my own texts

“THE AGE OF INDIVIDUALISM”

A theory that gives primacy to the individual over the collective.
The social fabric is a living, complex, and very delicate organism that develops over time through the interrelationships of its parts—that is, the contacts established between its members. A society is not simply an “isolated” grouping of individuals.

When the idea of ​​”personal well-being,” or personal health, or personal salvation, takes precedence over the notion of the group or the whole, we find ourselves with a serious problem of cohesion. It is not enough for each of the parts of an engine to be well-maintained, clean, and in perfect condition. The relationship between those parts is what will make the system work.

If, under the false and vain idea that by saving one, everyone is saved, we accept without resistance not being able to assist our sick loved ones, not being able to be present at the births of our future children; when we so easily renounce the embrace, the greeting, the care of the other for fear of becoming “infected” and endangering “our existence”, then we have assumed and welcomed the Age of Individualism.

I can’t imagine any of the figures who shaped our society adopting such attitudes. Did San Martín even consider his health when he decided to cross the Andes? (especially to liberate a neighboring people). What kind of “representatives” are we willing to accept as a society? Do we want to continue being treated like teenagers who, besides being frightened by some latest bogeyman, are expected to dictate how we relate to one another?

Is life risky? Of course it is. Do individuals die? Of course, and others are born to produce a generational shift of ideas, of new ways of seeing the world.

Like a shipwrecked person clinging to a piece of driftwood to survive, what would we do if another person appeared beside us, on the verge of drowning? Would we abandon them to isolate ourselves and thus save ourselves? Would we try to share the wood even at the risk of dying? The answer each of us gives to this question will shape the course of the times to come. We may be able to save ourselves individually. What is clear is that a collection of individuals will never form a society.

Dear “representatives,” know that your individualistic, paternalistic, and short-sighted attitude does NOT personally represent me!!!!

To use logical thinking simply to sharpen the “registration” of intuition and feeling. And to be able to suspend its operation the moment when, from pure and simple registration, thought begins a rapid process of “interpretation” of said registration, subsequently identifying with that interpretation. Finally, a false concept of identity is generated, based not on the registration itself but on its interpretation. This allows us to evade responsibility for said interpretation, since now, interpretation has taken the place of perception. The outside then is “That interpretation” ceases to be the trigger that generated the perception. It does not, in any way, exonerate it from the creative process.

Interpretation, therefore, seeks to appropriate the realm of the creative and the spiritual and bring it into the domain of logic. Rational thought plays a crucial role in resolving practical, enumerative, and functional situations. However, when it intervenes in the realm of the senses, a dysfunction arises, generating friction and consequently, discomfort and confusion.

Religious systems have operated in this way, hence their general discrediting in the West. However, religiosity remains current and active throughout the world. Ultimately, the need to ritualize experience is one of the paths that allows us to overcome mere “perception” and achieve a kind of “transcendence” (in the sense of transgressing limits—those of matter—to reach other realms—those of the senses) that restores us to existence.

Creativity can only arise when thought, after gathering stimuli, is suspended to allow the inner self to connect with the object, situation, or place that triggered them. The external world is always a material echo of that immaterial, internal force that sustains us.

“PROBABLE MEMORIES”

Prologue

As is often the case with those events in our lives that we try to recall, we never know for sure how much of what we say actually corresponds to what happened. From the depths of our being, a shadow of doubt always emerges. Gaps in memory that we fill arbitrarily, threads of events that we sense are capricious. No, we certainly don’t know if what we recount is fiction or reality, because deep down we sense that life itself is a plot written by someone else, and that it falls to us to act it out as best we can within that limited space of time called life.

When, as in my case, after the median inflection point of the most optimistic forecasts has passed, the years begin to be discounted instead of added,  It is acknowledged, with a certain degree of embarrassment, that even with the ingrained linearity of time, the succession of before-now-after is, at the very least, suspect. Events begin to read as circular, memories intertwine unexpectedly, and certain facts and situations are resolved or continue across vast geographical and historical distances. The plot now begins to reveal certain patterns that, although anticipated, have never before been presented with such undeniable clarity.

Memoirs, then, are probable…yes, because I imagine that if I were to rewrite them, they would necessarily take on a different format. That’s why I encourage you to read them randomly, to disregard the capricious numerical order of pages or chapters, and to read them letting yourself be guided by an unexpected design. Perhaps in this way, they will more closely resemble what I have actually lived, or what I have remembered and written without having lived it.

Alfa

The foundational elements. (part of the first third)

(Again, arbitrariness…is it about what’s furthest back in time?, the first thing I remember? Or about what I see deep down as essential, the part that structures the rest, the basic material with which the outlines of my existence began to be drawn?)

Almost all of the memories from the beginning are closely associated with sensations rather than with significant events or specific situations embedded in a particular story. It’s the sensory experience, not the narrative.

  • The airCertain aromasThe smells, more than the geography, gave it a very concrete architecture and clearly defined the place where I was born and lived: Buenos Aires. A humidity in the air lent it weight and magnitude, making it feel substantial rather than ethereal. Every breath here was always an awareness that something was entering my body. Later, when I lived in other places, I was orphaned of that volatile substance. Except for the occasional aroma, the air then became ethereal and weightless. It ceased to have content, to be a vehicle for evocative substance.
  • The airThe chiaroscuro of the shadows. Sharp-edged silhouettes that, as the day wore on, darkened the surfaces they glided across. Sunlight, for nine months of the year, constantly painted new and surprising shapes. My attention was captivated for hours, watching these forms shift with a slow, continuous rhythm that already hinted at the coexistence of several simultaneous speeds: the movement of shadows was neither the speed of speech nor the speed of events. The plaza where I played, the one my mother used to take us to in the afternoons, changed daily, and I think that as we walked along the sidewalks to get there, I would get excited imagining the new scene I would find. Later, I came to think that this sensation allowed me to feel that the forms themselves weren’t limited by silhouette, that objects were interwoven in a fabric whose meaning I was passionate about deciphering, the changing shadows uniting the space between them. (As the years passed, on one of my returns to the city, the plaza had disappeared, bisected by a highway. As a kind of anticipatory metaphor for what I would later define as the reinterpretation of meaning through absence or neglect, the two ombú trees that framed it and in which I used to play as a child remained standing on either side. Like two sentinels, beginning and end, they stood pointing to what was now lost and nonexistent…that’s why the memory, right?)
  • Water; of the Río de la Plata. A mystery that even today, at 58 years old and after having lived half that time in other distant lands, remains undecipherable, perpetual, and extraordinary. A majestic and imposing presence. A repository of wisdom that transcended the contingent and which the city, the people, and the culture into which I was born stubbornly refused to acknowledge. From before, until now.
  • Earth and FireThey appeared later in Ayacucho, on my grandfather Alejandro’s farm, when I was seven. There, a circle of fullness closed. There, life and death merged in a perpetual undifferentiated void. Substantial, germinal, burying earth. Ovenbird’s nest and plow furrow. Final fire and beginning in the burning of the tall grasses (the smoke was already a different shadow), in the red of the iron used to brand the animals (white smoke of burnt hair), in the iron stove warming long winter nights (without smoke).
  • A slow way of feeling the passage of time. The sensation of eternity in each day of childhood. Day, night, events and situations were mere changes of scenery, but life unfolded as a whole, undifferentiated.
  • The adult world felt alien and strange, fundamentally distant from me, even though I had to live among them. Sometimes I felt that the height difference was a result of that difference, but as the years went by, I realized there were other things at play.
  • An indescribable feeling of fulfillment that was repeated in every activity. Everything was experienced as a permanent and wonderful discovery that left me fascinated and further fueled my curiosity.

I think this entire first stage was guided by a nonexistent need to find explanations that would connect what I was experiencing. Sensation was enough. A way of recognizing my surroundings that didn’t yet fall into the realm of categories. The sunlight mingled with the warmth on my skin and the shadow my body cast on the tiled sidewalk, which broke at the curb and stretched out into the grassy area of ​​the plaza where I was playing. The call of a rufous hornero (there were many in the plazas back then) blended with the shouts of other children, the bell and the call of the ice cream vendor who punctually came to the plaza, the conversations of mothers sitting on the benches, and the sounds of car engines in the streets. While I could distinguish each of these things, the truth is I had the feeling that they were all connected. I couldn’t even conceive of any of them existing in isolation. I couldn’t explain it, but that feeling made me feel calm, safe. When I left that world, I would answer my mother’s call because we had to go back home, and I would observe with curiosity that world so different from that of adults.

Fifty-eight

In November 2013, I flew to Buenos Aires from Berlin with the intention of returning to Argentina after 26 years of living in Europe.

I had been there previously  In 2000 for 3 weeks and in 2007 for a month and a half. That is to say, in the last 13 years I had only traveled twice to the city where I was born and which had provided me with a backdrop until I was 29 years old.

The idea then struck me to divide my existence into three parts or periods, considering its probable duration to be around 80 years. The first third (29 years) would have taken place in the city where I was born. The second third (26 years) unfolded in Europe during a period of searching, establishing roots, and letting go… in which I developed my professional career and, fundamentally, had the privilege of starting a family.  The idea of ​​returning and living the final third of my life in Buenos Aires appealed to me. I imagined a return that was both possible and longed for…

The first and subsequent memories

(part of the first third)

From what I’ve been told and from what I haven’t forgotten, I know that there were very distinct stages in terms of the places where I lived or the circumstances and the people I had to live with in each of them.

The first one goes from birth to a year and a half.

I have no memories of that period, despite having tried several times to trace them. I know from family stories that I was born in Avellaneda in 1959, but that my first home was in the three-story house my paternal grandfather had built at 2049 Tacuarí Street in Barracas, where his entire family lived: my two grandparents, my father’s two sisters, and my parents with my brother. My parents lived on the second floor, and my grandparents and aunts lived on the first. The ground floor was the common area (kitchen and living room) and part of my grandfather’s company offices. The house is still standing, currently housing a nursing home, and in one of the many loops I experienced throughout my life, I was given the opportunity to return to the room where I lived until I was a year and a half old on the return trip to Buenos Aires, under circumstances that I will recount later and that had connotations and significance that are still surprising: if that room had been the first place where my life began to take shape, it later became the place where an important part of what I considered my being would end up dying.

The paternal ancestors.

  • Alejandro Puente (Don Alejandro) emigrated to Buenos Aires in 1924 from his native village of Pontecesures in Galicia, Spain. The eldest of three brothers, it fell to him, by tradition, to try to provide for the family, as his father had died when he was young. These were times of great hardship and hunger in Spain, and particularly in Galicia. Owning a wooden cart pulled by an ox, he hauled stones from the surrounding mountains to use in the construction of the local roads. When money was tight, he would go early in the morning to the mountains to gather firewood to sell in the village. Scarcity was the norm. The family home, built with meter-thick stone walls, had a lower floor where the animals (a cow, an ox, and a pig) were kept, along with the bread oven, tools and implements, the wooden printing press, and the oak barrels for storing the homemade wine and brandy produced every year. Upstairs were the wood-burning kitchen and dining room. A narrow staircase led to a corridor that ran through the house like a spine, flanked by bedrooms on either side, before opening into the living room (used for visitors and important occasions). The floors were made of wooden beams and planks. The windows were small to prevent the loss of what little heat there was, and the roof was made of wood and flagstone tiles. The surrounding land was cultivated to sustain a kind of self-sufficient subsistence economy. Vegetables, potatoes, legumes, grapevines for wine, and little else were grown. Down below, in the village nestled along the banks of the Ulla River, which separated Pontecesures from Padrón, fish could occasionally be bought. The river also provided the prized lampreys, the fishing rights for which were shared among the families on a rotating basis. It was a very hard life in a harsh climate: damp, cold, and unforgiving, offering only a respite during the two or three summer months.

I met Don Alejandro when I was 7 years old (previously,  Family feuds between my father and grandfather had, among many other consequences, prevented us from having contact with my father’s side of the family. By then, the five of us—my two brothers and my parents—were living in the apartment at 1160 Avenida del Libertador, where I lived until I was able to become independent and live on my own at 24, in 1983. I remember that image very clearly. It fell to me to open the apartment door when I heard the doorbell ring, and as I did, silhouetted against the light from the street in the background, was Don Alejandro. A very short and heavyset man. The fact that he barely had a neck separating his enormous, round, bald head from his shoulders gave the impression that he was almost as wide as he was tall. Hanging from his shoulder was a poncho folded over his suit jacket. The size of his feet amazed me (I later learned he wore a size 46). There he was, stiff, impassive, his arms glued to his sides, not uttering a word. I suppose he must have noticed my surprise. My father and mother appeared shortly after, and after greeting each other, Don Alejandro entered the house and became part of the family. Yes, from that day forward, he would begin living with us. The strangest thing about it all was that we had accepted, without any questioning or explanation from my parents, the arrival of this complete stranger and the fact that he would simply begin living with us from that day forward.

Image: 9 years.

In the shed in the Ayacucho countryside, an agricultural engineer stands with a blackboard beside him, explaining some story related to agricultural exploitation or some project he wants to talk about.  I convinced my grandfather to participate. Four or five other people sat in a semicircle across from him, listening to the talk. My grandfather was literally asleep in one of the chairs, snoring with a sound intensity that would later become a landmark in family history. Standing to one side, I observed the scene with a mixture of bewilderment and curiosity (at that time I enjoyed observing the adult world). When the talk ended, everyone got up from their chairs (my grandfather woke up) and went for a walk in a pasture. I suppose it was to see in the field what had just been discussed in front of the blackboard. In single file, following  A trail left by cattle through the pastures leads the way, followed by the engineers who continue talking to him. Suddenly, without even flinching, the old man unleashes a series of thunderous farts while impassively continuing on his way. I glance at the engineers’ bewildered faces. When the walk is over, I approach the old man and ask, “What was that, Grandpa?” to which he replies, “Let these bastards sniff my shit! They just want my money!”

My own memories: between the ages of 7 and 15.

(After that age I stopped seeing my grandfather and shortly after he passed away without me ever being able to see him again)

  • The intercom is ringing insistently and continuously. It’s nighttime, and the whole family is home. We go to the kitchen to see what’s causing the alarm. My mother answers the intercom: “Who is it?” Nothing. “Hello, who is it?”… no one answers, my mother says. We open the apartment door, which leads to the long entrance hall, and there at the far end, we see a figure backlit. As we approach, we see it’s Don Alejandro, asleep standing up, leaning against the wall, holding a crate in his arms that was pressing our apartment’s button.
  • Every day at lunchtime, I would see Don Alejandro (he sat across from me) eating a chopped raw onion that my mother prepared for him. I never knew why, but that image was not among the familiar ones.
  • A night of hunting in the Ayacucho countryside. It was winter and moonless. The darkness was profound. In the cab were Rossi (my grandfather’s driver) and Don Alejandro. In the back, Horacio, the foreman, operated a spotlight, and the beam of light it projected pierced the blackness, searching for a pair of red eyes (hares) or blue eyes (foxes) to begin the hunt. My father, standing beside him,  I rested the 16-gauge shotgun on the cab roof. Behind us, in the bed, the three of us brothers (responsible for collecting the game we hunted and loading it into the bed) were holding onto the edge. The cold was slowly seeping into our bodies; our fingers were starting to stiffen, and I would alternately put one hand in my pants pocket to regain some mobility and then do the same with the other to keep warm. The uneven terrain meant we were constantly jolted from side to side inside the bed. The floor was soaked with the blood of the dead animals we were loading, which made us inevitably slip and fall again and again among the still-warm bodies of hares (some still moving in their last gasps). We moved slowly, and the beam of light from the spotlight swept back and forth in front of the truck, trying to spot any game. When the light shone on a pair of red eyes, a moment of tension would ensue. The truck would stop, and my father would point the shotgun barrel in that direction.  Time seemed to stand still for a few eternal seconds until the thunderous sound of the shot set the flow of time in motion once more. The muzzle flash was accompanied by a white smoke and the smell of gunpowder. In the halo of light, the hare leaped, perhaps trying to escape the inevitable, and its body lay sprawled among the tall grass. It was time to jump out of the box and retrieve the prey, which was still kicking, as if it still wanted to run.  It lingered a little longer, but with its body lying on its side, its legs only cleaving the air, no longer finding any foothold on the ground to propel itself forward. Its final dash through the air slowed, its steps becoming increasingly sporadic until they stopped completely. I grabbed the hare by its hind legs and ran to the truck, which had already started moving again. I climbed onto the fender, illuminated by the red light of its taillights, and laid the dead animal on the bed of the truck bed.
"FIRST"

As if having moved so many times—between apartments, cities, countries—had definitively and inexorably detached him from any system of coordinates, Eduardo turns over in bed, tilting his head on the pillow so that his face is against the wall. This prevents the light coming through the window, even though his eyelids are still closed, from illuminating his retinas and filling them with a whitish haze. Although the day is clearly beginning, and in his memories this is associated with the habit of getting up, a part of him has grown accustomed to distrusting all points of reference. A kind of permanent state of bewilderment to which he has become accustomed and which he has come to accept as an attribute of his condition as an immigrant.

It was a gradual process. If it weren’t for his stubborn determination to understand things, he would hardly have noticed. It would all have been reduced to a series of anecdotes that, after so many years, wouldn’t have even left a trace. But, well, memory had already become a survival tool. Out of necessity, what in other people and other circumstances—those whose frame of reference isn’t so drastically altered—would have been applied to more immediate things, to situations that simply help solve immediate problems (being able to remember what time the bus comes to work in the morning, the shelf where the milk is located at the supermarket…) had been transformed in him into a kind of identity that sustained him and helped him endure so much change. Memory, remembering smells, gradients of light, ways of moving his body… all of it allowed him to know himself better.

German course: first classes in a classroom at the Volkshochschule in Aachen. Each of us sat at a table, which, aligned along their edges, formed a kind of U parallel to three of the room’s walls, leaving the fourth wall open. The teacher sat at a single table in front of the blackboard (not a chalkboard, but one for writing with markers). We sat there twice a week, hoping to learn some basic principles to begin understanding everything around us and everyone we lived with. The German teacher was of Armenian origin. He asked us, “What is ‘home’?” “The place where you are born,” one of us said, “the place we come from.”  “The people you love,” says another, of Turkish origin—a Colombian woman. The professor listens to everyone and then says: “Home is the place where you don’t need to spell out your last name.” More than 20 years have passed since then, and I still have to spell it out every time someone asks me my name.

Eduardo turns around again, opens his eyes, and lets the light in. He kicks off the sheets to expose his body, sits up on the edge of the bed, and goes into the bathroom so that, after weighing himself on the scale, the hot water can finally start his day.

Sho ashá had a drum. He worked it during the day, and at night he’d give it to my nephew so he could make a few bucks. Because I wanted the night for myself, you know?… my thing is the accordion, and at night we’d go out with the guys to play twice a week at a restaurant and at some milonga. But it wasn’t a life, you know? (Eduardo tried, but he couldn’t see something he had never experienced). One day a friend who played in an orchestra asked me if I wanted to go with them to Europe. Can you imagine? Europe!!! (Eduardo tries but he can’t imagine it, or at least he doesn’t do it in the same way as the bandoneon player he’s talking to). So I dropped everything and just came here. And almost 20 years have passed… I ended up staying. Here in Germany, they really like tango, you know? My boss is German. She doesn’t understand much, but she takes care of me.

Eduardo stands among the seats in the front row, beneath the small stage where, just minutes before, a man of about sixty, with thick hands and a protruding belly, had finished a tango concert in that tiny theater tucked away in a run-down little town: Würselen. This Argentinian, a tango aficionado, recounts parts of his life to him, and with each sentence, as if wanting to strengthen a bond with Eduardo, he takes hold of his shoulder and lets go, touches him, offers his elbow in a gesture of complicity. The suit is black with a shiny lapel. His head seems covered by a gleaming black layer, barely a few millimeters thick, divided in two by a thin line that runs from his forehead to the back of his neck. There are no traces of a comb. The black stain is uniform, a gleaming surface covering his skull.

