavalry charged on Balaklava, but their route was blocked by the 93rd (Highland) Regiment of Foot. Traditionally, infantry facing a charge would form a square, four lines deep. But the Highlanders took an unconventional approach, making two lines instead.
In the face of the oncoming Russian horses, the Highlanders' commander, Major-General Sir Colin Campbell, told his troops: ‘There is no retreat from here, men. You must die where you stand.’ They fired two disciplined volleys at the advancing enemy, which turned the Russians back.
Charge of the Heavy Brigade
The Heavy Brigade, moving up to support the Highlanders, then intercepted the retreating Russian cavalry.
The 800 British horsemen were hugely outnumbered by the 3,000-strong Russian cavalry. But seeing their enemy halted and vulnerable to attack, they charged uphill all the same. Their advance was little faster than a trot and only lasted 10 minutes, but it sent the Russian horsemen into disorder.
Charge of the Light Brigade
In response to their orders, the Light Brigade began their charge, but at the wrong gun batteries. They galloped through Russian artillery fire from three sides and on into the ‘Valley of Death’ suffering heavy losses in the process.
Some of the horsemen succeeded in reaching the Russian guns at the end of the valley, and even drove the men operating them into retreat before charging the Russian cavalry beyond.
Retreat
After intense fighting, the remnants of the Light Brigade were forced to retreat from the guns. They made their way back through the ‘Valley of Death’ before reaching safety. Fortunately, their return was ensured by the French cavalry, who cleared the Russians from the north side of the valley.
Although the reinforcements from Sevastopol had now deployed and were ready to begin an assault on the heights, no further action was taken.
The battle ended in strategic stalemate, with the Russians controlling the heights and the road, but Balaklava still in Allied hands. Unfortunately, Russian possession of the road made supplying the forces besieging Sevastopol during a terrible winter much harder.
En cualquier road movie lo más importante es el horizonte; tarde o temprano tiene que verse y significar algo por sí mismo, a fin de empaquetar en aquel punto el lejano espíritu de la película. Está bien estudiado que, en cine europeo, el horizonte significa pérdida o melancolía; en el cine norteamericano, esperanza, imán de pioneros; y en cine chino o japonés significa muerte y sexo anal.
Y esta entrada tenía algo de atardecer de otoño, cuando se empieza a notar cómo acortan los días. Una especie de reclusión voluntaria.
A veces también le cuento las cosas que siento de verdad porque me hace sentir bien. Porque no se las cuento a nadie más y si nunca cuentas lo que te pasa por dentro se te hace bola y se convierte en basura y alquitrán.
Son tiempos extraños los que vivimos, hay recónditos pasadizos detrás del decorado.
¿Qué es el fútbol gaélico y cómo se juega?
El fútbol gaélico es un deporte irlandés de equipo que se juega en un campo rectangular con una portería a cada lado. Las porterías tienen forma de H: la parte inferior cuenta con una red como cualquier portería de fútbol convencional, pero de los extremos del larguero salen dos palos verticales de varios metros de altura. El objetivo del juego es conseguir la máxima puntuación posible, bien marcando goles dentro de la red (tres puntos) o introduciendo el balón entre los dos palos superiores (un punto), ya sea con las manos o con los pies.
¿Cómo se controla el balón?
El balón de fútbol gaélico recuerda por su apariencia al de voleibol, pero es más pesado. Por lo general, se controla y pasa con las manos —golpeándolo con la parte interior de la muñeca—, pero también se puede pasar con el pie. Una vez en posesión del balón, el jugador solo puede dar cuatro pasos con él en las manos. Para conseguir otros cuatro pasos adicionales, debe botar el balón o hacer un solo, que consiste en echarse el balón al pie y volver a llevárselo a las manos golpeándolo con la puntera. No se puede botar dos veces seguidas, pero sí que se pueden encadenar todos los solos que se quieran. Lo más habitual es alternar ambos movimientos.
¿Cuáles son los torneos más destacados?
El campeonato de fútbol gaélico más importante actualmente es el All-Ireland Football Championship, que se disputa anualmente en Irlanda y en el que participan las selecciones de los condados, estrictamente amateurs. Los jugadores solo pueden representar a su condado de nacimiento o, si se han tenido que mudar por motivos profesionales, de residencia y están prohibidos los fichajes entre equipos.
La batalla no se ganará sin las tribus, en secreto cónclave. No la electoral: esa, a estas alturas, casi es más síntoma que causa. Pero ya no queda tiempo. Las víctimas se amontonan, los peregrinos vagan a los antiguos templos. Los ritos atávicos de la depredación están a la vuelta de la esquina, si no están aquí ya. La luna sangra. La tierra llora. El canibalismo está en nuestra carne, corrompe nuestro espíritu. No habrá Lothlórien al final de esta Moria, y Narsil sigue rota, y Excálibur está en un bosque encantado al que no sabemos llegar. ¿Quién hará lo que no puede hacerse? ¿Estamos solos en estos pasillos, abandonados en esta ruina? Sus enjambres se aproximan. Tambores. Tambores en lo profundo. Ya vienen.
Los niños dicen buah, las cámpers, buah, las cámpers, qué guapas, nene. Las cámpers, buah, nene. E imaginan futuros con cámpers y solo les viene a la cabeza construir una cámper casera con sus padres resacosos a partir de uno de esos coches fúnebres que vienen y van de los tanatorios transportando a quienes nos han abandonado. Un colchón detrás donde el ataúd y un camping gas y a cruzarse la costa con los colegas parando en playas que son difíciles de imaginar porque si piensan en el futuro se imaginan solo la cámper en un coche fúnebre. Buah, nene, una cámper, qué guapo.
Somos todos muy indies hasta que pasa la charanga.
El eugenismo aboga por el abandono del Homo Sapiens como «reliquia» o «fósil viviente» y la aplicación de tecnologías genéticas para penetrar en el genoma, probablemente escribiendo nuevos genes desde cero con la ayuda de un sintetizador de ADN. Tal eugenesia sería practicada por grupos de élite, cuyos logros superarían tan rápida y radicalmente el ritmo habitual de la evolución que, en diez generaciones, los nuevos grupos habrían superado a nuestra forma actual en la misma medida en que nosotros superamos a los simios
La dicotomía entre naturaleza y cultura adquiere rápidamente implicaciones políticas y emocionales. Para decirlo sin rodeos, a la derecha le gustan los genes y a la izquierda le gusta la cultura
Para este viaje me magullaré con el esputo baboso de mi amante más hermoso, para que sientan como la medida de mi cuerpo deforma su sombra, pues la belleza jamás será bandera y mi cerveza es más importante que esa virgen de cemento, alada y ciega que duerme en el asiento de un bus en esta ciudad extraña donde los adolescentes ya no se besan aunque una bandada de gaviotas eyacule desde sus ojos.
Soy el rostro sin huesos, reflejo de mi niñez contra la jeringa, espejo que adopté a falta de una máscara más blanca. Desde que los fantasmas abandonaron mi territorio, flores semejantes a la mentira son mi confesión, tan desechable como el cuarto mandamiento o una momia de cal.
Nadie va a librarme del satánico canto que inventé cuando fingía dormir en la cuna. A veces la familia bastaba para higienizar mis incendios con placebos y promesas con el sabor del manto de la abuela y mascotas muertas, pero la página dictada por la serpiente tiene gusto a crimen y ante eso, no hay fotografía del recuerdo que valga.
No saben nada de lo que es usted, de lo que representa. Su universo no tiene ningún significado para ellos. No tratarán de comprender. Estarán cansados, tendrán frío, harán fuego con su hermosa puerta de roble.
Escupirán su vino. Comerán con los dedos en los bonitos recipientes de estaño que cuelgan de su pared. Sentados en cuclillas, contemplarán cómo arden sus sillones. Se harán atavíos con los bordados de sus sábanas. Cada objeto perderá el sentido que usted le concedía; lo bello ya no será bello; lo útil se tornará irrisorio, y lo inútil, absurdo.
O Samaín é unha esmorga celta que marca o remate da tempada de colleita e o comezo do inverno ou "metade escura" do aberto todo o ano.
Hoxe toca tallar caveiras en melóns e cabazas, vestir como espíritos ou pantasmas e follar coas ovellas.
Ideas de libertad están atadas a la bebida.
Nuestro ideal de vida contiene una taberna
Donde un hombre puede sentarse y hablar o sólo pensar,
Sin ningún miedo al dragón nocturno;
O bien otra taberna donde no aparecen
Letreros de No se Fía ni de No hay crédito
Y, dejando aparte las ilimitadas cervezas,
Nos sentamos tranquilamente borrachos y locos a editar
Panfletos de un país realmente mejor donde un hombre
Puede beber un vino más delicado, ¡Ah!, no destilado
Que intoxica sutilmente sin dolor,
Tejiendo la visión de una taberna inasimilable
Donde siempre podemos beber sin pagar
Con la puerta abierta, y el viento soplando.
It was difficult at first to understand what “that Firmin” was doing at all with such an unlikely family. He had no tastes in common with the Taskerson lads and he was not even at the same school. Yet it was easy to see that the relatives who sent him had acted with the best of motives. Geoffrey’s “nose was always in a book,” so that “Cousin Abraham,” whose work had a religious turn, should be the “very man” to assist him. While as for the boys themselves they probably knew as little about them as Jacques’ own family: they won all the language prizes at school, and all the athletic ones: surely these fine hearty fellows would be “just the thing” to help poorGeoffrey over his shyness and stop him “wool-gathering” about his father and India. Jacques’ heart went out to the poor Old Bean. His mother had died when he was a child, in Kashmir, and, within the last year or so, his father, who’d married again, had simply, yet scandalously, disappeared. Nobody in Kashmir or elsewhere knew quite what had happened to him. One day he had walked up into the Himalayas and vanished, leaving Geoffrey, at Srinagar, with his half-brother, Hugh, then a baby in arms, and his stepmother. Then, as if that were not enough, the stepmother died too, leaving the two children alone in India. Poor Old Bean! He was really, in spite of his queerness, so touched by any kindness done to him. He was even touched by being called “that Firmin.” And he was devoted to old Taskerson. M. Laruelle felt that in his way he was devoted to all the Taskersons and would have defended them to the death. There was something disarmingly helpless and at the same time so loyal about him. And after all, the Taskerson boys had, in their monstrous bluff English fashion, done their best not to leave him out and to show him their sympathy on his first summer holiday in England. It was not their fault if he could not drink seven pints in fourteen minutes or walk fifty miles without dropping. It was partly due to them that Jacques himself was here to keep him company. And they had perhaps partly succeeded in making him overcome his shyness. For from the Taskersons the Old Bean had at least learned, as Jacques with him, the English art of “picking up girls.” They had an absurd Pierrot song, sung preferably in Jacques’ French accent.
