23 “Perhaps that was partly what had been driving me to unintentionally betray myself, for I had gradually stopped thinking with the required and sufficient coolness. I knew that such a doctor couldnt do anything about it. Before his well disguised mockery and even some involuntary derision, I came to suspect that his purpose could well be to go on overwhelming me, little by little. What for? Taking advantage of my plight, maybe they would make me desist and cease fighting back; hence, finishing me off, so as to let the fattest fish enjoy laissez-faire, laissez-passer. That they could then return to sleep in Holy peace of God. But I went along with him, simulating to respect his desire to kill time off. Less often, it gave me a chance to think of something to distract my febrile mind; some alternative resource to make the enclosed area explode into a thousand pieces. But mind you, I swear not to stay confined here forever and ever; not even ants visit me in this so stifling an enclosure! Not even unwinding myself have I managed to walk out. On the other hand, since it allows me to glimpse into some secret watering points of the universal logos, it is a seductive parentheses. It was thanks to my survival in the deserts experience that I could verify something already experienced during my childhood and first youth. We would engage in competitions of drinking milk at the cows side, from the bucket and almost to the point of bursting. Then, we would lie face up on the grass, to feel as if floating and almost to the point of levitating. It was that milk acting as an endorphin on the neurons. Fortunately, in prison they let me go on consuming condensed milk, provided that they sent it to me in some small plastic container. Thus, your mind can continue planning, along with an increased intensity of physical exercises to kill time off and to keep and improve your condition, an experience of projecting your mind much beyond yourself. So, I started launching my imagination towards confines unsuspected by my captors, and into the immediate future and even that of a medium term. Speaking of ants, when enclosed its useless to discard any topic that come into your head; in one of those afternoons I remembered when I barely was a vulnerable kid - and they say that some ought to be killed them when they are still little - my mother was playing the Spanish deck, with some real carefree friends of her sibling colonels. So abstracted were they at it, as well as at chatting and saying their respective occurrences... that they did not notice the tens, then hundreds of ants starting to cover my whole appetizing body. The odd thing was that not even one of those tiny machines of war stung me. Finally, when realizing what was happening, their amazement was not tiny. Among them... someone exclaimed, This child must be for at least a white magician! That is why I would then never allow other children, although they were bigger than I, to gait jump as idiots over there and killing them, just for the heck of it. It was normal to pretend to be feudal knights full of pretentiousness, as arrogant as brutal, quarrelsome and extremely violent, feared by our neighbor children, as well as by elder ones. Thus, we were growing up altogether with our repertoire of emotions and behaviors considered as negative, such as: jealousy or pride, anger or lying, impudence or guilt, homicidal or self destructive trends. Summing it up, we kept growing with the hidden and gloomy entity of our respective personal shadow, or Mr. Hyde. Feeding our Ego as Abel, and our shadow as Cain, we went about cementing a given potential that they would not wish to acknowledge; thus, half avoiding the essential of each one of our respective life experiences. They intended to muzzle it under the mask of an imposed conditioning upon our ideal this is I, the aware portion of our own mind. They repudiated it at the time, and then they would induce us to try and forget it. Whatever feature which would not adapt to our ideal this is I, was banished to vegetate in the said entity (as illustrated by Bill Sands, an author who included his autograph in his autobiography My Shadow Ran Fast, which he presented to me it in Palm Springs). But all of those rejected feelings and capabilities would keep on going to end into the dark side of our all too human nature. Thus, they would go on profiling in advance, all that we failed to become at a given time of our lives. Thereafter, we would stop dragging them... Among the experiences of my rather sad childhood - for it is one thing to be loved, quite another, feared - let me pinpoint two of them. When I barely had ceased to be a faltering kid, one of my child nurses left her small pouch, incidentally, outside of her room and half closed. And of course, that curious little mouse did not know any better than to fall into the trap! He opened the pouch and was terrified by such a scene. What could that be before his eager eyes? He couldnt tell... no idea... it seemed a ten of white mice, all covered with blood as if they had been stabbed! Why not even one of those unhappy bastards had managed to escape? What sins would they have been accumulating with themselves not to deserve a minimum of mercy any longer?... And why did they stink as much as rotten fish that he even felt like vomiting? I still remember with clarity, the hopelessness... I began to cry a long while until she that is to say my favorite cousin, came to rescue me; or... I do not know who did... A good many years would go by to be able to solve such a mystery: they WERENT mice, but cotton pieces of sanitary napkins, which at first sight looked as chilling white, almost fluorescent as the robes of nurses, or the flashes of the wings of bats when sliding amongst fireflies! And well, at least that idiot of the child nurse was not such an