I’m going to give you a couple of tips, kid, because living in Germany isn’t easy for us. It took me a while to adapt. The language is so-so, you know? But I have music, it’s easier. First of all: “never tell a German what to do, not even if they ask you.”

Anyone seeing Eduardo sitting alone in the subway car now, that smile spreading across his face, would think he was lost in his memories, reminiscing about some happy or funny encounter from the past. “Alexander Platz,” the station signs announce. Eduardo gets off the train, starts walking through the tunnels looking for the exit, and in the distance he begins to hear music. As he gets closer, his intuition is confirmed. A man is playing Piazzolla’s “Verano Porteño” on an accordion. Eduardo stops for a few minutes to listen, his smile widening, he drops in a coin, and goes up the stairs to the street with the firm conviction that today is going to be a good day.

I see Cuervo, as I speak to him, repeating that characteristic gesture of his that, I suppose, assures him a kind of self-possession. With his elbow resting on the café table, he traces a circular motion with the index finger of his left hand around the contour of his mouth, letting the pad of his finger feel the roughness of his nascent morning stubble as his lips come together and rise in a hypothetical, unrecipient kiss, only to retreat again and assume the relaxed posture of his face. He ponders his words for a moment while, his pupils anxiously following the waitress’s movements behind the magnifying lenses of his glasses. If I hadn’t known him for some time, I might deduce from this gesture a lack of interest in the conversation, when deep down it’s about protecting a misdirected sensitivity. But Cuervo has been in Germany for almost four years and has taken many language courses that haven’t quite managed to overcome his resistance. So I know for sure that what I’m telling him interests him, or at least resonates with him.

Eduardo keeps talking. He likes to talk because he realizes that silence, in these places, comes dangerously close to oblivion. Seated at the café table, the two of them fulfill their weekly ritual of meeting to catch up on what they’re feeling and what’s happening in their lives. Seeing them like this, relaxed and seated, one would say that the conversation has a rather ritualistic quality. As if they both needed an audience to fully express their gestures, unfold their discourses, and thus validate their respective existences.

As I was saying, it took me a while too. But less than it did you. After a year, I felt I could say things and understood quite a bit. But I always remember the first time I went to do laundry, just a few weeks after arriving in Aachen… At that time, I didn’t have a washing machine in the apartment I was renting, so I went with two bags of dirty clothes to one of those shops where, for 5 DM (back then we used German marks), you put all your clothes in a machine and in half an hour you came out with clean, dry clothes. I’ll never forget the bewilderment and helplessness I felt at that moment. I went into the shop and against one wall I saw a row of 12 washing machines. On the opposite wall were just as many machines that, because of their larger size and the shape of their doors, I could identify as dryers. There were lots of signs above the rows of machines with lists of what I assumed were the steps to follow to get the clothes washed, because each sentence was preceded by a number. 1. 2. 3. etc. That was the extent of my understanding. The machines repeated the instructions in small letters on adhesive signs. There wasn’t a single human being in the place… nobody. Just me and the machines. Now there was no escape, and I found myself confronted with the language in a crude, devastating, and definitive way. With my pocket German-Spanish dictionary, I felt like Father Scheil deciphering the Code of Hammur. It took me about half an hour to translate the hieroglyphics and get the machines working, including one that prepared and served me a restorative coffee in a cardboard cup. I sat in front of the washing machine watching the twists and counter-twists of the mixture of water, soap, dirt, and fabric, and I couldn’t help but fall into rather cheap existential reflections of the type: we are nothing, everything keeps turning, the end is the beginning, etc. When the hour was up, I left the shop with my two bags still warm from the clothes I’d just dried in the heat machines, with the distinct feeling of being in a foreign land whose contours I was only just beginning to grasp, and instinctively starting the process of discovering my own limits. The washing machine made me realize that I was “someone else.”

They look relaxed, enjoying the conversation. El Cuervo raises his hand and asks the waitress for “due espressi,” accompanying the gesture with a seductive smile that provokes laughter from Eduardo and his immediate judgment.

“Square, practical, good…” The Ritter chocolate bar is a true icon of German popular culture. A family business founded in 1912, they began producing the famous 100g square chocolate bar in 1932. In 1970, thanks to an advertising campaign featuring the aforementioned slogan, the bar became popular throughout Germany and achieved unprecedented sales records. This inability to perceive the subtleties of existence bothers me so much that at times I’m tempted to write an ode to the circle or a hymn to the amorphous.

This is what Eduardo thinks as he finishes eating the last piece of his chocolate bar and throws the wrapper into the trash can, watching as the letters of the slogan wrinkle, become deformed, and become unintelligible.

The Nationalgalerie in Berlin is a truly paradoxical building. Renowned as one of the finest examples of Modern architecture, the work of the German architect (although he had to go to the USA to achieve fame) Mies van der Rohe, it is also one of the worst architectural exhibition spaces I know. To such an extent that,  every time a sample is taken in its unique square, fully glazed space  On either side, with an iron roof supported by four pillars that seems to float in the air, another interior space is constructed with walls of plasterboard or wood, capable of transforming that open space into one that can house an art exhibition. Sometimes ego blinds us. I can’t even imagine what arguments were presented at the time.  What was going through Mies’s mind when he conceived that work… one thing is clear, either for him art was reduced to sculpture, or he simply didn’t care  I don’t know the function of that building. But anyway, there it is… and today I’m going in with Nivea to see a retrospective of the painter Gerhard Richter.. 

Nor should you think that these kinds of thoughts create a sour character that will prevail.  It’s on Eduardo’s face. It’s just the way he is. He’s always liked to question the why of things, or even their purpose (in moments of heightened inspiration). He often repeats the anecdote where his mother used to tell him: “But little Eduardo… don’t think so much…” always accompanied by a genuine smile.

On the specially constructed walls within the Nationalgalerie, over a hundred of Richter’s works are displayed, spanning more than 50 years of the artist’s career. The earliest pieces date from 1962 and continue to the present day. This allows for a comprehensive overview of his established body of work, and therefore, some conclusions drawn from this exhibition seem pertinent or appropriate.

What amazes me, in any case, is his unwavering obsession with the limits and scope of PAINTING. Richter is a painter, and all his work tirelessly explores the limits of perception, the ultimate and final inability to “represent” reality. I suspect that in the 50 years of dialogue the artist has had with the pictorial medium, there has been a significant shift in the role of the factors that lead to the creation of a work. Thus, while in his early works one can see the greater weight of the artist’s will in the elaboration, the greater influence of reason, the desire for understanding, and the reasoned study of the process of perception to the detriment of the random dictates of the pictorial medium (from works that reproduce color samples to photographic appropriations that, in a final gesture, are consciously blurred),  We see that in his latest large-format works, the artist has reached such a state of maturity that the dialogue with the material assumes a condition of reverential and celebratory acceptance of what painting, in and of itself, offers. The artist is a mere executor who has finally learned to listen to what the painting has to say. I leave the exhibition with great satisfaction. Today it won’t be necessary to write either an ode to the circle or a hymn to the amorphous. Richter is already taking care of that…

“HUGO ORLANDINI”

If globalization appears to be a new mental model that adheres to the

The daily development of a large part of the world’s population is no less true, or perhaps precisely because of this universality that is imposed upon us, the need to recreate a private, exclusive sphere of personal contingency in which the individual continues to have value and place.

Faced with the daily sensory bombardment and the speed at which information circulates, the desire for solitary activities (chatting, video games, nature, ecology) is growing, offering individuals a secluded space for self-discovery. Retro trends, looking back, and nostalgia attempt to recover something lost or yet to be lost: the familiarity of sitting on a park bench, chatting with a neighbor, leisure understood as a space for exchange. It’s about recognizing codes within the individual’s reach.

Today, computer language and keyboard language are part of our daily lives (text messages, chat, etc.) and have become integrated into our traditional ways of expressing ourselves. Their keyboard shortcuts have become part of the collective consciousness and have taken on the character of a personal code of interpretation through which individuals once again feel a sense of ownership or belonging. The abstract nature of language contains an empty universe in which the imagination can once again develop its potential.

The “Shortcuts” series proposes precisely an expansion and formalization of this idea. It incorporates these cryptograms, these key-shaped codes, into the everyday urban experience of the passerby. Form, function, and semantics converge here in an object of urban use. The bench-plaza-key-word unites in one object, and by centrifuging all these contents into one, it generates a space suitable for individual appropriation, for the individual’s enjoyment. The identification between the imaginary and the real is immediate. Virtual language is incorporated into  The tectonic and the everyday. And the fantasy computer universe settles into an everyday object: the park bench. A place to pause. A meeting place for oneself or others. An object that, despite the high degree of abstraction of its contents, or precisely because of it, leaves ample room for the development of the individual’s imagination.

In the first of the proposals, the cryptogram alludes precisely to that primary need to seek individual paths (“esc” plus arrow) in the face of the harassment of so much control and the feeling of the individual being absorbed by a system that is alien to him in its postulates.

The second proposal intensifies the idea of ​​free will. The atavistic need to wander and move. The eternal search for a home understood as a realm of self-recognition.

The third proposal is a reflection on that same lack of meaning in uniformity and leveling equality. The yearning to be “one’s own.” The fundamental need not to be a “zero.”

The fourth proposal embodies a poetic vision focused on a horizon yet to be discovered. In any case, the idea is that through movement, one’s own individuality is defined. The search no longer refers exclusively to a physical place but rather to a mental one. The initiatory journey of all mythology.

And the last of the proposals serves as a final reflection. The ultimate possibility of achieving individual development through helping others. A turning of the page, a kind of social nod.

The urban environment, the park bench, then becomes once again a place for reflection. Like in the Greek agora, it is the place where the citizen defines himself and acquires individual meaning in discourse with the other, with his neighbor, with his fellow man.

“HUGO ORLANDINI”

This text is meaningless. It assumes no relevance other than to claim to be a guide through the cryptic territory of Hugo Orlandini’s work. A modest guide who, in keeping with the content of his work, attempts tounveil” the facts, “disarticulate” the surface, to access the subtext. This is not about duplicating yet another text that reinforces the divide between the layperson and the scholar. Such shortsightedness is unacceptable, as this is a work that consistently avoids falling into the trap of blindness social circles that shape our daily lives. Here, as in Orlandini’s work, the quotations will be mere metaphors and no longer just intellectual self-indulgence.

In an era like the present, where a kind of neo-pompierism has taken hold of the art scene, where the incongruity between the content and attitude of many artists and the art world reminds us more of the celebrated salon artists of the 19th century (albeit with costumes and stage sets that have changed) than of the original role of the artist as questioner, seer, and herald of the cracks in a system, a body of work like that of Hugo Orlandini reminds us of these incongruities and hypocrisies and confronts us with the marginalityPerhaps the only morally possible attitude. To walk on the margins and live on the margins or in the “outside” in order to access a vision stripped of preconceptions. A work that is unsettling because of its investigative nature, leaving little room for half-measures, contemplation, or aesthetic indulgence. With Hugo Orlandini’s work, only two options remain: acceptance and self-questioning, or indifference.

Thus already in his first works (“Jean Jaurès and Oath“The margin is re-presented in its fullest expression. A corner of a typical Buenos Aires kitchen is directly reconstructed and elevated to the status of a museum piece. Most importantly, in this reconstruction, everything works (the water system, the gas pipes, the electrical wiring). The decontextualizing movement here is monumental. With “The General“The wink appears, the subtle irony, and here the dislocation is transformed into a pure mental process. The technological device (motion sensors) makes this perpetual motion machine a tragic plaything of adult associations. Here the social component appears, the historical reference (military dictatorship), and the artist’s gaze as a questioner. The same happens with the series of “CartoneroThe “outside,” the marginal, the hustler’s attitude and his product, now form the landscape of his work. Nature is now human nature, and its representation is not sensory or optical but fundamentally mental. The allegory is raw, direct. The subtext is a key to access.

In “Honey, don’t forget your umbrella“Orlandini’s work denotes the artist’s contact with his new accommodation in an unfamiliar Barcelona. The reaction is intimate, turning inward as a way of rediscovering answers. But the staging is sordid. As in all the artist’s works, there is a disturbing lack of actors. The invitation to step onto the stage is direct, almost compulsive. An invitation that with…”Pothole / Bache” It is stretched to the very limits of Western morality. The return to his roots, to his native Cuba, eschewing all concealing clichés. His voice is now that of the European Orisha, the mestizo who dice To unmask. The voice of the Golem, aware of its predestined path. The way of expressing its own bewilderment and rage at so much concealment and falsehood. A sonic reading also appears and takes root in his work, which, if before it was incipient and timid, here, with Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” acts as a small interpretive dictionary to access his work: the subtext.

In “Toys of Destiny” Reality is transformed into art. There is no longer representation (perhaps only a minimal and necessary dislocation of context), but rather everything is presentation. Playfulness as the last bastion of the absurd. Scale as a yardstick for the magnitude of nonsense. Staging as a Polaroid of the grotesque. What remains beyond, when what is near is alien?

And there’s still much more to come… “ShortcutsThe title itself gives it away. The manifestation and embodiment in an artistic work of so many “mental shortcuts” that Western society adopts when it comes to misunderstanding what is foreign and thus reducing “the other” to a mere pressing of keys. Oh, I almost forgot, for those who are nostalgic for pop and Marilyn, let’s see how the work “Miscellaneous”?

Visual metaphors, subtle exercises in reading where interpretation is guided through laborious decontextualization, by means of which the surface, the naive reading, the politically correct discourse, irrevocably crumble. A meticulous and artisanal work, of small and long-considered shifts. Without embellishment or framing.

Once, a doctor of Turkish origin, who had become a German citizen, was showing a German colleague her newly opened practice. Upon arriving in the waiting room, she proudly displayed a 19th-century Berlin three-seater sofa she had just purchased from an antique shop. The elegant German lady remarked: “Seeing that sofa immediately brings to mind the image of a typical Turkish family sitting in it…”  What kind of preconceptions will be awakened upon reading this text? What sort of prejudices will Hugo Orlandini’s work evoke in the viewer? In any case, the table is set…go ahead and enjoy.

I still have to keep creating. I believe that every artist, in an almost intuitive, profound, and distant way, knows that the moment their only possible expression becomes words, from then on, the most appropriate way to continue would be to be silent. Silence. An attitude that marks the definitive arrival on the other shore. Beyond the sea. The landing on the ever-present coast. The siren’s song when the siren is the final meaning and understanding.

“BUENOS AIRES”

Buenos Aires is more than just a city. Having lived there means you never truly say goodbye, because there’s no way to leave it. A city that has grown by accumulating farewells and encounters in the constant migrations of human stories, each person depositing their baggage of the past and sowing dreams and nurturing hopes in its soil. A city of alluvial flows, like the brown bed of its river. A womanly city, an inexhaustible blend of Pandora’s box and phoenix.

Crouching in the corners, nature breathes between its cracked sidewalks, asserting its undeniable dominion. Linden trees fill the air at the beginning of summer, the jacaranda bursts into violets in November, and February sweetens its facades with bouquets of jasmine brought from the delta and sold at newsstands. Bougainvillea intertwines fences in patios where conversations linger. Wisteria canopy shelters first kisses.

Each morning the city washes its face in the endless brown sea of ​​its coast as the sun illuminates its visage. At night, the heat hides behind its buildings and fades into its other, infinite plain. An island city, surrounded by two pampas: the humid one of its river, the dry one of its plains. Stories are woven within its walls. Outside, only the encounter with existence in its most stark form. The two boundless expanses where all movement is futile, where the only possibility of progress is upward or downward. And yet, that constant need to migrate, to close cycles. Perhaps the inertia of so much movement, of so many generations, of so many arrivals. A universe city, inventing its own language daily, shaping its ever-changing pantheon of fables and chimeras (everything in it is mutable, though its essence never changes). In it, one learns to dissect every corner of life, trying to understand what gives it that breath of a mocking Pachamama, smiling from some distant place at the sight of so much human endeavor.

A city of hens sheltering their chicks. We, those born there, bear the mark of the impossible embrace, and the inexhaustible need for foundational love. We can no longer shake off this inescapable urge to give affection, this search for warmth in the juggling act our hands perform as we speak, the endless encounters in the café, playing at reinventing the world anew each time. The touch of skin gives us belonging, generosity involves us because we learned that growth is never solitary… and yet, the search for the individual is always present.

A city that needed to be founded twice, as if once hadn’t been enough. Two attempts, as if to confirm a will to conquer that we’ve never truly believed in. We know we are weak, our depths are boundless, like its shores, and that’s why we alternate between nostalgia and a mask of arrogance.

I’ve walked a lot in Buenos Aires. For me, it was never just a backdrop, but the main character. I’ve caressed the bark of its trees, taken naps lying on the grass in its plazas and ravines, letting myself be lulled by the whisper of the earth’s voice. The rain has washed me clean. A rain that in April is almost a constant presence, more than an accident. Then its streets become rivers, and the city is a delta of blocks of buildings and neighborhood houses. Cars like boats churn up waves as they pass, and water seeps into the houses, the river that greets us from time to time so we don’t forget it, despite always turning our backs on it. The southeasterly winds that try to taste the surface of its streets. La Boca, like a Venice without a lobby.

Each neighborhood is a world within that world. Galaxy City, full of constellations, stars, asteroids, shooting stars. And we, its chickens, wandering through its infinite space. A continuous present where it’s hard to believe the idea of ​​permanence that they teach us in so many European history books. With incredulous docility, we accept “you love” without ever actually using it. “You want that you want.” How do you correct things when you assume that everything is mutable? When daily life forces us to invent the genesis again and again? All that’s left is to take the pieces, accept the rules of the game, and with them, assume the role of demiurge.

This is a first installment.

Yeah, well, I know… but no, it’s not a cooking recipe. No… I’m telling you, no. So what? Tell me, why can’t it be? In the end, it’s just two words… it’s not that big of a deal, man… It surprises me too, don’t think otherwise… but oh well, it happened like this and that’s it… I don’t want to dwell on it. Or are you going to tell me that something like this has never happened to you? I don’t believe you… really, never? Poor thing… no… not at all… but it happens to me all the time. No, man… I’m telling you, it’s not like I think about it beforehand… it just happens like that… without me realizing it… I get distracted. They suddenly appear like that… out of the blue… And what do I know? But what do I gain by denying it, really?… That’s why… that’s why I’m telling you. You’re not my friend?… then deal with it, man…

Well, it turns out that last night, I was clearing the table after dinner…yeah, right, alone, as always. But anyway, I still set the table for myself, light a candle, fill my glass with a good red wine…yeah…call it what you want, I don’t care…but I’m not bothering anyone, it makes me feel good… Anyway, I’ll continue… I had already finished dinner and was starting to clear the plates to take them to the sink. In a deep plate, there were some banana slices left that I hadn’t finished eating…you know I’m not much of a dessert person…but oh well…the banana cut into slices…yeah, so what? A childhood memory…of when my mom used to make me dessert…what are you laughing at, dude?…should I continue?  Or should I not follow you?… then don’t interrupt me anymore and listen…

On the large plate, there were a couple of lettuce leaves, a slice of tomato, and some onion rings from the salad… I’d sucked all the breaded cutlets down. There were streaks of mayonnaise left, filled with the remaining oil and vinegar from the salad. It was an almost mechanical gesture, I’d say, one of those that fill the hours of our lives and that we repeat daily without paying them the slightest attention… but who knows why, at that moment, the gesture took on a different meaning. Standing beside the table, with the plate in my left hand, I began to scrape the remaining salad with my fork… and the moment it fell onto the banana slices in the bowl… at that very moment… and in the same way as the food scraps… these two words fell into my head and gave this story its name.

There is nothing more beautiful than today.

My past is the sum of my yesterdays, some joyful and others sad. But I cannot move forward by looking back because I run the risk  of not being able to see the present.

Perhaps the future is promising, but I also cannot move forward by looking far into the horizon because I run the risk of not seeing the ground I stand on and falling into a pit.