Jacques and he walked along the promenade singing: Oh we allll And we alll And we alll ze wibberlee wobberlee ze wibberlee wobberlee wibberlee wobberlee And-look-at-all-ze-pretty-girls-with-wibberlee-wobberlee eyes. Oh We allll ze wibberlee wobberlee Until ze day is dawn-ing, And-we-all-have-zat-wibberlee-wobberlee-wobberlee-wibberleewibberlee-wobberlee feeling In ze morning. Then the ritual was to shout “Hi” and walk after some girl whose admiration you imagined, if she happened to turn round, you had aroused. If you really had and it was after sunset you took her walking on the golf course, which was full, as the Taskersons put it, of good “sitting-out places.” These were in the main bunkers or gulleys between dunes. The bunkers were usually full of sand, but they were windproof, and deep; none deeper than the “Hell Bunker.” The Hell Bunker was a dreaded hazard, fairly near the Taskersons’house, in the middle of the long sloping eighth fairway. It guarded the green in a sense, though at a great distance, being far below it and slightly to the left. The abyss yawned in such a position as to engulf the third shot of a golfer like Geoffrey, a naturally beautiful and graceful player, and about the fifteenth of a duffer like Jacques. Jacques and the Old Bean had often decided that the Hell Bunker would be a nice place to take a girl, though wherever you took one, it was understood nothing very serious happened. There was, in general, about the whole business of “picking up” an air of innocence. After a while the Old Bean, who was a virgin to put it mildly, and Jacques, who pretended he was not, fell into the habit of picking up girls on the promenade, walking to the golf course, separating there, and meeting later. There were, oddly, fairly regular hours at the Taskersons’. M. Laruelle didn’t know to this day why there was no understanding about the Hell Bunker. He had certainly no intention of playing Peeping Tom on Geoffrey. He had happened with his girl, who bored him, to be crossing the eighth fairway toward Leasowe Drive when both were startled by voices coming from the bunker. Then the moonlight disclosed the bizarre scene from which neither he nor the girl could turn their eyes. Laruelle would have hurried away but neither of them—neither quite aware of the sensible impact of what was occurring in the Hell Bunker—could control their laughter. Curiously, M. Laruelle had never remembered what anyone said, only the expression on Geoffrey’s face in the moonlight and the awkward grotesque way the girl had scrambled to her feet, then, that both Geoffrey and he behaved with remarkable aplomb. They all went to a tavern with some queer name, as “The Case is Altered.” It was patently the first time the Consul had ever been into a bar on his own initiative; he ordered Johnny Walkers all round loudly, but the waiter, encountering the proprietor, refused to serve them and they were turned out as minors. Alas, their friendship did not for some reason survive these two sad, though doubtless providential, little frustrations. M. Laruelle’s father had meantime dropped the idea of sending him to school in England. The holiday fizzled out in desolation and equinoctial gales.
It had been a melancholy dreary parting at Liverpool and a dreary melancholy journey down to Dover and back home, lonesome as an onion peddler, on the sea-swept channel boat to Calais— M. Laruelle straightened, instantly becoming aware of activity, to step just in time from the path of a horseman who had reined up sideways across the bridge. Darkness had fallen like the House of Usher. The horse stood blinking in the leaping headlights of a car, a rare phenomenon so far down the Calle Nicaragua, that was approaching from the town, rolling like a ship on the dreadful road. The rider of the horse was so drunk he was sprawling all over his mount, his stirrups lost, a feat in itself considering their size, andbarely managing to hold on by the reins, though not once did he grasp the pommel to steady himself. The horse reared wildly, rebellious—half fearful, half contemptuous, perhaps, of its rider—then it catapulted in the direction of the car: the man, who seemed to be falling straight backwards at first, miraculously saved himself only to slip to one side like a trick rider, regained the saddle, slid, slipped, fell backwards—just saving himself each time, but always with the reins, never with the pommel, holding them in one hand now, the stirrups still unrecovered as he furiously beat the horse’s flanks with the machete he had withdrawn from a long curved scabbard. Meantime the headlights had picked out a family straggling down the hill, a man and a woman in mourning, and two neatly dressed children, whom the woman drew in to the side of the road as the horseman fled on, while the man stood back against the ditch. The car halted, dimming its lights for the rider, then came toward M. Laruelle and crossed the bridge behind him. It was a powerful silent car, of American build, sinking deeply on its springs, its engine scarcely audible, and the sound of the horse’s hooves rang out plainly, receding now, slanting up the ill-lit Calle Nicaragua, past the Consul’s house, where there would be a light in the window M. Laruelle didn’t want to see—for long after Adam had left the garden the light in Adam’s house burned on—and the gate was mended, past the school on the left, and the spot where he had met Yvonne with Hugh and Geoffrey that day —and he imagined the rider as not pausing even at Laruelle’s own house, where his trunks lay mountainous and still only half packed, but galloping recklessly round the corner into the Calle Tierra del Fuego and on, his eyes wild as those soon to look on death, through the town—and this too, he thought suddenly, this maniacal vision of senseless frenzy, but controlled, not quite uncontrolled, somehow almost admirable, this too, obscurely, was the Consul . . .
M. Laruelle passed up the hill: he stood, tired, in the town below the square. He had not, however, climbed the Calle Nicaragua. In order to avoid his own house he had taken a cut to the left just beyond the school, a steep broken circuitous path that wound round behind the zócalo. People stared at him curiously as he sauntered down the Avenida de la Revolución, still encumbered with his tennis racquet. This street pursued far enough, would lead back to the American highway again and the Casino de la Selva; M. Laruelle smiled: at this rate he could go on travelling in an eccentric orbit round his house forever. Behind him now, the fair, which he’d given scarcely a glance, whirled on. The town, colorful even at night, was brilliantly lit, but only in patches, like a harbour. Windy shadows swept the pavements. And occasional trees in the shadow seemed as if drenched in coal dust, their branches bowed beneath a weight of soot. The little busclanged by him again, going the other way now, braking hard on the steep hill, and without a tail light.
The last bus to Tomalín. He passed Dr. Vigil’s windows on the far side: Dr. Arturo Díaz Vigil, Médico Cirujano y Partero, Facultad de México, de la Escuela Médico Militar, Enfermedades de Niños, Indisposiciones nerviosas—and how politely all this differed from the notices one encountered in the mingitorios!—Consultas de 12 a 2 y 4 a 7. A slight overstatement, he thought. Newsboys ran past selling copies of Quauhnahuac Nuevo, the pro-Almazán, pro-Axis sheet put out, they said, by the tiresome Unión Militar. Un avión de combate Francés derribado por un caza Alemán. Lost trabajadores de Australia abogan por la paz. ¿Quieré Vd.—a placard asked him in a shop window—vestirse con elegancía y a la última moda de Europa y los Estados Unidos? M. Laruelle walked on down the hill. Outside the barracks two soldiers, wearing French army helmets and grey faded purple uniforms laced and interlaced with green lariats, paced on sentry duty. He crossed the street. Approaching the cinema he became conscious all was not as it should be, that there was a strange unnatural excitement in the air, a kind of fever. It had grown on the instant much cooler. And the cinema was dark, as though no picture were playing tonight. On the other hand a large group of people, not a queue, but evidently some of the patrons from the cine itself, who had come prematurely flooding out, were standing on the pavement and under the arcature listening to a loudspeaker mounted on a van blaring the Washington Post March. Suddenly there was a crash of thunder and the street lights twitched off. So the lights of the cine had gone already. Rain, M. Laruelle thought. But his desire to get wet had deserted him. He put his tennis racquet under his coat and ran. A troughing wind all at once engulfed the street, scattering old newspapers and blowing the naphtha flares on the tortilla stands flat: there was a savage scribble of lightning over the hotel opposite the cinema, followed by another peal of thunder. The wind was moaning, everywhere people were running, mostly laughing, for shelter. M. Laruelle could hear the thunderclaps crashing on the mountains behind him. He just reached the theatre in time. The rain was falling in torrents.
He stood, out of breath, under the shelter of the theatre entrance which was, however, more like the entrance to some gloomy bazaar or market. Peasants were crowding in with baskets. At the box office, momentarily vacated, the door left half open, a frantic hen sought admission. Everywhere people were flashing torches or striking matches. The van with the loudspeaker slithered away into the rain and the thunder. Las Manos de Orlac, said a poster: 6 y 8:30. Las Manos de Orlac, con Peter Lorre. The street lights came on again, though the theatre still remained dark. M. Laruelle fumbled for a cigarette. The hands of Orlac . . . How, in a flash,that had brought back the old days of the cinema, he thought, indeed his own delayed student days, the days of the Student of Prague, and Wiene and Werner Krauss and Karl Grüne, the Ufa days when a defeated Germany was winning the respect of the cultured world by the pictures she was making. Only then it had been Conrad Veidt in “Orlac.” Strangely, that particular film had been scarcely better than the present version, a feeble Hollywood product he’d seen some years before in Mexico City or perhaps—M. Laruelle looked around him—perhaps at this very theatre. It was not impossible. But so far as he remembered not even Peter Lorre had been able to salvage it and he didn’t want to see it again . . . Yet what a complicated endless tale it seemed to tell, of tyranny and sanctuary, that poster looming above him now, showing the murderer Orlac! An artist with a murderer’s hands; that was the ticket, the hieroglyphic of the times. For really it was Germany itself that, in the gruesome degradation of a bad cartoon, stood over him.—Or was it, by some uncomfortable stretch of the imagination, M. Laruelle himself?
The manager of the cine was standing before him, cupping, with that same lightning-swift, fumbling-thwarting courtesy exhibited by Dr. Vigil, by all Latin Americans, a match for his cigarette: his hair, innocent of raindrops, which seemed almost lacquered, and a heavy perfume emanating from him, betrayed his daily visit to the peluquería; he was impeccably dressed in striped trousers and a black coat, inflexibly muy correcto, like most Mexicans of his type, despite earthquake and thunderstone. He threw the match away now with a gesture that was not wasted, for it amounted to a salute. “Come and have a drink,” he said. “The rainy season dies hard,” M. Laruelle smiled as they elbowed their way through into a little cantina which abutted on the cinema without sharing its frontal shelter. The cantina, known as the Cervecería XX, and which was also Vigil’s “place where you know,” was lit by candles stuck in bottles on the bar and on the few tables along the walls. The tables were all full. “Chingar,” the manager said, under his breath, preoccupied, alert, and gazing about him: they took their places standing at the end of the short bar where there was room for two. “I am very sorry the function must be suspended. But the wires have decomposed. Chingado. Every blessed week something goes wrong with the lights. Last week it was much worse, really terrible. You know we had a troupe from Panama City here trying out a show for Mexico.” “Do you mind my—” “No, hombre,” laughed the other—M. Laruelle had asked Sr. Bustamente, who’d now succeeded in attracting the barman’s attention,hadn’t he seen the Orlac picture here before and if so had he revived it as a hit. “—uno—?” M. Laruelle hesitated: “Tequila,” then corrected himself: “No, anís— anís, por favor, señor.” “Y una—ah—gaseosa,” Sr. Bustamente told the barman. “No, señor,” he was fingering, appraisingly, still preoccupied, the stuff of M. Laruelle’s scarcely wet tweed jacket. “Compañero, we have not revived it. It has only returned. The other day I show my latest news here too: believe it, the first newsreels from the Spanish war, that have come back again.”
