Textiles
Novelists often refer to trades, including that of textile workers, to the point that they do not consider them a good match for young men looking to marry. Perhaps I am one of the few who disagree. Textile workers have a sensuality and a sharp sense of humor, fostered by the environment and the docility of the fabrics they work with. My mother mastered both disciplines. In the workshop, I learned what both words mean, to the point that when I want to refer to the subject, I look there. I could not free myself from the threads of such unusual beauty.
Shipwreck
He had barely set foot outside when he was met with a great clamor. Not only did birds fill the morning with song; nearby, around several shops, customers shouted as if they had discovered, in unison, the powerful potential of their throats. Of course, none of this was new, but there are days when we look out at the world with the conviction that everything is beginning, and we realize the magnitude of the nightmare from which we have just awakened.
Handrail
He was tired of being a child, of others pulling the strings of his shoes, of them daring to rearrange his thoughts. He wanted to hide from the reproaches that came from those frowning faces, to build his own burrow like the foxes or ants he saw disappearing happily into the cracks in the ground. He had powerful reasons for doing so. Although he did not know the word “servile,” he believed he had invented it without being able to name it. Full of rebellion, he examined the stubborn dance of those who were in charge of the best years of his destiny. He trusted in the tenacity of elephants; they too had once been small.
Choice
He was taken in a wheelchair to collect the prize he had waited for all his life. He had pneumonia and was prey to other ailments to which age had conscientiously chained him. Lifting him out of bed was a criminal act, but the justice of recognition demanded it. Posthumous awards are crueler than death.
Lighting
Who can deny that life is a dance of shadows? Through light, we cast silhouettes that momentarily darken fixed and moving surfaces: shadows that come and go, rise and fall, without anyone glimpsing anything other than the object that produces them. How little value we give to the consciousness that wanders and remains! Then they wait for the light to go out to generate monstrous projections, because they know that only then do we notice them, turned into memories… and stories.
Definitions
*On the pavement lies the footprint of what was once a bird.
*It has risen so high that it cannot be found.
*Until I read it (myself), I did not understand it.
*The salvos of love do not justify it, but they exalt it.
*On the other hand, I loved her.
*All the original ideas came from one guy.
*Those who dream the least escape mediocrity.
*I always come back to this: poor patriots!
*They will attack you on all fronts, except the one that hurts the least.
*Institutions are the intestines of the world.
*Between marches and slogans, like a talking mute, the narrow river runs indifferently, perhaps even more depressed because of it.
*There are many ways to humiliate a human being. How many? I wonder.
*The commentator, horribly made up, reels off war news as if a piece of shrapnel had landed on her eyelids.
*“Man is basically good,” the prelate repeated over and over again.
*The churches distribute forgiveness and the courts admonish. Heaven looks on.
*An accidentally ridiculous moment can ruin a great epic.
*It’s funny, more than half of the cynical and manipulative people I’ve ever met are dead.
*Ah, love was missing. That’s all that was missing.
*After obtaining the most precious fruit, what state is the act of conquest left in?
*They run through those streets shouting at the top of their lungs. They are unaware that the only reason to celebrate isyouth.
*We all imitate at some point, while the imitators rejoice that others don’t take it seriously.
*They kiss the prize and dedicate touching words to it, no matter how sharp its edges are.
Retablo
My childhood and adolescence take me back to a city littered with cigarette butts, individuals spitting out their misery on platforms to sell discarded products, the clamor of calamitous complaints, suns burning like no other summer, slippery alleys paved with insults, loudspeakers stuck on slogans, crowds hurrying toward nowhere. Only the power of nostalgia exhumes a corpse with such ironwork, and savors it.
Contingent
They enter and leave prison as easily as changing shoes. There is a widespread predisposition to crime. It is not known for certain (no one has dared to investigate) whether it has a genetic basis. For now, they blame the environment. It is easier to look for an external agent, a scapegoat with someone else’s head. It would be terrible to discover that within oneself lives and feeds the scourge that prevents the advent of new times, ugly and pockmarked.
Reverberation
If anything is faithful to the past, it is nature: the bird that utters the same cry, the seemingly arbitrary direction of the winds, the committed movement of the sun, the alternating greenness of plants, the solitude of the sea; and love, whose time is measured by its astonishing brevity; and the weariness that surprises only those who suffer it.