That’s why I prefer to live in the present. I like to embrace it fully, experience it intensely, bask in its sunshine and shiver in its chill. To feel the “present” in every moment.

I like fearless surrender, because I know that’s the only way love can grow.

I cannot hold back my devotion, I cannot regulate my love because I am like water. Life is like water. It needs to flow, to constantly move, to traverse different terrains, to rise and fall in a perpetual cycle of change and transformation. Water, like life, like love, like the energy that sustains all life, needs to flow. Stagnant, held back, contained, in a state of waiting, it rots.

Yesterday I was. Tomorrow I will be.

But today soy.

Because today I breathe, I perspire, I see, I think, I hear, I smell, I laugh, I love… Today I am alive! But I cannot stop, because waiting brings pain. Fear brings pain, weariness, anguish, worry, confusion. The mind feeds on these feelings and builds dams to stagnate the flow of life, to stop the flow of love, and thus create a false sense of security, a cardboard identity that keeps us distracted, that constantly needs to feed on distraction, on superficial activity. And while we are distracted, life continues to pass us by. And if love does not flow, if it cannot manifest itself now, it is because fear has taken hold of us.

I want to live, I want to be a torrent, and I want to be able to experience love every moment, every day. Not tomorrow or yesterday.

As long as there is resistance, as long as life and love cannot settle in “the now,” the present will be filled with pain, anguish, fear, and the water will continue to stagnate.

I cannot allow myself to suffer like that. I wouldn’t be fair to myself. I wouldn’t be respecting my life, I wouldn’t be living up to my devotion or my love.

I look out the window. The sky is blue again after four days of rain and gray skies, and a ray of sunshine paints the few remaining leaves on the tree in the courtyard golden. In a couple of weeks, winter will have settled in this Berlin that sometimes feels so far away.

As my gaze relaxes, tracing shadows and gliding along the silhouettes of the branches, my thoughts take flight…

I remembered an anecdote from Ayacucho, the place where my father’s field is located and which, within the coordinates of my life, occupies a preferential place as a crossroads… so many stories, so many experiences that changed in some way, and definitely the course of my life.

It was about learning to see. Ismael, in particular (who hadn’t yet decided to say goodbye to his body), was trying to get me to tell him where the hare was hiding in front of us. We were walking through one of the fields, me eleven or twelve years old, filled with admiration and intoxication by this raw current of life that I was sensing for the first time, which, even without being able to touch its existence, prevented me from continuing to admire so many synoptic charts and schoolroom order. Nobody had told me about any of this. The countryside was a secret.

I felt the voices calling me, but I still didn’t understand their language. And for the first time in my life, asking why was useless. The answers to my questions came on their own, in an unpredictable order. All I could do was pay attention and wait. From that moment on, my eyes began to water.

“In those straws,” I said to Ismael, pointing with the tip of my outstretched finger. He laughed, swung the whip over his head, and threw it toward another clump of straw. There was a sharp crack, and  The hare leaped out (its last leap) only to fall dead onto the grass. –“Go and find it,” he told me. I stained my hands with warm blood, and while he cleaned the end of the whip in the grass, he said to me: –“You have to look far away, without paying attention to anything. Then you’ll see.”

The trick was to avoid focusing my gaze. In that state, the eye perceived every movement, even the slightest. I started practicing it, and it worked. From that day on, every walk filled me with ecstasy. The Pampas began to reveal some of their secrets. For the first time, I could see. And where before I had only perceived a somewhat monotonous plain, I now read, as if on a map, an enormous amount of information. I learned to interpret the flight patterns of the Southern Lapwing, discovered its nests, and deciphered its tracks. From then on, I learned to see, and paradoxically, to do so, I didn’t have to look, but rather unfocus and take a step back.

Of course, habits take hold of me completely, and through analogies, I began to see much more than just the flight of birds. I could see people and their sorrows. I saw the selfishness and malice hidden in the tall grass next door. I saw so much wasted life surrendered to the game of matter and its manipulation: production, routine, productivity. In any case, I began to feel rich and privileged. And I was consistent. I distanced myself so I could see. And I saw. But the distance remained…

I’m trying to understand the existential meaning of this loneliness. But I’m a privileged person. I’m still awake and eager to learn. I’m trying to clear my vision of so much rude and petty distraction. I have so much left to do… and as my eyes try to capture this last ray of sunlight filtering into the courtyard, I imagine that much of what I have left to do goes by another name.

“Farewell to the village of Navajas”

My name is Osvaldo Puente. I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and life’s circumstances led me to emigrate from my country almost 20 years ago. In a way, history repeats itself cyclically, and while some 60 years ago Argentina had become a land of promise and a generous welcome to European immigrants, the passage of time, combined with inept rulers, military dictatorships (supported and subsidized by European countries and the United States), and a sick desire for quick enrichment that instilled corruption at all levels of society, forced many in my country to take the path of emigration. My grandfather (originally from Galicia) had made the opposite journey in 1924, encouraged by tales of prosperity and driven away by a famine in Spain that was causing many of its citizens to emigrate to better destinations. I still have family in Spain, and it has always been a country I hold dear.

Two years ago, life’s “coincidences” led me to the town of Navajas. I came with my daughters (I’m divorced, and they both live with their mother in Germany) for a day trip, and I immediately fell in love with the place. I was living in the city of Valencia at the time, and arriving in this town was like a dream come true. We returned several times, and I slowly grew fond of the place. Without much hesitation, I rented an apartment and moved in. I let myself be filled with hope again (immigrants always look for a place where they can put down roots again, and Navajas appeared before me as a possibility). I saw everything in a positive light and decided to invest my meager savings in a housing development being built by Mr. Benjamín Torres Aucejo. My enthusiasm was great, my dreams even greater, and I embarked on this project, encouraged by Benjamín’s words and my desire to trust in someone and something. (Time later disillusioned me and ended up proving right the comments that were provoked by the mere mention of Benjamin’s name, and to which I unfortunately had no ears because I needed to believe in the goodness and righteousness of people).

I have met wonderful people in this town who have made my stay here very pleasant:

Rosalía: my first contact with the local people, and whose love for Argentina quickly established a common ground for affection. From her, I have always received a kind smile, help when needed, and a great deal of understanding.

Pili: then in charge of Look, a wonderful person whom I will miss very much and who also showed a lot of affection and kindness to me and my daughters during their holiday visits to the village. The same goes for her sister Ana and the rest of her family. They are caring, attentive, and helpful people. Through her, I got to know many other people in the village when I became a member of the Barcelona supporters’ club.

Miguel: my newspaper supplier and hiking companion. With him, I learned about the village’s surroundings, its nearby mountains, its trails, and some of the land’s secrets. Alongside his wife and his brother Rafael, I felt a connection to the land, a deep understanding of the place and its history.

Sancho: the dog breeder and hunter with whom I had many conversations, separated by a balcony. He was also a very attentive and kind person, always towards me and my daughters.

And so many others: the Argentinians Franco and Diego, Boro, Miguel Ángel, Periquito with his family, Paco, Sergio and the people from Tapias, the Local Police, the people who looked after the pool in the summer… and a very long etcetera of people who always responded to me with a smile and an open hand.

I imagine many of you reading this have met me, seen my girls, and realized what kind of person I am. I’ve always tried to understand and respect the unique character of this town. My approach has always been one of respect and acceptance. I felt very comfortable living here.

The circumstances of my life at that moment, when everything seemed so well on track, have dealt me ​​another blow. My father has been ill in Buenos Aires for over six months now, and since then I’ve been forced to radically change my plans. All the money I could save from my job was sent there to cover expenses that are now enormous in Argentina. It got to the point where I had to abandon my dream of owning my own home. A home I had dreamed of for so long, one I had designed to my specifications, envisioning a future life with my daughters, and where I had finally felt that so many years of emigration were coming to an end. Much to my regret, I had to make the decision to abandon the project and try to sell the apartment. The economic and real estate situation in Spain stagnated at that time, halting any possibility of sales. The months passed, and the date for the apartment’s handover drew near. Seeing that the problem had no solution, I went to Benjamín and explained my situation. He told me not to worry, that if I couldn’t sell it, he would sell it and return the money I had invested, minus the interest I had paid during that time (I thanked him profusely and continued to believe in him). The money was still insufficient, and I had to accept a job offer in Germany that would pay more and allow me to send larger amounts of money back home. I spoke with Benjamin again to tell him that I was leaving Navajas at the end of January and wanted to sort out the apartment situation. To my surprise (in the end, as we say in my country, everyone shows their true colors), Mr. Benjamín Torres Aucejo came to the apartment I rent and, in a raised voice, told me that I must have misunderstood because he had never said he would return any money, that it was even stipulated in the contract, and that if I left the apartment, it was my problem (he even had the audacity to suggest that my decision would cause him a series of financial inconveniences). I am a trusting person and had the privilege of a high-level university education. I was never a businessman because I resist that way of life that prioritizes the written and signed word over the word that comes from the heart. But both I and anyone with a modicum of common sense know that this doesn’t cause Mr. Aucejo any kind of financial inconvenience; on the contrary, it allows him to make a double profit. The day I sell that apartment, he will not only earn the difference from natural economic growth but will also have pocketed an extra 15,000 euros: “my money”).

Should we perceive as a continuous flow? Or as an experience punctuated by milestones, by sequences limited in time and space? The absolute and the real, the two axioms between which the complex world of our understanding unfolds.

Perhaps habit, perhaps ineptitude, most certainly fear, has imposed upon us this need for fragmentation, this scientistic habit of dissection, of separating parts, in the well-intentioned illusion of a subsequent re-linking (religion) that would allow humankind to assume the role of demiurge. This habit defines our daily lives in sequences of context: temporal (years, months, days, hours…), spatial (above, below, in front, behind…), sensory (sleep, wakefulness…), etc. The ability to quantify, to weigh, to measure, to locate and categorize allows us to secure a kind of existential tranquility in the otherwise ineffable passage of time.

And each part, each division, each sequence, identifiable by a beginning and an end (the two milestones that define its extent).

The link between sequences thus becomes a key point of existence: the moment of passage, instability, and uncertainty, the only place where a change of course would have a priori possibilities of occurring (the accident is not considered a variable until it happens). Hence the development of an entire culture of the portal, the idolatry of access. The role of the guardian (the person, the structure, the government) whose function would be to exercise control and ensure compliance with the requirements that allow an experience to be included in one of these categories (physical, mental, temporal). Thus, it is the clock that determines the belonging of a situation to a particular time of a particular day. It is language that includes us in a specific cultural sequence. It is a door that tests us in the dialectic of exclusion-inclusion that gives an appearance and an entity to our experience.

The door, then, is a filter, no longer just a passageway, but also the point of access (or denial) to a particular entity (cultural, temporal, physical). Customs admits us to or rejects us from a culture, the door allows or denies us entry to a concert, the metal detector transforms us into people worthy of trust, or not.

Obviously, living daily with the constant recording of all these controls would make the unfolding of our experience virtually impossible, since instead of living we would spend our time tallying events, replacing experience with a classificatory account. Amnesia then becomes almost necessary. The loss of attention, essential.

But art exists precisely to open doors and channels of perception. To subject accepted systems to new questions. To finally accept that life is never truly defined. This artistic intervention should be understood within this theoretical framework. An intervention that attempts to bring to the conscious level this rudimentary way in which we have constructed our inability to grasp existence as a whole. An intervention that allows us, even if only for a moment, to become aware of our daily, routine, and constant participation in this kind of wandering between physical, mental, and sensory spaces that define us as fit or unfit, as participants or excluded, as members or exporters. In short, to become aware that we are either inside or outside, and, believe it or not, it is we who cross the threshold.

December 14th

Waves expanding across the crystalline plate. Clusters of liquid blue particles inaugurating horizon possibilities. An amoral surface named by the condemnation of the verb. White foam cornered at one of its limits; at the other, air and water share a postcard.
      It’s time, the moment has arrived… countless drops fall onto my skin as I emerge from the bathtub.

December 15th

  -And the song of the ovenbird?… the frosted dew?…

  There’s a fog (the July fog in a faraway South…when the sheep are lambing), a white wall that gradually parts as I walk. The horizon stretches only downwards. My boots are firmly planted in the stirrups, piercing the hot steam of the animal’s armpit sweat. Dewdrops dot the weave of my poncho. My hand, numb with cold, my fingers cupped between the reins. There is no beyond. Only the bleating of the sheep as the sole and possible direction…

  Following sounds, not shapes. Shapes came much later, like specters through that fog. Only at the end, when the blood of the inverted womb was already in the air. A mixture of urine and colostrum. The warm viscosity of the placenta, amidst curled fleeces of corn-yellow wool, warming the flesh of my fingers that throb and ache. The heartbeat of the newborn lamb (like a pressure in the palm of my hand), mine like a muffled patch…And pulling from that liquid warmth…Pulling toward the fog to separate. A tearing apart for another life, amidst bleats of pain, blood, and moth-eaten excrement… Quickly clearing the mucus from between the nostrils so that first breath of air, of mist, can penetrate… Putting a hand in the mouth to remove all that mucus from between the tongue and empty it so that the newly opened lungs can fill with air, which will return the first sound… Rubbing all that warm molasses over the mother’s head as if washing her face with her own humor, so that she recognizes and doesn’t forget or abandon. She trembles among the straw, while a column of smoke rises from her body… It’s so cold

December 16th

  Lying there with his head turned to the side, the scent of the pastures still damp with dew filled the air… It was strange… he couldn’t feel his body. Only his right hand, which he could just make out, palm facing upward. He remembered nothing and felt nothing. The eucalyptus grove of Rosario was far away. He had never seen it like this, from the ground. His face was pressed against a mud of hot, red liquid. Was it blood? 

  What was delaying the passage of this time?  Why couldn’t she move? How long had she been like that?

  He heard the chestnut horse whinny and began to remember…Nice gait…how hard it had been to pull on its mouth…but it had been worth it because it had a free-flowing gait, its neck curled and making a sound  The bearded woman spitting foam on her tongue. How many horses had she already broken in? Memories were slipping away from her and  He was getting sleepy. There’s the chestnut horse, neck down, eating grass, reins on the ground. But why am I not on top of him? What am I doing lying here? Maybe I’d better take a nap and then continue the rounds…

  The pair of greyhounds appeared before his eyes. The female dog in heat was letting the male mount her as he copulated wildly. It was the last image his eyes saw before they closed.

  They found Horacio lying in the middle of the pasture, his body crushed and mangled, only one arm outstretched and his head intact. Beside him was the chestnut horse he had been breaking, its back covered in dirt and bits of blood and grass left after the fall and the crush.

  In the houses, Elena kept looking towards the road.

  Who told me this?


December in its 17th

  Is altitude the only limitation to density? Why are there only four cardinal points in our geography? As if going up or down didn’t involve any cartographic shift. Being inside isn’t really being there, but rather never having left.
 
Black on the 18th of a December that is none other


  What remains in the void of words thought but unspoken? Where does carelessness retreat? …”and while I watch, the coffee spoon swirls…”. The scent of Glostora hair gel, a blue jelly that in Manolo’s hands worked sculptural miracles on his always crystalline hair. Even in his coffin, he wore his hair slicked back, the perfect part, and the row of furrows along which my fingers would never again play. Aunt Luisa’s weeping and the scent of the linden trees on her street. Where do memories come from? Is it the past overflowing within us, or a hollowing emptiness of the present? And where do they go? To you, who are reading this… to be placed on a new shelf of someone else’s memory.

  I want to invent the science of hugs to see if we can invent a big one that includes us all.

December 19th at Alex’s 50th birthday

  Where is my Don Marcelino, so like Carlos’s Don Belisario…? He’s tucked away in a corner of my memory, and I see him there, standing with one foot resting his bare foot on the first line of the fence, his arms outstretched on the post, always gazing into the distance, at the horizon, searching for something that only with the passing years I began to understand, but which intrigued me even then. His hand-rolled cigarette, always unlit, dangling from his pursed lips. His fingers, like sausages, with the unchangeable shape they took when holding the reins of his dun horse, and nails accumulating the earth he would never truly own. His smile was childlike at 80, and he always gave the impression that on foot he wasn’t entirely whole; he always missed his horse between his legs. The pampas spilled into his ranch and became the floor of his room. He gave me a few words that I treasure and rarely share. But somehow, in a way I try to understand, it continues to accompany me in this very different way of herding cattle, which later became my daily routine. I’m in front, making sure the cows don’t get spooked and the herd doesn’t split up, and he’s behind, slowly driving them along, as if guiding them with an invisible hand, in an attitude I also learned to decipher over time.

  Today I suppose he’s out there free…but a part of him has stayed with me, because exile is not only “a wonderful tribute to our origins” (as Fuentes would say), but also the way in which memory transforms into identity.

20th last day in December

  Memory and hope, pendulum-like daughters of the present, stretching the arms of our dreams. Like fog… which doesn’t prevent us from seeing objects but simply reduces them to their essence, depriving them of all surface artifice. What better defines grass, its shape and color, or its smell? What more completes a person, their skin or their attempt? The rain washes, the earth absorbs, the river flows, the wind blows (no one knows from where or why), and man…
  It spins on itself in orbits of displacement… but is so much talk necessary? Or is speaking simply a vice that shelters us from fear? Perhaps speaking has meaning because of the space it creates between words… like fog.
 
December on the 21st of its days

  His name was Ismael, and he probably never heard from Melville in his life. His suicide (he was found hanging from a leather thong on the shed’s rafter) neither atoned for nor atoned for his wife’s infidelity. He taught me many things, I don’t know if intentionally or not; rather, I think he was one of those people who act as a kind of relay station, a delivery and a departure. At that time, my view of the countryside was so ignorant that I was overwhelmed by all that vastness where simply nothing ever happened. But with him, I learned to see: the hare among the straw, the lapwing crouched in its nest, the partridge’s whistle in its low flight betraying its brood. “How do you see all that, Ismael? I don’t see a thing!” I asked. We were both out riding one morning. “Look ahead and tell me if you see the hare.” We stopped the horses, and I strained my eyes until they hurt, but all I saw was tall grass and dirt. “I don’t see anything.” Raising his hand, he swung the whip and swung it hard toward some straw no more than 15 meters in front of us. The impact whirred, and a hare fell dead before my eyes. “How did you see it?” I asked him. “To see, you have to look ahead, but without focusing your gaze. If you focus your gaze on things, you won’t see anything.”

This phrase, which initially referred to the situation we were experiencing, transformed, after a few years of reflection, into a life lesson. From that moment on, I stopped fixating on what was happening, and a new world opened up before my eyes.

The Two Little Ducks of December

  Looking up and down as a different, forgotten way of traveling. The unseen, the unspoken, that which we have unknowingly left unused. Naps on the grass, imagining worlds of clouds. The scent of jasmine sprigs in distant Februaries. The wisteria in neighborhood courtyards or the linden trees lining the streets of some other place we will never return to. The puddle of water. Counting steps without quite knowing why.

  Ultimately, is there anything we truly know the reason for?

An eve in December

  A word that is not an answer but a question, or at most an invitation. Like an open door that neither subjugates nor forbids. Acceptance… how difficult when there is fear!         Search in the reflections, in the folds, and in the shadows, because often the surface has grown weary of being manipulated, and like the snail, it withdraws its sap to the innermost recesses of objects. A culture of absence, a nomadic way of life, or the definitive acceptance of the journey as both the ultimate and the first attitude. A clear initiatory journey (I’m not talking here about collecting three-dimensional, dated postcards). That kind of movement that, without needing a goal, a final destination, continues to give us a sense of perpetual arrival…and departure.
  Perhaps when the activity is suspended, the clouds will finally settle in our eyes, erasing so much foreign and false imagery.
  Remembering will then be a verb so similar to recovering…

December among its endings

  Things to remember: those we haven’t yet lived. To bring together the extremes of time so that past and future unite at our center. Every morning, every afternoon, every sunset, and every night tarnished by our lack of attention. The insipid habit of accumulating sorrow and storm clouds between my eyes and yours..
  It stopped raining yesterday, the sun is shining today, and I’m too lazy to establish any moral causality in that. It goes round and round… Why didn’t anyone explain to us that the carousel was already foreshadowing….
The journey, the memories, the smells, the loves, the dreams, the waters in which we have bathed, the lands we have trod, the leaves that have caressed us, the rain that has soaked us, the gazes in which the mirror has observed us, the hands we have touched (how many?), the hugs that we have neither classified nor counted…. And the whirlwind of names, dates, data clouding everything.
  Today I extend this hand so I can touch you without filters, having reached that place where everything is suspended and only life, death, space, you and I will be.