“I see you get some modern pictures still though,” M. Laruelle (he had just declined a seat in the autoridades box for the second showing, if any) glanced somewhat ironically at a garish threesheet of a German film star, though the features seemed carefully Spanish, hanging behind the bar: La simpatiquísima y encantadora María Landrock, notable artista alemana que pronto habremos de ver en sensacional Film. “—un momentito, señor. Con permiso . . .” Sr. Bustamente went out, not through the door by which they had entered, but through a side entrance behind the bar immediately on their right, from which a curtain had been drawn back, into the cinema itself. M. Laruelle had a good view of the interior. From it, exactly indeed as though the show were in progress, came a beautiful uproar of bawling children and hawkers selling fried potatoes and frijoles. It was difficult to believe so many had left their seats. Dark shapes of pariah dogs prowled in and out of the stalls. The lights were not entirely dead: they glimmered, a dim reddish orange, flickering. On the screen, over which clambered an endless procession of torchlit shadows, hung, magically projected upside down, a faint apology for the “suspended function”; in the autoridades box three cigarettes were lit on one match. At the rear where reflected light caught the lettering of the exit he just made out the anxious figure of Sr. Bustamente taking to his office. Outside it thundered and rained. M. Laruelle sipped his water-clouded anís which was first greenly chilling then rather nauseating. Actually it was not at all like absinthe. But his tiredness had left him and he began to feel hungry. It was already seven o’clock.
Though Vigil and he would probably dine later at the Gambrinus or Charley’s Place. He selected, from a saucer, a quarter lemon and sucked it reflectively, reading a calendar which, next to the enigmatic Maria Landrock, behind the bar portrayed the meeting of Cortez and Moctezuma in Tenochtitlán: El último Emperador Azteca, it said below, Moctezuma y Hernán Cortés representativo de la raza hispana, quedan frente a frente: dos razas y dos civilizaciones que habían llegado a un alto grado de perfección se mezclan para integrar el núcleo de nuestra nacionalidadactual. But Sr. Bustamente was coming back, carrying, in one uplifted hand above a press of people by the curtain, a book . . . M. Laruelle, conscious of shock, was turning the book over and over in his hands. Then he laid it on the bar counter and took a sip of anís. “Bueno, muchas gracias, señor,” he said. “De nada,” Sr. Bustamente answered in a lowered tone; he waved aside with a sweeping somehow inclusive gesture, a sombre pillar advancing bearing a tray of chocolate skulls. “Don’t know how long, maybe two, maybe three years aquí.” M. Laruelle glanced in the flyleaf again, then shut the book on the counter. Above them the rain slammed on the cinema roof. It was eighteen months since the Consul had lent him the thumbed maroon volume of Elizabethan plays. At that time Geoffrey and Yvonne had been separated for perhaps five months. Six more must elapse before she would return. In the Consul’s garden they drifted gloomily up and down among the roses and the plumbago and the waxplants “like dilapidated préservatifs,” the Consul had remarked with a diabolical look at him, a look at the same time almost official, that seemed now to have said: “I know, Jacques, you may never return the book, but suppose I lend it you precisely for that reason, that someday you may be sorry you did not. Oh, I shall forgive you then, but will you be able to forgive yourself? Not merely for not having returned it, but because the book will by then have become an emblem of what even now it is impossible to return.” M. Laruelle had taken the book. He wanted it because for some time he had been carrying at the back of his mind the notion of making in France a modern film version of the Faustus story with some such character as Trotsky for its protagonist: as a matter of fact he had not opened the volume till this minute. Though the Consul had several times asked him for it later he had missed it that same day when he must have left it behind in the cinema. M. Laruelle listened to the water booming down the gutters beneath the one jalousie door of the Cervecería XX which opened into a sidestreet in the far left-hand corner. A sudden thunderclap shook the whole building and the sound echoed away like coal sliding down a chute. “You know, señor,” he said suddenly, “that this isn’t my book.”
“I know,” Sr. Bustamente replied, but softly, almost in a whisper: “I think your amigo, it was his.” He gave a little confused cough, an appoggiatura. “Your amigo, the bicho—” Sensitive apparently to M. Laruelle’s smile he interrupted himself quietly. “I did not meant bitch; I mean bicho, the one with the blue eyes.” Then, as if there were any longer doubt of whom he spoke he pinched his chin and drew downward from it an imaginary beard. “Your amigo—ah—Señor Firmin. El Consul. The Americano.”“No. He wasn’t American.” M. Laruelle tried to raise his voice a little. It was hard, for everyone in the cantina had stopped talking and M. Laruelle noticed that a curious hush had also fallen in the theatre. The light had now completely failed and he stared over Sr. Bustamente’s shoulder past the curtain into a graveyard darkness, stabbed by flashes of torchlight like heat lightning, but the vendors had lowered their voices, the children had stopped laughing and crying while the diminished audience sat slackly and bored yet patient before the dark screen, suddenly illumined, swept, by silent grotesque shadows of giants and spears and birds, then dark again, the men along the right-hand balcony, who hadn’t bothered to move or come downstairs, a solid dark frieze carved into the wall, serious, moustachioed men, warriors waiting for the show to begin, for a glimpse of the murderer’s bloodstained hands. “No?” Sr. Bustamente said softly. He took a sip of his gaseosa, looking too into the dark theatre and then, preoccupied again, around the cantina. “But was it true, then, he was a Consul? For I remember him many times sitting here drinking: and often, the poor guy, he have no socks.” M. Laruelle laughed shortly. “Yes, he was the British Consul here.” They spoke subduedly in Spanish, and Sr. Bustamente despairing for another ten minutes of the lights, was persuaded to a glass of beer while M. Laruelle himself took a soft drink.
Estevo, gol por partido.
The zócalo was just the same in spite of its air of slumbering Harlequin. The old bandstand stood empty, the equestrian statue of the turbulent Huerta rode under the nutant trees wild-eyed ever more, gazing over the valley beyond which, as if nothing had happened and it was November 1936 and not November 1938, rose, eternally, her volcanoes, her beautiful beautiful volcanoes. Ah, how familiar it all was: Quauhnahuac, her town of cold mountain water swiftly running. Where the eagle stops! Or did it really mean, as Louis said, near the wood? The trees, the massive shining depths of these ancient fresno trees, how had she ever lived without them? She drew a deep breath, the air had yet a hint about it of dawn, the dawn this morning at Acapulco—green and deep purple high above and gold scrolled back to reveal a river of lapis where the horn of Venus burned so fiercely she could imagine her dim shadow cast from its light on the air field, the vultures floating lazily up there above the brick-red horizon into whose peaceful foreboding the little plane of the Compañía Mexicana de Aviación had ascended, like a minute red demon, winged emissary of Lucifer, the windsock below streaming out its steadfast farewell. She took in the zócalo with a long final look—the untenanted ambulance that might not have moved since she’d last been here, outside the Servicio de Ambulancia within Cortez Palace, the huge paper poster strung between two trees which said Hotel Bella Vista Gran Baile Noviembre 1938 a Beneficio de la Cruz Roja. Los Mejores Artistas del radio en acción. No falte Vd., beneath which some of the guests were returning home, pallid and exhausted as the music that struck up at this moment and reminded her the ball was still proceeding—then entered the bar silently, blinking, myopic in the swift leathery perfumed alcoholic dusk, the sea that morning going in with her, rough and pure, the long dawn rollers advancing, rising, and crashing down to glide, sinking, in colourless ellipses over the sand, while early pelicans hunting turned and dived, dived and turned and dived again into the spume, moving with the precision of planets, the spent breakers racing back to their calm; flotsam was scattered all along the beach: she had heard, from the small boats tossing in the Spanish Main, the boys, like young Tritons, already beginning to blow on their mournful conch shells . . . The bar was empty, however. Or rather it contained one figure. Still in his dress clothes, which weren’t particularly dishevelled, the Consul, a lock of fair hair falling over his eyes and one hand clasped in his short pointed beard, was sitting sideways with one foot on the rail of an adjacent stool at the small right-angled counter, half leaning over it and talking apparently to himself, for the barman, a sleek dark lad of about eighteen, stood at a little distance against a glass partitionthat divided the room (from yet another bar, she remembered now, giving on a sidestreet) and didn’t have the air of listening.
Yvonne stood there silently by the door, unable to make a move, watching, the roar of the plane still with her, the buffeting of wind and air as they left the sea behind, the roads below still climbing and dropping, the little towns still steadily passing with their humped churches, Quauhnahuac with all its cobalt swimming pools rising again obliquely to meet her. But the exhilaration of her flight, of mountain piled on mountain, the terrific onslaught of sunlight while the earth turned yet in shadow, a river flashing, a gorge winding darkly beneath, the volcanoes abruptly wheeling into view from the glowing east, the exhilaration and the longing had left her. Yvonne felt her spirit that had flown to meet this man’s as if already sticking to the leather. She saw she was mistaken about the barman: he was listening after all. That is, while he mightn’t understand what Geoffrey (who was, she noticed, wearing no socks) was talking about, he was waiting, his towelled hands overhauling the glasses ever more slowly, for an opening to say or do something. He set the glass he was drying down. Then he picked up the Consul’s cigarette, which was consuming itself in an ashtray at the counter edge, inhaled it deeply, closing his eyes with an expression of playful ecstasy, opened them and pointed, scarcely exhaling now the slow billowing smoke from his nostrils and mouth, at an advertisement for Cafeaspirina, a woman wearing a scarlet brassière lying on a scrolled divan, behind the upper row of tequila añejo bottles. “Absolutamente necesario,” he said, and Yvonne realized it was the woman, not the Cafeaspirina, he meant (the Consul’s phrase doubtless) was absolutely necessary. But he hadn’t attracted the Consul’s attention, so he closed his eyes again with the same expression, opened them, replaced the Consul’s cigarette, and, still exuding smoke, pointed once more to the advertisement—next it she noticed one for the local cinema, simply, Las Manos de Orlac, con Peter Lorre—and repeated: “Absolutamente necesario.” “A corpse, whether adult or child,” the Consul had resumed, after briefly pausing to laugh at this pantomime, and to agree, with a kind of agony, “Sí, Fernando, absolutamente necesario,”—and it is a ritual, she thought, a ritual between them, as there were once rituals between us, only Geoffrey has gotten a little bored with it at last—resumed his study of a blue and red Mexican National Railways timetable. Then he looked up abruptly and saw her, peering shortsightedly about him before recognizing her, standing there, a little blurred probably because the sunlight was behind her, with one hand thrust through the handle of her scarlet bag resting on her hip, standing there as she knew he must see her, half jaunty, a little diffident.
The Consul took her arm with courtliness (the ragged Mexican with the dark glasses had been joined, she noticed, by another man with a shade over one eye and bare feet who had been leaning against the wall further down, to whom the Consul also remarked “Buenas tardes,” but there were no more guests coming out of the hotel, only the two men who’d politely called “Buenas” after them standing there nudging each other as if to say: “He said ‘Buenas tardes,’ what a card he is!”) and they set off obliquely through the square. The fiesta wouldn’t start till much later and the streets that remembered so many other Days of the Dead were fairly deserted. The bright banners, the paper streamers, flashed: the great wheel brooded under the trees, brilliant, motionless. Even so the town around and below them was already full of sharp remote noises like explosions of rich colour. ¡Box! said an advertisement. . Frente al Jardín Xicotancatl. Domingo 8 de Noviembre de 1938. 4 Emocionantes Peleas. Yvonne tried to keep herself from asking: “Did you smack the car up again?” “As a matter of fact I’ve lost it.” “Lost it!” “It’s a pity because—but look here, dash it all, aren’t you terribly tired, Yvonne?” “Not in the least! I should think you’re the one to be—” —¡Box! Preliminar a 4 Rounds. 52 kilos) vs. (de Par. de 53 kilos). (Gonzalo Calderón de Par. de “I had a million hours of sleep on the boat! And I’d far rather walk, only —” “Nothing. Just a touch of rheumatiz.—Or is it the sprue? I’m glad to get some circulation going in the old legs.” —¡Box! Evento Especial a 5 Rounds, en los que el vencedor pasará al grupo de Semi-Finales. (el Invencible Indio de Quauhnahuac de 57 kilos, que acaba de llegar de la Capital de la República). . Frente al Jardín Xicotancatl. “It’s a pity about the car because we might have gone to the boxing,” said the Consul, who was walking almost exaggeratedly erect. “I hate boxing.”