ass as to let my great sensitivity towards colors, especially red, go unnoticed. When I already was from 12 to 13 years old, I met a girl of Italian origin about 3 to 4 years older than me, who aside from her own bedroom over there at the mansion in Tingo Maria, had a whole room full of interesting books and magazines! Needless to say, though by now I hardly dare to mention her name, Vita, nor say that I started to visit her almost every day. Always so sure of herself, every day she would read me aloud a poem of those which being by Pablo Neruda, were expressly prohibited to her. Then I, already back from to my foolproof solitude, would attempt to translate it into the Romance languages: Italian and French, to Spanish and from this unto English. As, “There are lonely cemeteries, filled with soundless bones graves passing through a tunnel, dark, dark, dark... the heart as we die from within, drowning in a shipwreck of the heart, as we creep out of the skin, unto the soul. Corpses, feet of cold, sticky clay, there amongst bones filled with death, like a pure sound, a barking without dogs, emanating from several bells and graves, swelling in such a humidity, like the heavy tears of rain. Alone, at times, I see coffins with sails bearing away the pallid dead, women with dead tresses, bakers white as Angels, pensive girls married to public notaries, Coffins ascending the vertical river of the dead, upstream that purple river, with sails blown by the sound of death, hauled by the silent sound of death. To the sonorous shore death arrives like a shoe without a foot, as without a man, a suit, with a stone less, fingerless ring knocking, with no throat nor tongue, mouth less, yet shouting. And yet its steps echo, even its clothing echoes, hushed, like a tree I know not, but little do I understand and scarcely see, but I think that its song has the color of humid violets, violets so used to the soil. For the face of death is green, with the penetrating moisture of a violet leaf and its somber color of exasperated winter. But death also goes through the world disguised as a broom lapping the floor, in search of the dead, death is the broom itself, it is the tongue seeking the dead, it is the needle seeking the latter thread. Death is in about the folding cots; in the slow mattresses, in the black blankets... It lives supine, and suddenly it blows: it blows a dismal sound that sells up the sheets; and the beds go sailing toward a port where death is waiting, awaiting there, all dressed up as an Admiral”. That sweet youngster made the unforgivable mistake of taking our idyll very seriously and getting to adore me indeed! And afraid before the unusual circumstance, I figured that I was facing a virtually insoluble problem. Why did she have to get to love me so, if aside from thanking her patient hospitality and fine courtesies, caresses even, I actually... did not love her so deeply any longer, but as a fourteen year old could try to love? Thus, in the subsequent occasion of her getting sick, wishing her to improve soon, I said that I would be back and visit her in a week, when she recovered and felt better. – Okay, as you wish my love... Whatever you say, my heaven. But, actually, I was thinking that in order not to ruin that so poetic a romance -though it had become unilateral - perhaps the ideal solution, slightly in the romantic way of Poe, who could hardly face the death of a beautiful young woman, were, that she died... lets say from one of those peritonitis, now known by acute-diffuse, with a 90 % efficiency. The following week, I casually met her best friend, and she protested for my not having been present at the wake, or at least the funeral, nor to express the due condolences to the family. In particular, since they all had had so much affection for me. Baffled and not just a little frightened, I asked, But if she is so young... What did she die from? – This is outrageous! Having been her boyfriend, you do not even know? Well her appendix blew! She died form peritonitis! Silent and sorry, I felt a deep guilt... suspecting that perhaps in some mysterious way, as that of the Kahuna sorcerers, I had induced the dreaded and irreparable death upon her. During a semester I went for scoring in a small address book, whatever word I happened to say every day. I may have felt that silence were the only sign of respect on behalf of that bride who liked the refined sounds of poetry... For some unknown reason, the total average during that ill-fated year, proved to be a mysterious 17. Now, you might think that perhaps I, sensing without the justification of an extra chromosome to have pushed me to be so lethal, I was negotiating to let myself go on living, until surviving her no more than that difference of 3 to 4 years. In addition, it was a time of greater introspection and ideas when not depressing, bizarre as that of gait walking sometimes... thinking that I were more lethal than the fatal ladies! That is why in those days of unrest I wrote the sad poem The Angel, The angel of the grim one, who is more agile and patient, follows us without hindering us, it goes by harassing us. It jumps around the corner, flies, displaces, spies on us, and scrutinizes... dreams about us and guesses us out. It is a tree which walks, it is dusk which floats the silent embrace of a lost friendship the glass sand clock that without noise, empties With no other word when you no longer wake up just greeting those who have gone before. Whether you like it or not, take it into account Like the naked child who goes into the cozy cave half peeps in, returns, and carries nothing Without needing to cover with silk or ermine, as the inside and outside lining, of the white pine coffin.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 00:40:51 +0000
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