25 and a burnt one to make December shine.

  I walk along a riverbed counting pebbles… The beginning, I think, was a line, and its attraction summoned the verb. If, as Matisse said, we are born with a verb and spend our lives simply conjugating it… Perhaps the forms of the pluperfect expand until they try to unite banks (that of my river with that of this other side).

  Here the sun tilts towards the other hemisphere, and since then I haven’t been able to regain my sense of south (I have to think about it first). But I like looking at the sky because it’s one of the places where the pluperfect tense is suspended.

  The enigmas of the wind (the only pariah so self-aware I have ever known, without origin or destination, a metaphor for the eternal journey…).

  The sun’s stubbornness with its endless and ever-new way of beginning and ending days.

  The circularity of the water cycle protects me from the folly of development and linear thinking. Plant patience shames my careless haste.

  Animal acceptance always looking from afar, from the place where judgments are diluted.
  I think it’s time to give thanks.

December, on the 26th of its days.

  The cold was like a poncho thrown over my back, transforming my body into a sheet of paper with two sides: the back side was dark and cold, almost inviting me to ignore its existence, the front side was bright and hot, reflecting the flames of the hearth that offered its best dance before my eyes.

  Our hands with our palms facing forward as if in a ridiculous gesture of stopping, when in reality what we most desired was the uncontrolled advance of that heat to feel that the body was still a part of us.

  Legs squatting (when I could still adopt that posture) and elbows resting on the knees, with arms extended patiently waiting for the turn of the mate round.

The sooty, dark turkey on a burning log.

No words were spoken, yet so much was being said… In the distance, the sky was letting in the first light, and the backlighting revealed the horses far away in the pasture. I anxiously awaited the words that would allow me to venture into the darkness, following the trail of smells and sounds until I managed to herd all the horses into the corral, saddle them, and begin the morning’s rounds. Later, dawn would break. Later, the heat would make my skin sweat. Later, the light would transform this scene, where for this moment, all of life was summed up in a hot mate tea, almost beyond recognition.

December 27th

When the threshold refuses us
his continuous fourth
When there is no other side
that seduces us to the other side
 
We’ll have to wall it up then, with peace and quiet.
his habit of swaying without a moral
 
And rinse with strands of sand
our central blindness
 
And soak it with hot earth
our equidistant forgetting
 
And stop
                even though no one can see us

December in its only 28s

  A line in Ayacucho, the one that marks beginnings and limits endings, was what first diminished my perception of time. Enormous stones fell silently and peacefully onto the water’s surface, indefinitely delaying the hours. Without a sound, they submerged and disappeared. Everything was happening. The silence expanded in three dimensions until it encompassed everything. The landscape acquired a diaphanous sordidness. I took a breath and filled my lungs.

           

  Having reached that desolate point where, through sheer concentration, the threads that had held together the networks of everyday life dissolved forever, the vertigo of the limitless arrived with the force of the obvious. Upward and downward.

29 rushing through the end of December

Perhaps this is what we call life.
the space between two questions
or the two sides of the same question
without us being their answer.
 
  When will the unbridled ambition that has terrified us so much finally subside? 

       To stop not the passage of time but perhaps its counting drive, the collector’s zeal, the sum of gaps (with names but empty in the end) and forgetfulness, the always postponed illusion, the assumed and unspoken “I love you,” the exercise of forgiveness (towards others but above all towards ourselves for having so disoriented the compass).

To stop, to halt, to quiet down, to be silent, to remain still for a moment, to lift our gaze, to look around us and to realize that right now, at this precise moment, in the precise second in which our gaze stops and we finally discover the nearby horizon… at this precise moment there is no obstacle between happiness and us.
  Happy New Year

30 in December shortly before

  A void that isn’t the day after. That doesn’t represent the end of the action, not even its absence. A timeless fact, solid on the side of the back but weightless. In front, a shadow like a radiance. A backlight of meaning. Like turning a glove inside out and still recognizing the shape of the hand. Perhaps the temptation of a possible oblivion, but permanent, without memory. Almost as before, if it weren’t for the fact that time would then have no measure. That is, the complete and definitive dissolution of any boundary. Even that of the words that name. Attraction and repulsion in parallel motion.

  To the round, to the round, for the emptiness became a wheel for me, and being in the middle, I am no longer the center.

My only enveloping element is that of others.

December on the 31st of its finals

  Another goodbye. And there had been so many that at times it was hard for her to surrender to the nostalgia of the memories because lately the names of places and people, dates and times, were beginning to blur together. With so many goodbyes, she was starting to feel that everything was a present, an indissoluble continuity that was beginning to disrupt her understanding of geography and customs..    

The dawn of January

  A beginning that is not a start but a process to weaken pride until it is stunted by its ineffectiveness. Why such a need to classify? I understand naming when it is closer to a poetic caress than to the enumeration of differences, but what if the music of the word is slipping away from us? What if sounds are gradually ceasing to play among us and are becoming mere attributes…?
  The morning or evening walk. Actions without a predetermined goal. Conversations with oneself. Mirror recognitions. The relentless pursuit of one’s own shadow. The air that enters and is expelled.

  There are so many opportunities to leave a mark… But an anonymous mark, so that the passing of the torch has meaning, so that there is someone else who can take up the mantle and continue it. (Of course, first we must stop signing vain authorships and abandon the idolatry of names and surnames).
  I walk along the dry riverbed, counting pebbles…
  And although different, I know that loneliness is a chimera

January to the second

  My work knows no schedules or productivity standards. Surrounded by all that most ignore or cannot see, I simply translate to prevent forgetting. A kind of shelter against the soul’s harshness, the one I foresaw as a child and which took me so long to incorporate into my daily life. Perhaps it has been so difficult because of the enormous amount of others’ neglect. How can we accept as extraordinary that which reveals itself to us every second? How can we renounce the obvious and blind ourselves to so many horizons opening up with every change of wind? And when the body no longer corresponds to age? What will happen then, when there is no longer any possible answer to the ambition of matter and the privilege of youth begins to show us its other side? Will there be time then to resume, to summon? Or will it be the time for vain regrets? I want to grow evenly, and sometimes it seems like a romantic utopia…
  I continue along the riverbed, not so much out of ambition but because life seems pleasantly inevitable to me.

Thursday, halfway through January of a year we call new

-Has that much time passed already?

 -It was only the years of your age.

            (At first it was a profound impulse, enough to chart a course. Then, already on the road, we grew sick with the habit of looking out the window, with the ingrained thought that each direction taken spawned infinite paths that would forever remain orphaned of their journey. And we grew accustomed to helplessness. Thus was born the habit of naming and explaining oblivion. And with it we cover ourselves, because doubt has always brought cold.)

            We first felt our skin when we brushed against the abyss. We knew then, without confessing it, that naming offers no comfort, and when we finished drying our tears, the mantle of poetry was given to us. With it came warmth and sheltered us to stay.

January the fourth

           A walk through the streets of Olivos, both near and far south. Immense trees (not in height, but in presence) and the sun weaving through their branches, dazzling me on every cobblestone. I no longer know how to direct my gaze. I submit to the whim of so much brilliance. The tips of the branches with new buds. It is the beginning of spring. The roots recognize no grid and burst through the tiles (the inescapable presence of the immense, always lurking…).

“Mate is like listening to the radio; it’s a companion and sparks the imagination,” a man who invented a yerba mate dispenser and makes all sorts of gadgets related to this beloved ritual tells me. Conversations with strangers. So much warmth…

Where do all these things come from? What determines that a drawer of memories opens in such an unexpected and unavoidable way? The hands of chance, blending components, forging an elastic mass on what kind of surface? I share words with loved ones. Some will resonate with unexpected echoes. Others will remain dormant in other drawers, in other memories, awaiting another unpredictable yet certain baking. Ultimately, we spend our lives rearranging things, transforming matter and spirit. An eternal migration that, like the wind… we don’t know where it comes from or where it goes.

Saturday on January 5th.

-Who will think of the Moon on the night of its name?

-Don’t know.

            (Perhaps it’s alright that it’s this way. Too many words to justify so much cloud embodied in the gaze, so much foolishness and so much forgetfulness. So many neglected gifts. Silently I have become a repository of ungiven caresses. My nose is full of unsprayed perfumes. A handkerchief gathers on my chest, damp in the absence of a platform. Is it the dew of your tears? Your Saint Rita in the summer of my fifteenth?)

January 6, Sunday.

Every time he went down the stairs, the same thought would assail him, to the point of believing that the image that came to his mind  And the daily act of going out into the street were all part of the same thing. For reasons beyond his understanding, he was unable to remember the moment of his birth, the precise instant his eyes first perceived the light. And yet, every morning, as he descended in complete darkness (he didn’t want to turn on the light) the steps that separated his apartment from the street, upon reaching the landing that separated him from the outside, the moment he opened the door, when the sun’s rays that fell on the doorway at that hour entered his pupils and burned deep in his head, at that instant, his heart reached a frenetic rhythm of palpitations and he could only imagine himself emerging from the womb; his first breath outside was always the first breath of his lungs. He never mentioned this to anyone around him. But I know he has decided to stop taking the medication prescribed by the psychiatrist. Since then, he feels almost happy being part of the gray, everyday, and uneventful world that surrounds him.

January 7th on his sad Monday.

It wasn’t that the rain made him melancholic. Sometimes he thought that throughout his life he had seen so many images in which a rainy day was associated with a farewell, with death, with loss, that it was for that reason, and only for that reason, that every time he stared at the changing reflection on the wet asphalt, that wave (he felt it as the ebb and flow of the tide) of ambiguity would come over him. What if the history of cinema, the lyrics of tangos, so much romantic literature had conspired to use their language of metaphors and had accompanied love endings, funeral farewells, existential re-evaluations with radiant images of sunbeams, incandescent light, sweltering heat?… (Nothing overwhelms the mind more than decontextualization).

-Marcos, we’ll be on air in a minute….

A strong storm is approaching tomorrow.  Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, bringing moderate to heavy rain along the Cantabrian coast; temperatures will continue to fall and a cold front from the continent will bring snowfall…

January the eighth

“Wake up, Carlos, it’s already seven.” My first thought: another day at school… thank goodness it’s Friday. I have to remember to bring my math notebook. Repetto, that pig, is giving us a test today. I have to pass the four or I’ll fail in December and goodbye to my beach vacation, goodbye to summer with Teresita (she’s so sweet… this summer I’m going to tell her I love her and give her a kiss). I’m almost ready. Time to wash my face to see if this sleepiness finally goes away. I love the smell of the coffee with milk coming from the kitchen. A couple of soggy cookies, my school uniform, my suitcase (my math notebook), Mom’s goodbye kiss, and her daily advice: be careful.

“Wake up, Carlos, it’s already seven.” The first image: a dimly lit room, the light entering in oblique slivers through the blinds, slicing objects into zebra-striped segments. The warmth inside the sheets. I turn my head and see the empty space on the pillow where Marta’s head had been half an hour ago. How many years has it been? She still wears the same perfume she had when they first met… (a smile spreads across his face). I hate the suit, the damn tie… And Marta, the lovely lady, saying I look so handsome (to encourage me), a soap opera heartthrob (one day I’m going to take her to the eye doctor, but without offending her, of course). I peek into the twins’ room; they’re still asleep. How they’ve grown… it seems like only yesterday I was holding them in my arms, and now they’re already starting with this shaving thing… I’d better not look in the mirror. Today is Friday, finally… When I get back, when I throw my briefcase on the couch, take off my damn tie and jacket, and start planning another weekend full of projects that will wake up on Monday without having been done… Marta’s goodbye kiss and her daily advice: be careful.

“Wake up, Carlos, it’s already seven.” The first memory: the voice that now only echoes inside his head. The cold bed and the empty space beside him (why does he still sleep on one side, leaving half the bed empty, when he’s been alone for years?). The sheepskin slippers. Sitting on the edge of the bed, exhaustion overwhelms him, and without his cane, it would be almost impossible to get up… slowly… his joints creak… (When are you going to get your oil changed, man… Mario had said to him at the senior citizens’ club after beating him at checkers and seeing how slow he was to get up from the armchair. Son of a bitch… I’d like to see him at my age…). The mate, sipped silently and slowly. The bitter liquid going down his throat, making him feel that he’s still alive… The twins will surely call today; it’s been about a year since they last called. Of course, they must be very busy…

“Wake up, Carlos, it’s already seven o’clock.” Today is Friday, but for the first time, Carlos doesn’t get up.

9 in the days leading up to January.

            I read in El País: “When individual consciousness is lost, everything is seen as volatile matter.” There’s some truth to that. The problem remains the everyday and its vulgarity, or rather, its solid and dense nature. An “almost spirit” wandering among granite columns and concrete walls, in the forest of prejudice and stillness.

            

Another idea: the concept of identity associated with the image of an archipelago rather than with that of insularity. This might do away with the idea of ​​a closed preserve and would likely allow for a much more everyday acceptance of the “other.” Times of change and migration are coming, times in which the very concept of sedentary life will be seriously questioned. What better way, then, than to associate identity (at least while this idea remains foundational in our societies and for their individuals) with an atomized and pluralistic criterion to facilitate the vast difference and otherness that are on the horizon?

            Nomadism is currently simply associated with a media phenomenon. Through the internet, television, and other news outlets, we have the false belief that we are connected to the various parts of the archipelago, when in reality we remain comfortably ensconced in our limited mental living room. Obviously, I am not taking into account that very common activity nowadays called “tourist travel,” which is simply about sensorially verifying places, objects, and buildings anticipated in tourist guides, books, and other people’s images. We no longer travel to discover but rather to confirm (I call this “reaffirmation of the mental living room,” sensitivity reduced to a mere corroborating instrument, stripping it of any possibility of novelty).

            The change, however, has already begun. Today’s mental stagnation will only lead to confrontation and subsequent disintegration (entropy or systems theory). A thorough review of the scope and necessity of maintaining the idea of ​​purity or cohesion as a foundational element of all identity is in order. Hybridity will gradually pave the way to finally embrace the archipelago as the only possible and true realm of intellectual discourse.

Round ten of January.

A summer

                          silver octagonal

                          scent of willow shade

                          linden boulevard

 

A deep look

                                        to stubbornly drill

                                      

that the gray-haired word may exile us

to its domain of unchanging plains

 

A ver acquitted

 A resolute look

                                 that record the iris of the memory

                                 of our horizontal luxury of naming.

January in 12.

The reason, nor the sum of circumstances that, despite all attempts at control, make each moment unique and unrepeatable, will never be known. Perhaps the linear perception of time as it unfolds is the most imaginative of human inventions. His poetry, however, is quite poor. (I return to the archipelago.)

January 13th, the jinx.

Images cluster together, fluttering between slanting sunbeams and chestnut branches along the Canal. Scents and sounds return like a lingering echo, rising to the surface of a new churning in undigested soups. The cold air envelops my skin, seeping into my alveoli and swelling my chest in something akin to the first time. New folder.

Moments when space cracks, time stands still, light bursts forth from within, signaling that this moment is a celebration and nothing exists but the here and now. I don’t know if it sounds like a welcome, but there’s a sense of renewed energy.

January in the 20th.

Nothing reveals the fragility of thought more than its constant fluctuation between the flippers of emotions, yearning for an extra bonus, rejoicing in a new record, celebrating an extra ball, or being disappointed by the impossibility of altering the straight course of a ball that slips through the middle. Why then its tenacious dominance? Its desperate attempt to encompass everything? The rain spreads horizontally across the asphalt, and its impact is not the end of the journey but a change of direction and appearance. The drop amalgamates into a new plate of damp surface, changes its name, embraces new destinies, alters trajectories, and yet its essence continues to flow. It will visit unknown sewers (it will also slip through the middle) and accumulate an infinite repertoire of experience that, when the time comes, it will transmit to the plant, to the fish. Perhaps in the sip of mate that warms my mouth at this moment. I am sea and rain, I am the sum of cosmic dust… and the rain keeps falling.

Salteadito from January 22nd.

There are words that create distance, others that invite embrace and compress the air between separations. There are also silences that speak and murmur, trying to gauge the measure of the distances or the inescapable clash of affections. Perhaps when reason is evicted and returns to its abode, some space will remain where our lost sensitivity can begin to emerge, allowing us to contemplate the vastness of the empty spaces.

January when the 23rd passes through it.

Ultimately, it’s all a matter of habit. They take root almost without us noticing, with the same carelessness with which we perform all repetitive actions. So, brushing our teeth only takes on new meaning when the toothpaste tastes different, or when the brush is somewhere other than usual, or when the cup we use to rinse our mouths slips, and then we have the feeling that something new is happening, that this moment is different… and yet we fall back into its trap, and another habit takes hold. The 11 o’clock coffee break, always returning home by the same route, the same gestures, sometimes even the same thoughts, and the same repeated forgetfulness. Perhaps it all comes down to waging impeccable battles against ingrained habits to finally feel that this day will be an important one… Today the dragonfly flies, and its fluttering sweetens the air I pass through…

A 26th on a Saturday in January.

         So much silence! Finally, the air reveals its gravity, a specific weight that defies the periodic table of elements due to its sheer volume. On the subway, people are lost in their own thoughts, wrapped in books, newspapers, dreams, thoughts, problems… I imagine that if all that murmur were ever to be expressed, it would be capable of tearing down the wall again, this time for good. Oh, Berlin: the physical and the spiritual are not served on the same plate, even though the spiritual always takes shape. And a stone wall will always be a stone wall, and although the culmination of its essence is only achieved with its demolition, that brings no real change if the spiritual content that that mass of concrete and steel held does not also crumble.

            Many people wander about, seemingly lost. What could they be missing? Berlin, the city of whispers, where silences speak volumes…

January of the final 29

I want you to save my name.
among jacaranda flowers and rubber tree leaves
Let them hold back my attempt
hidden between banks under the mud of its bed
Let them immerse themselves in a wisteria roof
the sum of strokes that exceeded my silence.
 
I’m tired of the calendar
 
I’ve stopped counting the hours
so that my walk becomes an abyss
 
I have opened a door
without license request
 
Perhaps one night someone will bring me
by making it their own and necessary
the renewed attempt to call me again.

The 31st, the end of January and the beginning of…

Having reached that desolate point where, through sheer concentration, the threads that had held together the networks of everyday life dissolved forever, the vertigo of the limitless arrived with the force of the obvious. Upward and downward.

           

The outlines dissolved with enveloping movements (walking along the dry riverbed, gathering pebbles). Opposites surpassed magnitude and complemented each other, thus revoking any contradiction. – walking from one place to another, counting the number of steps and subtracting the expected amount to discover the magnitude of the error. Light and shadow playing marbles: one winning, the other losing, and dominating everything, the unity of a shared time.

           

It was the maximum expansion.

February 5th, before oblivion.

Sometimes I even stop feeling the blood flowing in my feet… those are the moments when the air becomes light and even smells seem to carry languid music. Images lose color, depth, and contour, and the eyes receive only a magma of the present moment, horizontal and parallel to itself, like memory. Flowing among pebbles that no longer weigh anything and lie in no riverbed. Lurking among words (spoken and thought) searching for a place to house so much crystalline laziness.
Sometimes I sit on the side of the road and simply let life speak to me about itself.

February at 6, which is 10, for Leila.