“—But that’s not till next Sunday anyhow . . . I heard they had some kind of a bullthrowing on to-day over at Tomalín.—Do you remember—” “No!” The Consul, with no more recognition than she, held up one finger in dubious greeting to an individual resembling a carpenter, running past themwagging his head and carrying a sawed length of grained board under his arm and who threw, almost chanted, a laughing word at him that sounded like: “Mescalito!” The sunlight blazed down on them, blazed on the eternal ambulance whose headlights were momentarily transformed into a blinding magnifying glass, glazed on the volcanoes—she could not look at them now. Born in Hawaii, she’d had volcanoes in her life before, however. Seated on a park bench under a tree in the square, his feet barely touching the ground, the little public scribe was already crashing away on a giant typewriter. “I am taking the only way out, semicolon,” the Consul offered cheerfully and soberly in passing. “Good-bye, full stop. Change of paragraph, change of chapter, change of worlds—” The whole scene about her—the names on the shops surrounding the square: La China Poblana, hand-embroidered, dresses, the advertisements: Baños de la Libertad, Los mejores de la Capital y los únicos en donde nunca falta el agua, Estufas especiales para Damas y Caballeros: and Sr. Panadero: Sí quiere hacer buen pan exija las harinas “Princesa Donaji”— striking Yvonne as so strangely familiar all over again and yet so sharply strange after the year’s absence, the severance of thought and body, mode of being, became almost intolerable for a moment. “You might have made use of him to answer some of my letters,” she said. “Look, do you remember what Maria used to call it?” The Consul, with his stick, was indicating through the trees the little American grocery store, catercorner to Cortez Palace. “Peegly Weegly.” “I won’t,” Yvonne thought, hurrying on and biting her lips. “I won’t cry.” The Consul had taken her arm. “I’m sorry, I never thought.”
They emerged on the street again. When they had crossed it she was grateful for the excuse suggested by the printer’s shop window for readjustment. They stood, as once, looking in. The shop, adjacent to the Palace, but divided from it by the breadth of a steep narrow street desperate as a winze, was opening early. From the mirror within the window an ocean creature so drenched and coppered by sun and winnowed by sea-wind and spray looked back at her she seemed, even while making the fugitive motions of Yvonne’s vanity, somewhere beyond human grief charioting the surf. But the sun turned grief to poison and a glowing body only mocked the sick heart, Yvonne knew, if that sun-darkened creature of waves and sea margins and windrows did not! In the window itself, on either side of this abstracted gaze of her mirrored face, the same brave wedding invitations she remembered were ranged, the same touched-up prints of extravagantly floriferous brides, but this time there was something she hadn’t seen before,which the Consul now pointed out with a murmur of “Strange,” peering closer: a photographic enlargement, purporting to show the disintegration of a glacial deposit in the Sierra Madre, of a great rock split by forest fires. This curious, and curiously sad picture—to which the nature of the other exhibits lent an added ironic poignance—set behind and above the already spinning flywheel of the presses, was called: La Despedida. They moved on past the front of Cortez Palace, then down its blind side began to descend the cliff that traversed it widthways. Their path made the short cut to the Calle Tierra del Fuego which curved below to meet them but the cliff was little better than a rubbish heap with smouldering debris and they had to pick their way carefully. Yvonne breathed more freely though, now they were leaving the centre of the town behind. La Despedida, she thought. The Parting! After the damp and detritus had done their work both severed halves of that blasted rock would crumble to earth. It was inevitable, so it said on the picture . . . Was it really? Wasn’t there some way of saving the poor rock whose immutability so short a time ago no one would have dreamed of doubting! Ah, who would have thought of it then as other than a single integrated rock? But granted it had been split, was there no way before total disintegration should set in of at least saving the severed halves? There was no way. The violence of the fire which split the rock apart had also incited the destruction of each separate rock, cancelling the power that might have held them unities. Oh, but why—by some fanciful geologic thaumaturgy, couldn’t the pieces be welded together again! She longed to heal the cleft rock. She was one of the rocks and she yearned to save the other, that both might be saved. By a super-lapidary effort she moved herself nearer it, poured out her pleas, her passionate tears, told all her forgiveness: the other rock stood unmoved. “That’s all very well,” it said, “but it happens to be your fault, and as for myself, I propose to disintegrate as I please!” “—in Tortu,” the Consul was saying, though Yvonne was not following, and now they had come out in the Calle Tierra del Fuego itself, a rough narrow dusty street that, deserted, looked quite unfamiliar. The Consul was beginning to shake again.
“Geoffrey, I’m so thirsty, why don’t we stop and have a drink?” “Geoffrey, let’s be reckless this once and get tight together before breakfast!” Yvonne said neither of these things. —The Street of the Land of Fire! To their left, raised high above road level, were uneven sidewalks with rough steps hewn in them. The whole little thoroughfare, slightly humpbacked in the centre where the open sewers had been filled in, was banked sharply down to the right as though it had once sideslipped in an earthquake. On this side one-storied houses with tiledroofs and oblong barred windows stood flush with the street but seemingly below it. On the other, above them, they were passing small shops, sleepy, though mostly opening or, like the “Molino para Nixtamal, Morelense,” open: harness shops, a milk shop under its sign Lechería (brothel, someone insisted it meant, and she hadn’t seen the joke), dark interiors with strings of tiny sausages, chorizos, hanging over the counters where you could also buy goat cheese or sweet quince wine or cacao, into one of which the Consul was now, with a “momentito,” disappearing. “Just go on and I’ll catch you up. I won’t be a jiffy.” Yvonne walked on past the place a short distance, then retraced her steps. She had not entered any of these shops since their first week in Mexico and the danger of being recognized in the abarrotes was slight. Nevertheless, repenting her tardy impulse to follow the Consul in, she waited outside, restless as a little yacht turning at anchor. The opportunity to join him ebbed. A mood of martyrdom stole upon her. She wanted the Consul to see her, when he emerged, waiting there, abandoned and affronted. But glancing back the way they had come she forgot Geoffrey an instant.—It was unbelievable. She was in Quauhnahuac again! There was Cortez Palace and there, high on the cliff, a man standing gazing over the valley who from his air of martial intentness might have been Cortez himself. The man moved, spoiling the illusion. Now he looked less like Cortez than the poor young man in the dark glasses who’d been leaning against the wall of the Bella Vista. “You-are-a-man-who-like-much-Vine!” now issued powerfully from the abarrotes into the peaceful street, followed by a roar of incredibly goodhumoured but ruffianly male laughter. “You are—diablo!” There was a pause in which she heard the Consul saying something. “Eggs!” the goodhumoured voice exploded again. “You—two diablos! You tree diablos.” The voice cackled with glee. “Eggs!” Then: “Who is the beauful layee?—Ah, you are—ah five diablos, you ah—Eggs!” ludicrously followed the Consul who appeared at this moment, calmly smiling, on the pavement above Yvonne. “In Tortu,” he was saying, as, steadier again, he fell into step beside her, “the ideal University, where no application whatsoever, so I have heard on good authority, nothing, not even athletics, is allowed to interfere with the business of—look out! . . . drinking.”
They stood to one side while the little cortège slanted by swiftly in the direction of the town, then walked on in silence not looking at one another. The banking of the street now became less acute and the sidewalks and the shops dropped away. To the left there was only a low blank wall with vacant lots behind it, whereas to the right the houses had turned into low open shanties filled with black carbon. Yvonne’s heart, that had been struggling with an insufferable pang, suddenly missed a beat. Though one might not think it they were approaching the residential district, their own terrain. “Do look where you’re going, Geoffrey!” But it was Yvonne who had stumbled rounding the right-angled corner into the Calle Nicaragua. The Consul regarded her without expression as she stared up into the sun at the bizarre house opposite them near the head of their street, with two towers and a connecting catwalk over the ridgepole, at which someone else, a peon with his back turned, was also gazing curiously. “Yes, it’s still there, it hasn’t budged an inch,” he said, and now they had passed the house to their left with its inscription on the wall she didn’t want to see and were walking down the Calle Nicaragua. “Yet the street looks different somehow.” Yvonne relapsed into silence again. Actually she was making a tremendous effort to control herself. What she could not have explained was that recently in her picture of Quauhnahuac this house hadn’t been here at all! On the occasions imagination had led her with Geoffrey down the Calle Nicaragua lately, never once, poor phantoms, had they been confronted with Jacques’ zacuali. It had vanished some time before, leaving not a trace, it was as if the house had never existed, just as in the mind of a murderer, it may happen, some prominent landmark in the vicinity of his crime becomes obliterated, so that on returning to the neighborhood, once so familiar, he scarcely knows where to turn. But the Calle Nicaragua didn’t really look different. Here it was, still cluttered up with large grey loose stones, full of the same lunar potholes, and in that well-known state of frozen eruption that resembled repair but which in fact only testified facetiously to the continued deadlock between the Municipality and the property owners here over its maintenance. Calle Nicaragua!—the name, despite everything, sang plangently within her: only that ridiculous shock at Jacques’ house could account for her feeling, with one part of her mind, calm as she did about it. The road, broad, sidewalkless, ran with increasing steepness downhill, mostly between high walls overhung by trees, though at the moment there were more little carbon shanties to their right, down to a leftward curve some three hundred yards away where roughly the same distance again above their own house it was lost from sight. Trees blocked the view beyond of low rolling hills.
Nearly all the large residences were on their left, builtfar back from the road toward the barranca in order to face the volcanoes across the valley. She saw the mountains again in the distance through a gap between two estates, a small field bounded by a barbed wire fence and overflowing with tall spiny grasses tossed wildly together as by a big wind that had abruptly ceased. There they were, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, remote ambassadors of Mauna Loa, Mokuaweoweo: dark clouds now obscured their base. The grass, she thought, wasn’t as green as it should be at the end of the rains: there must have been a dry spell, though the gutters on either side of the road were brimful of rushing mountain water and— “And he’s still there too. He hasn’t budged an inch either.” The Consul without turning was nodding back in the direction of M. Laruelle’s house. “Who—who hasn’t—” Yvonne faltered. She glanced behind her: there was only the peon who had stopped looking at the house and was going into an alleyway. “Jacques.” “Jacques!” “That’s right. In fact we’ve had terrific times together. We’ve been slap through everything from Bishop Berkeley to the four o’clock mirabilis jalapa.” “You do what?” “The Diplomatic Service.” The Consul had paused and was lighting his pipe. “Sometimes I really think there’s something to be said for it.” “—” He stooped to float a match down the brimming gutter and somehow they were moving, even hurrying on: she heard bemusedly the swift angry click and crunch of her heels on the road and the Consul’s seemingly effortless voice at her shoulder. “For instance had you ever been British attaché to the White Russian Embassy in Zagreb in 1922, and I’ve always thought a woman like you would have done very well as attaché to the White Russian Embassy in Zagreb in 1922, though God knows how it managed to survive that long, you might have acquired a certain, I don’t say technique exactly, but a mien, a mask, a way, at any rate, of throwing a look into your face at a moment’s notice of sublime dishonest detachment.” “—” “Although I can very well see how it strikes you—how the picture of our implied indifference, Jacques’ and mine that is, I mean, strikes you, as being even more indecent than that, say, Jacques shouldn’t have left when you did or that we shouldn’t have dropped the friendship.”