A tremor of the retina heralds a dawn as belated as a final farewell. The air thins and penetrates softly, almost sweetly. Morning hours in which the day presents itself as a renewed and legitimate promise, of unstarted projects, of ruminated ideas, of dreams still seeking the substance to give them form. First
The body holds the summary of lived experience, lodged in every fold of skin, in every mark left and recovered by memory with every glance. The mirror reflects that intimate moment of connection between oneself and oneself, or what remains of our own language. Second
Covering oneself as an act of validation to the outside world. The safe-conduct pass to society and the street. Nudity as a remaining refuge of intimacy or solitude. Clothing is a kind of subtitle that attempts the impossible (perhaps that’s why so much care was taken in its development). Third
The fourth one is you and this moment we share.

The 14th, when February is halfway through.

Words… uhm. Pandora’s boxes with varying depths. The same box in different hands unfolds or contracts, reflecting worlds in prisms of crystalline drops. Triggers of unpredictable processes, of indefinite scope, and of cascades of memories, images, encounters and partings, present and forgotten. Everything is revealed before the gaze of our deepest eyes, those that long ago abandoned the description of the outside world. Words… traveling endlessly, caressing with their sounds the most distant fears, the most precious certainties. Words evoke and conjure. Released, they begin a journey between “you and me.”
Today the word is love, and I throw it into the air for you to pick it up, keep it for a while, and throw it again.

February, the 19th of its winter days.

Stillness…or movement: the pendulum cycle of existence throwing us alternately to each of its extremes, and then… And the mind ordering and filing, lodging in drawers of imprecise contours all that is memorable that resists oblivion.
From this side, the door frame ahead, its leaf open, foreshadows what we can’t even begin to imagine. The beam of light penetrates the room where we now reside. I don’t know if it’s some kind of invitation to move or simply an overflow from the continuous room. In any case, a sign, an emissary..
The empty space through which we slide our bodies and cross the threshold. Movement, displacement… almost an imponderable.
From the other side, another empty room… ready to be inhabited by new drawers of memory and recollection, packaged, labeled, cataloged and uselessly organized.
And another door, another beam of light, another threshold…. another anticipation of time that continues to invite us to an endless transfer, that perpetual movement that we usually call life.
(This one’s for Nico)

25 in February.

Skies open every time a name is spoken. Borders dissolve with every unexpected embrace. Every caress carries with it the yearning for a transgression of limits and a crumbling of edges. The fluid and the stagnant in constant flux… I observe, like a solitary lighthouse, the ceaseless movement of the tides, waiting with seasonal calm for the arrival of a wave. Meanwhile… spoonfuls of sugar at will, stirring the everyday.

Ending on February 29th.

I never imagined the sea could be so vast and the coast so far away….

March in its six days

We have only our inner voice. Impalpable if it were our hands, indecipherable if it were our mind. But its sound is clear and serene when the murmur of the waters finally stills, in those rare moments when we halt our tasks, our movements, our ambitions, and our searches. Then it emerges clear, crystalline, absorbing everything external to ourselves, emanating from and purifying the cloudiest aspects of our restless projection. The shadows recede, and duality is magnetized into inseparable nuclei (the pendulum’s repose). They are mere instants, like calls, if you will. Like memories that, unbidden, summon and claim us. It is only that… and also the planets, the stones, and a bit of the universe.

March in the tenth

The winds come mixed, intertwining fragments of memory, stitching together a fabric with imprecise edges where the warp alternates between areas of tight weaving and others where barely a couple of faint lines maintain the illusory continuity of the whole. Where is the now located?

There is a sound, a word that names and summons me. It only needs to be uttered, because sometimes the act of calling oneself is exhausted when almost all possible modifications, alterations in the order of the letters, different accents, have been tried. In the end, deception cannot withstand it, and there always remains the certainty of knowing oneself spoken to from the depths of the dialogue between oneself. Ah… the inner voice…

The air is yellow at this hour of the morning. It surrounds my face and deposits in my ears words, sounds, moods, from other people’s conversations, from neighboring tables, from people with whom I experience the greatest possible distance within the closest proximity allowed by that invisible barrier which, if crossed, would open the doors to intimacy. In another place, in another circumstance, the same distance would invite the touch of skin. Another of the many social pacts by which I pass… But if I close my eyes, the aroma of coffee drifts from the next table and stirs the thread of memories. Other cafes appear, other people, other places. Above all, other times. Where is the present?

In the waiter’s face, in his eyes fixed on mine, finally waiting for his question to be answered. “No, thank you, the check please.” And now it’s a Monday in March, the 10th… and the place is Berlin… and the coffee is…

March at sixteen, now eighteen.

If everything we have named, classified, and arranged were to suddenly dissolve into the meaninglessness of the verb, into its futile, demarcating conjugation, we would still have reality and its aroma. Sky would surely be another word, but it would still be sky. Dragonfly would always remain by my side, even if its fluttering inexplicably takes it away from my embrace.

March in its twenty-one days

The fragments spill across my retinas, seeking encounters of concavities. An amalgam crafted with the delicacy and care of a long-treasured memory. Like the blue arabesques of tobacco smoke, ascending in space, seeking a definitive and serene absolution in the whole. Thus arrived its fragments…scattered, yet undeniably its own. A map to decipher, a key hidden in each of those fragments, wanting to guide me, attempting to show me the most remote areas of its inscrutable and distant geography, the radiant realm of its essence. An invitation to participate in its faceted crystal kaleidoscope. Reflections and opacities wandering in the spheres of my pupils, delaying the revelatory moments of its final and all-encompassing offering.

     First came the liquid, crystalline green of her gaze. Fluctuating. Swept away at intervals by bursts of scattered attention, distractions of curiosity (surface ripples in an emerald wheat field). An unknown depth pierced her being, bouncing off echoes of inestimable beginning. If it weren’t for the moisture of her lips, her body would vanish in one of the puffs of smoke from my pipe. But there she is, and there she remains.

      Outside, the gray of the sky collapses like liquid onto the cobblestones of the street.

      It’s three in the afternoon… the place is Berlin… the café “Mir”… its name…..

Finals in the thirties of March.

A shelter with transparent edges, so as not to relinquish the lingering gaze or the unexpected embrace. So as not to bid farewell (yet) to the times of appointment, nor leave any of the kisses we have yet to give on the list. But what a shelter nonetheless…for the harshness of the elements, for the fearful wind of selfishness, or for the unexpected tide of stubborn and foolish despair. To lodge in the deep hollow of the water and hear the underwater moan of the bubbles, the endless caress of affection that sometimes rises, sometimes becomes a woman. Names changing from person to person in an inexplicable succession of avatars, of farewells and acknowledgments (an alternation of the possible and the dreamed).

Sometimes refuge is a cup. Other times it’s the warmth of the porcelain in the palm of an open hand. Often in exile, refuge is a coffee….

April 5 beginnings.

A nearsighted lip restrains in the dark

the sweat that baptizes our temples,

the narrow saying,

a cry without a silhouette

at the time and place of its twilight.

A stubborn fog of two plus two equals four surrounds us.

loosening the stupor in geometric wrapping,

wrapping up in the ah of course

the persistent tremor

of our recently shaken verb.

A final ray from the last crack.

A penultimate shadow hanging from the horizon at the ankle.

And a text

                   varnishing the custom

                   of our cardinal amnesia.

Could it have been the flood then?

Being inside is not entering

but rather not having gone out.

Seven in the springs

As if it were a folded piece of paper, I trace the folds of my memory, trying to piece together its original form. My fingertips glide along the lines that mark a crease in the past, dragging along remnants of banquets, farewells, images that flash when full moon nights plunge into my eyes. Aromas emerge and invade… the linden of the cobblestones, the jasmine of February, the wisteria in Marujita’s patio in Tigre. The patinas reveal themselves and crack, releasing stories that intertwine with the smoke of tobacco. (Today it’s not a café). I observe the dance, I dance with it until a smile settles on my face, and only then do I close the front door and go out to begin the day.

April in the slow nineteen.

Scattered shapes gather around unspoken words. A cluster of intentions clings to the weary body. In the folds of her skin, she hinted at battles, dawns, farewells, and leaps into the void… and a void surrounding her hands, like ghosts of unreceived caresses, enveloped her fingers, binding her limbs until they were withered and yearning.
Outside, the slanting sun outlined shapes on the ground. And knowing he was on this side of the window was the only thing that allowed him to keep clinging to the feeling of being inside. Inside something, even if it was just a room (being inside isn’t really being, but rather not having left… but oh well).
Her eyes were already repeating the shapes of the familiar. A couple of names always lingered in her thoughts, trying to summon bodies that had long since migrated from her touch.
Unexpectedly, the telephone rang (she could hardly remember the last time she had heard it). The repeated ringing gradually drove away all other sounds from her mind, plunging it completely into a deafening silence. She never received the call because, suddenly, it had ceased to exist.
 

May  dozen waiting for your day.

…where did my river go, overwhelmed by banks in its preliminary delta and bereft of horizon at its final mouth?… how to seek a reflection when the distant doesn’t contain but rather plunges into abysses, when the terrain subverts beliefs of linear Christianity? Walking would then be something more than joining two points and something less than a source of pride…

He liked to let his mind wander in thoughts like these, so he could give leisure a different name. Though devoid of any practical sense, they at least served to piece together his scattered limbs during his mornings of exile, his perpetual farewells… Had he known the language better, he might even have been able to share it, but his vocabulary was so meager that it barely sufficed to resolve, with high doses of uncertainty, the everyday (a coffee, please… how much is it?… thank you… you’re welcome… and a few more of those phrases where grammar, pronunciation, and accent are utterly irrelevant because they are destined for immediate oblivion). And what was urgently needed by him, now that his identity was so unrecognizable…

…twenty years already?…and recited to Girondo: cHow old am I?

Soon he would approach the meridian of belonging. He would have spent as many years in his native land as he had spent in various outlying areas, in territories far removed from his river, from his other half in flight.

When I was in the mood, to the initial question of every new encounter: and What do you do for a living? He liked to answer: I’m moving, I’m dedicated to moving. A fly-swatter, as he liked to say, because faced with such bewilderment, most people abandoned any further attempt to continue the conversation, and those who, despite everything, insisted, eventually became the people he now remembered and often liked to list….

 

Twenty-something in May of the new days.

Each new day is another circle that unwinds, carelessly, and begins to roll within me toward the limit of all forms. I go out early in the morning to gather flowers before the air runs wild, so as not to leave room for intermediaries and to eat the aromas of childhood, crumpled and wrinkled with unexpected oblivion. The sun peeks out in twilight because the circle advances and beginning and end are disrupted: front and back rotate, and there is only upward distance. Silence already has a name, and its sound expands memories to the territory of the inaugural.

Today is May, in a spring that is no longer autumn. Somewhere far away, the Mays of autumn remain, waiting to be summoned again. I go out onto the balcony, breathe in the 8:30 a.m. air, and go into the kitchen to heat the water for my mate.

June 13th.

Faintly at first, letting everything fall into place (sometimes a small change, an insignificant shift, opens the door to estrangement). The morning light grounded him in time, and his memories assigned it the name Friday. The patter of rain on the leaden window frame abandoned his reverie and settled now in the world of the everyday, in that other half of life we ​​mistake for wakefulness. His mind tried to organize all the sensations of this fragile, transitional state… and somehow, inexplicably, it always managed to place him in the world, in his world.

It was Friday, it was Berlin, and it was her room. A small breath of resignation tried to seep into the folds of her spirit (perhaps one morning, before the early morning light could no longer enter to inaugurate her days, she would manage to make it not Friday, nor Berlin, nor her room… but perhaps Wednesday, Istanbul, someone else’s bed…). But the air quickly carried away all trace of illusory disappointment, and recognizing herself, feeling once again the affinity of her spaces, the familiarity of the objects, the certainty of her routines, brought a smile to her face. Today wasn’t the day to move…

"January"

Saturday, January 14th.

A shiver runs through me, stirring up waters of nostalgia and recurring farewells. And above all: bewilderment. That volatile feeling of not being able to fully understand (or rather, accept) human fear. An irrational, atavistic fear that leads us to see ghosts at the doorways of every attempt at happiness. The rejection of simplicity, the constant turbulence manifested in an incessant accumulation of movements (physical and of the soul) to overwhelm and stifle the call of our primal silence. The denial of the source, or what I’m repeating when I call it the banquet of crumbs. Have we grown accustomed to that too?

The year has begun, and for me, these first few days have been tinged with sadness and disappointment. My train keeps moving, and I can’t (and no longer want to) stop the constant exodus of passengers. Where is my path leading?

If I didn’t know that time is round

I would not give to the water

some of my silences.

Nor would I let my eyes dawn on your face

liquids from so many farewells.

But I know that every gesture is rounded out over time.

and inexorably fulfills the ritual of any embrace.

They had arrived unexpectedly. I suppose, almost certainly, that it must have been during the night when everyone in the village was asleep, some giving their bodies rest, others trying to reach some kind of dreamed-of paradise that, with the passing of the years, had been displaced from the everyday, accepting the impossibility of its existence in daily life, to go and inhabit the more grateful and probable world of memory.

Nothing had ever happened in the village. And although successive generations of inhabitants, as they passed through the ages of racing blood, of the birth of the first adolescent heartbeats, had surrendered to the illusion of a natural and promising change, the truth is that all of them, one by one, as they later passed through the ages in which skin and thought abandon their fixation on the flesh, had seen how the passage of days had only managed to transform those first heartbeats into another kind of sign, anticipating an imminent rest, the only real and palpable change to which they had earned.

Until the inevitable visit of death, there had been almost no shocks or events worthy of further remembrance, to the point that on several occasions the customary condolences had even gone so far as to mistake names, giving as deceased people who at that moment were listening to the news.

But this surprised no one. It had gradually become accepted until gossip was impossible to suppress, just as it was absurd to try to stop breathing, and yet neither of these things managed to give meaning to the passing of the days. Even naming them didn’t allow one to feel any illusion of belonging to a place in time, one’s own and distinct, and no one could anymore associate Monday with a significant and singular event worthy of its name.

Perhaps it was all the natural consequence of the village being on an island of which it was the sole sign and only testament to human will. As if the isolated and incomparable fact of its presence were not enough to give reason sufficient substance or life enough weight. Existence in the village, the lives of those who lived there, had been cut short and orphaned.

The first to break the news was Paco, the one with the smells of dirty laundry and stale, tobacco-laden urine. He lived alone, far from the village and isolated (if one can imagine a life more isolated than living on an island), in a dilapidated caravan, without electricity, a bathroom, or running water, lost in his own thoughts, his conversations a blank stare. His past was a mystery, and his presence had been accepted like someone accepting having hiccups: unexpected, annoying, and inevitable. No one really knew when or from where he had arrived. Had one been able to distance oneself, I think anyone would have been right to say that his unknown origin made him the most suitable person to recognize and convey the unexpected arrival. But as I’ve already said, here, distance was impossible because there was no other place to stand and from which to reflect, and no one was then able to recognize in Paco and what was arriving a kinship in terms of the same uncertain origin. That’s why, when they saw what was happening that morning and started shouting to announce the unexpected arrival, no one paid the slightest attention to their words. Their words echoed through the streets, caught in crumbling walls, stumbled against rickety doors, and finally died hanging from broken windowpanes. Perhaps if one of their words had reached Rosaria’s ear, the news would have taken less time to reach her and meet its fate. But even in that, the town showed an utter lack of foresight.

And as Paco’s words began their familiar, doomed course, they continued to arrive uninterrupted, just as they had been doing all morning. No one but Paco had noticed, and Paco, in the eyes of the rest of the inhabitants, was more of a nobody than anyone else.

As is often the case, more frequently than we realize, events began to unfold in parallel, without apparent interference. Both with their own development, their palpable rhythm and characteristic speed, fulfilling the full course of their own destiny. And although subsequent interpretations will always be, at the very least, diverse, at most, divergent, the truth is that events continued their course imperturbably, oblivious to any future commentary. Two events: the town (an island within its island) and… they kept arriving.

At this point, no one could have predicted the imminent crossing of their paths, the approaching moment when their waters would merge, ceasing once and for all to belong to themselves, altering for the first and definitive time what had until now been called custom. For the moment, at this early hour of the morning, events were unfolding in parallel. It might have been paradoxical, even significant, that Paco (a nobody in the middle of nowhere) had been the one tasked with joining and crossing those two lines. But this was not Paco’s moment of immortality, nor was it even his death. Moreover, the already momentous consequences of the impending crossing had no messenger reserved for them. To tell the truth, I don’t think anyone in the village could give a true account of the details of that crossing today. This, too, was imposed upon them unwillingly, but the consequences ultimately gave their lives a meaning and weight that would have been enough to make them live the rest of their days with an unusual smile plastered on their faces.

And it happened almost imperceptibly. From the first light of day, those fragile, tiny flakes had been arriving, floating on the breeze carried from the sea to the shore. They were white, like cotton. They formed a kind of irregular cloud, swaying and drifting slowly with the movement of the air. A white dance that came from some distant, unknown place and had encountered this unknown, nearby place that was the town. Upon reaching the first houses, they abruptly changed course, enveloping the walls, turning corners, penetrating windows—an unstoppable invasion of silence that didn’t settle on any object, but slowly followed their advance, thus recognizing the layout of its streets. Thus accepting their fulfilled destiny.

Paco, as we said, was the first to see them, but Rosaria was the first to feel their presence. She was the first to leave her house that morning, and the moment she stepped through the door and looked out onto the street, countless snowflakes clung to her entire body, leaving her white, almost transparent, but with a profound smile on her face, one she had never before imagined. It was the very image of pure happiness etched on her face. And the same thing happened to the neighbor, and to everyone else who lived there. It even happened to Paco (incidentally, he was the last, and that’s why no one heard him saying that the memories had been arriving since morning, flying in snowflakes).

At that moment, something completely unexpected happened. The town slowly began to curve. The entire terrain, as if precipitated and dragged downwards by its own inconsistency, rounded its forms inwards, and the horizon became like the rim of an immense concave bowl at the bottom of which a large drop of mercury still moved agitatedly.

Angela floated with joy. She had never received such a wonderful gift, and although the rest of her friends, looking at the jar she held in her hands, had mocked and laughed, she remained absorbed, staring through the glass at the enormous drop of mercury that trickled down its bottom. It was the seventh day. That day, Angela began to invent the world.

Another goodbye. And there had been so many that at times it was hard for her to surrender to the nostalgia of memories because lately the names of places and people, dates and times, were beginning to blur together. With so many goodbyes, she was starting to feel that everything was a present, an indissoluble continuity that was beginning to disrupt her understanding of geography and customs. 

Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a field full of plants and animals. The sun rose every day, and each of the inhabitants of the field joyfully greeted its arrival.

In the middle of that field there was a plant all green, full of branches and stems, that really enjoyed living in that field.

One day, a small bud sprouted at the tip of one of the twigs. All the other branches began to wonder what it could be. They had never seen anything like it. It was like a little ball that grew larger each day at the tip of that branch. They didn’t know what a bud was. They knew what a stem was, they knew what a branch was: a long, thin, green stick. But a bud? At the tip of a branch? And all plump, too?

So the days passed, and the bud grew taller and taller, its branches and stem growing more and more worried. Finally, after a rainy day, the first rays of sunlight illuminated the bud, and it opened, revealing a beautiful white flower.

The branches and the stem didn’t know what a flower was, and, even more surprised, they began to make fun of it. “Look at the ugly thing that’s grown from that bud,” said one branch. “Yes, it’s not delicate or green like us,” said another. “Look how fat and horrible it looks,” said the stem.

The newly blossomed flower was surprised that the branches and stem treated her so badly. At first, she was sad, but then she realized that if they made fun of her so much, it was simply because she was different and they had never seen anything like her.

Then, looking at the stem and the branches, he said to them: don’t make fun of me, for me you are also different, and in the end, we are all part of the same thing, stem, branches and flower, we are part of the same plant.

Friday-Saturday, September 30, 2006:

Six years later. The unusual feeling that the journey is reduced to the simple passage of time, its accumulation, and the final arrival. Even being able to sleep inside the plane becomes a revealing experience, at the very least, insofar as it is forgotten.

Stepping off the plane, the palimpsest festival begins. A chaotic invasion of diverse sensations: the smells, the fresh air of this Buenos Aires spring, the blue of a sky that’s high again, and everything else that seeps in… the rationalist buildings of Perón’s Ezeiza (so similar now to Berlin’s Tempelhof) that I first saw during some hazy farewell to my parents as they left for the United States: my mother’s 1960s soufflé bun, an airplane on a runway of concrete squares joined by a line of black tar, which you reached on foot, which you climbed via a staircase beside it…  the time needed to  Turning around one last time to say goodbye from afar (everything so gray and slicked back), Chonga, Paula, and I watching from the building’s terrace as my parents walked across that floor of square tiles, climbed those stairs, passed through the airplane door, and from then on, simply a face pressed against an oval window so like the flying saucer from “Lost in Space”… all images overlapping, mingling, and settling somewhere in my present. Or taking refuge in some corner of memory, thus delaying such an unexpected claim.

A modernity that, more than being current, has to do with not to be outdone (that very southern complex of being the last one in the jar…).

And the suitcases (which, for the duration of this stay, will cease to be suitcases) that decide not to travel with us. A queue of complaints and the comments among the people who manage to unite us and somehow dilute our mutual ignorance: I’m going to Córdoba now, my mother is waiting for me; what are you studying?; so your girls live in Berlin? That’s great, they speak both languages…

Finally, the threshold of automatic doors that separate the institutional from the human (although in these places, institution and humanity aren’t necessarily so divorced) and the embrace, imagined and obviously different from what we imagined. As is often the case with these things, exceeding, to a greater or lesser extent, what we expected.

Driving out on the Richieri highway, the smell of barbecue, the freshly cut grass (not lawn), a few scrawny horses grazing somewhere. The first dilapidated trucks (bumpers held together with wire, wood in the bed with peeling paint and rust dusting the surfaces). Sun, blue sky, green. And finally, the first glimpse of the river, splendid, nestled at the end of the highway, filling the entire horizon, still silvered by the rays of the sun that had just risen again.

It’s a good day, we’ve arrived.

In the afternoon we went out to pick up my nephews from school. A walk through the streets of Olivos. Immense trees (not in height, but in presence) and the sun darting between their branches, dazzling me on every cobblestone. I no longer know how to direct my gaze. I submit to the whim of so much brilliance. The tips of the branches with new buds. It’s the beginning of spring. The roots don’t recognize any grid and burst through the tiles (the inescapable presence of the immense, always lurking…). Bianca: it’s like walking through a soap opera (seeing so many uniformed teenagers on the streets at school dismissal time: girls in pleated skirts and plaid fabric, boys in white shirts with rolled-up sleeves and half-tied ties). And finally, the reunion with my sister. So aged by resistance and suffering. My God, what we are capable of doing to ourselves… first hit

My nephews: adorable, shy, long-suffering, a little wild. An inner world with no outlet (this is so familiar). The cousins ​​and their connection: the kind that only children who haven’t yet learned how to hurt each other can achieve.

First BBQ!!!!!!  In a very humble place near the river. A place straight out of Marechal. And just two hundred meters away is my sister: that’s Rubén Peuchele’s house, remember? (Titans in the Ring, the big one… how could I forget?) And I think that guy sitting on the tree stump drinking mate must be him… We drove past and through the window I saw a gray-haired old man, shirtless, the sadness on his face part of his expression, in the background a jumble of sheet metal and cardboard made up his house. How is that possible?? The big Peuchele in those conditions?  Is there no one who cares?  Someone who has made so many children laugh (I am one of them)… Part of Argentina too, the part we have never looked at.

 

Later we took my niece to her mother’s/sister’s house. Another confirmation that the outside and the inside usually mirror each other. So much neglect of both surface and content. How do you wake someone who wants to stay asleep? A rabbit fur hanging on the closet door (image alarm clocks, a cascade of memories…).

I write (I write to you) an email, and I’m left wanting to hear your voice (the time difference).

Back at my parents’ house, this first day is coming to an end, and I can say that the landing went smoothly. The runway is clear.

Sunday, October 1st

Sunny Sunday, pasta factories packed, and pastries to take to Grandma’s. Coffee with milk and croissants (3) at Borges station with the old folks and the girls. The subtle, clear air of Buenos Aires in spring.  Then a walk through Maipú. So many signs designed to be forgotten (impossible to read them all at once). The flower stalls where, for some inexplicable reason, they also sell incense (gardening associated with scent). The kindness of the people, such a welcome touch. The “everything for $2” bazaar: a paradise of nostalgia where you can find everything from the thermos-mate (a contraption of national industry in which, through communicating vessels, the same thermos that contains the water also serves as a mate gourd, holding the yerba mate in the upper part, from which a plastic bombilla (straw) protrudes), to candles of Ceferino and Gauchito Gil, the kettle, the rolling pin with grooves for making ravioli, the green foam of an indeterminate material for sticking plastic flowers to take to the cemetery on Sundays, and an etcetera that at times crowds and clumps together in the memory. Upon leaving, on the Mitre station bridge, an Argentine craft fair once again confronts me with kindness and warmth. “Mate is like listening to the radio; it’s a companion and awakens the imagination,” a man tells me. He’s invented a yerba mate dispenser and makes all sorts of gadgets related to this beloved ritual. Conversations with strangers. So much affection…

In the afternoon, after the reunion with Víctor’s stuffed fugazza pizza (so many nights returning to San Telmo!), we went with Eli, the nephews, and the girls to the cliffs of San Isidro. Lots of lovely, creative people, ready to embrace life in all its uncertainty. A spectacle on the stairs reaffirmed my belief that creativity and resources aren’t always linked (at least if you escape the view instilled by this culture of appearances that reduces everything to mere surface). Fortunately, the girls thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

Then we wandered through the craft stalls (artistic activity as an anonymous gesture?) and finally headed back to my parents’ house. Rushing to go out again and have coffee with Pablito (after so many years…). Another slap of affection, and that makes… It’s a shame we don’t have more time. How do you condense the eight years we haven’t seen each other into an hour and a half? Neither of us tries, and the present settles in with the naturalness of the unspoken. Is this cyclical conception of time a constant in these cultures (what if Vicco had arrived in the same trunk, along with Erasmus’s “In Praise of Folly”?)? And if so, why the rush to jump on the Western bandwagon? An inferiority complex? Poorly digested mixed heritage?

Two hours for another hug with Pablito, which I’ll have to carry around until our next meeting, and just enough time to get back to my parents’ house and attend a gathering of many people (his friends: the Dalios, the Muñiz, the Sirlins). Sergio and Graciela are there too, and just like with Pablo, time continues to be a fallacy exposed.

At the end of the day, a lot of tiredness, as well as well-being.

Monday, October 2nd.

The day dawns dark, the sky presses against the horizon, caressing the distant buildings of Buenos Aires, and the rain pours down. A deluge that cools and soaks everything. Hail falls. The trip to Tigre with Norberto is canceled. Plan B.

He picks us up in his car and we spend the afternoon at a shopping mall. Norberto is distant (local life takes over and it’s difficult to connect with him on the same level as when he visits me in Spain). In any case, it’s a very pleasant afternoon. I buy some music and dive headfirst into the Folklore section (I’m still browsing). A couple of those discoveries that brighten every music search: Mogilesky playing with Falú’s son (how crazy…).

We then go to the riverbank where Paraná Street descends and there’s a pier (the same one where the leg was bandaged 20 years ago). The rain continues and mixes with the river.

Then mate at Amanda’s. Her usual cheerfulness was matched by her hospitality. Finally, I returned to my parents’ house.

And the desire to hear from you turns into a phone call. What a joy to know you’re there despite my mistake in counting the hours (of course, with so much difficulty understanding time, it’s not surprising…). I would love at times for the  The Time Tunnel (in black and white with those bracket-like rings that circumscribed a very 60s black spiral) materialized and as the cloud of dust that followed each transfer faded (maximum power Mitch!) your person appeared, your image, the one I don’t know yet.

Tuesday 03

Breakfast and mate. The sky is gray and the day windy, but luckily there’s no rain. The old man takes us to his office and then drives us downtown. In the office (a semi-abandoned warehouse), I realize this about the inner and outer house as a reflection of the former. Shipwreck debris: a coat rack from the Tacuarí offices (designed by engineer López), iron filing cabinets from Alejandro Puente SA, the rusty and dirty refrigerator from my childhood, brochures and paint can labels I designed in other, thankfully distant, times. A jumble of objects that recall frustrated dreams, unfinished projects, dreams merely dreamt. How desolate! Remnants of prostheses, crutches, bandages, incapable, despite their accumulation, of filling the voids of a broken and shattered soul.

It takes us closer to the city center. We get off at Plaza San Martín. Immense trees, their bark damp and black, a rubber tree like the ones in Recoleta sheltering the entire center. And then we start walking along Florida Street. I observe in the girls’ faces and reactions what all this impression produces in them. I see them happy, attentive, surprised. The noise of the buses with their trails of black smoke. Narrow, disjointed sidewalks. So many people (almost all in a hurry). And so much affection everywhere. A tango couple dancing, the bookseller and his conversation, the artist statue at the entrance to Pacífico, painted white like an angel who approaches the girls and kisses them and speaks to them when they come near (their faces reflecting surprise). Books, music, encounters, discoveries, everything revolves and moves, the waters that converge in my hand and rescue a record, a book from a shelf.

Finally, I met Eli Sirlin at the San Martín Theater. We had coffee and a hurried chat. She was nervous in the time leading up to tonight’s play premiere. A strong wind picked up, and it started to get a bit chilly. We said goodbye to Eli, and the girls and I went into a phone booth. I messaged you on Messenger and was glad you were there. We returned to Olivos on the Mitre line from Retiro. I was surprised by how clean the place was (it reminded me of my own Retiro from years past), although there were still many people asking for help (the girls stopped at each one and asked me for money). On the train, it was the same old scene: people leaving the office, wearing light blue or white shirts, or light blue or blue stripes, ties undone in a futile gesture of rebellion, jackets on or draped over their shoulders, and most people reading newspapers. When we arrived in Olivos, a group of cardboard collectors waited for the night to fall, for the day to end so they could begin their work. The parallel stories of Buenos Aires, its submerged and ignored worlds (like the shantytowns of Retiro, the coastal train with mansions on one side and the shantytown on the other side of the window…).  We arrived at my parents’ house, I said goodbye to the girls, and headed back downtown to get to the San Martín Theatre in time for the play. There was a lot of posturing in the entrance hall: you could sense a lot of politicians or people from Buenos Aires’ “cultural” scene: elderly men and women, past their prime, in a rather undignified state, feigning the impossible and revealing a lot of division, too much… like the final scene of Death in Venice with the dye running down the cheek…

I enter the room, close my eyes, and meditate for a minute to rest my head. The room gradually fills up, the lights dim, Eli greets me and goes to the lighting console, her assistant beside me. “The Tempest” begins, performed by the San Martín contemporary dance group, choreographed by Weinrot (music by Glass). A flatline performance. Pretentious in its understatement, and unable to discern the heights of its various levels. Afterward, a banquet in the entrance hall, more formal than usual. Eli, his girlfriend, and Mónica (a visual artist from Misiones) and I go to a steakhouse for dinner. We talk about the play, about life, about Spain and Argentina—in short, a little bit of everything. A very pleasant, enjoyable, enriching, and affectionate conversation.

Then, a visit to their house (a very livable, well-maintained, thoughtful, and clean space) with its Zen garden. And then, at 2:30 in the morning, Eli and her partner Cristina brought me in their car on a drive through a desolate Maipú.

Wednesday, 4th.

Tomorrow at my parents’ house: homework, mate, and the balcony. I’m packing the girls’ suitcases for the trip to the countryside. The sky is a galvanized gray, with thick white clouds seeping through the cracks in its sheet metal. At least it’s not raining.

We’re going to Amanda’s house for lunch, where she’s known for her warm, neighborhood friendliness. Then they’ll drop me off at La Lucila station and continue on to meet up with my mom and nephews and go to the children’s museum in Abasto.

I take the opportunity to go downtown, meet up with María José, retrieve my paints, browse books and listen to music, and breathe in the Buenos Aires air. A torrential downpour prevents me from forgetting. In seconds, the streets are drenched in water, in swirling sewer rivers, waves of spray with each passing bus, the tiles and their liquid bite at ankles. Fat drops fall on the collar of my shirt, others cling to the tip of my nose or eyebrows in a kind of baptismal bath that doesn’t stop the movement of people, cars, or houses.

At 6 PM I met Sergio at the corner of Cerrito and Santa Fe. While I waited, sheltered under a corner awning, a man next to me (from Tucumán) started talking to me without any prompting: “I had a countryman who would look at the sky and say, ‘It’s letting up now,’ and go for a walk in the rain. Of course, it’s annoying here in the city, isn’t it? But it’s so good for the countryside. My father planted sorghum on his farm in Tucumán, and now with this rain, it’s going to grow really fast.” (Suddenly, a fleeting friendship was formed, easing the passage of time, offering companionship, and vanishing with Sergio’s honking from the corner.) “See you later, and don’t get wet.” (And I never saw this person again.)

Sergio takes me for a walk through Palermo Soho. It’s a slightly strange feeling, walking through that beloved and familiar neighborhood of Palermo, the place where I searched for a place to live on my own back then, or where I spent nights at La Trastienda with Yabor, Rubén Rada, Alicia Rinaldi, running into Dino Saluzzi begging for a gig, saying he’d get sick if he didn’t play, the exhibition (my first and last time at a bar with Sergio back in 1980 or 1981?). Now it’s the same facade, the same corner buildings on low-rise buildings.  But with designer interiors, an air of modernity and a youthful hunger for the latest trends, a furtive trip to the great fashion capitals (?). The feeling, however, is more like an interplanetary landing than a genuine sprouting from the cobblestones. How long will all this last? All with exquisite taste, with prices that reveal the perpetual duplicity of this Buenos Aires society so prone to discounting its back. But can this be criticized? What is still awaited from that side of the horizon, the distant and longed-for sea and mud? A landing that surely never happened. The horizon shrinks to the East. And what about the other horizon? The western one of pampas and mountains? Is an atavistic, malevolent terror still entrenched there? Oh Ezequiel, the day you become a textbook… perhaps then your X-ray of the pampas will show us the deep skeleton that sustains us.

We visited the gallery where Sergio exhibited, and I don’t dare say anything (that time has to stay behind me, inevitably). Then we had a lovely coffee at a corner bar, an old warehouse with a corrugated iron roof, now very “fashionable,” as they say here. The big guy’s warmth enveloped us, and I felt it within me. His loneliness was slowly taking hold, but it wasn’t bitter.

Then we go to his house, Graciela, with their children, two dogs, and a comfortable lifestyle. His studio, his paintings, the lingering presence of his grandfather Bonome, thankfully becoming more distant. And suddenly, the doorbell brings the figure of Ariel Fridmann back into my world 30 years later… The packaging has changed, but I still see the Ariel of Buenos Aires, of afternoons at his house playing cards while studying physics, with Alejandro Grinspun or Fabián Borenstein. 30 years that are crushed in a hug, a kiss, and so much warmth gathered together. How lovely, a dinner after so long, the same joy, of course, missing the blue blazer, the machetes, the gray pants, the rows of wooden desks, the high ceilings of those classrooms at the National School… The packaging has changed, but how wonderful that everything still has the same flavor.

And, late in the day, one more goodbye that now feels more and more like a reunion. A chatty taxi unravels so many memories, transporting me along wide streets of damp asphalt, Congreso, Libertador, and finally the Olivos station. Good night. I walk the streets accompanied by trees, memories, smells, skin. Everything crowds into my chest, and by some unknown impulse, I take a deep breath, expanding my lungs.

Thursday 5

Dawn breaks at 6:30 a.m. I wake the girls and they get ready to go out to the countryside with my parents. My mother starts to get tiresome with her constant verbal incontinence and demands for attention (even the girls notice and get annoyed, and I see myself reflected in them and understand many of my childhood experiences). Finally, they leave, and I decide to stay awake, drinking mate, watching the sunrise over the river, calling you on the phone even though I can’t reach you. I organize my things a bit to take (from Ayacucho we’ll continue our trip to Torquist with Alex, Anabel, and their daughters) and go for a walk to the Olivos port. The river is low, and you can see the “minuet ripples” in the mud. A glow on the horizon is the only thing that connects the river to its name. I have breakfast at a bar on its bank, gazing at the water for hours, letting my mind and eyes drift aimlessly. A couple of photos.

Then on my way back I go to an internet café and write you an email. When I get home I try again on the phone and I can hear your voice. How happy I am to hear you… What a lovely feeling, so long forgotten.

I finish packing my suitcase and take the Mitre train to Retiro. Beyond the Mitre station, a glimpse of Buenos Aires’ unofficial side begins: the chipá vendors, the people from the provinces with their dreams of prosperity in the capital, the street vendors, the hurried meals in conspicuously shabby bars. The doors open to another world… the one that only appears in statistics, the one without a name or newspaper headlines, the world of often futile struggles. I walk to the bus terminal, buy my ticket, and sit down at a bar to eat something while I let myself be enveloped by that mix of smells, colors, and feelings.

Finally, I boarded the bus (very run-down, with dirty upholstery, cracked windows, a musty smell—so far removed from the magazines). But after half an hour, I had my first glimpse of the Pampas, the plains of scrubland and straw, of cows and eucalyptus trees, the straight lines attempting the impossible. I felt better again.

Sleep overcomes me, and the journey transforms into an indistinct mix of dreamt images and sights. At dusk, the arrival in Las Armas, Route 74, and the sun shining directly on us as we head towards Tandil. Almost at sunset, the bus stops in La Llegada, and we transfer to a van to enter the town. At the station, my father is waiting for me as the sun sets. We travel the 15 km to the countryside, and there I meet up again with my nephews and my mother. As night falls, the memories return. The hardship of the lack of electricity. Lighting by candles and a gas lantern, just like when I was seven. Things don’t change in this environment. (How often your comments about the importance of closing chapters come to mind… now I understand that in my family, chapters never close, and perhaps that has a lot to do with everything I’ve experienced before. Now I don’t want to anymore. But so much neglect, so much unhappiness, so much discomfort still hurts.) The house is in semi-darkness, and I piece it together, piecing together fragments of images and memories. Fortunately, I know this house like the back of my hand; I’ve seen it come into being, first on paper and then in brick. But even so, it hurts. I go outside to bask in the moonlight. Splendid. After dinner, I take the girls for a walk to the gate and smoke a cigarette with them under the full moon. Time for bed.

Friday 8.

A sunny but windy day. My first images upon waking: a blue sky through the glass in the roof of the house. I go out onto the bedroom terrace and am enveloped by the scent of lavender (lush and unnoticed by others). The dairy farm pasture, the eucalyptus boulevard leading to the dirt road. The woods in the distance towards the sunrise, and to the right, part of the Rosario woods. Bird sounds: southern lapwings, ovenbirds, parrots, eared doves, and in the distance, southern screamers and chimangos. I’ve slept for about 10 hours and have a slight headache (could it be from sleeping so much?). I go down to the kitchen and start drinking mate. I go for a walk in the dairy farm pasture with Bianca and Franco (Leila is still asleep), and at the windmill, I see a pair of southern lapwings walking with their chicks in paddock number 6. I try to focus my gaze, but by the time I open the gate for the kids, I lose sight of them. We approached the spot, but I couldn’t find the chick. We climbed up to the windmill to get a better view, to breathe some fresh air… We went back for breakfast, and while Marques saddled a horse for us, we had a small chat in the kitchen. My mother was nervous (more so every day) and a real pain with the preparations and arrangements. It was starting to get overwhelming. Even Bianca noticed and began to show her displeasure (worse still, the painful and familiar cycle from my childhood began, the one where once it starts, you don’t know how to stop it, and at the same time, you refuse to accept it as inevitable…). I left the kitchen with Bianca and Franco, we got the horse, and went back to the pasture. This time, I finally spotted a baby lapwing. Bianca picked it up (I saw the mixture of fear and fascination on her face), and we took it home. As we were arriving, Leila and Solana came running to meet us. The baby lapwing was officially adopted. They make him a little house out of a cardboard box, put water and food in it, and begin to incorporate him into their imagination.