“But had you, Yvonne, ever been on the bridge of a British Q-ship, and I’ve always thought a woman like you would have been very good on the bridge of a British Q-ship—peering at the Tottenham Court Road through a telescope, only figuratively speaking of course, day in and day out, counting the waves, you might have learnt—” “Please look where you’re going!” “Though had you of course ever been Consul to Cuckoldshaven, that town cursed by the lost love of Maximilian and Carlotta, then, why then—” —¡ ! . vs. . “But I don’t think I finished about the little corpse. What is really so astonishing about him is that he has to be checked, actually checked, to the U. S. Border of Exit. While the charges for him are equivalent to two adult passengers—” “—” “However since you don’t seem to want to listen to me, here’s something else perhaps I ought to tell you.” “—” “Something else, I repeat, very important, that perhaps I ought to tell you.” “Yes. What is it?” “About Hugh.” Yvonne said at last: “You’ve heard from Hugh. How is he?” “He’s staying with me.” —¡ ! . Noviembre de 1938. 4 Emocionantes Peleas. Las Manos de Orlac. Con Peter Lorre. “What!” Yvonne stopped dead. . Domingo 8 de vs. . “It seems he’s been in America this time on a cattle ranch,” the Consul was saying rather gravely as somehow, anyhow, they moved on, but this time more slowly. “Why, heaven knows. It couldn’t be he was learning to ride, but still, he turned up about a week ago in a distinctly unpukka outfit, looking like Hoot S. Hart in the Riders to the Purple Sage. Apparently he’d teleported himself, or been deported, from America by cattletruck. I don’t pretend to know how the press get by in these matters. Or maybe it was a bet . . . Anyhow he got as far as Chihuahua with the cattle, and some gunrunning gun-toting pal by the name of—Weber?—I forget, anyway, I didn’t meet him, flew him the rest of the way.” The Consul knocked out his pipe on his heel, smiling. “It seems everyone comes flying to see me these days.” “But—but Hugh—I don’t understand—”
“He’d lost his clothes en route but it wasn’t carelessness, if you can believe it, only that they wanted to make him pay higher duty at the border than they were worth, so quite naturally he left them behind. He hadn’t lost his passport however, which was unusual perhaps because he’s still somehow with—though I haven’t the foggiest in what capacity—the London Globe . . . Of course you knew he’s become quite famous lately. For the second time, in case you weren’t aware of the first.” “Did he know about our divorce?” Yvonne managed to ask. The Consul shook his head. They walked on slowly, the Consul looking at the ground. “Did you tell him?” The Consul was silent, walking more and more slowly. “What did I say,” he said at length. “Nothing, Geoff.” “Well, he knows now that we’re separated, of course.” The Consul decapitated a dusty coquelicot poppy growing by the side of the gutter with his stick. “But he expected us both to be here. I gather he had some idea we might let—but I avoided telling him the divorce had gone through. That is, I think I did. I meant to avoid it. So far as I know, honestly, I hadn’t got around to telling him when he left.” “Then he’s not staying with you any longer.” The Consul burst out in a laugh that became a cough. “Oh yes he is! He most certainly is . . . In fact, I nearly passed out altogether under the stress of his salvage operations. Which is to say he’s been trying to ‘straighten me out.’ Can’t you see it? Can’t you recognize his fine Italian hand? And he almost literally succeeded right off with some malevolent strychnine compound he produced. But,” just for one moment the Consul seemed to have difficulty placing one foot before another, “to be more concrete, actually he did have a better reason for staying than to play Theodore Watts Dunton. To my Swinburne.” The Consul decapitated another poppy. “Mute Swinburne. He’d got wind of some story while vacationing on the ranch and came after it here like a red rag after a bull. Didn’t I tell you that? . . . Which —didn’t I say so before?—is why he’s gone off to Mexico City.” After a while Yvonne said weakly, scarcely hearing herself speak: “Well, we may have a little time together, mayn’t we?” “Quién sabe?” “But you mean he’s in the City now,” she covered hastily. “Oh, he’s throwing up the job—he might be home now. At any rate he’ll be back to-day, I think. He says he wants ‘action.’ Poor old chap, he’s wearing a very popular front indeed these days.”
Whether the Consul wasbeing sincere or not he added, sympathetically enough, it sounded, “And God alone knows what will be the end of that romantic little urge in him.” “And how will he feel,” Yvonne asked bravely all at once, “when he sees you again?” “Yes, well, not much difference, not enough time to show, but I’d just been about to say,” the Consul went on with a slight hoarseness, “that the terrific times, Laruelle’s and mine, I mean, ceased on the advent of Hugh.” He was poking at the dust with his stick, making little patterns for a minute as he went along, like a blind man. “They were mostly mine because Jacques has a weak stomach and is usually sick after three drinks and after four he would start to play the Good Samaritan, and after five Theodore Watts Dunton too . . . So that I appreciated, so to speak, a change of technique. At least to the extent that I find I shall be grateful now, on Hugh’s behalf, if you’d say nothing to him—” “Oh—” The Consul cleared his throat. “Not that I have been drinking much of course in his absence, and not that I’m not absolutely cold stone sober now, as you can readily see.” “Oh yes indeed,” Yvonne smiled, full of thoughts that had already swept her a thousand miles in frantic retreat from all this. Yet she was walking on slowly beside him. And deliberately as a climber on a high unguarded place looks up at the pine trees above on the precipice and comforts himself by saying: “Never mind about the drop below me, how very much worse if I were on top of one of those pines up there!” she forced herself out of the moment: she stopped thinking: or she thought about the street again, remembering her last poignant glimpse of it—and how even more desperate things had seemed then!—at the beginning of that fateful journey to Mexico City, glancing back from the now lost Plymouth as they turned the corner, crashing, crunching down on its springs into the potholes, stopping dead, then crawling, leaping forward again, keeping in, it didn’t matter on which side, to the walls. They were higher than she recalled and covered with bougainvillea; massive smouldering banks of bloom. Over them she could see the crests of trees, their boughs heavy and motionless, and occasionally a watchtower, the eternal mirador of Parián state, set among them, the houses invisible here below the walls and from on top too, she’d once taken the trouble to find out, as if shrunken down inside their patios, the miradors cut off, floating above like lonely rooftrees of the soul. Nor could you distinguish the houses much better through the wrought-iron lacework of the high gates, vaguely reminiscent of New Orleans, locked in these walls on which were furtively pencilled lovers’ trysts, and which so often concealed less Mexico than a Spaniard’s dream of home.
Estudou un ciclo superior de artes gráficas no IES Montecelo, Maxisterio de Primaria na Universidade de Vigo e o grao en lingua e literatura galegas na Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Publicou relatos curtos en revistas e fanzines, ás veces baixo pseudónimo, e traduciu ao galego a novela de John Fante A irmandade da uva (Editorial Hugin e Munin, 2013). Escribe tamén na revista dixital Cicloxénese expresiva. Colabora no Liceo Mutante e xoga ao fútbol gaélico. É administrador da Wikipedia en lingua galega, e gústalle conducir e sacar fotos. Vive en Figueirido.
John Fante (Denver, 1909-Los Ángeles, 1983) creó un alter ego, Arturo Bandini, con el que ficcionó la vida de un italoamericano de segunda generación, hijo de un albañil borracho y de una señora obsesionada con la religión. Ese era Fante, que halló en Bandini el espejo perfecto, esa clase de personaje amado hasta las últimas consecuencias por su sentido del humor y desgarro, y lo más importante, con esa escasa compasión hacia sí mismo.
No es fácil explicar por qué el mundo ignoró a Fante durante décadas. No se entiende por qué Pregúntale al polvo solo vendió tres mil ejemplares antes de despeñarse por el olvido. Al menos comprendes que a finales de los años setenta apareciese Charles Bukowski y rescatase la novela de los abismos, escribiendo un célebre prólogo, en el que declara que la literatura de Fante tiene una «influencia vitalicia» en sus propios libros. La dedicatoria de Love is a Dog from Hell. Poems 1974-1977 reza así: «A John Fante —quien me enseñó cómo hacerlo. Hank».
Pero ya era tarde para Fante, que en 1980 se quedó ciego a causa de la diabetes, y ya había consumido sus mejores años haciendo de «puta de Hollywood» y «lamecoños de la Paramount», en sus propias palabras.
Pregúntale al polvo es la segunda de las cuatro novelas protagonizadas por Bandini, en la que se nos presenta ya como un aspirante a escritor que sueña con alcanzar el reconocimiento literario, pese a vivir en una sucia pensión en Bunker Hill, a las afueras de Los Ángeles, que ni siquiera es capaz de pagar en los plazos acordados. El reto es escribir —pese a que por ahora apenas ha publicado un breve texto en una revista— desde la miseria, la incomodidad y las pocas ideas que le vienen a la cabeza. Es una variante más del sueño americano, al que Bandini se enfrenta con un tono soñador e ingenuo, al igual que había hecho el propio Fante. Es un joven contradictorio, que se mueve por impulsos, al que la frustración por no ser un escritor afamado no le impide actuar imitando a un fracasado bravucón y un poco mangante.
A punto de ser desalojado de su habitación, recibe una nota de su casera, instándolo a pagar o irse. «Un problema relevante —admite—, merecedor de una atención enorme. Lo resolví apagando la luz y echándome a dormir». Ese es Bandini, un tipo convencido de que al lado de la dificultad está la facilidad, y de que ningún revés doblegará su sueño de convertirse en escritor. Alguien lo bastante importante como para que la academia pueda decir de él que ha conseguido decir «lo no dicho desde Joyce». Hará lo que sea para conseguirlo. Así sea rezar, en última instancia, la clase de esfuerzo lánguido que cuando estás desganado te puede ayudar a alcanzar tus sueños. No es un escritor insobornable, por otra parte. Hay otro momento en el que se dirige a la iglesia y le habla a Dios en susurros: «Dios Todopoderoso, voy a jugar limpio, voy a hacerte una proposición. Haz que sea un gran escritor y volveré al seno de la Iglesia». Son esos instantes en los que lamenta su ateísmo, y en todo caso echa la culpa del mismo a Nietzsche. El sueño de triunfar no merece todos sus esfuerzos, que a menudo deben centrarse en conseguir tabaco, comida y dinero para pagar la pensión. Bastante es. Suerte que el sueño de Bandini a veces parece más ser un escritor, que escribir realmente. Persigue el papel social que desempeña un escritor, de ahí que sus fantasías sean convertirse en un señor que usa bastón, fuma en pipa, se mueve en un automóvil negro, en el que le acompaña una mujer envidiable, envuelta en un abrigo de zorro. Si pareces un novelista tal vez un día acabes siéndolo.
The gutter on the right ranunderground a while and another of those low shanties built on the street frowned at her with its dark open sinister bunkers—where Maria used to fetch their carbon. Then the water tumbled out into the sunlight and on the other side, through a gap in the walls, Popocatepetl emerged alone. Without her knowing it they had passed the corner and the entrance to their house was in sight. The street was now absolutely deserted and save for the gushing murmurous gutters that now became like two fierce little streams racing each other, silent: it reminded her, confusedly, of how in her heart’s eye, before she’d met Louis, and when she’d half imagined the Consul back in England, she’d tried to keep Quauhnahuac itself, as a sort of safe footway where his phantom could endlessly pace, accompanied only by her own consoling unwanted shadow, above the rising waters of possible catastrophe. Then since the other day Quauhnahuac had seemed, though emptied still, different—purged, swept clean of the past, with Geoffrey here alone, but now in the flesh, redeemable, wanting her help. And here Geoffrey indeed was, not only not alone, not only not wanting her help, but living in the midst of her blame, a blame by which, to all appearances, he was curiously sustained— Yvonne gripped her bag tightly, suddenly light-headed and barely conscious of the landmarks the Consul, who seemed recovered in spirits, was silently indicating with his stick: the country lane to the right, and the little church that had been turned into a school with the tombstones and the horizontal bar in the playground, the dark entrance in the ditch—the high walls on both sides had temporarily disappeared altogether—to the abandoned iron mine running under the garden.
To and fro from school . . . Popocatepetl
It was your shining day . . .
The Consul hummed. Yvonne felt her heart melting. A sense of a shared, a mountain peace seemed to fall between them; it was false, it was a lie, but for a moment it was almost as though they were returning home from marketing in days past. She took his arm, laughing, they fell into step. And now here were the walls again, and their drive sloping down into the street where no one had allayed the dust, already paddled by early bare feet, and now here was their gate, off its hinges and lying just beyond the entrance, as for that matter it always had lain, defiantly, half hidden under the bank of bougainvillea. “There now, Yvonne. Come along, darling . . . We’re almost home!”
“Yes.”“Strange—” the Consul said. A hideous pariah dog followed them in.
T tragedy, proclaimed, as they made their way up the crescent of the drive, no less by the gaping potholes in it than by the tall exotic plants, livid and crepuscular through his dark glasses, perishing on every hand of unnecessary thirst, staggering, it almost appeared, against one another, yet struggling like dying voluptuaries in a vision to maintain some final attitude of potency, or of a collective desolate fecundity, the Consul thought distantly, seemed to be reviewed and interpreted by a person walking at his side suffering for him and saying: “Regard: see how strange, how sad, familiar things may be. Touch this tree, once your friend: alas, that that which you have known in the blood should ever seem so strange! Look up at that niche in the wall over there on the house where Christ is still, suffering, who would help you if you asked him: you cannot ask him. Consider the agony of the roses. See, on the lawn Concepta’s coffee beans, you used to say they were Maria’s, drying in the sun. Do you know their sweet aroma any more? Regard: the plantains with their queer familiar blooms, once emblematic of life, now of an evil phallic death. You do not know how to love these things any longer. All your love is the cantinas now: the feeble survival of a love of life now turned to poison, which only is not wholly poison, and poison has become your daily food, when in the tavern—” “Has Pedro gone too then?” Yvonne was holding his arm tightly but her voice was almost natural, he felt. “Yes, thank God!” “How about the cats?” “Perro!” the Consul, removing his glasses, said amiably to the pariah dog that had appeared familiarly at heel. But the animal cowered back down the drive. “Though the garden’s a rajah mess, I’m afraid. We’ve been virtually without a gardener at all for months. Hugh pulled up a few weeds. He cleaned out the swimming pool too . . . Hear it? It ought to be full today.” The drive widened to a small arena then debouched into a path cutting obliquely across the narrow sloping lawn, islanded by rose beds, to the “front” door, actually at the back of the low white house which was roofed with imbricated flower-pot-colored tiles resembling bisected drainpipes. Glimpsed through the trees, with its chimney on the far left, from which rosea thread of dark smoke, the bungalow looked an instant like a pretty little ship lying at anchor.
“No. Skullduggery and suings for back wages have been my lot. And leafcutter ants, several species. The house was broken into one night when I was out. And flood: the drains of Quauhnahuac visited us and left us with something that smelt like the Cosmic Egg till recently. Never mind though, maybe you can—” Yvonne disengaged her arm to lift aside a tentacle from a trumpet vine growing across the path: “Oh Geoffrey! Where’re my camellias?—” “God knows.” The lawn was divided by a dry runnel parallel with the house bridged by a spurious plank. Between floribundia and rose a spider wove an intricate web. With pebbly cries a covey of tyrant flycatchers swept over the house in quick dark flight. They crossed the plank and they were on the “stoop.” An old woman with a face of a highly intellectual black gnome, the Consul always thought (mistress to some gnarled guardian of the mine beneath the garden once, perhaps), and carrying the inevitable mop, the trapeador or American husband, over her shoulder, shuffled out of the “front” door, scraping her feet—the shuffling and the scraping however seemingly unidentified, controlled by separate mechanisms. “Here’s Concepta,” the Consul said. “Yvonne: Concepta. Concepta, Señora Firmin.” The gnome smiled a child-like smile that momentarily transformed its face into an innocent girl’s. Concepta wiped her hands on her apron: she was shaking hands with Yvonne as the Consul hesitated, seeing now, studying with sober interest (though at this point all at once he felt more pleasantly “tight” than at any time since just before that blank period last night) Yvonne’s luggage on the stoop before him, three bags and a hatbox so bespangled with labels they might have burst forth into a kind of bloom, to be saying too, here is your history: Hotel Hilo Honolulu, Villa Carmona Granada, Hotel Theba Algeciras, Hotel Peninsula Gibraltar, Hotel Nazareth Galilee, Hotel Manchester Paris, Cosmo Hotel London, the S.S. Ile de France, Regis Hotel Canada, Hotel Mexico D.F.—and now the new labels, the newest blossoms: Hotel Astor New York, the Town House Los Angeles, S.S. Pennsylvania, Hotel Mirador Acapulco, the Compañía Mexicana de Aviación. “El otro señor?” he was saying to Conceptata who shook her head with delighted emphasis. “Hasn’t returned yet. All right, Yvonne, I dare say you want your old room. Anyhow Hugh’s in the back one with the machine.” “The machine?” “The mowing machine.”“—por qué no, agua caliente,” Concepta’s soft musical humorous voice rose and fell as she shuffled and scraped off with two of the bags. “So there’s hot water for you, which is a miracle!” On the other side of the house the view was suddenly spacious and windy as the sea.
Beyond the barranca the plains rolled up to the very foot of the volcanoes into a barrier of murk above which rose the pure cone of old Popo, and spreading to the left of it like a University City in the snow the jagged peaks of Ixtaccihuatl, and for a moment they stood on the porch without speaking, not holding hands, but with their hands just meeting, as though not quite sure they weren’t dreaming this, each of them separately on their far bereaved cots, their hands but blown fragments of their memories, half afraid to commingle, yet touching over the howling sea at night. Immediately below them the small chuckling swimming pool was still filling from a leaky hose connected with a hydrant, though it was almost full; they had painted it themselves once, blue on the sides and the bottom; the paint had scarcely faded and mirroring the sky, aping it, the water appeared a deep turquoise. Hugh had trimmed about the pool’s edges but the garden sloped off beyond into an indescribable confusion of briars from which the Consul averted his eyes: the pleasant evanescent feeling of tightness was wearing off . . . He glanced absently round the porch which also embraced briefly the left side of the house, the house Yvonne hadn’t yet entered at all, and now as in answer to his prayer Concepta was approaching them down its length. Concepta’s gaze was fixed steadfastly on the tray she was carrying and she glanced neither to right nor left, neither at the drooping plants, dusty and gone to seed on the low parapet, nor at the stained hammock, nor the bad melodrama of the broken chair, nor the disembowelled daybed, nor the uncomfortable stuffed Quixotes tilting their straw mounts on the house wall, shuffling slowly nearer them through the dust and dead leaves she hadn’t yet swept from the ruddy tiled floor. “Concepta knows my habits, you see.” The Consul regarded the tray now on which were two glasses, a bottle of Johnny Walker, half full, a soda siphon, a jarro of melting ice and the sinister-looking bottle, also half full, containing a dull red concoction like bad claret, or perhaps cough mixture. “However this is the strychnine. Will you have a whiskey and soda? . . . The ice seems to be for your benefit anyway. Not even a straight wormwood?” The Consul shifted the tray from the parapet to a wicker table Concepta had just brought out. “Good heavens, not for me, thank you.” “—A straight whiskey then. Go ahead. What have you got to lose?”“. . . Let me have some breakfast first!” “—She might have said yes for once,” a voice said in the Consul’s ear at this moment with incredible rapidity, “for now of course poor old chap you want horribly to get drunk all over again don’t you the whole trouble being as we see it that Yvonne’s long-dreamed-of coming alas but put away the anguish my boy there’s nothing in it,” the voice gabbled on, “has in itself created the most important situation in your life save one namely the far more important situation it in turn creates of your having to have five hundred drinks in order to deal with it,” the voice he recognized of a pleasant and impertinent familiar, perhaps horned, prodigal of disguise, a specialist in casuistry, and who added severely, “but are you the man to weaken and have a drink at this critical hour Geoffrey Firmin you are not you will fight it have already fought down this temptation have you not you have not then I must remind you did you not last night refuse drink after drink and finally after a nice little sleep even sober up altogether you didn’t you did you didn’t you did we know afterwards you did you were only drinking enough to correct your tremor a masterly self-control she does not and cannot appreciate!”
“I don’t feel you believe in the strychnine somehow,” the Consul said, with quiet triumph (there was an immense comfort however in the mere presence of the whiskey bottle) pouring himself from the sinister bottle a half-tumblerful of his mixture. I have resisted temptation for two and a half minutes at least: my redemption is sure. “Neither do I believe in the strychnine, you’ll make me cry again, you bloody fool Geoffrey Firmin, I’ll kick your face in, O idiot!” That was yet another familiar and the Consul raised his glass in token of recognition and drank half its contents thoughtfully. The strychnine—he had ironically put some ice in it—tasted sweet, rather like cassis; it provided perhaps a species of subliminal stimulus, faintly perceived: the Consul, who was still standing, was aware too of a faint feeble wooling of his pain, contemptible . . . “But can’t you see you cabrón that she is thinking that the first thing you think of after she has arrived home like this is a drink even if it is only a drink of strychnine the intrusive necessity for which and juxtaposition cancels its innocence so you see you might as well in the face of such hostility might you not start now on the whiskey instead of later not on the tequila where it is by the way all right all right we know where it is that would be the beginning of the end nor on the mescal which would be the end though a damned good end perhaps but whiskey the fine old healthful throat-smarting fire of your wife’s ancestors nació 1820 y siguiendo tan campante and afterwards you might perhaps have some beer good for you too and full of vitamins for your brother will be here and it is an occasionand this is perhaps the whole point for celebration of course it is and while drinking the whiskey and later the beer you could nevertheless still be tapering off poco a poco as you must but everyone knows it’s dangerous to attempt it too quickly still keeping up Hugh’s good work of straightening you out of course you would!” It was his first familiar again and the Consul sighing put the tumbler down on the tray with a defiantly steady hand. “What was that you said?” he asked Yvonne. “I said three times,” Yvonne was laughing, “for Pete’s sake have a decent drink. You don’t have to drink that stuff to impress me . . . I’ll just sit here and cheer.” “What?” She was sitting on the parapet gazing over the valley with every semblance of interested enjoyment. It was dead calm in the garden itself. But the wind must have suddenly changed; Ixta had vanished while Popocatepetl was almost wholly obscured by black horizontal columns of cloud, like smoke drawn across the mountain by several trains running parallel. “Will you say that again?” The Consul took her hand.