My brother’s eldest daughter manages to attract the attention and drain the energy of most of the adults. She’s going through a jealous phase that’s driving me crazy; at least, it’s quite difficult for me to remain neutral and contemplative. I feel my calm and good humor beginning to crumble. It’s like an old movie playing out from afar. The same attitudes that caused me so much suffering in childhood, the same intolerances, the same grievances, the same inability to show affection. It’s all starting to overwhelm me. All I have left is the refuge of nature and my daughters.

At midday my father prepares a barbecue (the second of the trip, despite having mentioned my desire for barbecue as many times as possible). The meat is from an old cow butchered right there in the field (the splattering continues). The grill is falling apart, rusty, without wheels… I try to cheer him up and approach my father to talk (impossible to interrupt his monologue, useless to interject any kind of comment, he just needs ears to listen, unconditional submission, I can’t…)

During siesta time, I help the girls with their homework, and while I lie down, I repeatedly fall into incredibly deep sleeps, snoring all the time. I ignore the cue and keep going. In the afternoon, we go horseback riding with the girls and my nephews, taking turns on the two horses. I drive around town. I use the internet café and read your messages.

Back to the countryside for sunset. Dinner, family, commotion, disorder, carelessness… I get to bed exhausted and unable to convey any of this to anyone.

Saturday 09

We went out for a walk in the morning with Márquez and my brother. The memory of those nine years floods back, nourishing me. But soon the conversation (which I would have liked to silence) devolves into another of my father’s anecdotes. The negativity continues to encroach upon my territory, and I feel I can no longer escape its tide. How can one live with such distance? I don’t participate, but I still feel the conversation gradually affecting me. I search for the horizon, the presence of the pampas, the familiarity of the terrain, and little by little, everything begins to fade. Finally, some of that grayness settles into my soul.

We returned for lunchtime (the desired roast had been replaced by the imposition of ravioli that my mother insisted on serving at all costs)  and then do your homework and try to rest a little.

In the afternoon, I make up my mind and don’t let my intention of going out into the countryside with the girls slip away. I saddle the horses, and the three of us set off to search for Bianca’s little mare (one of her wishes for this trip, which I must try to fulfill on my own). With Bianca and Leila, I feel that everything else would be almost superfluous. I delay our return, even knowing the sour faces we’ll get when we get back. Especially my mother’s (now her constant reproach towards me is so obvious… the unhappiness of my childhood is beginning to be fully revealed).

As evening fell, I finally gave in to my mother’s insistence on going to town for a drink (it was already late, but her discomfort made the outing unavoidable). At the Anarchist’s confectionery (completely remodeled and butchered with a disrespectful display of modernity), my mother continued to complain (now it was the noise that bothered her). My attempts to avoid collapsing became desperate. I couldn’t.

We got back late so we could have dinner and go to bed. I don’t think I can control the girls anymore, and I feel like they’re resenting it.

That night (I don’t know what time it was) I heard nausea coming from the girls’ room. I went to check on them and saw Solana vomiting on her bed. No one was there. I tried to comfort her at first, and then I started washing up all the vomit. I sent her to sleep in my bed and finished cleaning up. No one was there. I knew I was doing something good, but I couldn’t help wondering: what am I doing here? I suppose about an hour later (I’m amazed that no one heard anything) I finished cleaning everything and lay down on the sofa in front of the fireplace, improvising a sort of bed. The acid from the vomit filled my nostrils. I tried to fall asleep.

After a while (I had already fallen back asleep) I heard Solana vomit again. This time it was upstairs in my old bed. This time my parents came running, surprised (their comment: “Why didn’t you tell us sooner? I can’t take it anymore”). I went back downstairs to sleep by the fire. I felt a third bout of retching, but this time I didn’t get up.

"March"

Monday, March 20th.

I wake up with a vivid memory of my dream. I’m increasingly bringing the world of dreams closer to my daily life. This fills me with satisfaction. On my way to work, I remember Viola’s exhibition in Madrid (The Passions). He speaks of the loss of solitude and isolation to which daily life in our society subjects us. He says that only in silence does any moral compass emerge (a brilliant insight). And I wonder if symmetry might not be, formally, a good framework for recovering stillness. Symmetry as the quintessential cyclical element in which not only beginning and end are suspended, but even all movement. I think of the perishable associated with linear movement and the eternal associated with cyclical movement (nature, for example, life and death, and every imaginable duality that, in its movement and alternation, necessarily implies a third element, namely: emptiness, the space between the two, the end of one and the beginning of the other).  Association with Roberto Juarroz and the text read last night before going to sleep: “between the one who gives and the one who receives, between the one who speaks and the one who listens, there is an inconsolable eternity. The poet knows it.”

I wait for him at midday and invite Roberto to lunch. We talk about all of this, but at times I experience the two silences: the silence of when I’m silent and the silence of when I speak but don’t reach my target.

It’s very humid today; these days the sky seems almost human. Walking home, the same thought always crosses my mind: what’s with repeated gestures? With passing by the same place every day at roughly the same time? I like to imagine that one day I’ll receive signs. I need to be more attentive because the everyday seduces and lulls me into complacency.

Seeing examples like Bill Viola’s makes me feel less alone. A kind of brotherhood, distant in body but close in spirit. It’s a voice of encouragement.

 

Sunday, November 19th.

I read in the country: “When individual consciousness is lost, everything is seen as volatile matter.” There’s some truth to that. The problem remains the everyday and its vulgarity, or rather, its solidity. A near-spirit wandering among granite columns and concrete walls, in the forest of prejudice and stillness.

Another idea: the concept of identity associated with the image of an archipelago rather than with insularity. This might do away with the idea of ​​a closed preserve and would likely allow for a much more everyday acceptance of the “other.” Times of change and migration are coming, times in which the very concept of sedentary life will be seriously questioned. What better way, then, than to associate identity (at least while this idea remains foundational in our societies) with an atomized and pluralistic criterion to facilitate the vast difference and otherness that are on the horizon?

Sedentary lifestyles have simply become associated with a media phenomenon. Through the internet, television, and news outlets, we have the false belief that we are connected to the various parts of the archipelago, when in reality we remain comfortably ensconced in our limited mental living room.

Change is coming (and I don’t mean to sound fatalistic, but rather forward-thinking). Mental stagnation today will only lead to confrontation and subsequent collapse. A thorough re-examination of the idea of ​​purity or cohesion as a foundational element of all identity is in order. Cultural mixing will gradually pave the way for the archipelago to finally be recognized as the only possible and true realm of intellectual discourse.

Monday, September 12th.

One airport, Munich, and four hours until my flight to Berlin. I’ve brought my departure forward, or rather, I’ve prepared to leave earlier than planned, almost as a matter of spiritual survival. The renewed experience of German life, after having migrated to the Mediterranean, allows me to finally close chapters that, due to the urgency and haste of leaving this country two and a half years ago, hadn’t been fully completed.

This place is very sick. Selfishness and an overvaluation of the personal have become ingrained as a kind of daily normality. I don’t know if I could even call this a society, because exchange here has been reduced to a forced, unavoidable, yet simultaneously fearful coexistence. How sad! A material facade, a shell to silence so much repressed crying, so much forced politeness and complacency. But deep down… who could spare me from hearing so much pain!

Haven’t they noticed?

It’s drizzling, and I think even the weather seems to be in solidarity with this nostalgic way of understanding life. Stillness. A silence that’s more unsettling than refined manners: very interesting!

I look for a café table and a television screen showing a football match that will never move me, but at least it will prevent the shock from growing.

I need to sharpen my senses and become more selective. I can’t keep allowing myself to be so exposed to illness. Have I not yet finished learning? Is this a recurring desire or need to believe in humanity in a general way? Clearly, that’s not possible. I need to stop looking outward so much. I need to take care of my own little corner, the allotted plot of land. I need to keep pruning what’s necessary, turning the soil over before it’s exhausted. That’s it. Back to work…

Sunday, September 17

Berlin again. Another encounter with the past. But this time, knowing I’m just passing through grants me a certain impermeability to my surroundings. I’m a spectator, still curious, but with the privilege that comes from being a foreigner. Things haven’t changed much. Berlin is still an octopus city feeding on the lost souls who wander its streets, searching for some kind of belonging, inventing some kind of superficial utopia, steeped in a sort of intoxicating, well-disguised, and concealed ambition.

The city as a grand experiment in bodily boundaries, the furthest extreme of our identity. Our most distant hands feeling for ever-changing clay, molding contours where the past imposes itself on any attempt at modernity. I feel the hidden cries, those spoken before and those now civilly silenced. Smiles are forced onto faces like a grimace completely alien to body language. Where do the dreams of the people who dream in Berlin go?

Silent monologues crowd into the U-bahn carriages (like in the Wim Wenders film)  “The Sky above Berlin.” A mass of words to build not just one wall, but hundreds of them surrounding each of its inhabitants, each group of belonging, but how much fear! How heavy fear weighs on Berlin…!

Wednesday, September 28.

I think Berlin will always be a thing of the past for me. Every corner is carpeted with memories hanging abandoned, as if frozen in time. The streets are embroidered with melancholy: Leila’s birth in the snow, the hurried steps and slips on the walk to the hospital. The squares and playgrounds hold frozen images of the girls, like a secret photo album to which only my eyes seem to have access. The sky turns gray again and descends in a drizzle like a blanket of nostalgia, sowing the cobblestones with accumulated tears. I still hear laments everywhere, and the feeling that it’s only me who perceives them, or perhaps the absent faces of the people on the subway…

The need to leave this place slowly takes hold within me, despite the water, the trees, the river. Rilke’s poem:

A pale, gray sky in which the colors wither,

In the distance, a flash, like the fire of a scar.

Reflections that err and settle.

There is a faint scent of roses in the air

And tears held back.

Thursday, September 29.

Soon the return to Spain. It’s starting slowly, but it’s settling in, another farewell process, and it’s already… Friday with the girls at the pool, enjoying some time together until they come to Valencia the following week. And despite everything, I still feel the need to believe in people.

Friday, September 30th.

So much silence! On the subway, people are engrossed in books, newspapers, dreams, thoughts, problems… I feel that if all that murmur were ever to be expressed, I would be capable of tearing down the wall again, this time for good. The physical and the spiritual are not served on the same plate, even though the spiritual always takes shape. And a stone wall will always be a stone wall, and its demolition doesn’t imply any change as long as the spiritual content that that mass of concrete and steel held doesn’t also crumble.

Many people are wandering around, seemingly lost. What could it be that they’re missing?

“Thursday, April 22, 2004”

Thursday, April 22, 2004

It shouldn’t be said that everything we’ve always dreamed of is simply a product of our desires. Rather, it would be wise to recognize that we live immersed in a subtle and complex system that, although difficult to explain in terms of limited human logic, incorporates in its design that sequence of events we call chance, and therefore, if we are incapable of admiration and joy, we should at least remain silent.

Thursday, September 16th.

If the process of devaluation, loss of distinction (in the sense of being different from one another) and amnesia continues, a point will be reached where human fear will be very difficult to control because it is unpredictable.

Who, having reached that point, will be able to contain or prevent its bestial manifestation?

“October 24th in 2002”

October 24, 2002

Something that forces us to turn around, to stop in our tracks; that holds our souls captive by the narrowness of its waist. To find a pair of eyes that summon us and bathe our bodies with their name,  Until we can finally recognize the sound of our own language. Like the beginning of a line that we sense forms a circle. And that it doesn’t matter.

Every prayer that emerges corners us in the direction of oblivion, because even memory is oblivion on the side of its inevitable lie (…and so the lie does not lose its character even if it spreads from one to another across great distances and remote times, and is said and published by people who in good faith believe it to be true…)

Perhaps the name itself is the only word worthy of being conjugated, though not a verb. And yet to write…

A summer

                          silver octagonal

                          scent of willow shade

                          linden boulevard

A deep look

                                        to stubbornly drill

                                      

that the gray-haired word may exile us

to its domain of unchanging plains

A ver acquitted

A resolute look

                                 that record the iris of the memory

                                 of our horizontal luxury of naming.

I no longer have any distance.

where to rest your gaze

Not a line surrounding me

with its alternation of light and shadow

The moisture blurs the edges

                                                          with vapors of an indifferent oxide

The saying

               I’m speechless.

The naming

                     It pierces me in its alien

However, I still have memories.

                                                               and two shores

just like at the beginning.

Perhaps this is what we call life.

the space between two questions

or the two sides of the same question

without us being their answer.

Travel the world

                                  in its long

                                  and in its width

It does not protect us from its abyss.

When time reflects us

                                                    at the core of its essence,

When action whispers to us

                                                         its ineffectiveness in providing support and shelter,

When  enunciate

                name

                order             they corner us

against the limit of their specific chimeras,

Then the time will have arrived

to renounce the gesture

                                      already the word,

so that, without further delay,

run out to start the day.

A nearsighted lip restrains in the dark

the sweat that baptizes our temples,

the narrow saying,

a cry without a silhouette

at the time and place of its twilight.

A stubborn fog of two plus two equals four surrounds us.

loosening the stupor in geometric wrapping,

wrapping up in the ah of course

the persistent tremor

of our recently shaken verb.

A final ray from the last crack.

A penultimate shadow hanging from the horizon at the ankle.

And a text

                   banalizing the custom

                   of our cardinal amnesia.

Could it have been the flood then?

Being inside is not entering

but rather not having gone out.

Walk

                It’s another way

                                         of moving the world.

I want you to save my name.

among jacaranda flowers and rubber tree leaves

Let them hold back my attempt

hidden between banks under the mud of its bed

Let them immerse themselves in a wisteria roof

the sum of strokes that exceeded my silence.

I’m tired of the calendar

I’ve stopped counting the hours

so that my walk becomes an abyss

I have opened a door

without license request

Perhaps one night someone will contract me

by making it their own and necessary

the renewed attempt to call me again.

I have felt in the slow precipitation

a dull sense of having crossed a threshold

a silent letting go.

Piercing that background silence

By canceling that infinity of zero

A night-bird’s flapping of wings prevails

thus forcing, to the limit,

the restart of cycles in my awakening

(one day before the complete oblivion)

I will recognize then in the bird

the sound of the letters that name you.

I recognize voices

                              between the folds of each embrace

I hear shadows

                         in the cracks of gestures

I feel for blindness

I exhale handfuls of barren earth

and memory seeps into me across open distances.

I tell, then,

                  to establish a possible fit

I will have to wake up sooner

                                             that time will convince me of its siren.

Before we begin.

ANDOr I don’t know why I’m writing all this. I keep turning the matter over in my mind, trying to find some justification, something that explains its   why, or that convinces me of its urgent necessity, and there is no  In this case, nothing I can think of quite makes sense. The only certainty is that I have to do it. I can’t help it. Actually, it’s like almost everything I do, because logic or meaning has always seemed retroactive to me. Perhaps it’s alright this way. So many words to justify so little evidence, so much clouded vision (the kind that looks far and inward). First, a deep impulse, enough to chart a course. Then, already on the way, the habit of starting to look out the window with the ingrained thought that every direction taken leaves an infinite number of other possible paths, orphaned of their journey. And then the fog in the rain-soaked eye, the retroactive gaze. The need to check the ticket for an unequivocal destination and to buy certainty with its price. To quickly cover myself with the habit of naming and explaining what clearly emerges as random. Because doubt always brings cold, and the habit doesn’t make the monk, but it does provide a warm certainty. Of course, if I could only look ahead, everything would be easier. One might even believe oneself indispensable, or at least important.  But I was never very good at lying. I see it in others. And I pity them. Because I know it’s a way to survive, or at least, I imagine it is. That it doesn’t work for me is another matter. me The topic. Don’t think too much, my mother, your grandmother, tells me, because thinking is bad for you. How funny, as if it were so easy. And it would be, if I could believe that I’m the one who decides. But it’s not me. Most people can’t even imagine the weight of memory when they choose someone to resurrect. And what can one do with memory but remember? Or rather, accumulate. Because those who have memory don’t remember, they accumulate. They don’t remember because they never forget. And then they have to carry all that burden on them, which grows heavier and heavier, and the only relief is being able to organize, to group together similar fragments, so as not to go crazy. Or to write. Yes, there it is. To write to lighten the load. Or to organize it. And perhaps by discovering the relationships between those groups of memories that still pile up in disorder, I’ll begin to glimpse who I am and what I’m doing here, in this place so cold and so far away, so different from everything that nine years ago was my world. Or rather, our world, because of your mother, of course. Back then everything was easier, because although the world was still round, the need to bring together the shores of such a fragmented history, so linked from the beginning to the journey and the farewell, had not yet germinated.

Sometimes I imagine you, grown up, reading this sort of remnant, and that image comforts me, thinking that this whole story will also become part of your life and thus find sufficient justification. At least today, as I write and see you sitting and playing, two and a half years old, all of this seems necessary. But then I know that this image is only a product of my own lack, or of my wishful thinking.  Your mother would say I’m always thinking about posterity. I believe more in the continuity of things and stories. I’m not entirely satisfied with the idea that the world begins and ends with oneself. What arrogance! The shores remain, with so much sea in between. I prefer the image of the relay race.  In this relay race, each runner, having completed their leg, hands the baton to the next to complete theirs, and so on. There’s something magical about the moment they run together and the baton is passed. One rushing through their final steps, weary and perhaps with the satisfaction of having fulfilled their purpose; the other with the fresh anticipation of what is yet to come. A moment where the end and the beginning embrace and merge into the unspeakable: death, birth?

Because if it all ended with the digging, explain to me, why would I have felt seven years ago, in Puentecesures, that kind of nostalgia that one can only feel for beloved places, places one has lived in, if until then I had never even set foot there? (except on the plate, of course.) Have you ever felt homesick for the unknown? That’s why I’m trying to piece together this sort of puzzle made from frayed fragments of memory, to find myself again with those places.  who preceded me  and to understand a little better who I am. Will this help you?

Today, at 37, I know for sure that time isn’t a line that grows in step with our lives. Perhaps we are nothing more than the material it needs to define itself.

The Plate.

I remember, for example, a large, rather rough and heavy white ceramic plate that hung in the gallery of the country house, and for which my father showed a particular affection. A kind of need to preserve it that I, at nine years old, didn’t quite understand. Especially after having witnessed so much painful detachment from him in  so little time.  In the center, he had painted a landscape. A river, with low houses on both banks and crossed by a bridge with semicircular arches (I learned this later, during my architecture studies), and above it all, a word: Puentecesures. This is the town where Grandfather Alejandro came from, my mother would say. I spent a lot of time, while the adults napped, observing that landscape, as if waiting for someone to cross that bridge at any moment, or for the river’s waters to stir. I never found out how that plate ended up all the way from Galicia to Ayacucho, a journey of a little over ten thousand kilometers, but sometimes I think that if certain objects could talk, what they would tell us might be quite similar to the story of an ordinary person like me, with my comings and goings, changes of course and world, unexpected destinations that only our blindness makes us believe were premeditated. Moreover, if I’m not careful, when after so many years I finally saw the waters of that river flowing and was able to cross that Roman bridge on foot to go to Padrón, I no longer know if what followed was my life or that of the plate that borrowed my body. Isn’t everything we experience the crystallized thought of those objects among which we move daily? If so, who is writing these words at this moment? I only know that the image of the bridge-town-river is likely still attached to that round piece of ceramic, hanging on some wall, perhaps waiting for you to look at it someday, and from then on, with your life, the cycle of stories yet to be told will resume. And if that plate no longer exists, nor the wall, nor Ayacucho, perhaps this text is a new incarnation of theirs. Or the passing of a baton.