They were embracing, or so it all but seemed, passionately: somewhere, out of the heavens, a swan, transfixed, plummeted to earth. Outside the cantina El Puerto del Sol in Independencia the doomed men would be already crowding into the warmth of the sun, waiting for the shutters to roll up with a crash of trumpets . . . “No, I’ll stick to the old medicine, thanks.” The Consul had almost fallen backwards onto his broken green rocking chair. He sat soberly facing Yvonne. This was the moment then, yearned for under beds, sleeping in the corners of bars, at the edge of dark woods, lanes, bazaars, prisons, the moment when—but the moment, stillborn, was gone: and behind him the ursa horribilis of the night had moved nearer. What had he done? Slept somewhere, that much was certain. Tak: tok: help: help: the swimming pool ticked like a clock. He had slept: what else? His hand searching in his dress trousers pockets felt the hard edge of a clue. The card he brought to light said: Arturo Díaz Vigil Médico Cirujano y Partero Enfermedades de Niños Indisposiciones Nerviosas Consultas de 12 a 2 y de 4 a 7 Av. Revolución Número 8. “—Have you really come back? Or have you just come to see me?” the Consul was asking Yvonne gently as he replaced the card.
“Here I am, aren’t I?” Yvonne said merrily, even with a slight note of challenge. “Strange,” the Consul commented, half trying to rise for the drink Yvonne had ratified in spite of himself and the quick voice that protested: “You bloody fool Geoffrey Firmin, I’ll kick your face in if you do, if you have a drink I’ll cry, O idiot!” “Yet it’s awfully courageous of you. What if —I’m in a frightful jolly mess, you know.” “But you look amazingly well I thought. You’ve no idea how well you look.” (The Consul had absurdly flexed his biceps, feeling them: “Still strong as a horse, so to speak, strong as a horse!”) “How do I look?” She seemed to have said. Yvonne averted her face a little, keeping it in profile. “Didn’t I say?” The Consul watched her. “Beautiful . . . Brown.” Had he said that? “Brown as a berry. You’ve been swimming,” he added. “You look as though you’ve had plenty of sun . . . There’s been plenty of sun here too of course,” he went on. “As usual . . . Too much of it. In spite of the rain . . . Do you know, I don’t like it.” “Oh yes you do, really,” she had apparently replied. “We could get out in the sun, you know.” “Well—” The Consul sat on the broken green rocker facing Yvonne. Perhaps it was just the soul, he thought, slowly emerging out of the strychnine into a form of detachment, to dispute with Lucretius, that grew older, while the body could renew itself many times unless it had acquired an unalterable habit of age. And perhaps the soul thrived on its sufferings, and upon the sufferings he had inflicted on his wife her soul had not only thrived but flourished. Ah, and not only upon the sufferings he had inflicted. What of those for which the adulterous ghost named Cliff he imagined always as just a morning coat and a pair of striped pyjamas open at the front, had been responsible? And the child, strangely named Geoffrey too, she had had by the ghost, two years before her first ticket to Reno, and which would now be six, had it not died at the age of as many months as many years ago, of meningitis, in 1932, three years before they themselves had met, and been married in Granada, in Spain? There Yvonne was at all events, bronzed and youthful and ageless: she had been at fifteen, she’d told him (that is, about the time she must have been acting in those Western pictures M. Laruelle, who had not seen them, adroitly assured one had influenced Eisenstein or somebody), a girl of whom people said, “She is not pretty but she is going to be beautiful”: at twenty they still said so, and at twenty-seven when she’d married him it was still true, according to the category through which one perceived such things of course: it was equally true of her now, at thirty, that she gave the impression of someone who is still going to be, perhaps justabout to be, “beautiful”: the same tilted nose, the small ears, the warm brown eyes, clouded now and hurt-looking, the same wide, full-lipped mouth, warm too and generous, the slightly weak chin.
Yvonne’s was the same fresh bright face that could collapse, as Hugh would say, like a heap of ashes, and be grey. Yet she was changed. Ah yes indeed! Much as the demoted skipper’s lost command, seen through the barroom window lying out in harbour, is changed. She was no longer his: someone had doubtless approved her smart slate blue travelling suit: it had not been he. Suddenly with a quietly impatient gesture Yvonne pulled her hat off, and shaking her brown sunbleached hair rose from the parapet. She settled herself on the daybed, crossing her unusually beautiful and aristocratic long legs. The daybed emitted a rending guitar crash of chords. The Consul found his dark glasses and put them on almost playfully. But it had struck him with remote anguish that Yvonne was still waiting for the courage to enter the house. He said consularly in a deep false voice: “Hugh ought to be here before very long if he comes back by the first bus.” “What time is the first bus?” “Half past ten, eleven.” What did it matter? Chimes sounded from the city. Unless of course it seemed utterly impossible, one dreaded the hour of anyone’s arrival unless they were bringing liquor. What if there had been no liquor in the house, only the strychnine? Could he have endured it? He would be even now stumbling through the dusty streets in the growing heat of the day after a bottle; or have dispatched Concepta. In some tiny bar at a dusty alley corner, his mission forgotten, he would drink all morning celebrating Yvonne’s coming while she slept. Perhaps he would pretend to be an Icelander or a visitor from the Andes or Argentina. Far more than the hour of Hugh’s arrival was to be dreaded the issue that was already bounding after him at the gait of Goethe’s famous church bell in pursuit of the child truant from church. Yvonne twisted her wedding ring round her finger, once. Did she still wear it for love or for one of two kinds of convenience, or both? Or, poor girl, was it merely for his, for their benefit? The swimming pool ticked on. Might a soul bathe there and be clean or slake its drought? “It’s still only eight-thirty.” The Consul took off his glasses again. “Your eyes, you poor darling—they’ve got such a glare,” Yvonne burst out with: and the church bell was nearer; now it had loped, clanging, over a stile and the child had stumbled. “A touch of the goujeers . . . Just a touch.” Die glocke glocke tönt nicht mehr . . . The Consul traced a pattern on one of the porch tiles with his dress shoes in which his sockless feet (sockless not because as Sr. Bustamente themanager of the local cinema would have it, he’d drunk himself into a position where he could afford no socks, but because his whole frame was so neuritic with alcohol he found it impossible to put them on) felt swollen and sore. They would not have, but for the strychnine, damn the stuff, and this complete cold ugly sobriety it had let him down into! Yvonne was sitting on the parapet again leaning against a pillar. She bit her lips, intent on the garden: “Geoffrey, this place is a wreck!” “Mariana and the moated grange isn’t in it.” The Consul was winding his wrist watch. “. . . But look here, suppose for the sake of argument you abandon a besieged town to the enemy and then somehow or other not very long afterwards you go back to it—there’s something about my analogy I don’t like, but never mind, suppose you do it—then you can’t very well expect to invite your soul into quite the same green graces, with quite the same dear old welcome here and there, can you, eh?” “But I didn’t abandon—” “Even, I wouldn’t say, if that town seems to be going about its business again, though in a somewhat stricken fashion, I admit, and its trams running more or less on schedule.” The Consul strapped his watch firmly on his wrist. “Eh?” “—Look at the red bird on the tree-twigs, Geoffrey! I never saw a cardinal as big as that before.”
“No.” The Consul, all unobserved, secured the whiskey bottle, uncorked it, smelt its contents and returned it to the tray gravely, pursing his lips: “You wouldn’t have. Because it isn’t a cardinal.” “Of course that’s a cardinal. Look at its red breast. It’s like a bit of flame!” Yvonne, it was clear to him, dreaded the approaching scene as much as he, and now felt under some compulsion to go on talking about anything until the perfect inappropriate moment arrived, that moment too when, unseen by her, the awful bell would actually touch the doomed child with giant protruding tongue and hellish Wesleyan breath. “There, on the hibiscus!” The Consul closed one eye. “He’s a coppery-tailed trogon I believe. And he has no red breast. He’s a solitary fellow who probably lives way off in the Canyon of the Wolves over there, away off from those other fellows with ideas, so that he can have peace to meditate about not being a cardinal.” “I’m sure it’s a cardinal and lives right here in this garden!” “Have it your own way. Trogon ambiguus ambiguus is the exact name, I think, the ambiguous bird! Two ambiguities ought to make an affirmative and this is it, the coppery-tailed trogon, not the cardinal.” The Consul reached out toward the tray for his empty strychnine glass, but forgettingmidway what he proposed to put in it, or whether it wasn’t one of the bottles he wanted first, if only to smell, and not the glass, he dropped his hand and leaned still further forward, turning the movement into one of concern for the volcanoes. He said: “Old Popeye ought to be coming out again pretty soon.” “He seems to be completely obliterated in spinach at the moment—” Yvonne’s voice quivered. The Consul struck a match against their old jest for the cigarette he had somehow failed to place between his lips: after a little, finding himself with a dead match, he put it in his pocket. For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts. The water still trickling into the pool—God, how deadeningly slowly— filled the silence between them . . . There was something else; the Consul imagined he still heard the music of the ball, which must have long since ceased, so that this silence was pervaded as with a stale thudding of drums. Pariah: that meant drums too. Parián. It was doubtless the almost tactile absence of the music however, that made it so peculiar the trees should be apparently shaking to it, an illusion investing not only the garden but the plains beyond, the whole scene before his eyes, with horror, the horror of an intolerable unreality. This must be not unlike, he told himself, what some insane person suffers at those moments when, sitting benignly in the asylum grounds, madness suddenly ceases to be a refuge and becomes incarnate in the shattering sky and all his surroundings in the presence of which reason, already struck dumb, can only bow the head. Does the madman find solace at such moments, as his thoughts like cannon-balls crash through his brain, in the exquisite beauty of the madhouse garden or of the neighbouring hills beyond the terrible chimney? Hardly, the Consul felt. As for this particular beauty he knew it dead as his marriage and as wilfully slaughtered. The sun shining brilliantly now on all the world before him, its rays picking out the timberline of Popocatepetl as its summit like a gigantic surfacing whale shouldered out of the clouds again, all this could not lift his spirit. The sunlight could not share his burden of conscience, of sourceless sorrow. It did not know him.
Down to his left beyond the plantains the gardener at the Argentinian ambassador’s week-end residence was slashing his way through some tall grasses, clearing the ground for a badminton court, yet something about this innocent enough occupation contained a horrible threat against him. The broad leaves of the plantains themselves drooping gently seemed menacingly savage as the stretched wings of pelicans, shaking before they fold. The movements of some more little red birds in the garden, like animated rosebuds, appeared unbearably jittery and thievish.