You have to start somewhere.

I don’t remember being born. It’s that simple. I know it sounds a bit basic,  But it’s true. I don’t have any images or memories.

  1. Here’s one of those many unanswered questions, met with silence from others in the face of my own unease. Who will be able to resolve so much doubt?
  2. Childhood has, among other things, the advantage of everything being possible, which adulthood distorts with doubt, and learning is confined to the straitjacket of rigid definitions. That’s why I resist your kindergarten.

Nor any physical sensation of that first movement of my body trying to gasp for air, struggling to feel its own gravity. I don’t know how long I’ve been locked up here.  But I’ve never been able to discover anything in all this time that would allow me to reconstruct that origin. Not a single photograph. Nor can I find, flailing through all that accumulated dust, any little package that I might recognize as linked to my first breath. Nothing. Except for being alive, there’s nothing to prove to me that that first breath ever existed. I search every corner of this room, while the daylight still allows me to see, feeling the packages from the outside as if trying to guess their contents. The language of the blind. And at times I begin to get agitated. Then I tell myself, slowly, let’s start again. But there isn’t a time that, having sorted and re-sorted all the packages, re-examining even those I know by heart from so much rummaging through them, distrusting even my own memory, changing their places to see if, when the light hits them from a different angle, they  would illuminate an unknown fold; there isn’t a time, he said, that I don’t end up accepting that lamentable lack of record, that inexplicable oversight that forces me to begin this existence with a doubt. What if, instead of the first time, I had started breathing the second time? Then I could reserve that first, held breath for when the time comes for the last, which I would then leave  If so. A kind of immortality. Or at least a postponed mortality, which perhaps amounts to the same thing. In any case, there won’t be any of that either.  record.

From my First Communion, I do recognize several packets because inside one of them I found a photo of me with hair gel, my body in three-quarter left profile, my head facing forward (such a ridiculous position), sticking half my chest out against the school wall. It was Riobamba Street, October 1968. And that’s what I remember. The moment they took the photo and what I felt. Back then, it was a kind of pride. I was always on the honor roll. There’s another photo of me receiving one of the many gold medals I accumulated throughout my elementary school years from the principal. Back then, everything was orderly, not like now in this room (You have to hurry). Everyone in a line, one per black tile of the black and white checkerboard floor. In front, the platform with the long table where all the respectable people sat facing us—people who later, during the military years, began to be called authorities. Everyone in a line too. They were side by side. We were one behind the other. There were the headmasters, the vice-headmasters, the regents, the highly respected and intelligent professors. And when my name was called over the loudspeakers, I lowered my head to inspect the polish of my shoes and my gray knee-high socks. Then followed an endless list of decorations and diplomas I had earned during the year of study, which I would collect from the long table. Everyone shook my hand in exchange for a diploma and a medal. A kind of barter.  And when the table was empty, that’s when I gave in.  I turned around, laden with trophies, searching my parents’ eyes. I saw them looking proud.  From the back, amidst so many expectant parents’ heads. Then he finally stepped down from the platform because everything was alright now.

Here in this other package are all the medals together, although I must admit they’ve lost much of their former luster. Back then, there was a feeling of belonging to something that, while not justifying its existence in itself, at least postponed questioning it. Or perhaps it was the pride of others that rubbed off on me. My parents’ pride. Your grandmother’s care in spreading the hair gel perfectly evenly, and how could I possibly disappoint them? It must be a fad, I think, this hair gel thing, I mean.

But who cares about that? Instead, notice that something as crucial as the first breath remains hidden in some corner, unreachable. A kind of abort, a return from dry to wet. Water (Later, the floods would repeatedly remind you of your origin. The earth was then masculine for you, and the water uterine). Yes, I know the negative consequences of my birth, not because I remember them, but because I recall them.  My mother remembering. Didn’t Grandma ever tell you about her prolapse?  Today I believe that from then on, I was instilled with this manic need to justify my existence “in spite of,” a kind of prolapsed redemption. Or its outward manifestation in the immoderate enthusiasm for constantly considering the effects of my actions on others, instead of tidying up the chaos of packages and little packages that kept accumulating inside me, gathering clouds of dust and procrastination. (At first you thought you could keep everything inside that body, confident in its constant growth. Later you had to lock yourself in that room.)  My poor mother.

The Telephone.

 

The phone hasn’t rung in ages. Every now and then I go and pick up the receiver to confirm the stupidity and monotony of its silent ring. It must be the price for having gone to lock myself away so high up, for having climbed so many stairs (Always one step further). My gym teacher is to blame for this, but he’s not around to be held responsible now. There’s always been a kind of permanent in-between situation in my life where time and place don’t quite match up. I mean, of course they matched a time and a place, but they never aligned with my own perception. For example: at eighteen, you usually use the night to test the limits of a developing, thirsty body, not to devour Nietzsche’s books (though the poor fellow was thirsty too). The only explanation is the mismatch. Either I wasn’t eighteen or I wasn’t in that place, but unfortunately, I remember both facts very well as belonging to me. And now it’s the same thing again. Here I am, just waiting for the blessed teacher to call me, and nothing. He won’t call. What’s more, I don’t even think I remember the summer of ’70. But it was then that I listened to him and believed his words. “Fuck your self-importance, Marincioni. When you’re tired and think you can’t go on, you can always take another step.” That’s how it was. That’s what the son of a bitch said. And how could you not believe such a tall man, such a professor, such a big shot?  And so brave, climbing Mount Tronador? And then, at the end of the month-long camp, they give me a shovel with my name engraved on a little copper plate as a memento of being chosen best buddy? How could I not believe them, when that prize was supposed to silence me and put an end to my doubts? If I could have accepted being a leader, everything would have been so much easier. They should have engraved my name on my pride, not on that crappy little shovel that ended up completely rusted and who knows where it went after all those moves and goodbyes. But I always preferred small gatherings.

When I look back at this room, now that everything is covered with a respectable layer of dust, it’s crystal clear that they always wanted to put me in the leader’s shoes. Captain of the football team, student representative, honor roll, black sheep, stubborn, and so on and so forth, so long that just thinking about it makes me want to remain silent. Anyway, ever since then, I’ve always been one step ahead.

I was deceived by this whole order thing. I was always told that things had to be in order. And of course, I not only believed it, but I obeyed unconditionally (when adults speak, children fall silent), as if the order they instilled in me were an absolute value. Something like the existence of the sun, or so many little packages. It’s something you don’t question; at most, you try to rearrange it. Only much later did I realize that there were infinite possibilities for ordering systems, as many as the arbitrariness of a whim. But before that… who would have been so insolent as to think that the line after recess could be formed any other way than from shortest to tallest, keeping their distance with their arm raised like this, touching the shoulder of the person in front? No one. And why couldn’t we arrange ourselves alphabetically by last name if in the detention book we were written like this, Perez-Puente and not Puente-Perez, or Puente-Berenstein? Or by sex, like they separated us in banks during the military years? There were always so many things I couldn’t understand. And that’s why, from observing and being so busy looking at so much loose stuff that slipped through my fingers faster than my hands could wrap it up, my eyes started to water. I don’t know if that’s why I started getting old, but I’m aware that I’ve been living a bit on the sidelines of what was happening since very early on. They said I was very thoughtful, but all I was doing was trying to make sense of so much chaos. Later I learned to close my eyes from time to time, even if I wasn’t sleepy. That’s why I gathered all the memories I could and brought them up here. Now I can go through everything slowly and put each bundle in its place. Here I am at peace. Nothing interrupts me except my own tiredness. I don’t think the phone will ring. I don’t even know if it ever will.  I gave her number to someone. And when everything is finally in place, I can start calling myself.  Perhaps I will then leave this room again to begin what remains of my life.

"notes"

-The European colonization project was an excellent (and, if you want to be charitable, unconscious) excuse for the West to find its own identity. 20/5/97.

– The act of watching and making public what one has seen is above all a moral decision. 5/6/97.

– Dualism diminishes our magnitude and gives us size. 6/8/97.

“1994”

Light creates duality, or at least its potential credibility. In illuminating, it clarifies and simultaneously obscures.  October

  •  

What correspondence between what is seen and what is expected will make the illusion of objects more evident to us?

  •  

Art as an object-based way of thinking about life. And some other things besides…

  •  

Between revisionism and contemporaneity there is a quantitative difference with respect to the amount of risk assumed.

  •  

It’s not about avoiding seeing, but rather about not inducing it, about stimulating in others the desire to see. themselves.

  •  

The fact that we can recognize in two photos of the same person that they correspond to two different periods of time, does that allow us to deduce that time passes? What explanation other than memory or recollection leads us to infer a passage of time? Is memory an undeniable form of deception?

  •  

Travelling the world in its breadth and length does not protect us from its abyss.

  •  

Does not answering a question necessarily mean not answering it?

  •  

When faced with a question, answering is simply “one” of the possible reactions (is it essential?). There is another possible response that shouldn’t even need to be written down.

  •  

Is the question asked to find out, or to confirm? This is also a question.

  •  

Where does a thought originate?

  •  

What determines the order in which things appear?

  •  

Dualism takes away our magnitude and gives us size.

  •  

Is memory a call from the present to the past, a plea from the past to the present?

  •  

What triggers the emergence of a memory? Is it merely a sensory invocation?

  •  

If only I could let myself be convinced by some kind of certainty… Sometimes the questions pile up too much.

  •  

Is alignment a form of ordering, or is it merely a dimensional reduction? If it’s reduced to shrink (there’s also expansive reduction, but it’s not precisely dimensional), does it order things, or does it become dormant?

  •  

Is there some kind of stillness that leads us to infer its hidden dynamics? Despite the fear, of course.

"boxes"

A line in Ayacucho, the one that marks beginnings and limits endings, was what first diminished my perception of time. Enormous stones fell silently and peacefully onto the water’s surface, indefinitely delaying the hours. Without a sound, they submerged and disappeared. Everything was happening. The silence expanded in three dimensions until it encompassed everything. The landscape acquired a diaphanous sordidness. I took a breath and filled my lungs.

Having reached that desolate point where, through sheer concentration, the threads that had held together the networks of everyday life dissolved forever, the vertigo of the limitless arrived with the force of the obvious. Upward and downward.

The outlines dissolved with enveloping movements (walking along the dry riverbed, gathering pebbles). Opposites surpassed magnitude and complemented each other, thus revoking any contradiction. walk from one place to another counting the number of steps and subtracting the amount intended to discover the magnitude of the errorLight and shadow playing marbles: one wins, the other loses, and dominating everything is the unity of a common time.

It was the maximum expansion.

It was the moment from which the distinct fragments of the finite and illusory sensory world (the marbles) forced a redrawing of the limits of infinity. Groping. Silently.

Nor was it a matter of arguing over every step. Intuition may well be the best walking stick I know to this day; with a rubber tip to avoid tripping, a molded handle to bear the weight of the worst doubt, useful in any case, for calling a taxi in case of rain (because not all rains that fall are wet).

Since then, the habit of speaking. Hence the need to reinvent a world that no longer conformed to the lazy, linear categories of thought. walk from one place to another always choosing different routes– Categories that, despite having repeatedly clashed with the wall of intuition, continued to govern the ways of seeing and creating.

It was the entry into the poetic.

The first act begins: The Prefiguration.

I suppose that from that moment on I began to look down (and eventually up), trying to find hidden messages. (walking along the dry riverbed collecting pebbles).

 

Everything had to be restarted.

Re-education meant both stripping away and tightening one’s belt (concentration again). What was essential? What could be removed from the suitcase? What couldn’t? A new light illuminated things. Objects had to be named again.

Now he possessed the keys to reading, and the discoveries were no longer tainted by that element of chance that until then had meant, at the very least, disrepute. Two plus two equals four…when did they start deceiving us?Walking aimlessly only to discover that we always end up somewhere.-.

Everything was becoming intertwined in a web that, through reduction, expanded. And the enormous stones continued to fall silently and peacefully.

NOTE: This text is a box.

Metaphysics came with time, or rather, with its leveling.Walk until your legs tell you to stop. Mark the spot with a deep sigh.-.

The images, the objects, the things, contained numbers (the number four); secrets hidden deep within their appearances that demanded the possibility of manifesting themselves.

RIDDLE: A pond of water; at the bottom, remains of leaves among stones and submerged plants; in the middle, water; on the surface, my reflection. What level defines the pond? Complete on the dotted line ………………………………………………………………

 

The narrow confines of names were no longer sufficient. Definitions were cracking, and through their fissures, bonds of connection were emerging: between images, objects, things.

Another, new, framework re-linked the parts. New mosaics were designed, like the double ceiling of St. Mark’s: the ceiling that is seen and the one that is felt.

Everything happened for no reason, like in dreams, like from the age of seven, like everything else.

 

When reducing meant returning something to its previous place or state, I realized that in this path of rigorous selection that I was undertaking, I was not only separating/removing/disassembling objects from a place to then put them together/group/reunite them in

not only that, but also, by exciting the strings of distance in such a way, the objects transcended the superficial level of their appearances, and emerged clear and polished.

 

If the true journey is the return, perhaps my return has already begun. Although I still anxiously await the arrival of letters. In a way, it’s as if they’re calling me.walk to a place secluded enough that they can’t hear us and try to call us from there. Wait to see which of us will come-.

 

When far became near, I began my journey with these boxes. To set aside and regroup in order to speak.

 

I called this the “poetic expansion”.

 

Synchronicity operated in a randomly efficient (or efficiently random) way, forging new images into reverie. The fragmentary was a kind of visual clutter, an intellectual presbyopia that those who need the object to be farther away than it actually is to see clearly could always resort to.

Above all, that: at a greater distance.

 

Otherwise, the new grouping was like a mountain river with crystal-clear waters, up whose meanders tiny fish darted. Mine was the López stream, but it could be any other for anyone else. (I walk along the dry bed of my river).
What is the salmon’s stubbornness? Why so much effort in understanding the perseverance of a migration? What if, following Andrej’s advice, we watered every day at the same time? Surely something would happen, even if the tree didn’t recover from its dryness. Playing with chance is the only way I know to make art. And trust (stubbornness/perseverance/obstinacy).

Synchronicity is the way the world operates.

 

Time, in its own time, levels the playing field. It’s time to accept that the stones will always keep falling…

 

By invoking the past (and all the possible pasts attached to each object), the present became untimely.

 

The moment is now

in which you are reading this.

It will be too

when someone else reads it again.

 

Yesterday (those yesterdays) surpassed the pretense of its oblivion (negligence? forgetfulness?) and thus the future was, then, the limit of the possible.Walk forward for a while, then step back to discover the impossibility of reaching the same place-.

 

Before, it was objects; now, it’s time. Everything converged, like in a laborious distillation process, to yield its most concentrated nectar. To savor the last drops of a liquid that remains in your hand or in another container (a box).

Time, its categories, ceased to be vertical and consecutive (the fiction of order) to collapse like a tree felled by the evidence: the gravity of stones.

And so he lay, his pride vanquished, in a sleep from which he would never again rise.

 

Currents of sweet, germinal air, like that of a December night in Dakar, flowing beyond continents and borders. A sigh is not only the first stage; to sigh is to open a box.

 

Everything was now a timeless horizon, like the Ayacucho line, which marked the beginnings and limited the ends, which for the first time (and there was no second) reduced the representation of the passage of time.

 

Art is an exercise

that compresses us into a border:

  • to jump
  • to fall

and  never to get up again.

 

The edges are peripheral places. Will it be from there that the fresh air will blow again, heralding the end of this long and decadent autumn?

 

What if the gap were the support of the verb?

What if putting away and setting aside were two ways of doing the same thing?

What if something were capable of representing the whole?

What if you were a box?……What would your name be?

 

Box: a hollow piece for storing something. And some other things that defy description. (Perhaps you can hear them)

-An empty space with defined physical limits and, therefore, ready to be poetically transgressed.

-A vessel called to summon spirits.

-A possibility of condensing horizons so that, at the extreme of non-existence, they would expand indefinitely through the labyrinths of memory (of your memory).

 

Give precedence to the seed.

The box arrived at the appointment, embodying, in a way, the illusion of absence. The sum of all farewells frozen in a single frame.

Now, past/present/future leveled. All stories, all men, all things, at once and none. That ephemeral instant of darkness that precedes the start of the projection, when breath is held, or when, at the end of the struggle, wakefulness yields and we meekly surrender to an uncertain destiny from which we trust we will awaken.

 

A delimited space with physically transgressed boundaries (poetic privileges) that encapsulates within its cavity the possibility of vast beginnings, like deserts.Walking on water to discover that we don’t always leave a trace-.

A dune-shaping wind (those of your mind) that condemns the remoras to the ostracism of an eternal reflection, so that, emerging from the classificatory torment, you can freely count your handful of grains of sand, before the rains come and wash it all away.

 

The time was approaching. End of Act Two.

 

The objects, precipitated to dwell in a new realm of absence (the box), retraced their steps to encounter the sustenance of their forgotten shadows, their recovered backs.

 

Absence was the origin.

Absence will be the end.

 

What is physically absent, what cannot be seen, touched, or smelled, can nevertheless have its presence in intuition. Developing this sense involves two types of movement: concentration and detachment. Absence is an invisible presence that illuminates reality and is supported by it.walking trying to lose our shadow– It is a milestone in time that your gaze initiates.

 

Opening a box can be a way of making the wind blow, or of making it dark.

Boxes are keys that unlock the universe of intuition, they are guides to explore the paths of memory (yours), they are mirrors that show no reflection, they are gaps of silence, they are points.

And apart from that.

 

And if absence –not emptiness– was the dwelling place of objects, then silence was the necessary condition for them to manifest themselves.

 

-I hear footsteps, this door will open any moment-.

“Silence, they’re here,” and the box opened.

From the depths of dreams

a voice,

It remains and persists,

suspends all questioning.

Compressed in a corner,

We are addressing your complaint

and we let go

in its hollow.

The song of the sirens

It’s not a scam.

It’s the sound of your name

spoken in silence.

Silence is the space between two ears. Or the door to enter the abyss, where the fall is horizontal (as when time levels out).

I walk along the dry riverbed, gathering pebbles, and so great is my sorrow that they vanish in my hand, leaving no trace or memory. I clench handfuls of air, which also slip away. Between my ears.

A silence filled with voices.

You remain and persist…

 

And through absence, through silence, the chaos in which a phenomenological interpretation of the world persuades us that we are immersed, dissolves.

The visions of good and evil, the strata that give rise to seemingly irreconcilable dualities, in which one party subjugates the other – perhaps without knowing (or without wanting to, due to the myopia of fear) that the back is the shadow of the face –; fragmentation as a simplistic reading resource –Read one of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales and discover who is really the good guy and who is the bad guy.—The bias resulting from this record; all of this fades away, like air. Between my ears.

The face is the voodoo series on the conquerors. What to do when our soul hurts? (I walk along the dry riverbed collecting corpses).

The back is a series of poetic enclosures. To enter. And to stay.

With distances overcome, imagination emerges as the only key to immersing ourselves and, from the depths, unveiling the mystery of life. To once again become part of it…

 

Beneath superficial appearances, a universe of sounds lies dormant, awaiting its hour (wake readings in which we learned to listen beyond words).

The life of objects (dormant echoes awaiting confession), the reunited parts listening to their resonances. A meeting of today with today.

The patient awaits life’s end, the end of human chaos, its partiality and blindness (due to unwillingness and fear). Fragmentation is a useless excrescence.

The man has reached the threshold of a journey of no return. His arrogance and lack of respect have led him there.

However, the dream still belongs to him.

If he doesn’t renounce his creative nature, times will come when he will have to reinvent his relationship with things, with the cosmos, once again; times when perhaps he will accept the challenge. Or retreat into his box. (I walk along the dry riverbed sowing seeds).

It’s time to begin.