It was asthough the creatures were attached by sensitive wires to his nerves. When the telephone rang his heart almost stopped beating. As a matter of fact the telephone was ringing clearly and the Consul left the porch for the dining room where, afraid of the furious thing, he started to speak into the receiver, then, sweating, into the mouthpiece, talking rapidly —for it was a trunk call—not knowing what he was saying, hearing Tom’s muted voice quite plainly but turning his questions into his own answers, apprehensive lest at any moment boiling oil pour into his eardrums or his mouth: “All right. Good-bye . . . Oh, say, Tom, what was the origin of that silver rumour that appeared in the papers yesterday denied by Washington? I wonder where it came from . . . What started it. Yes. All right. Good-bye. Yes, I have, terrible. Oh they did! Too bad. But after all they own it. Or don’t they? Good-bye. They probably will. Yes that’s all right, that’s all right. Good-bye; good-bye!” . . . Christ. What does he want to ring me up at this hour of the morning for. What time is it in America. Erikson 43. Christ . . . He hung up the receiver the wrong way and returned to the porch: no Yvonne; after a moment he heard her in the bathroom . . . The Consul was guiltily climbing the Calle Nicaragua. It was as if he were toiling up some endless staircase between houses. Or perhaps even old Popeye itself. Never had it seemed such a long way to the top of this hill. The road with its tossing broken stones stretched on forever into the distance like a life of agony. He thought: 900 pesos=100 bottles of whiskey=900 ditto tequila. Argal: one should drink neither tequila nor whiskey but mescal. It was hot as a furnace too out on the street and the Consul sweated profusely. Away! Away! He was not going very far away, nor to the top of the hill. There was a lane branching to the left before you reached Jacques’ house, leafy, no more than a carttrack at first, then a switchback, and somewhere along that lane to the right, not five minutes’ walk, at a dusty corner, waited a little cool nameless cantina with horses probably tethered outside, and a huge white tomcat sleeping below the counter of whom a whiskerando would say: “He ah work all night mistair and sleep all day!” And this cantina would be open.
This was where he was going (the lane was plainly in sight now, a dog guarding it) to have in peace a couple of necessary drinks unspecified in his mind, and be back again before Yvonne had finished her bath. It was just possible too of course that he might meet— But suddenly the Calle Nicaragua rose up to meet him. The Consul lay face downward on the deserted street. —Hugh, is that you old chap lending the old boy a hand? Thank you so much. For it is perhaps indeed your turn these days to lend a hand. Not that I haven’t always been delighted to help you! I was even delighted in Paris thattime you arrived from Aden in a fix over your carte d’identité and the passport you so often seem to prefer travelling without and whose number I remember to this day is 21312. It perhaps gave me all the more pleasure in that it served a while to take my mind from my own tangled affairs and moreover proved to my satisfaction, though some of my colleagues were even then beginning to doubt it, that I was still not so divorced from life as to be incapable of discharging such duties with dispatch. Why do I say this? —Is it in part that you should see that I also recognize how close Yvonne and I had already been brought to disaster before your meeting! Are you listening, Hugh—do I make myself clear? Clear that I forgive you, as somehow I have never wholly been able to forgive Yvonne, and that I can still love you as a brother and respect you as a man. Clear, that I would help you, ungrudgingly, again. In fact ever since Father went up into the White Alps alone and failed to return, though they happened to be the Himalayas, and more often than I care to think these volcanoes remind me of them, just as this valley does of the Valley of the Indus, and as those old turbaned trees in Taxco do of Srinigar, and just as Xochimilco—are you listening Hugh?— of all places when I first came here, reminded me of those houseboats on the Shalimar you cannot remember, and your mother, my stepmother died, all those dreadful things seeming to happen at once as though the in-laws of catastrophe had suddenly arrived from nowhere, or, perhaps, Damchok, and moved in on us bag and baggage—there has been all too little opportunity to act, so to say, as a brother to you. Mind you I have perhaps acted as a father: but you were only an infant then, and seasick, upon the P and O, the old erratic Cocanada. But after that and once back in England there were too many guardians, too many surrogates in Harrogate, too many establishments and schools, not to mention the war, the struggle to win which, for as you say rightly it is not yet over, I continue in a bottle and you with the ideas I hope may prove less calamitous to you than did our father’s to him, or for that matter mine to myself. However all this may be—still there, Hugh, lending a hand?—I ought to point out in no uncertain terms that I never dreamed for a moment such a thing as did happen would or could happen. That I had forfeited Yvonne’s trust did not necessarily mean she had forfeited mine, of which one had a rather different conception.
And that I trusted you goes without saying. Far less could I have dreamed you would attempt morally to justify yourself on the grounds that I was absorbed in a debauch: there are certain reasons too, to be revealed only at the day of reckoning, why you should not have stood in judgement upon me. Yet I am afraid—are you listening, Hugh?—that long before that day what you did impulsively and have tried to forget in the cruel abstraction of youth will begin to strike you in a new and darker light. I am sadly afraid that you mayindeed, precisely because you are a good and simple person at bottom and genuinely respect more than most the principles and decencies that might have prevented it, fall heir, as you grow older and your conscience less robust, to a suffering on account of it more abominable than any you have caused me. How may I help you? How ward it off? How shall the murdered man convince his assassin he will not haunt him. Ah, the past is filled up quicker than we know and God has little patience with remorse! Yet does this help, what I am trying to tell you, that I realise to what degree I brought all this upon myself? Help, that I am admitting moreover that to have cast Yvonne upon you in that fashion was a feckless action, almost, I was going to say, a clownish one, inviting in return the inevitable bladder on the brain, the mouthful and heartful of sawdust. I sincerely hope so . . . Meantime, however, old fellow, my mind, staggering under the influence of the last half-hour’s strychnine, of the several therapeutic drinks before that, of the numerous distinctly untherapeutic drinks with Dr. Vigil before that, you must meet Dr. Vigil, I say nothing of his friend Jacques Laruelle to whom for various reasons I have hitherto avoided introducing you—please remind me to get back my Elizabethan plays from him—of the two days’ and one night’s continuous drinking before that, of the seven hundred and seventyseven and a half—but why go on? My mind, I repeat, must somehow, drugged though it is, like Don Quixote avoiding a town invested with his abhorrence because of his excesses there, take a clear cut around—did I say Dr. Vigil?— “I say I say what’s the matter there?” The English “King’s Parade” voice, scarcely above him, called out from behind the steering wheel, the Consul saw now, of an extremely long low car drawn up beside him, murmurous: an M.G. Magna, or some such. “Nothing.” The Consul sprang to his feet instantly sober as a judge. “Absolutely all right.”
“Can’t be all right, you were lying right down in the road there, what?” The English face, now turned up toward him, was rubicund, merry, kindly, but worried, above the English striped tie, mnemonic of a fountain in a great court. The Consul brushed the dust from his clothes; he sought for wounds in vain; there was not a scratch. He saw the fountain distinctly. Might a soul bathe there and be clean or slake its drought? “All right, apparently,” he said, “thanks very much.” “But damn it all I say you were lying right down in the road there, might have run over you, there must be something wrong, what? No?” The Englishman switched his engine off. “I say, haven’t I seen you before or something.”“—” “—” “Trinity.” The Consul found his own voice becoming involuntarily a little more “English.” “Unless—” “Caius.” “But you’re wearing a Trinity tie—” the Consul remarked with a polite note of triumph. “Trinity? . . . Yes. It’s my cousin’s, as a matter of fact.” The Englishman peered down his chin at the tie, his red merry face become a shade redder. “We’re going to Guatemala . . . Wonderful country this. Pity about all this oil business, isn’t it? Bad show.—Are you sure there’re no bones broken or anything, old man?” “No. There are no bones broken,” the Consul said. But he was trembling. The Englishman leaned forward fumbling as for the engine switch again. “Sure you’re all right? We’re staying at the Bella Vista Hotel, not leaving until this afternoon. I could take you along there for a little shuteye . . . Deuced nice pub I must say but deuced awful row going on all night. I suppose you were at the ball—is that it? Going the wrong way though, aren’t you? I always keep a bottle of something in the car for an emergency . . . No. Not Scotch. Irish. Burke’s Irish. Have a nip? But perhaps you’d—” “Ah . . .” The Consul was taking a long draught. “Thanks a million.” “Go ahead . . . Go ahead . . .” “Thanks.” The Consul handed back the bottle. “A million.” “Well, cheerio.” The Englishman restarted his engine. “Cheerio man. Don’t go lying down in roads. Bless my soul you’ll get run over or run in or something, damn it all. Dreadful road too. Splendid weather, isn’t it?” The Englishman drove away up the hill, waving his hand. “If you’re ever in any kind of a jam yourself,” the Consul cried after him recklessly, “I’m—wait, here’s my card—” “Bungho!” —It was not Dr. Vigil’s card the Consul still held in his hand: but it was certainly not his own. Compliments of the Venezuelan Government. What was this? The Venezuelan Government will appreciate . . . Wherever could this have sprung from? The Venezuelan Government will appreciate an acknowledgement to the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores. Caracas, Venezuela. Well, now, Caracas—well, why not? Erect as Jim Taskerson, he thought, married now too, poor devil— restored, the Consul glided down the Calle Nicaragua.
Sorprende por fin esa fosforescencia blanca en la amanecida. La hierba aparece manchada de plata, como si una lengua la hubiese repasado durante la noche una y otra vez hasta dejarla así, ensalivada de estrellas. Primera helada.
Los ancianos todavía se visten de caza y sacan a los perros y disparan y no aciertan o sí aciertan pero aciertan a los perros que caen heridos y solo queda rematarlos.
La única posibilidad de que esto cambie está en no olvidar.
En el telediario de las tres, en el de las nueve, en las tertulias, en los editoriales de los periódicos, en todas partes, había gente poderosa hablando de sacrificio, de responsabilidad. Gente que estaba robando, que se estaba llevando el dinero a Suiza, a Panamá. Miraban a cámara y decían: “por encima de nuestras posibilidades”. Nos decían “sacrificio”, “responsabilidad”. Yo miraba sus caras y quería verlas sufrir. Yo solo quería verlos retorcerse de dolor. Que la seguridad con que mentían, la confianza en nuestra credulidad y estupidez, se convirtiera en un millón de agujas que perforaran cada uno de sus órganos internos. No lo pensaba. Era natural, como rascarte cuando pica. No pensaba, solo odiaba. Mi otro yo no tenía la culpa, pero estaba ahí, y estaba callado. Me daba la razón. Le daba a me gusta cuando publicaba en Facebook mis diatribas, las compartía. Era la época en que todavía se podían poner ciertas cosas en las redes sociales.
La nada no es el vacío, sino todo.
¿Alguien sabe cuántos años estaremos muertos?
El tiempo es breve, las ansias crecen, las esperanzas menguan y, con todo esto, llevo la vida sobre el deseo que tengo de vivir.
Una casa alta sobre un alcor, junto a un son de agua, y a los pies corren, vuelan, ascienden, campo arriba, campo abajo, en el altozano, en la cañada, por el otero, en la hoz, las hojas proseguidoras, propagadas, continuas, desplegadoras sobre el haz de la tierra, de los olivos. Al otro fondo están las mieses. Acá la huerta ubérrima, y todavía allá, muy más allá, las herrizas, los pelados cabezos, el viento, el cielo azul… El espacio.
Esta situación solo es novedosa para la única especie animal que imagina su supervivencia y sus éxitos como la narrativa en el corazón de la historia del planeta, un relato con principio y nudo y desenlace, un relato con estructura y reglas, que significa algo, pero esta, la situación, no tiene por qué resolverse de forma amable con nosotros, o con nuestra economía, o con ningún sistema o estilo de vida particular, no tiene por qué resolverse en un espacio de tiempo razonable solo porque queramos que así lo haga, pensar lo contrario es volver a sucumbir a la ficción
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